Blog by Jedde

Jedde, Fourth-Year High School, Year 2011 Photo from: Steven Tan An achiever - this sums up my identity in my younger years.  In high school, I've consistently strove to earn myself a place in the honor's list - a highly coveted recognition given to exemplary students, so to speak. Submitting projects on time, actively raising my hand, studying enough to ace my exams. All of these worked for me. In fact, during our quarterly recognition, my name would often be in the top ten list and I would feel proud of myself.  To put a little context to this story, I studied in a Science-Math curriculum school - Mandaue City Science High School. The pressure is high. Passing grade is 85. Below that grade, a possibility awaits for you to transfer to another school because you're unable to maintain the grade requirements.  So I planted in my mind that I must work hard to remain studying in my school; and to push that goal even further, I told myself that I'm going to be an honor stude...

Expectations are burdens that are heavy to bear. Yet, we easily impose expectations on ourselves and other people carefully pile up their expectations on us as well. It's either one of these two and if you're lucky, you get both. Failing to meet these expectations can either cause us to get compared with other people or we end up beating ourselves hard for it. It's tiring isn't it? You're tired too, aren't you?  No matter how many inspirational quotes we read, how we strive to improve ourselves, or try our best to meet others halfway, there will always be moments when we question our self-worth just because we didn't become someone who we expected ourselves to be.  How do we forgive ourselves for all the things we didn't become?  -- There was one evening when I found it difficult to sleep. I asked myself this question and what happened became a turning point in my life. I thought of a chair. It was a nicely polished chair with a red cushion. It looked co...

Accepting criticism is a hard pill to swallow. Especially when it is given without compassion. When we give our best efforts on something that we're passionate about, only to be told that it isn't good enough, we usually accept it and think it is sensible. Especially when it is coming from someone who we know has the best intentions for us. But what if it came from someone who doesn't care about us? What if that criticism was given without compassion? How would that feel? Usually, it feels really awful, don't you think so? Like someone stabbed us right in the heart. After all, we spent hours working hard on it. We went through a lot of troubles. We had to hear all the loud voices in our head magnifying our insecurities and press on really hard to overcome them. They don't know anything about how greatly we worked hard for it and yet they still throw these insensitive remarks at us.  It is unavoidable to experience this in our lives. People will always have something...

Many times, I have no idea what I'm doing. Sometimes, I find myself writing so confidently while there are also those moments when I just try to wing it. For me, the most important thing here is, I write. Like doing the verb and actually writing .  I knew I became committed to writing the moment I wrote consistently, not when I "said" I will. Then, I found out some surprising results. There are now 33+ posts on my blog, 14,000 inspired readers all over the world, and I've received invitations to be featured on podcasts and shows in Singapore. It's definitely humbling and awesome!  Listen to The Positive Arena Podcast here. There are plenty of us out there who wants to start something - a podcast, a vlog channel, writing a blog, building their own business and so on and that's absolutely great! However, there are only a few who actually take the first step of doing it and making it happen.  My question is, "What's stopping you?". To which I kn...