I came across this Holstee Manifesto and thought that life should be as simple as this. 

For the past two days, I have been attending a class “Influencing Skills” sponsored by the government.  I walked into the class without any expectation, and today, I walked out slightly enlightened about behaviors and most importantly, I learnt a little more about myself.  Like many soft skill classes these days, behavior profiling is part of the key curriculum.  When the instructor Tony started to go through the main 4 quadrant of personalities, namely Socializer, Relater, Controller and Thinker, I found that I have characteristics in all of them.  I could not identify with any particular group, mainly because in my mind, the characteristics of all the groups were playing.  Just last week, I was the “Controller”, I was leading an audit in our Contract Manufacturer and I was taking charge, giving orders, and short in patience.  I could also relate to “Thinker” where I have been doing Product Qualification Reliability engineer for the past year, where I have to pretty much work on my own and analyze and device qualification strategy and doing some research.  I was silo and kept pretty much to myself. 

Then, going back further, I could find myself as the “Relator” who have been emotionally engage in task and when I express and appeal to get things done, I usually approach from the emotional perspective, giving the task an emotional meaning and expressing how the person could relate to the task emotionally.  As I sat in the class, living through these traits of life, I came to myself when I had my first job, a little over 12 years back.  I was a socialize then.  I was a Failure Analysis Engineer, a job that requires me to work in the lab, but I knew everyone in the plat, from facilities, to planning, not to mention, production, product engineering and even finance.  I even knew the next plant people.  This network enable me to be effective in my work and subsequently got me what I wanted then.  I was also the socializer when I was in the University.  While my friends prefer to stick with each others, I had friends from almost the continent.  It daunted to me that me, myself and I have been a Socializer all this while.  Then this trait of personality starts to pop up across my adult life.  This explains many of the things that I do, and it explains in some way who I am. 

It was a revelation that woke me up to some level.  There is this level of joy and happiness for being able to know oneself.  Being able to realize how oneself behaves and most importantly, why.  For this, I am grateful that I was selected to join the course, I was grateful that the instructor put forward a compelling structure of the class and revealing content.  Knowing this now can help me to move on in this journey of self discovery.  Sometimes, one do not have to leave your home to find one self, and this is one instant. 

On the other extreme, I have never encounter such coffee bitches at Starbucks.  I patron Starbucks in every city I visit and always, never fail, greeted with a smile, friendly voice and always made to feel like home.  I’ve read “How Starbucks Saved my Life” by Michael Gates Gill and finally understood why there’s a smile at the back of every Starbucks counter.  It’s their culture.  Now, why can’t coffee bean be more like them.  Then again, if coffee bean would embrace such cultures, then coffee bean wouldn’t be coffee bean today.  At the end of the day, these coffee bitches are human after all, and thanks to Coffee Bean, they have a job.  If there were no coffee bean in the world, and only Starbucks, these coffee bitches would have been discriminated, or worst being forced into doing someone that they are not.  So, the next time, I encounter these Coffee Bitches, I would just smile, and glad that these bitches are working in the coffee shop and not in my company which I have to deal with more often than visiting the coffee shop.  Maybe they will smile back and dont spit into my food.

When you are young, you think you can change the world,
When you get old, you realize that the world changed you instead.

Kew L. Ang Summer 2007

And now a research to prove that writing down your feelings (blogging) helps you to feel better. This is because the act of writing the feelings down, makes the feeling of anger and pain less intense. Read the full article here.

“When you put feelings into words, you’re activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala,” he said. “In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses.”

As a result, an individual may feel less angry or less sad.

This is ancient wisdom,” Lieberman said. “Putting our feelings into words helps us heal better. If a friend is sad and we can get them to talk about it, that probably will make them feel better.”

This is on negative feelings, how about positive feelings, I wonder if you write about love, will you feel less love?

Just like life, the sky is not always sunny. If raining is one end of the spectrum, and denoting the worst, then cloudy is just getting to the worst. And once it rains, the worst has happen and after rain, the sun comes up again. Its rather cloudy in my life now, I wonder when it will rain?