Facebook reminded me today that I took this picture about three years ago. This was the first picture I uploaded to my Instagram account:
I have very good memories of that day. The weather was amazingly good, and the girls and I met our friends, "the Txemas" (Bea, Txema and Alan, our best friends here in Ireland) to go for a nice walk together, around Killiney hill and its nearby beach.
But there´s another reason why I´m excited to see this photo. This week also marks the third anniversary of me rescuing the BinaryWords website from oblivion, cleaning its cobwebs and resuming the blog writing, setting up this very same picture as the header image.
Back then, in May 2021, I was in the middle of rethinking what to do with my life. The pandemic had brought me two presents in the form of a change in perspective and plenty of time to think, and I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to reinvent myself; I wanted a job that truly fulfilled me and allowed me to provide more value to others. But I had no idea what that job could be.
That´s when I decided to take action, to start walking, even if I didn´t have a clear idea of where exactly I was going. I remember doing an online course to clarify my thoughts and find my purpose, my ikigai. And while I didn´t find it straight away, the course was useful in that I was able to put together a list of things that I liked and that motivated me, and that I was relatively good at. So I set out to do more of those things, enjoy them, and trust that the path would eventually start to appear.
And what were those things? Writing. Translating. Learning about personal development. Sharing with others what I learned.
So I promptly got to work; I configured the BinaryWords website as bilingual Spanish-English, and wrote the first article in the blog´s new reincarnation: This is your life.
They say that, very often, asking the Universe for things is not enough; we also need (in Sergio Fernández´s words) "to seal our thoughts with an action", that is, to do something in the direction of the goal we want to achieve, to make it clear to the Universe that that´s what we really want, and allow it to start opening doors for us and helping us along the way.
Pues bien, unos días después de retomar el proyecto de BinaryWords, por «casualidad» me tropecé con un vídeo de YouTube que hablaba del coaching, algo que yo no sabía ni que existía, pero que acabó siendo lo que para mí lo cambió todo (si es que se puede decir alguna vez que haya una sola cosa o acontecimiento que «lo cambie todo» para una persona; yo tiendo a pensar que es todo mucho más progresivo…)
Three years later, I feel a lot more aligned to my professional purpose, even though I still have a long path ahead of me. I´m still learning loads every day (for as we know, this is a journey that never ends), and I´m getting more and more opportunities to share knowledge and experiences with others. For this blog in particular, in three years I´ve written around 160 articles with my reflections on a variety of topics, which you can explore in the archive.
What about you? Where were you three years ago? What ideas and thoughts were crossing your mind? And what has changed for you since then?