Month: October 2025

Lights and shadows

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This week we started to really notice the weather changing, temperatures dropping and the hours of light diminishing. And now with the clocks changing, it's the beginning of the half of the year I find the hardest here in Ireland: the one with the shortest days, the darkest season.

(Halloween drawing provided by Eva, thanks!)

As I mentioned in previous posts, many traditional celebrations at this time of the year, like Halloween, Diwali and the Day of the Dead, are a reflection of this fear of the darkness that surrounds us, with its ghosts and spirits, and also of our hope that light finally triumphs.

At the end of the day, the darkness that we see outside is nothing but a reflection of the darkness inside of us: our shadows, the things we don't like about ourselves. And also inside of us, we fight for our most luminous side, our most virtuous side, to finally win the battle.

Thinking about this, I realize that, in the same way I don't like horror movies, or movies showing violence, and therefore choose not to watch them, my reaction to unpleasant things in general is to try not to see or hear them, unless I absolutely can't avoid it. I don't want to feel the discomfort of having to acknowledge that things are not how they "should be" in my opinion, that people don't behave as "they should" (including me, of course), so my strategy is to block my ears (almost literally!) so that I don't have to hear.

But deep down, I know that's not the solution. Because the reality is that we all we have our shadows, the same way we all have our light. All of us human beings are complicated and contradictory in nature.

And yes, there are aspects of ourselves that we don't feel proud of, and sometimes the intentions behind the things that we do are rather selfish (potentially causing bad consequences). But this doesn't mean we're "bad"; it means we're human beings, like everyone else.

Sometimes it's tempting for us to play deaf and ignore our shadiest parts, or to repress and punish them, hoping to make them disappear. But that's not the way it works. The solution is not to "kill our ego", but to acknowledge, accept and understand it. Which is hard, of course, because it involves looking inside and face the discomfort of feeling bad, broken or flawed. But it's also very liberating; it relieves us from a lot of the suffering, and allows us to finally move forward without fooling ourselves

Because at the end of the day, we need the shadows to be able to distinguish the light. We need to experience the consequences of our "shadier" actions in order to learn to make better decisions.

How about you? What's your relationship with your own lights and shadows? And how much darkness are you willing to see and transform in your life?

Twenty years

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Today, October 19th 2025 (festivity of Saint Peter of Alcántara, patron saint of Extremadura, my homeland), marks exactly twenty years since I relocated to Ireland, happy anniversary!

By way of celebration, I went for a lovely walk around Harmonstown, the area where Fredi and I lived for the first three months of our Irish adventure, before moving to Dublin´s city centre (thanks, Rafa and Hernán, for welcoming us into your house back then; staying with you made the adaptation period easier and much more fun).

Blue and green signpost in a train station in the greater Dublin area, with the stop name in Irish ("Baile Hearmann") and English ("Harmonstown")

(Picture of the DART station in Harmonstown. The DART is the short-distance train system in Dublin city and surrounding areas, and back then, it was our primary means of transportation, together with the bus, which, if I recall correctly, was route 42B.)

Now it´s when I would typically say, "OMG, time flies", "it seems like yesterday", "if someone had told me I would end up staying for twenty years", etc., etc., etc. And yes, they´re all clichés, but they´re also true in this case. On the one hand, I get the feeling that it all happened in a heartbeat (as Carlos Gardel used to sing, "twenty years is nothing").

On the other hand, I look back and realise how much progress I´ve made, how much I´ve matured and changed. And to be honest, I feel proud. Proud of what I´ve achieved so far in different aspects of my life, and most of all, proud of the three little ladies who didn´t exist back then and are now the three people I love most in this world.

Sometimes it´s good to spend a bit of time looking back, as we said in this post on the trunk of memories, to be able to appreciate the path that brought us here, and continue to walk with renewed energy.

So I am thankful, and I raise my glass for these twenty years in Ireland, plus all the years still to come! Sláinte.

Ma ka hana ka ʻike

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This week, I´m bringing you a proverb from Hawaii, no less (thanks, Ryan!): Ma ka hana ka ʻike, which could be translated as "in doing, one learns", or in other words: true knowledge is acquired through practice.

Photo of a white sheet of paper with line drawings in black pen - multiple sections with different types of lines and patterns

This is a picture of a draft I made a couple of years ago using line drawing techniques, something I learnt from a work colleague (thanks, Valerie!) and that I really enjoyed, despite being terrible at it.

Now, why was I terrible at it? Well, because drawing is not something I would have practiced much (or at all, to be honest). At some point towards the end of my childhood, I remember looking at one of my drawings and coming to the conclusion that, given that I wasn´t any good at it, it was better to give it up.

And now, looking back, I realize I did the same with many other activities: try it once, be mediocre or bad at it, and immediately consider it a lost cause. Sports, arts and crafts, and even cooking for a good few years, all fell into this category. Anything creative and/or spontaneous requiring skills I didn´t have.

What never crossed my mind back then was that I didn´t have those skills yet, but I could cultivate them. Back at that time, there was no mention of, or at least I never heard about growth mindset .

The good news is that nowadays we do know skills can be cultivated and improved. But what´s the best way to do that?

The clue could be in a learning model that´s one of the most widely used by companies: the 70/20/10 rule, which originated in a study from the nineties, and postulates that, in a workplace environment, 90% of the learning is not of a formal nature, but informal:

  • 70% of learning is experiential: it comes from on-the-job experiences, performing tasks, facing new situations, making decisions, and above all, living new and challenging experiences.
  • 20% is social learning: it happens through discussions, information sharing with colleagues, collaboration in pairs or groups, work with a coach or mentor, etc.
  • Only 10% is formal learning, including training courses, masterclassess, books, articles, videos...

As you can see, this rule agrees with the Hawaiian proverb: the best way to cultivate skills is to practice them. Ideally, we would start to practice after having learned a bit about that particular skill, and we would be part of a group that can support us in that learning.

So this article is dedicated to all of those who, like me, are or once were an "eternal pupil", so that we finally stop: once you have the knowledge foundations and find a community that can support you in your growth, it´s time to take the plunge and start practising NOW. Not "when you are ready", because that´s never going to happen if you don´t get started.

So, what about you? What are you going to practise this week?

Progress

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It´s been a while since I last shared a quote on the blog... Google showed me this one today as I opened a new browser tab; I really liked it:

Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Teresa Amabile

What do you think of this? Do you agree? I would add that this happens not only at work, but in every aspect of life. Feeling that we´re making progress in something that matters to us, even if it´s very slowly, is fundamental for us to stay motivated and actively engaged in any project or activity..

In fact, the best kind of progress we can make in the majority of cases is precisely that, slow and steady, partially because time and circumstances often don´t give us room for anything else, but also because the most effective way to achieve long-lasting change (be it individually or as a team, or an organisation) is by progressively introducing minor changes, instead of trying to change too many things at once.

Having said that, it is true that on some occasions we seem to make a tremendous amount of progress in one go, like when there´s a major scientific breakthrough. But as we all know, major scientific breakthroughs don´t happen overnight: there´s a lot of silent work happening in the background that we don´t get to see or appreciate from the outside. And similarly for ourselves, sometimes it´s hard for us to realize how much progress we´ve made already, until one day we suddenly look back and see how far we´ve come.

Page of a colourful book, with a pink and purple striped background. and a bright yellow star-like shape with the message "Tiny bits of progress add up to big results"

(Page from the book titled Be kind, be cool, be you! from Nikki Miles, a collection of inspirational phrases accompanied by colourful illustrations. In this case, the message reads "Tiny bits of progress add up to big results".)

Now, over to you: what´s the project or activity you care about the most at the moment? And what are you already doing, or are going to do, to ensure you keep making progress?