Today we're adding a new subcategory to one of this blog's recurring themes: the "untranslatables": words, phrases and expressions that I think are very clumsy to translate from Spanish into English or vice versa.
The other day I was looking around in El Corte Inglés (a very well known department store in Spain) and saw this:
Image description: photo of the cover of a weekly planner notebook by Mr. Wonderful, with a drawing of Mafalda (the famous comic strip character by Quino) flying, looking happy, and the following sentence: "¿Y si en vez de planear tanto VOLÁRAMOS un poco más alto?", which can be translated as: "what if, instead of planning/gliding so much, we FLEW a little higher?"
I thought it was a nice word play, although it only works in Spanish, where we use the same verb (planear) for planning and for gliding, instead of two distinct verbs like in English.
Still, I hope the idea is clear in both languages. My interpretation is that we often spend our lives making plans in our heads but then fall short when it comes to "flying", that is, taking action.
And in reality, the problem is not with planning, which is great, as long as it's done in the right amount. The danger, as usual, is going to the extremes, and either planning too much or too little. Like when we get stuck adding more and more details to the plan, continuously preparing and never seeing the moment to get started.
Or when we fall into wishful thinking (another untranslatable), declare our intentions of doing or achieving something, and think that that's enough planning and it's magically going to happen. Many of our New Year's resolutions also fall in this category, and then we get surprised when they don't last long: unless we turn them into a plan that's both motivating and realistic, all our good intentions are useless.
So my proposal for this New Year, which is already around the corner, is to quietly sit down with pen and paper and answer the following questions:
In what area of my life do I want to "fly" more (or fly higher) in 2026?
What specifically do I want to achieve this year?
What steps / routines / systems do I have to set in motion in order to achieve that?
From there, elaborate an initial plan, just enough to get started, and then, most importantly, get started! Get on to it. The rest is just a matter of checking and adjusting as you go, based on the results you get along the way.
It´s definitely happening! Christmas is just around the corner, and I´d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy holiday.
Nollaig Shona is the most extended Gaelic vesion of our "Merry Christmas", at least to my knowledge (I just read you can also say Nollaig Shona Duit, translated as "Merry Christmas to you"). Interestingly, the word Nollaig means Christmas and also December, which gives us an idea of how inseparable the Christian religion is from Ireland´s traditional culture. December is, simply put, the month of Christmas.
Both Spain (the country where I was born) and Ireland (where I live and work) are traditionally Catholic, although their customs around this time of the year are quite different, I suppose due to differences in cultural and geographical influences. In Spain, for example, it´s much more common to see Nativity scenes, like this one I photographed a few years ago:
On the other hand, the best of Ireland (in my opinion) is the festive lights; I believe they have the power to almost magically transform the sadness and darkness of the long December nights into joy and excitement for what is yet to come. And that´s exactly the meaning of this holiday, dating back to long before Christianity: celebrating the winter solstice. Remembering that, even when there are moments where darkness takes over, and there doesn´t seem to be any hope left, eventually the light will triumph again.
It´s also a good time of the year to meet with friends and family, if the circumstances allow, and celebrate being together. Or it may be the perfect occasion to rest for a few days, do something different or recharge batteries to prepare for a strong start of the year.
In any case, regardless of the way you choose to celebrate (or not), let me wish you happy holidays!
We´re in mid-December, and it´s time to start looking back at the year that´s now coming to an end. I have to say that 2025 has been a super busy year for me, both personally and professionally... But also, and probably for the same reasons, it´s been a tremendously rewarding year, one in which I believe I have grown and matured in many ways.
Professionally speaking, there are two highlights of this year for which I am incredibly thankful, and I´ll say it, also very proud. The first one I already told you in September: achieving my ACC certification.
The second one has been a whole journey of learning (and unlearning!) that began in January, and that I´m not going to say is just finished, because I´m sure I´m going to continue to learn... I´ve just completed the ATA – Awareness to Action training and certification program, delivered by Mario Sikora and María José Munita, of Awareness to Action International. And to me, this has meant finding a fundamental piece of my coaching project, integrating the Enneagram.
(Symbolic image of the three instinctual biases that are characteristic to Awareness to Action´s methodology: preservers, navigators and transmitters. Thanks Óscar for the drawings!)
If you´ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have seen me timidly mention the Enneagram on a few occasions; very few, if we take into account that I´ve been studying it in detail for three years now... And this hasn´t been due to a lack of interest, not at all: I find the Enneagram fascinating, I believe it´s an incredibly helpful tool for personal (and professional) development.
It´s been mostly due to a lack of confidence in my ability to explain it well, to be able to convey its full value without falling into superficial stereotypes (putting us all in boxes rather than setting us free) or overcomplicated explanations (confusing us even more instead of helping our understanding). And I´m sure there´s still more progress for me to make on this, but at least, today I can finally say that I have that confidence.
At this point, it´s good to clarify what we mean exactly when we say "the Enneagram". In the most literal sense, the Enneagram is a symbol named after two Greek words: ennea means "nine", and gram, "line", and indeed, this diagram is formed by nine lines, connecting nine points distributed around a circle.
This symbol is used as part of a personal development tool, called "the Enneagram of personality", which describes nine different personality profiles and the way they are interconnected following certain patterns.
Now, what not many people know is that there´s not a single fixed and static "Enneagram" as such, in the sense that it´s not a proprietary system of personality typing like DISC or MBTI (Myers-Briggs). In the Enneagram world, there are multiple approaches and schools of thought, some older and some more recent, that have been evolving and getting refined over time, in the same way the fields of psychology, philosophy and many other disciplines have been progressively evolving and building new approaches based on previous ones.
If we were to compare it with an operating system, for example, it wouldn´t be like Windows or Mac OS, but rather like Linux - open source, available for everyone to create their own versions, enhancements and contributions.
The thing is, one of the current problems we see with the Enneagram is that many people are learning it from books that were written many years ago, using certain concepts and ideas that are obsolete nowadays, and for which now we have better explanations, based on practical applications of the model over the years. Or even worse, they only get a partial version of those stereotyped concepts and ideas, in the form of hypersummarized descriptions and superficial jokes published on social media.
And to be honest, it´s a pity, because the Enneagram, when it´s well understood, well explained and well applied, is surprisingly powerful, both for its depth and its simplicity, and tremendously helpful for personal work, as well as for professional growth.
That´s why I´m so happy to have found an approach to the Enneagram that allows me not only to understand it in all its depth, but also to explain it in clear and simple terms, and to apply it to practical situations inside and outside my coaching practice. So, from January onwards, you can expect a lot more blog content on the Enneagram; I´ll explain the methodology behind Awareness to Action, or ATA, its different components and how they relate to each other.
Thanks a million again, Mario and María José, for your generosity over the last year, sharing your wisdom and the model you´ve built through many years of working in the field. Also, thanks Lee, Micky and Creek for your support, each of you in your own style and with your own perspectives, and thanks to all my classmates for the time we shared. And of course, I also want to thank Autognosis, the school where I got my Enneagram foundation in the first place: Alberto, Laura, Fernando, Rafa, Luis, Benoit, Ana B and Ana M. Thank you!
Today, I got this daily quote as a present from Google:
Your big opportunity may be right where you are now..
Napoleon Hill
And it reminded me of a post I wrote on Facebook years ago, back when I used to write on Facebook instead of a blog (big mistake: now I no longer have access to my own posts, except when Facebook decides to show me a random "memory" and I take a screenshot, like in this case).
(Photo of a bunch of multicolour lanterns in San Francisco´s Chinatown)
I don´t know exactly when I wrote it; I reckon it was around 2009. The title I gave it was "Interesting times", a heading that I think is also very appropriate for the times we´re living in now, so here you go:
... But I don´t like being this way, I don´t like living as a pessimist, so I prefer searching through popular wisdom to try and find a different way of looking at things. And a phrase came into my mind, something about the Chinese using the same word for crisis and opportunity... Thanks to Saint Google, I found the graphical representation for those two words:
Simplified Chinese: 危机 (Crisis) 机会 (Opportunity)
Traditional Chinese: 危機 (Crisis) 機會 (Opportunity)
The key here is that the last ideogram in crisis is the first one in opportunity, so they´re not exactly the same, it´s more that one can develop into the other: in each crisis, we can find an opportunity.
The way I see it, the word crisis is passive: a crisis is something that comes upon you, and that you cannot control. But the word opportunity is a call to action, a call to react to what is happening, to do something about it.
So, as always, the decision is ours: we can choose to see these "interesting times" as a worldwide crisis in which we´re simply the victims, or we can choose to see them as an opportunity, a wake-up call, the push that we need to rethink our approach to life and start making conscious and responsible decisions, learn from our mistakes and adapt to the new times.
What are your thoughts on this? What examples do you have, from your own life, where a crisis turned into a big opportunity? I have a few, so I´m sure you have them too.
By the way, the made-up word in the title, "crisitunity", was apparently invented by Homer Simpson, in an episode where Lisa told him about the Chinese using the same word for both things... And even though now we know it´s not exactly like that, this is still a really interesting idea, and a good example of how our language often determines our way of thinking.
November is gone, and here comes December, the last month of the year.
There´s only a month left in 2025! We´re in the home stretch of this year; we´ll be saying hello to 2026 in no time.
(Photo of the December page in the calendar currently hanging on my kitchen door. Having a calendar on the kitchen door is one of those habits I inherited from my family, and it may seem a little old-fashioned, now that we have Google Calendar and other modern contraptions, but I still love having a physical calendar at home, along with a giant whiteboard we can all write on, and clocks in almost every room.)
Today I thought I'd have a look at what I wrote on this blog at the beginning of the year. And I bumped into something I set out to do back in January, which, to be honest, I had forgotten about... Or not really, as it´s a topic that´s always on my mind, and one at which, in my opinion, I´m getting better at. But I had forgotten that back then I decided to make this my theme for the year, my common thread, my focus of attention: 2025 was going to be the year of...Decluttering.
And then what happened? Well, now that I think of it, two main things:
First, I didn´t set specific goals to work on; I settled for a goal that was too generic and "up in the air", without "bringing it down to Earth" in the shape of specific and measurable tasks (this, by the way, is what happens to our New Year´s resolutions, more often than not).
And second, I didn´t follow up throughout the year; I had a very good start, but then, along the way, there were other problems to solve, other tasks to attend to and other goals to achieve, pushing aside what I considered to be so important only a year ago. Does this ring a bell?
As the saying goes, life got in the way , like it often happens. But it´s precisely because we know that this is what happens, because we know life keeps changing and our priorities change too, that it´s so important for us to have a method that can help us to adjust our course and continue to cruise without losing our way.
The good news is that it´s always a good time to take (or resume) control of our ship, evaluate the situation, and act accordingly. In this case, there are still thirty days left for me to focus on freeing up space, be it physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually. So, turning the phrase around:
There´s still a month left in 2025! How are you going to make the most of it?
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