Blog essays

The world is full of small victories and loses. Every day there is a reason to celebrate a victory, whether it’s getting up in the morning or scoring a good job position. The point is to notice those little wins and get a nice little energy boost out of them. Well-being is the hot topic right now and yet people still tend to think about all the negative things around them. Noticing the small wins might help your well-being and give you a lot more self-esteem. So, you have to notice the small wins. These things are something that that you do successfully but were not sure you could actually do it. (Great performers, 2018) A small win is different from person to person. Some people might think that you did nothing when you feel like you’ve just battled through the world war of the dishes. Either way you will have to learn to recognize the wins during the day. It is okay to get excited when you notice your small wins. If you think about children and their enthusiasm, where do yo...

I’ve read a few blogs in my life and now that I’m writing one, I wonder if I’m doing it well. I know that a good and catchy title is required. Then the writing style should make the reader want to read more. The content might not even matter if your writing style is top notch. If you have the ability to get people to read, then use it. Teachingenglish.org has published an article about how to write a good blog. Of course, they start with picking a catchy title. But what after that? The structure of the blog is important. They’re claiming that your main point should be in the first paragraph, since that’s the thing the reader reads first. Writing style is listed there also. A friendly approach is always better than a hostile one. (Teachingenglish.org) The topics must be interesting. Something that changes weekly. For example, reflecting and writing about your work or whatever has happened in there might be interesting to some people. Of course, the best way to pick topics ...

Self-leadership is something that I want to get better at. I’ve never been good at it, maybe a bit better when I was younger but not good. It would be best for me to get to know self-leadership more. Leading yourself before others might sound easy, but definitely it is not. Once you get a hang of it, you need to maintain it. That’s the hard part. Laura Kozelouzek wrote an article in Forbes about self-leadership. She claims that when we’re starting a new activity, our motivation is at its highest peak. (Kozelouzek 2018) I believe her. That is the time when you have wanted to start doing something in the first place. For example, if I would want to start going to the gym, my motivation would be the highest at that moment. The trick is how to keep things interesting enough, to make it worth continuing. When time goes by and you’ve been doing your thing for long enough, your mindset starts to change. If there’s nothing more to motivate you and things just flies by you might start...

International business in general is what I’m aiming for. I see no point in just doing something in your own country. The thrill of travelling and all the experiences that doing international business brings is just amazing. Working with people from different cultures would be a valuable experience and would help me in the future when I’m going international. People like to settle for just doing business in their own countries. I know that in Finland when talking about going international it might frighten some people. For some reason it sounds scary to go out there and conquer the world. It might be that the Finnish mindset is made to settle for less. Dreaming and thinking big is hard for us who are not that ambitious. Over the years I’ve realized that you will not succeed unless you’re willing to think big. I’ve told in my previous blogs that I never really had a dream job when I was a kid. I just wanted to use my English skills. I think that that way of thinking might have...

A couple months ago I hosted a training session with a colleague of mine. It was about cultural differences and how to understand them. We used Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as a tool to find out about other countries. There are six dimensions in Hofstede’s theory; Power Distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, long term orientation and indulgence. There are many very good tools online to use this theory. It might be helpful to check how to do business with people from different cultures before you start doing it. No one wants to look like a fool, right? Power distance index With the power distance index, you can observe the differences in how equality is valued in different countries. In a culture that has high power distance the people are accepting a more hierarchical order. And cultures with low power distance are equalizing the distribution of power. The power distance in china is 80 on a scale from 1 to 100. That means that all individuals...

The education system in Finland is in the top 5 education systems in the world. We have a lot of good teachers and good students, but the issue is that the students are not that motivated. They start school when they’re seven years old. After that it’s only school school school if you want to have a nice job. Does the motivation level start dropping because the things that they teach us are boring? Is the information relevant to us? In a world where cellphones control our lives, it’s very easy to get bored quickly. The New York Times wrote an article about millennials, the bored generation. They say that the people born between 1981 and 1996 are defined as millennials.   (The New York Times, 2018) The millennials are often described as lazy and unmotivated. The cellphone and smartphone era has started while they were kids. So, they grew up looking at their screens and worrying over likes when social media started showing its head. If they start to get bored, they just take th...

When I was a kid I didn’t really have a real dream job to be honest. All I knew was that speaking English was one of my strengths and I wanted to use it. I played a lot of video games in elementary school and used English pretty much daily by doing so. We all use English daily in some form. We see ads, we hear music, we surf the internet every day. Our minds start to connect words to pictures and even kids will learn more easily than what it was like 50 years ago. Nowadays it’s more likely to a person to answer you if you ask them something in English here in Finland. Still many people are afraid to use English. Even in Finnish we don’t small talk. I saw VisitFinland writing about our lovely nation perfectly on their website. This is what they wrote: “Finns are not big small talkers, and quiet moments in conversations are not considered awkward. Silence merely means the person doesn’t have anything essential to say. There’s no necessity to fill gaps in conversation with chatter...

Milloin viimeksi olet tietoisesti asettanut tavoitteita itsellesi? Saavutitko tavoitteesi vai asetitko ne liian korkealle? Ilman tavoitteita emme voisi saavuttaa mitään suurta, sillä ne antavat suunnan toiminnallemme. On hauska miettiä omaa elämää tavoitteellisuuden kannalta, sillä tuntuu, että yhä isompi osa varsinkin nuorista ovat tietoisia siitä mitä he haluavat elämältä. Itse koen selviytyneeni hyvin ilman, että olen asettanut tietoisesti sen isompia tavoitteita. Se etten ole niitä asettanut johtuu siitä, etten ole tiennyt minne olen menossa. Tulevaisuuteni on ollut suurimman osan elämästäni pimennossa, enkä ole uhrannut montaakaan ajatusta tulevaisuudelleni ennen kuin aloitin Proakatemiassa. Elina Henttonen ja Kirsi LaPointe kertovat osan työn päämääristä olevan epämääräisempiä ja niiden sanoittamisen vaativan perusteellista pohdintaa. (Henttonen, E. & LaPointe, K. 2018) Tämän voin allekirjoittaa, sillä varmasti minullakin on ollut tavoitteita tekemisissäni, mutta en ole v...