Improving user experience

If want to improve improve the user experience of your site get someone to browse through your site and come up with a few points on what could be better.

Or if you’re like me, you randomly decide to browse your own site and instantly find some things worth changing.

So this is really just a heads up to say if you notice things starting to look a little different. If you have any particular feedback on the site that’d be great.

When I started this site I was so focused on creating something simple to showcase daily musings that I didn’t really give thought to the design aspects of the site. In some ways that’s a good thing as I could have gotten so caught up in that aspect of the site that it distracted me from just writing.

However after just over 8 months, I think that now is the right time to make some changes.

And if Instagram is your thing why not follow me @thedailygemm

Getting to know you

How exactly does one discover themselves?

Through exploration, experimentation and being open to the unknown.

If you live your life in the box of what you know, you may think that you know yourself. But actually, there is so much more of you to explore outside of that box.

As much as there is ‘the me I know’ inside of the box, there is also ‘the me I don’t know’ outside of it.

Granted you can’t experience every single thing in life but you can try things that are outside of your usual routine.

It can be big or it can be small.

Things like:

Journaling
Visiting a new city
Joining a group or class
Doing the thing you’ve always thought about doing but kept putting off
Volunteering
Meditation
Going for a walk

You might think you know yourself or that you’re content with your life. But when you do a journal prompt like ‘Describe your dream life’ you might find you’re nowhere near where you want to be. Maybe you settled for an unfulfilling ‘stable’ job and you never even took the time to figure out what you truly wanted to do for a living.

“And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?”

– Rumi

A 17 year old walks into a bookshop in Wales…

That’s how the story of how I discovered the person who would become one of my biggest life inspirations begins. This person would go on to help influence the words I wrote, the person I’ve become and the things that I chose to do.

At 17 I liked to think that I was someone who didn’t fall for marketing ploys. I liked to think that I was a girl unswayed by the things that surrounded me.

Mostly because marketing sometimes seemed like you were being tricked into wanting or buying things by people who wanted your money, like a sort of elaborate scam.

I wanted to believe that I was above that sort of thing but I can now admit that the perception I held of myself wasn’t true.

I was wrong.

Wrong because I felt myself pulled to pick up a book called ‘Free Prize Inside’. Turns out there was no actual free prize inside the book but it did change my life which is even better.

The right time to quit

Perhaps there is no right time.

It’s easy to quit in the early stages but gets harder over time. After 3 years once you’ve invested time effort and energy quitting, even if it’s for the best feels like giving up.

And so, it’s hard to know the right time to quit. If you’ve been working on something for a while and that could just be a few months (it depends on how much you’re putting into it), if you’re thinking of quitting don’t make what you’ve put into it so far be the only reason to keep going.

But some questions to ask and things to consider are:
Do you still believe in what you’re doing?
If you knew what you now know, would you still start today?
Are you doing this for yourself or because you feel you have something to prove?
Do you enjoy doing the work?
Will the end result bring you joy?

Why sometimes you should do what you’re told

Have you ever had someone tell you what to do or what you need to work on and instantly put resistance to it, even when it’s something you planned to do or know you need to work on?

I have and I can take a wild guess that some of you have too. I recently found myself wondering what exactly this resistance is that comes up and more importantly why it happens.

I think it’s a mix of ego and the fact that sometimes being told what to do is annoying.

But since it’s impossible to avoid someone telling you what to do whether it’s a sibling, parent, manager, teacher stranger etc. The best thing to do is figure out how to overcome that feeling instead of being stubborn about it.

However if that has no benefit, it might be worth just doing what you’re told.

Of course this doesn’t apply to everyone that tells you what to do. But when you know that you need to be more focused and someone points it out, if you give into stubbornness and double down on your lack of focus it’s not going to help and it probably won’t feel good.

It’s a two way thing

When someone doesn’t want what you’re offering.

In a post called generous projection, I wrote about how when people try to help, they might just be projecting. I wrote it with a focus on the receiver but what about when you’re the one trying to help.

We often say things like I’m here if you wanna talk etc with the expectation that the other person will want to talk to us. We might even get frustrated if they don’t, but you have to remember it’s really not about you.

When you make someone an offer it might be useful to remember that they don’t have to accept.

Talk but don’t dwell

Often when we talk about difficult things we get so caught up in the story that we end up dwelling on it.

Sometimes to the point where we end up reliving it and our bodies remember exactly how it felt.

It could be a time you felt rejected, overwhelmed or ignored.

It’s not difficult to understand that those are things you might want to speak about. But it is important that you’re not just talking about it for the sake of it.

Talking is an amazing tool that you can use to help get past or overcome challenges but also just to get things off your chest.

However, if every few days you’re having conversations telling the same story about a situation that didn’t feel good, that’s just dwelling and it’s probably not going to benefit you in any way either.

It’s like that popular quote says:

Where attention goes energy flows

If you catch yourself telling the same stories over and over stop and ask, why?

It could be because you’re not over it and you still have strong emotions attached to whatever happened. If it’s something you want to get past, start with learning how to let go.