"Your emotion is your data, trust it, act upon it."
I absolutely love this sentence just after hearing it in a podcast that I listened to early this morning.
It is coming to the end of the summer, and I had enough time to listen to myself and notice the trends within myself. Especially, in the evenings when my son went to bed, it was “me time” which means the escape time to read, write and charge the soul before the winter. I know “winter is coming” or as recently called by Jerome Powell, “pain is coming” so that I did my best to understand my pain points and to serve for it.
 |
| This content is created in a coffee-shop |
What does Volkan feel and want?
Let’s start with the fact that it might be so personal. Everybody is unique with their own dreams, desires, pains, problems, so on and so forth. As a father responsible for his family, the economic crisis in Turkey is a heavy load that I lift. I need to make financial plans, calculate their potential risks and benefits to create passive income against the increasing impacts of inflation. This can be sometimes so tiring, but it is a fact that I feel I need to deal with. Thanks God, I am working for a multinational company (Philip Morris International) but the life in Turkey is relatively hard for everyone. In order to increase my level of financial literacy, I spent some quality time reading and watching videos to learn from others’ learnings. Now I have new plans to fight against inflation but when you are responsible for not only yourself but the whole family you need to bear in mind this responsibility for every penny that you risk.
Secondly, I found much more time to follow up how my son develops, what makes him motivated, what makes him unsatisfied and even tired throughout this summer. Working remotely enables me to work from away and this opens the summer houses of our families to stay. Within office hours spent at family houses, my son spends time on robotic coding, mainly learned (or we can say increased his level of proficiency in) robotic programming languages like Scratch, Thinkercad. He attended online courses, watched YouTube videos, and brought some products into life. As his parents, the time he spent on such activities is highly motivating for us. As a supporter of digitalization in my business life, seeing him spending time on such activities when he is just 8 years old makes me so “delighted”. On the other hand, seeing his interest and abilities makes me feel alarmed that I need to take further steps to support him towards this area. As his parents, we should provide the resources that he needs. Do I clearly know about it? I have some estimates, but I am not sure about them. Finding a low-budget Udemy course for Scratch or a free learning program by municipalities are what we have done so far but maybe he needs more in the upcoming period because the world is changing so quickly, and more professional support may be needed. I am not a hundred percent sure, but this also has financial costs like private school support. So far, I have heard that private schools have such coding classes, but government schools do not. And as you may guess, the prices of these private schools skyrocketed, and I don’t prefer it in his early ages but later may be too late for him. Spending the budget in these early years may open some new doors but what about the opportunity cost for future investments on him?
The last feeling is about the next step in my career. Taking further steps in my career path always motivates me. Two years ago, I got the title: Finance Manager and working in Duty Free affiliate which was highly impacted by pandemic made me learn a lot. I am working with great people, and I love the people and company. On top of this, dreams never end. I keep on dreaming: hopefully, one day I will work in a foreign country with much more responsibility than today. In order to reach this objective, I am investing in myself. One of these investments is English conversation lessons in Rosetta Stone. In each one-to-one class, as an icebreaker, lecturer asks me the reason for attending the class and I describe my motivation towards working in a foreign country. I tell about the economic problems in Turkey and education opportunities for my son. I repeat this every lecture (Yes, I noticed that I repeated it once again) and working for it. On the other hand, I see that the number of international assignments decrease as remote work and digitalization enables us to do our responsibilities all around the world but who knows, maybe one day… The critical thing is being ready for that opportunity if it comes one day.
I described my three major emotions above and how they make me think and act. At least, I had the chance to notice them, think about them and act about them. Let’s see what time will bring… Stay tuned for the updates and always follow up your feelings because they are your data.
