Survival Strategy #9 – Difficult Choices

When it comes to difficult choices, what makes them so hard is that they tend to involve a lot of mixed feelings. Making a decision in such cases can be a very conflicting and gut-wrenching experience. It’s incredibly difficult to turn off the emotional parts of your brain when you’re faced with a choice you that you don’t know how to best resolve – your subconscious and conscious inputs collide with your expectations and desires, leaving you confused and desperate for a resolution.

On multiple such occasions, making pros/cons lists has helped me make rational choices. What’s sometimes scary about these lists is that the decision that your list gives you can feel wrong to make at the time, in spite of the obvious answer. For example, you don’t know if you should break up with your boyfriend/girlfriend because there’s some things you’re concerned about their actions but can’t tell if they’re dealbreakers or just minor annoyances. Making a pros/cons list about his/her qualities can help you reach an objective conclusion. And if that conclusion is that you are wasting your time with this person, breaking up can still feel like the wrong thing to do, especially if both of you have invested a lot into the relationship.

However, for a lot of difficult choices if you know that your pros/cons list is thorough and you also know what you ultimately want, you will be able to make the right call for you with a rational outlook. It’s generally easier to solve other people’s problems than it is to solve your own, which is why pros/cons lists work – they help you look at your problems as if they were someone else’s issues written on that list. When you cool off and look back, you will feel better about your choice because emotions fade and stabilize, but your rational mind is pretty steady and almost always wants the best for you.

Lazy, Cute Multi-Ocassion Top

As a lazy, low-maintenance girl, one of my goals is to own as few clothes as possible that work for as many occasions as possible. This arrangement is great because it eliminates a lot of “I don’t know what to wear in spite of an overflowing closet of options,” which I don’t deal so well with.

The following shirt as a fantastic example of a solution to my problem – it’s a classic, simple, sophisticated top that can be matched to different jewelry, bottoms, shoes, makeup, and so on. It can easily work with shorts, jeans, slacks, or even a skirt. My favorite part is that it’s a flowy shirt that holds its own form, which is perfect for those not-so-fit-feeling days when you really need to hide that extra cupcake (or 5) that were so delicious.

Forever 21 Ribbed-Trim Top – $17.90

Survival Strategy #8 – Movement

Life is a tricky mix of moving and reflecting, adjusting and growing. Each person finds their balance between these challenges, but often it’s some pretty unpleasant events that lead us to find that balance.

It’s ok to take some time to feel sad and disappointed while we’re struggling with finding that balance. Mistakes are normal and important in this process. Just don’t give up, because every experience, good or bad, is a valuable lesson that you can use in the future either for yourself or to help someone else struggling in a similar situation.

Keep moving no matter what. Accept the challenges that come your way and don’t be afraid to seek out new ones. Life is very short and there is a lot we can offer and learn, but we can only do that if we don’t stagnate.

Bronzers – What’s the Point?

I have been extremely dubious about bronzers for a looong time. I felt like my face was ruddy enough to shine through any amount of foundation and any additional colors were just an unnecessary, pointless, and even potentially damaging step.

However, lately I’ve realized that bronzers are actually an amazing way to highlight certain parts of your face and make it look more refined and complete thanks to the way light works in conjunction with the shimmeriness of bronzers. Even though it does add more color to your face, it’s color that resembles more of a nice, clean tan rather than additional ruddiness, which was my biggest fear.

I particularly like e.l.f.’s bronzer below because it contains several highlighting, neutral colors that you can just swirl your brush through and apply to your T-section as needed, giving you some pretty awesome depth and shine with minimal effort.

E.L.F. Bronzer – $3.00

Survival Strategy #7 – Comfort Zone Expansion

Comfort zones are where we feel most at ease, like we can handle anything that happens within that arena. It’s commonly understood that the expansion of a comfort zone is a desirable and important event since our survival as humans depends on our ability to take risks, succeed with those risks, and grow.

It is a very tricky question as to how far an individual person can be pushed out of their comfort zone and not be destroyed completely by the new challenges they are faced without the proper intermediate growth. The answer to this question varies from person to person, as well as with different events happening to the same person. For example, someone with a background in public speaking will probably succeed better in an improv setting as opposed to someone who is naturally introverted and has limited public speaking experience.

Although it is crucial to expand your comfort zone, it’s necessary to consider how and when you can accomplish that without setting yourself back with confidence-crushing experiments. Setting up a goal chart with intermediate steps and milestones can be beneficial, similarly to how physical training and exercise is presented and addressed. However, sometimes throwing yourself into the fire is the only option. In those cases, your goal tree can be adjusted for a speedy growth spurt.

Most importantly, be kind to yourself. Remember that expanding your comfort zone is supposed to be really, really, really hard.

But also don’t forget that accomplishing goals is fun! The expansion of your comfort zone doesn’t have to a nerve wracking, guilt-laden obligation that you know you need to do… or else! Keep in mind how awesome you’ll be after your public speaking fear, or any other discomfort you may have, will be conquered. Let that motivate you but also don’t forget to take it easy and enjoy the things that are already within your comfort zone.

Frizz Free Hair = Freeze Hold Hairspray

I enjoy having my hair down a lot. The problem with this choice comes up when my hair becomes a giant, unkempt aura around me that looks distinctly unflattering.

The one sure way so far that I have found to keep it looking non-frizzy for a full day is through the following steps, which I do after I want to eliminate the frizz after either straightening my hair or deciding that I’m keeping it naturally curly for the day:

1. Buy a freezehold (or whatever the strongest rating is) hairspray.

2. Spray onto your palm.

3. Pass your palm through your hair.

Spraying the hairspray directly onto the hair works as well, but doesn’t saturate and weigh down the frizz quite as impressively and sometimes you can’t control the exact direction of where you want a particular batch of hair to point.

The only downside to this technique is that the hair becomes stiff in that position and it’s difficult to get swaying movement out of it sometimes if you’re keeping it down. For me though, I’m ok with the tradeoff between scary frizz and less scary freeze.

Survival Strategy #6 – Expectations

Some of the most difficult aspects of life for me personally are expectations. I expect that I will master something much faster than I can, or I expect that people will behave a certain way, or I expect that I will look good regardless of how lazy I am and how little effort I decide to put into myself.

Of course, I am deeply disappointed when these expectations aren’t met. Sometimes this disillusionment is so great that I want to give up completely on whatever it was that disappointed me.

I’ve noticed that these highly rigid expectations are not a good survival strategy but instead, they seem like excellent self-destructive and stress-inducing methods. But it appears that although it can cause a lot of harm, it is also a normal human trait to expect better things and to strive for them, which is a great survival strategy.

It’s important to remember that the things that we strive for and want to do we might not always be able to fulfill in the way that we expect. Maintaining a more relaxed, flexible, and forgiving view of ourselves and our limitations helps us recognize what we need to work on in order to survive in possibly different ways than we imagined.

Looking Extra Awake with Minimal Effort

For those of us who are visually impaired, we have been given a very quick and easy way to look wide awake when we’re feeling extra lazy – glasses. Thanks to the overshadowing effect produced by these traditionally not very desired visual aids, they have a built-in eyeliner effect, which is great for making you look more wide awake.

However, if you have been blessed with excellent vision or you prefer to wear contacts, eyeliner is an easy solution. Not being a very artistic person and definitely not having a surgeon’s steady hand, I was initially terrified of eyeliners, and I still mess up with declining regularity. I’ve experimented with several different eyeliner types, and what I like best about liquid versus gel or pencil liners is that liquid seems to be the easiest to get off (yay!). Because of the low-maintenance aspect, liquid eyeliners are by far my favorite.

E.L.F.’s liquid eyeliner has been really great and easy to use for my winged eyeliner experiments. It’s also pretty inexpensive and comes off really easily if you let it dry completely before adjusting any mistakes.

E.L.F. Liquid Eyeliner – $2.00

Survival Strategy #5 – Dignified Failure

Failure is an inevitable yet horribly unpleasant occurrence. We can fail at almost everything imaginable, from our speaking abilities to our work to our families to our hobbies.

An important emotion that also comes from failing is humility. This is a very important effect, which makes us humans more tolerable to each other. However, before we can reap the benefits that come with newly learned humility and other lessons we gather from each individual failure, we need to somehow overcome those paralyzingly negative feelings.

While we battle those bad emotions, we need to maintain our dignity no matter how terribly we messed up, or how bad of a place we might think we are in relative to other people, or how unlikely it might seem that there can be redemption after all. It’s much easier to maintain that dignity when you remember that you are just one person out of billions, and your mistakes are just drops in an enormous sea of other mistakes made by the rest of humanity. Remember that failure is part of being human just as much as breathing or eating.

What’s amazing is that sometimes our failures can lead to incredibly positive events. Initially, there is the embarrassment we feel about messing up, the emotions of disappointment, shame, and anger that things went so poorly. But if we survive those feelings without getting trapped into a destructive mode of self-pity and regret and instead remember that we are dignified and human, we can grow and become much more amazing that we could have if hadn’t gone through those less-than pleasant events.

Instant Professional

A fast and easy way to get a professional appearance is through solid colors. Especially if they’re complimentary or, if you’re artistically challenged like me, they can be simple, dark colors like black, blue, and gray.

What’s great is that these colors can go for any of your clothes, and if you get a collection of solid colors going, mixing and matching becomes a fun, reliable way of maintaining that professional vibe with some safe variety.