What can you do?

Getting better at the mental game.

The first half of this year passed with great turbulences.

Due to calculation mistakes of my own making, combined with overambitious renovations, I put myself into a rough spot financially.

I learned that I'm not good at managing financial stress – it quickly spiralled into an endless loop of “I made the wrong choices, I need to change something, but I can't change anything because all the wrong choices are attached to things I actually want to have or achieve.”

Unfortunately, this lesson came with making life harder for the people around me, so if you got the panicky version of me: sorry! I know how to manage this better now.

Credits go to Thorsten for a much needed pep talk.

The advice is the obvious “focus on the things you can do.”

As with all good advice, it needs to meet you at the right time and place.

Focussing on what I can do meant preparing the small apartment with the big mortgage payment for a renter, and finding one.

And getting the Swedish house into marketable shape.

And selling the plot of land in the city center I held on to, without the means to develop it.

Focussing on what you can do leads to doing, and doing is better than not doing, because opportunities spring from action.

Going forward, I want to train this skill by applying it to writing (like this blog post, after a long hiatus!), and tackling the final boss of language learning: Japanese.