Moving to Finland was quite a jarring experience. For a people person such as myself, I suddenly found myself being unable to relate to or understand people…

5 years ago, I got on a plane a moved to Finland. I no longer wanted to live in Canada.

I went to my first 8am class at the gym yesterday morning. Our awesome instructor (who I am totally dazzled by) was pretty tough on us that morning. Tough but fair – if we she knew we could do better she said so. I wanted to accomplish what she seemed so sure I could accomplish.

2014 was the year of new beginnings. In some ways, 2014 was a hard year, and in other ways, it was a much easier year than those which came before it.

I noticed yesterday, while flying from Helsinki to Bucharest via Istanbul, that whenever I am on a plane, I feel deeply humbled. On board, everyone is equal.

It’s the last day of 2014 and I’m trying to mentally prepare myself for one of 2015’s first adventures: spending January in Bucharest.

I’m reading ‘The Happiness of Pursuit’ by Chris Guillebeau in which he talks about finding meaning in our lives through the pursuit of big goals, which he calls quests. Naturally, it got me thinking about my blog, my business, and basically my life overall. On his website, he has a guide to doing something called an annual review, where you look back at the ending year and forward into the next.

We all know the hero story: a problem, a struggle, and either a tragedy or a success in the end. This is the story on which we base many of our important life moments, whether we realize it or not. The hero defeats or is defeated… but what about the struggle? How many of us are so deterred by struggling that we don’t end up trying at all?

People would often ask me: “How did you learn Finnish?” and I wouldn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how I did it, it seemed like a random smørrebrød of ways.

Then a couple months ago, Cory, a high school friend of mine, came to visit me in Helsinki. He’s always been excited about languages and he was looking forward to picking up a bit of Finnish during his time here. It didn’t take me long to figure out that our ways of learning were quite similar…

The secret is out – it is grey and depressing outside these days. I won’t go into details but my first word of advice is, become aware of the effect that the weather has on your mood. Then venture to change it. In the video below, I discuss 5 different tactics I use for staying chipper through this tougher part of the year.