Day 123: First step of moving to Maribor

Days 121 to 122 are in my Slovenian blog

Yesterday I drove with fully packed car to Maribor city. I have transported there the first quantity of my stuff to the temporary location in the center of the city near Lent region. I have checked out the location of my potential new apartment in the two-story old city house near a two-way road. The son of the owner of the house is living in one of the top apartments and is renovating all the apartments on father's behalf and converting them into rooms for the students. In the top as in the bottom floor there are three to four rooms with joint kitchen and bathroom.

In the first floor of the house there are already people living and one of them is a friend who I met couple of years ago and is deeply involved in spirituality. She moved there from the costal region to study at the Faculty of education. We had and interesting chat after I moved all my stuff from the car to one of the bottom rooms. I also met some of her visiting friends who is working in field of ecology and there was also a nice asian girl who decided to live in the city with her young child and a dog.

So while the top floor of the house has already been completely renovated and filled with people, the bottom floor yet needs a couple of days for the finishing touches. The landlord allowed me to store my stuff in one of the rooms and maybe I will decide to stay there for a while. It all depends how I will find living there appropriate. At this time the heating is off, the kitchen is not installed, light bulbs and shower are missing and the door frames are not completed.

What also bothers me there is that my potential room is near the road so there is some noise from the cars driving nearby. Also the parking is not very comfortable. Then I will have to see if there will be any other disturbing elements that will be unacceptable for me. So I am a bit nervous and anxious about all this movement to the new place and I feel a block in my belly. I am entering a new, unknown territory and obviously every moving of permanent residence is quite a big change.

Yesterday I also met another friend who has a master's degree in education, is author of three books and an interesting card sets that assist people in realizing and overcoming emotional limitations. We had quite a long talk, I estimate it was at least three hours and we shared a lot of interesting information. She is a very fast and extensive speaker, energetic person, very opened, kind and with lots of ideas. There is a lot of potential of mutual collaboration there and I am looking forward to it.

Now I will have to wait in Ljubljana for another two days until the rooms in the bottom floors will be ready for living and in that time I will pack the rest of my stuff in the boxes. I plan the next and final trip to Maribor on Sunday and from then on I will become a resident of Maribor city.

I forgive myself that I have allowed and accepted the feeling of fear that I will not be comfortable in my new place after visiting the location where work is in the progress, instead of realizing that when I will move there is couple of days, the work will be already completely finished.

I forgive myself that I have allowed and accepted the feeling of anxiety due to thinking that noise in the new apartment will be too much for me instead of realizing that I could get used to frequent sounds, like I got used to quite loud sound of the refrigerator in my current apartment which I found very disturbing initially.

I forgive myself that I have allowed and accepted to be afraid of the nearby very wide river to fill my future apartment with water in case of the floods instead of researching the history of floods in that area and verifying if my location is in fact on endangered locations.

I commit myself to breathe effectively and be full here, in this moment and act in accordance to real physical events and situations.

I commit myself to fully express myself and communicate with people that I am surrounded with and dependent so that they understand my needs and assist me in providing me with a suitable living conditions.

Day 120: Undecided due to unknown future

Several days ago I decided to start a new online project that I expect to become an additional source of income since I would be offering services that anyone can order online from anywhere in the world and I would also deliver the final product electronically. But then I started to wonder if it would be wise to create another project since that would divide my attention ever further. Also there is some competition in the targeted field and I am not sure if it would be worth the effort.

Recently I decided to move to another apartment and I picked preferred region, however moving would again mean a lot of stress and costs. I want to sell the stock of my goods that were left from the online store and I organized an auction but no from the companies that I invited to participate bided yet. So I plan to call them on monday and urge them. Basically I will have to come up with some money in order to organize the move and also to pay some bills.

But what possessed me lately was the urge to find some compatible life partner. So I reengaged in online social and dating sites and started to connect with some people. It would be cool if I would find soon some partner which I could collaborate on the projects with and I already have one date in couple of days. There sure is a possibility that I would connect with someone very quick and maybe also move to her apartment or move together to some new location. So I am opened for any opportunity and am not fixed on moving to any particular location.

Since anything can happen in next several days I am also procrastinating with developing the new project and searching appropriate new place to move to. Also I am waiting for the confirmation of the new legal entity that I filed documents for one week ago. When the papers will be received, I would be able to move very fast in direction of developing current projects. And almost any day I also connect with a new potential business partner globally so the opportunities and potentials are wast.

All this makes me hard to decide which point to prioritize and in which direction to move. I slip into state of mind where I just want to fast forward the time and research the new potentials. However since I can not speed up time, I make myself busy by surfing the web, watching movies, hiking and other stuff. I am aware that I could use the time to do all sorts of useful things, but I am so restless inside that I want to distract myself and just kill the time.

I feel confident that everything will turn out just right and that whatever will happen could be turned around somehow and make something that would enable me to move on towards my goals. I do not allow myself to experience fear or anxiety. I know that I will be able to make it regardless of what will happen. I have always had a lot of ideas and I made good use of them. I know that even if I loose everything, I can simply connect with other people, share my concerns and desires and they will assist me. I have even made peace with the death already so basically nothing is able to frighten me.

Writing all this down, I see that I just needed to sort out my thought and that I am fully capable of moving myself towards my goals. After I finish this post, I will clean the kitchen and work on the new project. Writing really assists and it is cool that I have started to use this tool to support myself.

Day 119: Moving again

It has not been even five months yet since I moved to current small studio apartment and I have made a decision to move again. It was relatively nice to live here in the neighborhood of medium to high class people on the suburb of capital city Ljubljana with nature and hills nearby. However some points started to accumulate that resulted in decision to place myself in a new environment again.

The apartment was quite practical due to being very narrow and long, allowing me to have the business office in front and kitchen way back which was very nice for my business needs. However shortly after I moved in I noticed that roof was leaking, the internet connection was slow, the lighting was poor, especially in the kitchen and bathroom, and now I also got the information that the ceiling has poor thermal isolation and that in the cold winter it is freezing inside in spite of heating being turned on fully.

Then also the landlord who is older woman lives just next door, meaning that I need to pass right her doors and porch in order to enter my apartment which is not very convenient. Firstly I expected that I will be in very good relationship with the landlord since she also studied spiritual books very intensely, however in time it turned out that she is not really very open-minded but part of a certain international spiritual group with such philosophy that prevents her to act grounded and consider this physical reality as something that has to be considered as primary point.

And the third reason why I am to move out is that I initially thought that living in the capital city will enable my business and non-profit projects to manifest faster, however it turned out that in the big cities, people are generally very nervous, full of fear, pressured with high rent prices and lack of time so it is not ideal place where my plans could be achieved effectively. I got information recently that it is generally best for any sales, especially if they are school and education related, to work outside big cities, especially in the northeast part of our country.

So while being born and living most of my life in northwest part of Slovenia and for the past four years living in the center of the country, I plan now to experience also life in the northeast region. I see this as kind of adventure and opportunity to gather more life experiences by meeting new people there. Also a lot of good friends live now in the surrounding of my future planned place of permanent residence so there will be many benefits.

Day 118: Zombification

I heard the word zombification firstly in audio interview about child education. When a child has accumulated a lot of information, it can not process it in real time and is enters a stage where it stares with a jaw dropped. The body stays still and it looks like a zombie, thus the zombification. I had a neighbor whose child went zombie very frequent, also at events where he was in danger to become hurt or even killed. However the parents nor doctors did not understand the cause of this and treated him only with pills.

Lately I also find myself in a very strange mode of the mind. When I finish all the important daily errands, I enter a state where I do not feel like doing anything. However since I do not want to be in that kind of state, I then do something just for the case of doing. This usually means using the computer for activities like browsing the web, checking email and social networks and watching movies. I kinda want to do something for so long until I would become again motivated enough for doing something important.

When I watch movies I notice that there is lot of drama and emotions involved and that actors frequently express anger or passion or other strong emotion. They act from the point of attachment to the past memories and not wanting to let it go. But I see myself like someone who is not attached on anything on this world and has accepted death as something inevitable. In some strange sort of way I already see myself dead thus I have nothing to loose and also no real fear about anything.

This kind of perception is in a way beneficial since it brings me a peace of mind, however it also renders me to become very passive from time to time, not wanting to do anything particular. So I must then do something to regain motivation and move myself into action. Sometimes also a quick nap or a meditation assists me in digest all the impulses and to come with and idea for the next step. Also writing a blog like this one is very helpful to materialize your thought and thus easily see and understand what is going on within you.

Basically I am quite satisfied with myself and making best use of my available time. However I tend to forget what all I have achieved today and in the past days. Sometimes it feels like I have done nothing, however that is not true. So it is important to acknowledge to myself what all I have achieved in oder to become satisfied with myself knowing that I am in fact moving effectively. It is so strange that it is best to track your progress graphically in oder to understand the score. However I see that this is a must if I want to effectively motivate myself and realize what I have achieved.

Day 117: Influence of the price

Yesterday I participated at free webinar of Slovenian marketing guru Aleš Lisac where he talked about the price setting of the products. It assisted me a lot in realizing some facts that I thought before were quite different. I will now be able to be more confident at sales activities of the product that I am marketing. The conclusion is that most of the time we do not think very much about the price of the products we buy. We buy it simply out of convenience, because it was there, on our path, near other things and places and times where we usually buy our stuff.

The biggest mistake that he pointed out was that when sales are not as expected, we lower the price. This act produces very bad psychological message to the potential buyer and it also diminishes the profit of the seller a lot. Price reduction is actually lack of imagination about other possibilities. The price is basically never the problem and the best practice is to enhance the quality of packaging or create a product with even larger price. This is because price is never in a vacuum, it is always relative to prices of other similar products. 

So if for example your main product costs 100 € it is best to produce just a bit larger or better variation and price it significantly higher, like 200 €. Immediately the primary product would not anymore be regarded as expensive but quite cheap, regardless of what it is. Improved looks, design or packaging also influence very much what the price range can be. For example average book costs 25 € however the special issue of the Bible produces by our famous print company sold it for the price of 2.000 € and was treated as collectors item. The other example is a dog shed which costs about 100 € however there is a producer of dog sheds with starting price of 20.000 € and they do sell very well.

There are also certain psychological price levels that influence very much how much each type of product will sell and they have to be tested. Also a very wide variant selection of one product can bring to confusion and consumers have hard time to decide. And the most challenging way of selling is one on one personal direct sale when the customer can find out very quickly if the salesperson believes that the price is too high. Also one must never judge the price based on own buying power since they are people who can afford your product even if it is too expensive for you to buy it for yourself. 

Other ways of improving sales is to improve the product line, to sell in batches, to add some kind of bait, to offer terms or installments, to make product more exclusive or to hire a celebrity. Salesperson must be skilled in noticing when the person has already decided to buy the product and then not get benevolent beyond what is necessary. The strange rule of thumb is that there will be always people who will claim that the price is too high, even if you drop it just to production costs. So the rule is to raise the price until the share of people who complain about the price gets to about 20%. Of course if the share of complainers is more than 50% then one might consider that the price is actually too much or that the value of the product has not been presented properly.

The best way to justify the price is to find out what is the cost of the problem that your product is solving. The value of the product is thus never the production price but the potential money savings if the product would be purchased and used. And also the price is relative to the budget or context of the product or service that you offer. For a client with low budget your product would be considered expensive, but for the well funded client, no price is no matter. Also one should ask the client what characteristics of the product or service they desire.

And the strangest point that Mr. Lisac exposed is that many companies, especially startups go bankrupt because the price of the product is too low. One must always consider many costs, like production, marketing, accounting, salaries etc. so the profit margin has to be high enough to cover all expenses. One must calculate how much is needed not only to produce the product, but also how much money would be necessary to sell the product. For example there were two producers of the fitness device that both enable the same functionality. However the first one was prices 600 € and the second one 14.000 € and they both sell. The difference is that the advertising budget for the first model of device is only 200 € but for the second one is 13.000 €. So the produces of more expensive device can invest 65 times more expensive advertisement and thus also succeed in sales.

Day 116: Got sick

Days 113 to 116 are in my Slovenian blog

Five days ago on Saturday morning I had a business presentation for the product that I am selling. It all went relatively I was late 10 minutes for the meeting however their location was not in the GPS correctly anyway. Initially they expected to have a meeting outside in front of the house, however since it was still quite cold, I suggested that we move inside the house which we did. Interior was not very clean since they had a very big dog and you know how it is if you have and animal in the house. The presentation that takes usually up to two hours has stretched to three and a half hours however they did not immediately decide to buy the product so I left the contract there and gave them one month to decide and benefit from the discount.

I don't remember if it was the same or the next day when I started to experience sore throat. I considered it to be due to giving a very long presentation and extensive speech thus my vocal cords got overused. However this was strange since it was not the first time I have such a long talk and never have I experienced such pain.

The next day I focused on updating one of my web sites and I was quite focused, better to say obsessed with finishing all required details by the evening. And when I went to bed the throat condition got worse. I experienced irritation in the throat thus my mouth constantly produced saliva and I had to swallow very frequently. However whenever I would swallow I would experience great pain in my throat. So I struggled all the night very much and did not sleep a lot.

The next evening the pain in my throat diminished a bit however I felt extremely cold. I turned on the heater and covered myself with two blankets and I felt still like freezing. Well in couple of hours the condition went to other direction. I became hot, extremely hot. Thus I uncovered myself completely and then also sickness appeared. I also started to experience vertigo or spinning in my head. Then the sickness became so strong I had to vomit.

The third day the pain in my throat was gone and I got nasal congestion. It started to pour out of my nose extensively and I used all my napkins. From the first day I got sick I decided not to eat anything and to drink also a herbal tea with lots of lemon. However I expected to get better faster than I actually is my speed of recovery. Today is the fourth day and also the nose condition stabilized itself completely. Now I wonder what was actually the cause for me getting so sick. It could be the accumulation of several things.

Two days before I did a presentation I went to visit my grandmother who also became very ill and started to vomit. The next day she was accepted to the hospital and they removed some stones from her belly. Then I am a bit worried about how to get enough money until the end of the month to pay my rent. Then I am disappointed about my landlord since she still did not fixed the leaking roof of my apartment after several months of discovering the leak. Then I was worrying if the person who promised me to assist in my business will keep her word, bus she is not answering my phone calls and emails for three days now.

All this with a lot of minor point could accumulate to the cause of me getting sick. So I must be more careful about my thought management not to go out of balance so much again. It is strange how much our physical body depends on mental condition. And how thought in our heads are so fast and intangible that they are quite hard to direct. However I will have to keep it going and direct my thought more firmly since as has been proven many times, the thoughts then start to direct me eventually. 

Day 112: Colossal degree of separation

I am continuing with listening to the free Eqafe audio interviews with creators, demons and animals. It is unbelievable how from the perspective of other living beings in existence humans are almost lost case since we became so much integrated with the mind that it has diminished us almost to nothing. Thus other beings do not even bother to communicate with us, since we are not capable of common-sensical reasoning. A good example was Jesus who came with the message of equality, however no one was able to understand his message and was thus crucified.

In that interview there is a cool analogy between the vertical line in the cross, representing the Here, the present moment, the physical and the horizontal line which represents the stretched current moment into the past and into the future and thus creating the illusion of time in the mind. Human beings are unable to live Here in the now, since we are located in the separation from here in our minds. We can not see what is Here, we do not care about other living beings, we do not give as we receive, but only take and take and take, equal as the mind only takes the energy from the physical body and thus destroys and kills it.

We see animals as less than humans since they are humble, and nice representation of benevolence are the sheep. They are perceived as creatures with low intelligence and we see them purely as grass eating beings that produce wool and meat. However they live in equality with all the physical and feel everything that is going in this world. They have a keen sense of grasping the larger picture, they understand our world system and the immense suffering that humans produce. Also understanding how elephants perceive themselves is very interesting. Animals see even the structure of nutrients in the food they eat and they return everything that they receive back to the physical when they die.

It is interesting how animals feel every minute part of their bodies, the bones, the organs since they are fully one and equal with their physicals. Some posses incredible sense of seeing, similar to x-ray vision, some communicate telepathically. All respect each other and understand that we are all part of the same source, just different expression. Some beings can even swap the bodies and thus live some time as the snail and then move to the body of the bird, without the snail having to die firstly. So from the human perspective of evolution, exchanging bodies and experiencing different life expressions while remaining the same being is quite phenomenal.

So for us to be able to understand the existence, there is no way of achieving this by accumulating knowledge and information and trying to grasp it using our minds. This is like trying to hold the water with a screen. It is impossible. One has to use water-tight bucket. So we must stop using our minds and birth ourselves into the physical. Only when becoming one and equal with our physical body, will we be able to understand life and become capable of existing in equality and oneness.