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Embracing challenges, weathering storms, and standing tall amidst adversity – these are the hallmarks of strong-minded people. In a world where uncertainty lurks around every corner and obstacles often seem insurmountable, the individuals who possess unwavering determination and resilience stand out like beacons of inspiration.

If you’ve ever wondered what sets these exceptional individuals apart, you’re in for a journey of discovery. In this enlightening exploration, we delve into the depths of the minds of these remarkable individuals, unveiling 7 key characteristics that define their strength and tenacity. Get ready to be inspired as we uncover the secrets that empower these strong-minded souls to conquer challenges and leave an indelible mark on the world.

Read also: 10 Mindsets Of Successful Women You Need To Adopt ASAP

1. Perseverance in the face of setbacks

Strong-minded people have clear goals that they’re pursuing. Their focus is unwavering, and they persevere in the most difficult circumstances. 

Where other people see an insurmountable roadblock, strong-minded people see a temporary obstacle they need and will overcome.

These people finish what they have started, contrary to those who quit at the first sign of difficulty or boredom.

Perseverance is one of the most powerful traits to have, as it might just take one more step for you to succeed, which you’d never find out if you gave up. 

2. Willingness to go against the stream

Few people have created an extraordinary life for themself by being perfectly ordinary and going with the stream all their life. 

So many success stories have at least one moment in which someone did something unconventional to make them stand out. 

However, going against the flow and ignoring peer pressure is far from easy. It requires nerves of steel and a lot of determination. 

In other words, you need to be strong-minded to do so. 

3. Open to qualified criticism only

We’ve all heard that you should be open to constructive criticism because that’s the only way to improve. 

While it is certainly true that we should weed out the haters from constructive critics, there is another differentiation we need to make. Because not every constructive criticism is qualified advice.

Your friends, family, and neighbors can give you seemingly wise tips about building a business or getting a promotion. However, if they have never built a business or got promoted in a similar situation, they are not qualified for this kind of advice. 

Strong-willed people are secure enough to realize this and put aside these tips in favor of more qualified ones. 

4. Willingness to take responsibility

Individuals who willingly shoulder responsibility are truly a rare breed in today’s world. It’s a familiar story – when things go awry, many folks are quick to dodge accountability and point fingers elsewhere. But, let’s be real, when things go right, they’re the first ones to bask in their accomplishments, as if it were solely their brilliance that made it happen.

Consider the scenario of service hotlines – a bewildering journey of being shuffled from one representative to another, without getting any closer to resolving the actual issue at hand.

Conversely, you’ve got these strong-minded individuals who don’t flinch from being answerable for their actions or even inactions. They’re the ones who can navigate the discomfort of accountability with grace and determination.

5. Consistency, even with little things

How you do anything is how you do everything. The origins of this quote are not entirely clear, though that doesn’t diminish its impact. 

Many people think they can laze about and conserve energy for the few things that truly matter. 

However, it will be significantly harder to excel at something if you have trained yourself to be mediocre. 

Strong-minded people manage to be motivated not only for the important things but also the seemingly mundane tasks. And if they lack motivation, then they push through with sheer self-discipline. 

Read also: 11 Tips To Be More Consistent | How To Stick To Habits

6. Comfortable being alone

Surprisingly many people are uncomfortable with being alone with their thoughts. It might be a side effect of the smartphone age, where instant entertainment distracts from unwanted thoughts. 

Either way, time for introspection is very powerful. It enables us to grow more rapidly because we can analyze, overthink and plan without distractions. 

Of course, you will also stumble upon many uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, e. g. regrets, guilt, jealousy, anxiety, etc. 

But strong-minded people are not scared of these moments. They know they are essential for a fulfilling life, so they brace them head-on. 

7. Very aware of their faults

Strong-minded people don’t shy away from admitting their faults to the person that matters the most: themself. 

Often, people secretly know that they are not doing enough to lose weight or only studying halfheartedly, but they can’t admit it to themself. 

Why? Because it would take away their right to complain about things not going as they want them to. And people enjoy their pity parties oh so much. 

On the other hand, strong-willed people manage to break out of pity mode and face reality much more quickly. 

This also enables them to improve their current situation when others are still turning a blind eye. 

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These were the 7 characteristics of strong-minded people. How many of them do you already possess? 

Also, this is the last blog post of the year! Take a moment to share your greatest success of the past twelve months with us! As always, we love to hear from you. 

We wish you an awesome start to the new year!

Until next time, Felicity Seeker! 

Is your life boring and frustrating? You deserve more than that! Let’s take a look at how to romanticize your life.

What Does Romanticize Your Life Mean?

Have you ever seen a romance movie that gave you this warm and content feeling? Or maybe you went on a romantic date once.

Romanticizing your life means creating those kinds of feelings in your daily life. Basically, you want it to feel like life is one big romantic date instead of the boring normalcy many are used to. 

Fortunately, you can romanticize everything. You can romanticize your daily habits, work, and life as a student (even if it’s just online school). 

You only need to try instead of waiting for it to happen on its own. 

How To Romanticize Your Life

1. Find a fictional role model to emulate 

Perfectly mundane tasks become much more exciting when we know that our role model does them too. 

It doesn’t matter if your role model is real or fictional as long as they inspire and motivate you.

For example, imagine you are Rory Gilmore, taking a book outside and reading somewhere. 

Imagine you are Tony Stark the next time you have this super boring lab assignment in school. 

Even if it is a totally unrelated task, imagine doing it as if you were your role model. 

2. Make little changes to already existing tasks 

The easiest way to romanticize your life is by tweaking existing habits instead of adopting new ones. 

For example, if you rarely read books, it will be more difficult to romanticize your life by reading outdoors, like Blair Waldorf. 

However, if you are already reading daily, a slight tweak to the habit can bring big results with little effort. 

So take a look at your daily habits. Which of them correlates with what your role model is doing? 

Worst case scenario, it will only be brushing your teeth, going to bed, and eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

Still, look at those habits and see how to make them more exciting. 

For example, brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand like Jim Kwik.

As you go to bed, try listening to soundtracks promoting deep sleep. 

And for breakfast, try out a few quick but fresh meals instead of cereal.

Build on what already exists before you try to overhaul your daily routine. 

3. Stop rushing around

The number one thing that zaps all romance out of life is stress. 

Imagine going on a date where your partner has scheduled every minute of it to a specific activity. So you’d be rushing to stick with the schedule, destroying all the romance of the moment. 

After all, romance is in its natural calm and relaxed.

So, if you want to romanticize your life, you should slow down. You can do that by cutting your to-do list to its essentials and getting your most time-consuming distractions under control. 

Also, expect delays and always plan accordingly. 

4. Seek out scenic locations to read, work, or chill

Our environment impacts our mood. Things as simple as the room’s wallpaper, a conversation your neighbor is having, or the clutter around you can trigger a constant buzz of annoyance in us. 

Sure, we can get rid of the clutter, but many other environmental factors are only for us to decide if we want to move to a different home. 

That’s why changing your scenery is a great way to trigger a more romantic mood. 

Pick one of the tasks you already do and relocate it to a more romantic location (library, café, or park). 

And don’t argue that there are no great locations around you. If none come to mind right now, go out and stop by different places. 

And if all fails or your introverted self doesn’t want to leave the house unnecessarily, then use the car or bus ride to admire the scenery around you. 

You could even walk to a bus stop further to take in more of your surroundings. 

Whatever floats your boat. 

5. Narrate your life

Your life will seem more romantic than you usually perceive it when you start narrating it as if you were the main character in a movie. 

You can do this through journaling in the form of letters to someone, through a video diary like the one in ‘Good Luck Charlie,’ or you can publish vlogs on YouTube.

All these pursuits will give your life a slight edge and make you focus more on the romantic aspects of it. 

(By the way, have you seen the movie ‘Stranger Than Fiction?’ The protagonist suddenly hears a voice narrating his boring life, always foreshadowing his imminent death. Predictably he freaks out. It’s hilarious to watch!) 

6. Be more intuitive and spontaneous

Sometimes, all your plans about romanticizing your life don’t feel right. You’re just not in the mood for it. 

These are the moments where the better choice is to follow your intuition and be spontaneous. 

Don’t do it if you don’t feel like hanging out in that cozy café. Romanticizing your life is meant to feel good and not forced. 

Humans require not only stability but also variety. You can’t plan everything perfectly. 

Just because you planned to have spaghetti next Friday doesn’t guarantee you will have an appetite for it when the day comes. 

Allow yourself to deviate from plans or even not make concrete plans at all. 

7. Define what romantic means to you

In the end, there is, of course, no one size fits all solution to romanticizing your life. 

You have to figure out what a romantic life means to you.

You can do this by going through Pinterest and sticking relevant pins to a board. After a couple dozen pins, this board will show you clear patterns of what you consider a romantic life. 

You can even make a collage out of them and use them as the background on your digital devices. 

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I hope you found some helpful ideas on how to romanticize your life. For example, if you had to rate your life on a scale from 1 to 10, how romantic would you say is your life? 

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Also, feel free to reach out with content ideas you’d like to see. Perhaps, we’ll choose your idea next! 

Until next time, Felicity Seeker! 

Do you love Harry Potter and can’t get enough of it? Then you’ll like this list! Here are 11 life lessons we can learn from Ravenclaw.

As with all of these Harry Potter lists, remember that many of these ideas come from the fandom instead of the books or movies. 

There are many characteristics of the four houses that big parts of the fandom have agreed on, and the following life lessons are some of them.

Read also: 11 Life Lessons To Learn From Slytherin | How To Be A True Slytherin

Read also: Reading List For Personal Growth

1. Seek Knowledge for knowledge’s sake

Knowledge is potential power, and Ravenclaws are aware of this. But few of them truly care. 

They don’t aspire to hold powerful positions in society. Instead, they enjoy knowledge for knowledge’s sake. 

That’s also why they often find reading about random topics that piqued their curiosity instead of issues targeted to be useful to them. 

In our informational age, it is incredibly easy to gain new information. Yet only a minority of people use the internet and books for purposes other than entertainment. 

2. Create! – that’s what humans are meant to do

Ravenclaws embody the essence of what makes humans so different from their mammal peers: Intellect and creativity. 

Our capability to learn new information is unrivaled in the animal kingdom. 

But even more unique is our ability to create new things, be it houses we live in, school systems for better education, or genetically modified food. 

Animals might create a nest or den to live in, but they don’t experiment with ways to improve that structure. 

Creativity is part of what makes us more than mere animals. This makes it all the more surprising that many humans dedicate little time to creating things. Even worse, some people seem almost exclusively focused on destroying things. 

Ravenclaws, however, embrace their creativity firmly; look at Luna Lovegood being involved with the Quibbler production or Rowena Ravenclaw and her Room of Requirement. 

A life lesson to learn from Ravenclaw is that we should be more creative, whether that means writing fanfictions in private or making a living as content creators. Just create something, anything.

3. Look beyond the obvious and see what others miss 

It can be difficult to look beyond what you see. That’s why many people shy away from spirituality, and fake news is immediately taken for face value. 

While Slytherins can see the less obvious on a psychological level, Ravenclaws see it on a more worldly level. 

Think of Luna Lovegood and her almost seer-like remarks. She views the world in an entirely different way than the rest of us. 

Sure, some of it may be far-fetched, but a lot is spot on and helps her navigate life much more smoothly. 

When was the last time you tried to look beyond the obvious? 

For example, look at school peers or coworkers. Surely, you’ve given some of them mental labels by now (e. g. know-it-all, lazy, naive, spoilt, etc.).

Try to look beyond that for a change. Actively seek out different explanations for their behavior that you have yet to consider. 

Do the same with the news you consume. Always consider different sources of information and know that nobody is ever entirely unbiased.  

4. Be curious and search for answers 

Children are naturally curious. They ask questions about everything and annoy their parents during their ‘WHY’-phase. 

As we grow older, we lose big parts of this curiosity. Sometimes we don’t question further because it seems like too much trouble, and other times we think we already know everything there is to know. 

But a true Ravenclaw is a person who is curious about everything. They research and ask questions until that curiosity is satisfied or, rather, until they latch onto one of the many new questions that came up in their research. 

As the Ravenclaws show, one should never underestimate the importance of curiosity in learning. 

Curiosity is a big reason children learn so quickly and why Ravenclaws are the high performers at Hogwarts. 

Try to explore your curiosity a bit more in the coming days. Do research on topics you’ve never fully understood but always brushed over. 

Ask a friend about their current obsession and dive into that for a day or two to see if you’ll also latch on. 

Just give it a try – that’s what a true Ravenclaw would do. 

5. Sharpen the weapon that is language

“Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.” – Luna Lovegood.

Ravenclaws have a large vocabulary. It comes with all the reading. 

That’s why they can express themself so succinctly and know exactly how to intelligently tell someone off.

A quick tongue is not only useful during presentations and negotiations but also for dating. 

So endeavor to up your wit levels. 

Read more challenging reading material than social media captions and instant messages. 

Play act like your favorite witty character while you’re alone, to slowly adopt some of their mannerism. 

Just don’t assume that it is an innate trait. It can very well be learned. 

6. Get in touch with your intuition

One of the life lessons we can learn from Ravenclaw is to get more in touch with our intuition.

Rowena Ravenclaw was not a woman purely driven by logic and intellect. In fact, her intuition often led her so accurately that it seemed almost eerie to the other founders. 

Luna Lovegood is much the same in that way, and Harry Potter, who could have been sorted into any of the houses, also has those moments. 

You might wonder how you can get in touch with your intuition. Thankfully, many coaches and courses can help you with that nowadays. 

They will hold your hand and help you eliminate mindset and energy blocks that make connecting with your intuition harder. 

But ultimately, it comes down to practice. The more you feel like you can trust your intuition, the easier it will be to feel it out. 

One way to trust your intuition is through games. For example, when you have no idea how to answer during multiple-choice quiz games, pick the question that feels good before you’ve even given yourself any time to think. 

Or, during Sudoku, put the number into the field that feels right when you are stuck. 

The more little successes you have while using your intuition, the easier it will get. 

But is it good to follow your intuition?

The book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ mentions multiple studies that show just why you shouldn’t trust your intuition. Time and time again people have fallen prey to biases. 

But then again, there is a difference between guessing and listening to your intuition. 

Ultimately, it’s up to you when to follow your intuition and when to apply logical thinking.

 

7. Be unique and stand out

Nobody ever got remembered in history because they were perfectly ordinary. 

And I bet what draws you most to your loved ones is never their ‘normality.’ No, it’s their unique quirks. 

Luckily, you don’t have to come up with things that will make you unique. You already have them within you. 

In other words, authenticity makes you stand out from the rest – to be unapologetically yourself. 

However, being authentic doesn’t justify you being a nasty asshole who only complains about all their problems instead of attempting to fix them. 

In a way, that nasty version of you is not your true authentic self, but instead, your real self is hidden behind all that baggage and waiting to come out.

A true Ravenclaw is a person who stands out from the crowd; think of Luna Lovegood and her quirky Quidditch hat or Filius Flitwick’s squeaky excitement as he fell off the books. 

Have you been trying to blend in? In what way are you trying to ‘normalize’ yourself? 

8. The pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword decides who holds the pen

Ravenclaws can sometimes be idealistic. They know that knowledge can be power, and that makes them feel superior. 

They think they only need to get all the facts straight and do ‘proper’ research, and then everyone will hear them out. 

Sooner or later, they will all make the frustrating experience that that’s not how our world works. 

Just remember how scandalized and frustrated Hermione was when she was met by the willful blindness and vicious lies of Umbridge and Fudge. 

She could scarcely believe that they chose to ignore the facts. 

In fact, the suppression of truth through people in power became so bad that the Ministry officially accused muggle-borns of stealing their wands from ‘proper’ wizards. 

This highlights the difference between Slytherins and Ravenclaws beautifully. While Ravenclaws focus all their effort on acquiring knowledge, Slytherins strive to gain knowledge and power. 

It’s unsurprising that, in the end, there are more Slytherins in positions of power whose knowledge is referred to than Ravenclaws. 

10. You can’t live life with your head in the clouds

Since this list is about the life lessons we can learn from Ravenclaw, we also have to talk about negative personality traits the Ravenclaws have come to terms with. 

For example, they must learn how to stop losing track of time. Luna Lovegood is a perfect example of someone who constantly has her head in the clouds. 

But she’s far from the only Ravenclaw with that tendency. The ravens are always contemplating something, but only sometimes is it relevant to what is going on in the physical world at that moment. 

And that’s ok, as long as the topic you’re thinking about doesn’t make you lose track of time. So, pulling your head out of the clouds will be hard if that happens. 

Thankfully, there are some things you can do about this. 

If you are on your own and want to let your mind run free, then set yourself a timer or five. 

This also works if your mind keeps drifting off unconsciously. Set a timer for recurring intervals as a reminder to focus on the task at hand. 

Another technique can be to write down whatever seems urgent for your mind to consider immediately. Once you’ve written it down somewhere, you can rest assured that it won’t be forgotten. 

And if all that fails, consider taking up meditation and reducing your time on ‘short media.’ 

TikTok and Insta Stories lower your attention span to a few seconds. No wonder you struggle during 90 min lectures!

11. Not everything is a competition

Some Ravenclaws are too competitive when it comes to the knowledge department. 

They pride themself in their knowledge and want to prove it to everyone around them. 

Sooner or later, they will learn what happens if you are too competitive: You upset everyone around you. 

Let other people raise their hand in class, too, for heaven’s sake! And if you do answer, make it brief, and don’t use the opportunity for a presentation about everything else you know. 

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These were the 11 life lessons we can learn from Ravenclaw. Do you have another lesson to add? Share your thoughts with us!

If you are determined to bring out your inner Ravenclaw, comment ‘DIADEM‘ down below.

Until next time, Felicity Seeker!

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