POSITIVE PEER PRESSURE

What you can find on this blog: - My dealing experience with Peer Pressure - Methods from my viewpoint that you can use on most of activities before making decision - Accept the Peer pressure feelings and turn it into your motivation.

Will there be a time that we all suffer from these statements?

• Tired of going to social media, know our classmates have internship at an ambitious company.

• Come up with the specific salary we should get and the fixed age at which we start the career (because our peers all have that goals in common)

• Intensely joining for courses and social activities since we don't want to be left behind in our network of friends?

I also had this FOMO feeling for the whole first year at university. Seeing how I have suffered the anxious feeling with the Zero social experience background from high school has made me crazily spending most of my time looking for social activities that my friends (and friends, I mean, all the people I could talk to on the first day of class) were also occupied. And what can I get in four months of this? Am I as successful as my peers, even if we do the same thing? Yes. But more to the point, I lost myself in other races. So have I wasted my time and energy trying to achieve the same results as others? Sadly but Yes, and I suspect not all of us want that.

So how can I manage to turn the pressure into the positive site?

QUESTIONING

What we WANT, what we NEED and what we HAVE TO

What ten activities have we been doing lately? How many have come from our original goal, and how many have come from advice from others or pressure from our peers? Based on the need for education, career path, and personal life, do we need to take that position just to ease the feeling of catching up with friends?

Clarify the activities that we, at least, have time for (which I mean conclude with school life, family life, and your life too). Next are the capacity and potential. Therefore, we are already filtering many transient activities that come from peer pressure, and our to-do list becomes self-centric.

ANALYZING

(S-T-A-R Model applied)

S-Situation: Answering all the concerns above. Consider into a different level of WANT - NEED - HAVE TO

T-Task: What kind of work do we undertake, how much JD can we provide, and if our peer has previously taken it, what is the peer review for that job? Through this, we can visualize our on-working look and have the right decision to move on with this job.

A-Action: Plan out scenarios if we are unsuitable for the position. Then what would we do? (Resilience of our goals in the beginning, if the accomplishments we can achieve to take the best place in our dream job can't keep up with the efforts we're currently making and put more pressure, then we should break one and look through.

R-Result: Set expectations and goals for this position based on our own desired experience, not what our peers had. I also have a role model I want to become in my major; this helps me be flexible, learn from my peer in Industry networking, and improve my skills to meet the demand of that role.

DISCONNECT

I realize the more I access social media, the more I feel negative about myself. With the digital tool's help, we can always cover our profile seemed perfectly with photoshop, full of career milestones and happy, balanced life. We know our new feed and other social media platforms will be displayed based on our interests and recent views. From then, start to unfollow peers that bring your pressure feelings about their success (it's not about their doing but about the thing you want to receive when using social media). Instead, renew our newsfeed with inspirational posts, career experiences shared by a top manager, CEO in our major to know more about their career path.

Sometimes, turn off the notifications and stay away from technologies; connect with our mind and feelings (self-talk) with a cup of hot tea at your lovely corner can come up with some decision in a better way.

FIND OUR PEER

If a group of peers causes unwanted stress, how about we proactively find a peer that can motivate us to work harder. It could be our mentor, a close friend, a teacher, or even ourselves. Ask a friend how she can manage the studying and get the scholarship, ask for feedback from your lecture about your career path and intern position that you can approach, and many more. Sometimes, all we need is a person who can get us back on track and encourage us to keep moving on, not a pressure to push us to the race that is not ours, am I right?

Last but not least,

TELL OUR OWN STORY.

Our path is our choice. So don't let the assumption of "25 to get a job, 30 to have a house, and 40 to reach the top of your career" story get you lost on someone else's life path. Is it the story that you want? If not, you know where to start again.

" It takes time to feel, identify, and be aware of how peer pressure can harm our mental and career paths. But as long as we resilience in our life story and know where we are standing in the race, we still can still turn other's opportunities into our possibilities. "

This blog inspired by:

• Amateur Psychology ep.8: The psychology of Envy - Bản chất con người là ghen tị?

• "Positive Thinking"_Neil Francis