WHO AM I

As a person, I enjoy both being with myself and with my friends. I love the feeling of absolute solitude whenever I'm just with myself reading a book while having a cup of tea. At least twice or thrice a month, I take my #MeTime: go out and have lunch or dinner in a restaurant and watch a movie.

 

My first ever hobby has been reading. I've been hooked on it since I read the sci-fi novel, The Choice, written by Gloria Skurzynski. I think what hooked me to this hobby is the ability to be in different places, eras, and realms without leaving the comfort of my bed. A perfect Saturday night is sitting on my bed while reading a novel with a cup of hot tea on my nightstand as the strong winds and heavy rains try to get inside my bedroom through a window facing a blooming rose garden illuminated by the occasional lightning in the sky.

 

Come Sunday morning, I usually wake up just in time for brunch. And this is when I cook my go-to brunch: a cup of smoking white rice, a sunny-side-up, a creamy scrambled egg, and a mug of Assam tea with milk. After brunch, I am usually busy preparing my meals for the coming weekdays so cooking and eating healthy in a busy workweek will not be difficult.

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To burn some extra calories and prepare me for another week of hustle at work, I play badminton with my friends every Sunday afternoon. I learned to play this sport when I was looking for an outlet to focus my attention and release my unwanted emotions after an unexpected breakup. After hours of playing badminton, my friends and I usually hang out to have dinner and sometimes get some alcohol in our systems while catching up and talking about random ideas.

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Whenever I take some extra time offs from work, I cook some dishes that I watched or read online, adjusting the recipe according to my taste and the available ingredients in my cupboards. Lately, I've been watching cooking videos of Judy Ann's Kitchen on YouTube. I also just recently downloaded the mobile app of Tasty to my phone. There's something in altering complicated recipes and cooking them into dishes that fit my simple taste and cupboards that excite me.​

 

I also travel if I feel like I need a break from the metro life. Museums, beaches, and mountains have been comforting me whenever I feel so suffocated by the black smog and roaring engines of busy city life. I usually travel with my best friends and partner. Because you know, it's better to have someone to share memories and expenses with. I want to explore the destinations that the Philippines has to offer first before traveling abroad.

WHAT DO I DO

I'm currently working in the business process outsourcing industry. I was promoted years ago to be a part of a workforce management team as a scheduling coordinator. During this time, I made sure to learn the processes and tools as efficiently as I could. Then came an opening for a scheduling analyst so I talked to my manager and took the opportunity. Being an analyst has its own perks and pains. Though I don’t feel so much stress since my tasks are set to be done on a weekly basis except when scheduling-related escalations happen which are very minimal since I always make sure that my tasks are executed and done with accuracy and efficiency. After some years as a scheduling analyst, I am now part of an even larger team as a planning analyst. This time, my workweek revolves around training module development and training completion reporting. In the next few months, I will be certified as a training facilitator.

 

Prior to joining WFM, I was a sales coach for the same account that I'm supporting. Being a sales coach exposed me to a lot of ways how to motivate a person. It made me understand more how just lending an ear to someone who's going through a lot of things could make a big difference. I can still clearly remember how a grieving daughter talked to me and just totally opened up to me about how losing her father was affecting her as an agent and her life as a whole. Until now, that has been one of the proudest moments in my life as a professional, not only she was able to motivate herself to move forward after our coaching sessions for that month but also that incident influenced me to be more understanding as to why people did things that were out of my own experiences.

 

Before I became a sales coach, I spent the first two and a half years of my experience in BPO as an agent, be it in customer service or sales. And you know what, I never, for a moment, regretted starting from the lowest rank in the industry. These two and a half years of laughter, frustrations, and sadness every time I talked to customers made me know by heart that differences in languages and cultures weren't barriers to showing compassion and kindness to others.

 

I also have my fair share of experience in digital marketing. I used to be a marketing consultant for a foreign-owned digital marketing firm. I used to Skype-meet with marketing firms and agency owners from across the globe to come up with the best service recommendations depending on their end clients' business needs. After that, I worked for other two firms as their business development consultant, one was in-office and the other was home-based. This role was like marketing consultant plus lead generation specialist plus payment-collection specialist.

 

Regardless, these posts gave me an in-depth knowledge of the digital marketing world. I've learned how to perform a site analysis using an SEO roadmap, create marketing materials tailored to a specific business, manage multiple projects with different needs and deadlines, and come up with effective sales pitches.

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Continue here for more details of my professional background.

WHAT IS HERE

This blog is about some random things that I want to share with the world. My posts are grouped into three categories: first-hand narratives, my experimentations in the kitchen, and my budget-friendly travels. These are all my passion projects where I will be sharing series of posts supporting umbrella ideas so others can have a deeper understanding of certain topics, be able to cook simplified yet nutritious and yummy dishes out of complicated recipes, and be able to explore places without hurting their wallets.

 

I will also share here my life as a bookworm: my sentiments on the books that I read and my journey in finding some titles that are somehow not easy to find on the usual shelves of a typical bookstore. Moreover, I will use this as my avenue to share my journey to owning my dream homestead. As of now, I'm still renting a house with my partner but we're already in the process of owning a two-story house in a nearby province.

REMEMBER THIS

Whatever I share on this blog is purely my opinion and does not reflect that of my affiliates and the companies that I'm working with and for.

 

As for my posts themselves, I will always insert the link to the sources if ever I will be quoting from someone else's work. For the photos that will be from the internet, other than those from the photo library of this platform, I will always use their link so that they can be easily traced to their original pages.

 

Furthermore, I only authorize the use of my posts for proper information dissemination and not in any malicious, harmful, deceitful, and/or offensive ways. Should my posts be resources, just cite them properly.