A Journey within
May represents a month dedicated to promoting mental health awareness. There are many individuals, entrepreneurs, and corporates in the community who shared their best case practice to support you in the past period of COVID-19. We took a chance to use the last week of May and share some tips and solutions with you on this topic.
We held an interview with Ilma Ibrisevic, a content creator and startup mentor. She shared with us her views on health and how she manages to stay productive and aligned with her goals.
We are happy to do this interview with you and talk about your work with mental health awareness. Would you like to tell us more about yourself?
Thank you for the invitation to share about this topic that’s so close to my heart! It’s an honour.
More about me?
In all honesty, the answer changes every day!
Here’s what it is today:
I’m a 28-year old human, born and raised in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but I’ve been moving around our wonderful planet for the past 6 years — spending some of that time in the UK, US, and Peru.
I see myself as a wonderer and wanderer, always on a quest to (ironically) not be on a quest. I love learning, exploring, and feeding my natural curiosity. I value freedom and I’ve been on some terrifying inner journeys so as to really embody that value.
My prior professional experience is varied. I’ve worked as a Business Development Associate, Marketing & Growth Associate, Event Manager, Mentor, Entrepreneur, Project Manager, Facilitator, Learning Consultant, and so much more.
Since then, I’ve shifted my direction and focused on my personal work of inner healing, self-leadership, and exploration of what it means to be alive.
I’m passionate about holistic health and exploring a variety of modalities to assist myself and others on their own journeys — from coaching to intuitive presence to movement.
I fervently believe in a better, more loving and conscious world available to us all, within us and outside of us.
To pay for those oat milk lattes and avocados, I also work freelance in content marketing. Words are my craft.
What’s your opinion on the importance of mental health today?
What a question! I feel like I’d need to write thousands of pages to feel like I “answered”…
Today, via social media, we’re hyper-connected, but not to real people. We’re connected to their holograms, cardboard cut-outs, names on the screen.
Social media leads to become ultra-focused on ourselves and what we feel others perceive of us. We’re one click away from comparing ourselves to others and the curated highlights of their lives.
Many of our neighbourhoods, families, and communities have weakened or collapsed, leaving us feeling alienated and alone. We’re disconnected from the very ecosystem on which we depend. We don’t know we’re eating Marta the cow when we buy a sausage wrapped in plastic in the supermarket, and we have no real experience of connecting with a tree without which efforts we’d die in minutes.
The modern narrative of hustle and what it means to be successful has left us feeling perpetually underachieving and unaccomplished. Because after all, Mark Zuckerberg was only 19 when he started Facebook. So we must be a failure then.
In the West, we lost ceremonies, ritual, reverence, and awe — respecting only what we can touch and measure. I believe we lost some magic of what it means to be alive when we allowed the dogma of rational thought (‘I think therefore I am’) to penetrate all aspects of our lives.
We are slaves of the idealized images of happiness. The ‘Coca Cola ad’ happiness is a highly prized emotional state in Western culture. Businesses are constantly pairing their projects with feelings of happiness.
And don’t get me wrong… It’s not ‘bad’ to want to be happy. The problem arises when we come to believe we should always feel this way. And when we don’t, we’re lost, upset, and think something is wrong with us. This makes our negative emotions — which are inevitable and normally quite adaptive — seem like they are getting in the way of an important goal in life.
There’s a lot of richness in sadness, anger, jealousy, envy, feeling lost, and other “negative” emotions. But many of us don’t know this. We were never taught this. Life wisdom, usually held in the elders of society, is no longer transmitted to the young. Today, the elderly are merely an inconvenience, or even worse — invisible.
Mental health becomes an even more complex conversation when individuals have life experiences that compound the risk factors, such as abuse, trauma, stress, domestic violence, adverse childhood experience, bullying, conflict, and more.
I’ve only scratched the surface here… All that to say:
As individuals and as a collective, it’s time completely overhaul the way we live. Our inner worlds are in distress, and we’re receiving the alarm signals every day.
This all sounds quite gloomy, I admit. BUT, I think solutions are available at the moment. We just have to get on with them!
(*Note: I focused on mental health issues in the West, and in populations heavily influenced by Western ideologies.)
You have been travelling and working around the world in different sectors. How do those experiences shape you to get to know your higher self?
I don’t believe that we need to travel anywhere or change sectors and jobs to meet our higher selves. That is a journey of going within!
However, travelling and working around the world and in different sectors has exposed me to a variety of circumstances that have challenged me in ways that staying in one place could never have. By needing to adapt to new environments, uproot myself from my place of comfort, by leaving all I knew, I was forced to meet parts of me that I never knew were there.
Today, most of my really close friends are not from Bosnia and Herzegovina. And I owe it to them and other people I met while travelling and living abroad much of who I’ve become and how I changed.
I was exposed to different ideas, worldviews, traditions, customs. I met people who grew up in very different contexts, and I’ve come to see how much the place we grow up in shapes a lot of our beliefs and attitudes about ourselves and life.
Leaving my home country freed me in many ways, allowing me to reinvent myself from a certain narrow-beingness. It also allowed me to explore new ways of being. Today I truly believe I’m a very different person to the person I think I would be now had I never left.
There’s simply more broadening and widening that happens when one intentionally and consistently exposes themselves to new environments, challenges, and perspectives.
All of that has helped me meet my higher self for the first time. We sat eye-to-eye, and now I meet her more often than ever!
We are curious. Would you like to share with us what your day looks like managing to stay productive and aligned with your goals?
First, define what being productive and aligned with your goals means to you!
I think it’s essential to understand what we really want, what productivity and good work mean to us personally. And this might look different from what the latest productivity guru said in their video (or what I write below).
So, on a good day for me recently:
I wake up with the sun. There was no need for an alarm because I got enough sleep.
I lay in bed for a few moments taking some time before “starting” the day. I drink some water and hop on my yoga mat (I set it up the night before). I flow 20–30 minutes, and choose either a more gentle or a more energizing sequence depending on my mood. Most days, I also do a strength workout of 30–40 minutes. This is key to doing good work later in the day. If I don’t move my body at all, I’m more sluggish throughout the day.
*And no, this is not how I’ve always been! Very much a couch potato for most of my life, aspiring to work out year after year, physical exercise only became a part of my life throughout these last two years. And that happened only after I stopped thinking that “I should do it because everyone says it’s good and because successful healthy people do it” and instead worked on my intrinsic motivation. I found what motivates me, what makes me feel good.
Then, I meditate 10–20 minutes — using whichever technique I feel like using that day. I think meditation is quintessential to better mental health. It also helps me feel more productive, as I work better when I’m more grounded and centred.
I then eat a nourishing breakfast that will keep me full for a while and never drink coffee on an empty stomach. I work best when I’m satiated, but not stuffed, and when I can be focused but not jittery from the caffeine.
I set a realistic and specific goal for the day.
I recently discovered something that’s revolutionised my productivity. It’s a website called Focusmate. Basically, you log in and choose a time to work, and Focusmate pairs you with an accountability partner for a live, virtual 50-minute coworking session that will keep you on task and focused. These sessions have tripled my productivity recently. With the partner on video, I no longer feel like I “need to” go and pet my cat or clean my room while trying to work.
I work using Focusmate for a good amount of my working time, stopping for breaks and a healthy lunch.
During the day, I make time for hobbies, silent time, and socializing (online mostly these days). This balance helps me stay healthy and do my best work. I no longer work late, I have a ‘stop time’, even as a freelancer.
I stay aligned by often reflecting on my values, goals, and priorities, and whether what I’m doing reflects who and how I want to be. Journaling is a great tool for this!
Final question. You have been working with entrepreneurs as a mentor. Do you have any tips for entrepreneurs to take care of regarding mental health?
Stop idealizing the hustle.
There’s nothing glamourous about burning out because you keep answering emails at 2 am before sleeping and you eat pizza every day because you never ‘have time’ to cook.
It’s almost become a badge of honour to constantly speak of how busy we are, how we don’t have the time for anything. We demand the impossible of ourselves, cramming stuff into every second of our day. When there’s no space to breathe, rest, sit in silence, and do something just for fun — mental health suffers immensely.
If you struggle to do this and you thrive in a scheduled life, then schedule rest, fun, and hobbies into your calendar. If that’s what it takes, do it.
Take care of all of your bodies. Do things that heal and stimulate your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual self.
Meditation is immensely helpful — for too many reasons to write. If you tried it before and you decided it wasn’t for you because ‘you kept thinking’, that’s the point.
Meditation is a practice, not something that can be ‘achieved’, not an end goal. It’s a practice of noticing we’re thinking, letting those thoughts go, focusing on breathing/sound/mantra, noticing we’re thinking and repeat. It’s laborious, but worth it.
I recommend the app Insight Timer — there are so many different types of meditations of different lengths and by a variety of teachers on there.
Ask for help if you need it and engage in communities that can help you on your mental health journey. We’re social creatures after all, and having the support of others is immensely beneficial!
Notice what you think about, especially what you say to yourself about yourself in your head. Take note of your thought patterns, narratives, and beliefs. If they don’t serve you, rewrite them.
Be with yourself as you would be with your own child or a best friend. You wouldn’t tell them they’re stupid when they make a mistake, so why tell it to yourself?
Be kind to yourself!
Thank you for reading our story!
We are a small team dedicated to the startup community of Sarajevo, who collects entrepreneurial stories for sarajevo.tech and organizes awesome fireside chats and panels within Startup Grind Sarajevo. Stay updated for more events and stories and subscribe here.
