Before I start musing about my life today, I understand the link for the calendar wasn’t working from my previous invitation. So let me give it a go again, here is the link for tomorrow’s July Bizcoach open house, starting at 8AM Pacific time. Here’s more info about this ICYMI: <LINK>
I can’t believe it’s October already, one full month of being in Los Angeles and still a full time coach. I’m not swimming in clients at the moment, but at the same time I’ve been very occupied. Why? What’s been keeping me so busy? I’m hoping I can spend some time hashing it out with you because I like to share the details of what I’m doing with my life.
First of all, a big part of what I’m focusing on: French. There’s this official French exam called DELF (Diplôme d’Études en Langue Française) and it has various levels of certification. I’m trying to certify for a pretty high level of C1, and while I made some significant progress by myself I was struggling to develop in a more structured way.
So I hired a tutor and she encouraged me to take a sample test to see what my level is at. I now officially know that I can pass B1! (It goes from A1, A2, B1, B2, …) So the immediate goal is to prep at the level of B2, then C1. What’s cool about this is I am, for the first time, genuinely enjoying this phase of test preparation.
There’s a lot of strategy around how you can maximize for points and how you can optimize certain sections to pass. At the same time you don’t wanna keep overfitting for the best strategy, you just gotta be good at French.
Perhaps this is related to the French culture but the test isn’t just a generic test of “can you say xyz in French?”, but the test actually gives you really interesting passages for reading comprehension and for the written portion you have to write an informed opinion piece instead of showcasing the words you know how to use.
So studying French has been a delight and a massive time sink. Another time sink, which was temporary for the month of September, is some translation work. My Buddhist order, Jungto Society, hosts pilgrimages to India every January and this year we’re also accepting foreign practitioners so they need translations for the pilgrimage guide and sutras.
I took upon the guide translation for three sites and it turns out I’m the only translator who doesn’t use AI. It was extremely time consuming for sure, but to me it was an opportunity to refresh my memories on how I spent my time in India, remember what I wanted to focus on after the pilgrimage, and intentionally focus on how I want the English listeners of this guide to experience India.
I’m planning to go again in 2027, soo hopefully I can encourage more English speaking (actually, French and German too) readers to join our order’s Buddhism 101 program to become a member! And we’ll hang out in India. I’ll show you where the best chai stalls are, how to cook a bunch of stuff in a harsh environment, and such.
Another focus: my currently live content creation program, The Middle Way. My collaborator Michelle has been creating great videos and I’ve been creating the ultimate guide for content creators, the Content Creator Companion. It is a 26 page beast of a PDF that has the A-Z of everything when it comes to content creation. I’m also adding the video portion of my teachings and all of that will be accessible to you once you join the program. Get more info and join here.
Lastly I’m preparing to go on my annual Buddhist training for the last two weeks of October. Last year I learned so much and all of the learnings I had at that time directly translated to the impact of the work I did this year. I’ve signed up for more programs this year so I’m hoping to absorb as much of it as possible so I can directly give it back to you.
This is a bit random but after I quit my job I just really don’t want to be on my laptop. I think if I’m going to be on the computer, I’d rather be at the desktop instead of being forced to go on a smaller screen that burns my lap over the following 30 minutes. And as a consequence of that my writing time significantly got reduced because when I’m not at my desk I don’t really want to be on the computer again after being on it for most of the day.
Ah! One more thing I forgot, but I can’t talk about that right now because it’s a bit unsettled. Sorry. When this ordeal comes to an end I’ll happily share it with all of you. Actually there’s another thing I’m preparing, but I think I’d rather dedicate a separate writing for that in the upcoming days.
Hey, now that I’ve said everything that I wanted to say I want to ask you for a favor. If you’ve benefitted from my coaching, my reddit program, and my business coaching (the last two in particular is important for me right now), I would love for you to provide some testimonials for me. To make that process easy for you I’ve created a form: <LINK> Thanks for filling it out.
I’ll see you tomorrow on the business coaching call, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
