A woman like a Swiss Army knife, the versatile Sandra Raju has been a Nike trainer, development coach, recruiter, event manager, marketer and much more. But now Sandra has made a U-turn from freelance and is enjoying a nine-to-five working day instead. We found out why she did it and how she discovered that being sad is also normal and that emotions are part of everyday life.
Listen to the full interview (in Estonian) on our very own podcast “Samm-sammult heaoluni” 10th episode in Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
- A year of without Instagram – what changed?
- How to recognise emotions
- Relationships
- The magic of 9-5 office jobs
Find Sandra on Instagram @sandraraju.
You’ll find wellness consulting in Stebby HERE and a motivating personal trainer HERE.
What new insights did the year-long break from personal social media bring and did Sandra Raju survive as a personal brand?
Sandra Raju is still Sandra Raju – in the sense that those who knew before know now. However, I want to clarify one thing. I started this in January 2023, which means that I was no longer on my personal Instagram, but I was actually active ASI ON MINUS! Instagram still, so as a platform I used it less, but I still used it.
In retrospect, it was a very sensible move, because now I can say that I was addicted to this platform, social media and smart devices in general, so it was a bit of a step-by-step departure. Normally with alcohol, tobacco and other addictions, they say that everything, one day you’re done, but for me, it suited me to get used to being away from it, that it didn’t play such a big part in my life anymore.
Nüüd on nii, et tunne on jube hea ja ma unustan selle ära, et mul see üldse on. Viimastel päevadel olen täheldanud, et ma käin seal, aga ma vaatan seal vaid saarmate videosid. Ma tegin asja enda jaoks ka lihtsamaks sellega, et sel aastal kontosse uuesti logides ma võtsin kõigilt jälgimise (unfollow) ja mõtlesin, et kui ma alustan, siis täiesti nullist.
How have you learned to feel your emotions and don’t you have bad days?
The past year has been full of challenges for me, both in my personal life and in my career, and I have had to make decisions for which I did not have the skills or competence.
But this summer I went to do something called the holistic quad – a form of therapy that consists of four sessions with a therapist. Each session lasts three hours in total, one and a half of which is a conversation and one and a half a walk. And I understand that the walk may seem like a kind of ‘voodoo’ thing, but it’s more of a focused and deep state of being where you feel good and warm. I’m not very good at concentrating in my private life, so it’s a good way to get rid of distractions and look inward. And that’s where we come to the realisation that I have a hard time feeling emotions.
I’ve been happy, young and in the spotlight all my life. As a trainer, you’re the one people go to the gym for, because you’re fun and you’re nice and nobody cares if you had a bad day or not. You don’t go up in front of people and say, listen, sorry, let’s not do it today because I’m in a bad mood. You go up there and you put that smile on your face. At some point it became so normal for me that I just couldn’t feel the negative emotions anymore.
Now for the past year I’ve really learned to accept that there are negative emotions and try to deal with them because they’re not bad, they’re just different from who I am. And it’s been an interesting process, because even in my early thirties I didn’t have that kind of analytical capacity about myself. The understanding of myself is coming to me now.
My focus has always been on achievement, and as an athlete, that mentality is inevitable, that you have a finish line or a workout that you have to cross without ever once thinking about whether I’m tired and shouldn’t be doing it. Perhaps suppressing this will lead to you breaking down and the further you let it go, the harder it will be to deal with these issues in the future.
How do you transform your day from negative to positive?
Using the sports metaphor, if you have a goal, let’s take the triathlon, I know that if I don’t train, I’m going to have a hard time on the track. But I can choose not to do the whole workout, I can choose to do half of the workout or I can choose to do some of the workout. I’ve been trying to get from this frantic pushing myself to a new spectrum where I’m absolutely not pushing myself, I’m doing a bit versus rather than not at all.
The days are pretty intense for me now, too, because I’ve switched from a daytime freelance life to a nine-to-five one, and that’s something new for me, too, and when I’m tired I try to figure out when it’s actually the right time to rest.
We’ve also been putting things off until tomorrow within the team, because the brain just doesn’t work. What’s the point if I’m physically there but I can’t think mentally. I’m all for rest is for the strong and when you’re tired you need to take breaks and rest.
How do you manage comparing yourself with others?
It’s very difficult to know where my wall is, because my wall may not be where my colleague’s wall is. Constant comparisons can also cause tremendous stress and I have done this a lot throughout my life, trying to be as good or better than others. Just to get to this present day and say to myself that maybe I’m not, maybe I can’t and that’s perfectly okay. Every person’s ability is different and every ability has limits.
You’ve made the nine-to-five shift and you say that’s cool too. How so?
I had very practical reasons for this – one was the economic stability I felt I needed. For example, if you want to get a loan from a bank but you are paying yourself a salary, it is much more difficult. Because there were several little things like that, at one point I had to choose between two very good things. I did, even months later, think that maybe I made the wrong decision, but these decisions are necessary and there are many rewards. You know, perhaps one of the best is that I have 100 euros of Stebby money every quarter!
At the end of the day, it’s the things that make me shine, for example, that I go into an office where everyone is so cool – I don’t have a single co-worker that I look at and want to walk back out the door with my back to them. It’s nice to be part of a team, because when you’re freelancing you miss it.
Furthermore, a big plus is that when the clock strikes five, the computer shuts down. I don’t think about what’s still to be done. Freelancing also taught me a lot about time management, and now it’s easy to fit it all into the day so I don’t have a lot of things left over. But I still miss Killu and Sandra from time to time – we are still good friends and I still miss what we do.
Listen to the full interview in our very own podcast’s “Samm-sammult heaoluni” 10th episode on Spotify or Apple Podcast.
Find 9000 ways to take care of your well-being HERE.
