About Me
Hello!
​
First of all, we are all complex human beings with many endless angles, features, and details; words cannot describe who we are completely. Anything I write here is merely a symbolic signpost pointing to who I am. However, words are all I have right now, so I will do my very best to use them.
​
I have always been thoughtful - meaning, I have always been full of thoughts. Ever since I was a kid, I have always been quiet, reserved, self-reflective. In preschool, I was always the kid on the outside of the play circle, calmly observing the other kids. In elementary school, I was always the kid who sat in the back of the class, raising my hand once per month to ask the deepest question I could think of. In high school, I was always the kid with a small but meaningful friend group.
​
In a loud, extroverted world, I doubted for a long time whether this introspective nature was valuable and frequently tried to hide it from the rest of the world. As time has passed, I have learned more about how this quality is neither a superpower nor a superweakness - it is simply part of who I am. In some cases, it is the most powerful personality trait in the world. In others, it prevents me from fully participating in life. I have always observed people, situations, and problems from the outside, analyzing and dissecting to better understand them. In school (especially the analytical subjects like math and science), this turned out to be a gift. However, I learned about its drawbacks when it came to making new friends, engaging in group conversations, and being open to new perspectives.
​
At the beginning of high school, I wasn't in a great place. I was making choices in friendships, responsibilities, and school that didn't bring out the best in me. Like many teenagers, I was playing around with different roles and personalities. Halfway through eighth grade, I got suspended from school, which led to question my entire existence and how I was presenting myself in the world. Although this was a major shock for me, it took me a while to change my external behaviours and reconsider how I wanted to carry myself through the world. I knew the person who got suspended wasn't really me, so I embarked upon a mission to discover my "true" self - a journey that began about a year after my suspension.
​
My life "began" when the COVID pandemic hit around March 2020. What started as an abrupt removal from school, my friends, and the rest of the world slowly transformed into a life-changing opportunity to learn about my place in the world. For many, the pandemic was a destructive period of mental illness, physical illness, and isolation, but for me it was a time of reinvention. For that, I am extremely grateful. I started listening to self-help podcasts, reading personal development books, meditating daily, and exercising regularly. Now that I was locked inside four walls with my two parents and younger brother, we became increasingly closer and interconnected. I picked up one of my dad's cameras and fell in love with photography again - a hobby that I had once been interested in as a kid. I even started completing 100 push-ups every day: a habit I continued for a year and a half, only missing one day.
​
I would attribute this massive shift in character to three core pillars: journalling, meditation, and exercise. Essentially, I took better care of myself, which allowed me to carry myself in a happier, more caring way. Slowly, I began to see how it inspired others to make changes to their own lives...in pursuit of their goals and dreams. I decided a wanted to become a life coach because I desperately wanted to share those things that helped me to change my reality. All around me, I saw people who wanted to live full of meaning, purpose, and happiness. Many of them simply did not know how to get there or didn't have someone to accompany them. I wanted to be the person to bridge the gap between who they were and who they wished to become. Even though everybody's life is unique, I believe we can look to others we respect and become inspired by their personal journeys. I strongly believed that I could support others in the process of becoming their true selves.
​
When everything began reopening a couple of years after the pandemic settled, I reinvented myself with the newfound realizations I gained during my time in self-reflection. I participated more in my air cadet squadron, started actually trying in school (and started to get good grades), and co-founded a photography club at my school with one of my best friends.
​
The summer after high school, my philosophical tendencies led me to spirituality. Although spirituality is an enormous realm with an endless amount of beliefs and branches, my goal was always to be more loving toward my family, friends, and the greater world. Spirituality, to me, is not a way of thinking or a set of rules and traditions. It is simply the courage to be curious about everything we do not know and are currently not seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. After all, there's a whole whack of stuff out there that we cannot perceive (and of course, the more we learn, the more we discover how much we do not know). Although I've wrestled with spiritual duality, materialism, my ego, and other pitfalls along the way, I've found that spirituality ultimately allows me to approach the surrounding world with curiosity, playfulness, and imagination.
​
Four years after that life-changing moment, I now study Business at the University of British Columbia. My latest challenge is trying to figure out what the meaning of life is, what the meaning of my life is, and how to align those two things. Honestly, I don't know whether I will ever figure out the answers to these questions. But I don't think that will ever stop me from asking. In fact, if these answers were easy to answer, life wouldn't be much fun. I'm also a little scared to write in too much detail out of fear that I will need to constantly return to this page and edit these words. It is indeed difficult to see where we be led in the greater scheme of our life. Unfortunately, we don't get sneak peeks into the future; we only understand the arcs of our lives when we look back on our past experiences.
​
At the moment, I have way too many hobbies/interests to keep count: cooking, writing, lucid dreaming, psychology, running, personal development, photography, cinematography, breathwork, mathematics, reiki, music, quantum physics, computer science, yoga, astrology, poetry, Eastern philosophy, religious studies, world history, languages, dancing, data analysis, and many more (I will probably have to come back in a few hours to add others). Currently, I'm trying to find ways to link all of these polymathic pursuits into holistic structures. I believe everything is interconnected; the only reason things appear separate is because we haven't found connections between them yet.
​
I created this website because I felt like I had something to say and something to give. Again and again, people around me have told me that I do not always realize how much I have to offer - how much people could benefit from my talents and skills. I hope that creating a "spider web" of all different aspects of me (in the form of this website) will allow me to learn more about myself and how I can best serve the world. After all, that is always my highest intention across all of my different hobbies and curiosities. By being open-minded and vulnerable, I hope I can create a caring space so that people like you can feel safe continuously coming back here for support, inspiration, and love.
Thank you so much for listening,
​
Connell