How to grow yourself while indoors

Because of the coronavirus pandemic - that has brought with it quarantine, isolation and social distancing, you might have found yourself with more time on your hands. So, which ways can you use that time to grow as a person?

Learn vertical farming

As markets largely stay closed, you may be fretting over where to get fresh vegetables. Having a garden outside would be great, but that is not an option for most urban dwellers.

However, you can easily turn your balcony into a garden and grow your own vegetables. You do not need much space to grow a lot of crops there, as you can do vertical farming.

This is done by making tower gardens, where the holes for the crops are drilled on both sides of pipes lined horizontally, and then placed upright instead of horizontally.

There are companies that can install them for you. You can also use old plastic bottles to grow plants.

Practise meditation and mindfulness

Meditation is a great tool to use during this time, where anxiety abounds. It can calm you down, help you learn to focus and give you mental clarity. You can also practise mindfulness.

As defined by mindful.org, mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. The world has been so fast-paced that you may have not even noticed this ability slipping away from you, but now is a good time to refine it.

Most top CEOs and high performers also tout meditation as one of the things that helped them get and stay where they are.

There are numerous resources and apps online to help you meditate and be mindful. Mindful.org is a great place to start one simple type of meditation known as mindfulness meditation.

 Read

This is another one of those beneficial activities that top business leaders say they do, and regular people rarely do.

Bill Gates, for instance, reads 50 books a year, which translates to about book a week. The late Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore would also read three to four books in a month. The average person reads 12 books a year.

If you no longer have to commute to work, you can easily turn part of the time you used to go to work into reading time. Start by reading books on subjects you are interested in to build interest in reading.

Reading will improve your way of thinking, expand your knowledge and take you places you cannot go physically. As Mark Twain said: “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” 

 Learn a skill

The options here are endless – you can learn how to play an instrument, learn a new language, learn to cook different recipes, upgrade the skills in your profession, learn business and entrpreneurshp skills and so much more.

The resources are equally endless. There is hardly a skill for which you cannot find tutorials on Youtube.

You can also take online courses and get certification.

Some of the options are: Coursera, Microsoft Office Training Centre, Google analytics, Edx (created by Harvard and MIT universities), Udemy and Brainbench.

 Make money online

Turn your existing skills into profit online. One of the best sites to get freelance work is Upwork.

The site connects professionals and agencies to businesses seeking specialized talent.

The kinds of skills people are looking for include writing, software development, design, data science, animation, transcription and numerous more. Chances are that a skill you have is required by someone.

There are also other sites that do the same thing, some for specific skill sets. iwriter.com, for instance, is for writers only. Other ways to make money online include writing an ebook, starting a blog, digital marketing and copywriting.