Wow! How has this semester flown by so quickly! What a journey this has been.
Gif: Buffer
I feel like this semester has been such an amazing opportunity to learn and grow, and being able to document a part of that journey through these blog posts has been so meaningful. As time went on this semester, I began to see that what I was learning in this process could be utilized and taught in the classroom. This wasn’t necessarily my initial intention but I’m so happy it ended up turning out that way. Not only was I learning things for myself, but it taught me lessons that I can embed in my future classrooms. As we have continuously talked about this semester, the amount you give to a classroom, the more you get. In all honestly, my biggest goal right now is to become the best teacher I can be. I am in a constant search for new tools that I can use to teach my future students to become successful life-long learners. I too am still learning and these lessons play such a vital role in accomplishing this. In my future classroom, I hope to create a space where every student has the chance to work on building the best version of themselves. I want to support them on their journeys in finding and understanding who they are and what they want to become. Having an outlet both here and in my journal over these past few months, where I have pushed myself to become the best version of me that I can be, has been such an amazing experience. It’s almost April and I am so proud of my accomplishments so far! I really hope that I can replicate this feeling for my future students so they can reflect on their time in elementary as a positive and accomplished time.
I feel like learning how to create a website was really cool this semester. I can envision myself using something like this to hold a lot of future lesson plans and ideas. These websites are super accessible and are such a great collaboration outlet. So far I have created a google drive of everything I have completed in terms of lesson plans and assignments! It’s so easy to get wrapped up in lesson plans on the internet and having a space where I can store and share my ideas is something I want to create in the future. As for now, I hope to continue this journey as this (and future years) progress. Thank you to everyone who tuned in 🙂
Why set goals? I feel like this is an important topic to discuss, especially as a future teacher. Teaching students how to set goals is really important as it helps students with motivation, which can help them with becoming lifelong learners.
One way goals can be set within the classroom is using the S.M.A.R.T goal outline. According to mindtools.com
To make sure your goals are clear and reachable, each one should be:
Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
Achievable (agreed, attainable).
Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
Specific: to find specifics about a goal, answer the 5 W questions.
What do I want to accomplish?
Why is this goal important?
Who is involved?
Where is it located?
Which resources or limits are involved?
Measurable: Can you track your process? How does this help with motivation?
Achievable: Are the goals realistic and attainable?
Relevant: Do your goals matter to you? Does your goal seem worthwhile? Is this the right time for these goals? Am I the right person to reach this goal?
Time-Bound: What does this goal look like to you in the future?
Why should we set goals in the classroom?
Edward Locke and Gary Latham (1990) are leaders in goal-setting theory. According to their research, goals not only affect behavior as well as job performance, but they also help mobilize energy which leads to a higher effort overall. Higher effort leads to an increase in persistent effort.
Establishing goal-setting skills in the classroom can really motivate students to work hard to accomplish these goals! These skills can be reflected in many different forms as these students become young adults and are entering the world. In goal setting, students have an opportunity take ownership of their own learning which is something I find really fascinating. As teachers, it’s our task is to empower, inspire, and give tools to students to help them grow into lifelong learners.
Photo from: Education Week
On the topic of goals, I feel that student reflection is one way teachers can assess how these goal-setting progress is coming along! Daily exit passes can be used in the classroom in a variety of different ways (as seen below in one I designed for a music lesson plan) and can be tailored to follow goal setting and achieving journeys.
Ferlazzo, L. (2021, March 5). Response: Student goal-setting in the classroom (opinion). Education Week. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-response-student-goal-setting-in-the-classroom/2017/01
Mind Tools Content Team. (n.d.). Smart goals: How to make your goals achievable. Time Management Training From MindTools.com. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/smart-goals.htm
Mind Tools Content Team. (n.d.). Personal goal setting: – planning to live your life your way. How to Set SMART Goals – from MindTools.com. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://www.mindtools.com/page6.html#:~:text=Setting%20goals%20gives%20you%20long,the%20most%20of%20your%20life.
The importance, benefits, and value of goal setting. PositivePsychology.com. (2021, December 7). Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-goal-setting/#:~:text=Setting%20goals%20helps%20trigger%20new,you%20don’t%20properly%20manage.
I cannot believe it’s already March! I feel like I have been on so many ups and downs on this journey. Even though I have had to re-introduce and edit my routines and habits, I am so proud of this journey. However, to say that I have stuck to everything I said I would, would be a lie. The biggest thing I have realized is that I’m not disappointed in myself for not sticking to these goals.
Photo by: Doctors Under The Radar
The goals I set out for myself in January still inspire and motivate me, but putting my full energy into completing them every day is just not possible right now. As this semester starts to wrap up, school definitely has taken more of a priority than this journey. I still take time for myself every day, but completing x,y, and z some days gets to be too much. What I have found that works for me are week by week, I’ll pick and choose which goals I want to focus on each day. With this, I take time to look ahead at my schedule and make a plan in advance so I know I can take time to do something for myself every day. Some days this may look like taking a few hours away from school to socialize or go to the gym. On the other hand, some days when I know my schedule is tight, I’ll make sure I take time to meditate and reflect on my day in some way. That way, even on those crazy and hectic days, I can allow myself time to think about my day and ask myself what I can do the next day to feel more on top of everything.
I feel like it took me a while to really understand this method. For a while, any time I couldn’t meet all of my day-to-day goals I felt like I had failed myself and started to look for ways to start over. When I would start over, I would somehow ‘fail’ again and I became caught in this loop of equaling an ‘off’ day to failure. Soon I started to see those ‘off’ days as rest periods and found others ways I could meet some of my goals. Here, I started to think about my goals from a different lens and began to look at the bigger picture. Sure I didn’t work out every day, but for me, that meant I had more time and energy to put into school and self-care. Learning how to balance goals, time, and understand my success/fail mainframe is something I still need to work on. Overall, I am really happy that this journey is pushing me to better understand how I view success and failures. In life, there are always ups and downs and I really want to push to become a person who can readily adapt to those changes rather than see them as threats. For now, I’ll keep looking at the bigger picture and continue this journey one day at a time.
Like I mentioned in my last blog, meal planning has really helped me on this journey. I feel like when I plan ahead, I eat a well-balanced diet more often. Not only that, but I can get all my groceries in one go once a week. This saves me time and money because I can plan to use similar ingredients for the week so no food goes to waste! In this blog, I want to share my top 2 go-to meals that I have made recently.
Sushi Bowls:
Photo by:
Ingredients:
1 Avocado, large
1 1/2 cups English cucumber
3/4 cup carrots
Nori (seaweed packet)
1/4 cup Mayonnaise, light
1/2 cup edamame
1/4 cup Soy sauce, low-sodium
1 1/2 tbsp Sriracha
2 cups Sushi rice
10 oz Imitation crab
Sesame seeds
Instructions: Cook rice and edamame in separate pots. While rice is cooking prep carrots and cucumbers by cutting them up into small bite-sized pieces (can do matchstick carrots). Combine siracha and mayonnaise in a small bowl. Once rice is done, prepare a bowl with rice topped with carrots, cucumber, edamame, immitation crab, and avaocado. Drizzle with spicy mayo, soy sauce, and sesame seeds.
Luscious Lentil Loaf
Serving size: 3 people
Ingredients:
¾ cup lentils
¾ cup cooked rice
2 cups vegetable broth
1 onion finely chopped
1 red pepper finely chopped
1 cup chopped mushrooms
1 cup shredded carrots
2 cloves minced garlic
2 cups grated cheddar cheese
¼ cup water
¼ tsp cayenne
½ tsp coriander
½ tsp cumin
½ tsp curry
½ tsp basil
1 tsp seasoning salt
2 tsp cornstarch
Directions:
Cook lentils in broth for ½ hour or until soft
Put small amount of oil in a large pan and saute onions, garlic, carrots, peppers, mushrooms, then add seasoning and saute until soft. (remember for rice use ¾ cup cooked rice so you may have extra cooked rice since it is hard to get that proportion! Luckily you can make a easy fried rice or stir fry with extra veggies)
Add remaining ingredients, rice, and lentils. Stir well. Put in loaf pan and bake @ 350 for 20-30 min!
Last year I took a nutrition course and I found it so interesting!! Not only did I learn tons of information that help me make healthy choices every day, but now I’m learning how to take that information and turn it into lessons I can one day teach! Right now I’m working on a physical education unit on nutrition and I find that it’s really cool to start integrating what I know with what I want to teach!
One thing that I have been focusing on during this journey of building healthy habits is expanding my culinary skills. Put simply, food is fuel! Our brains are in constant need of fuel because they’re always on! A big part of the efficiency of this brain fuel is what our food is made up of. What you eat affects your mood as well as the structure and function of your brain! Harvard Health’s article Nutritional psychiatry: Your brain on food uses a really great analogy here.
Like an expensive car, your brain functions best when it gets only premium fuel. Eating high-quality foods that contain lots of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants nourishes the brain and protects it from oxidative stress — the “waste” (free radicals) produced when the body uses oxygen, which can damage cells. Unfortunately, just like an expensive car, your brain can be damaged if you ingest anything other than premium fuel. If substances from “low-premium” fuel (such as what you get from processed or refined foods) get to the brain, it has little ability to get rid of them. Diets high in refined sugars, for example, are harmful to the brain. In addition to worsening your body’s regulation of insulin, they also promote inflammation and oxidative stress. Multiple studies have found a correlation between a diet high in refined sugars and impaired brain function — and even a worsening of symptoms of mood disorders, such as depression.
HARVARD HEALTH
So how does food affect how you feel? As explained by Harvard Health “Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that helps regulate sleep and appetite, mediate moods, and inhibit pain.” What’s really cool about this is that 95% of your serotonin is produced in your gastrointestinal tract! Due to this, the GI tract is lined with billions of neurons and bacteria. Thinking about it this way, your digestive system not only digests your food but greatly affects your mood. With this considered, when we are eating foods that upset our stomachs and interrupt the regular workings of the GI tract, it’s no surprise that our mood is affected by that. According to the article Food for your mood: How what you eat affects your mental health “The connection between diet and emotions stems from the close relationship between your brain and your gastrointestinal tract, often called the “second brain.”
Lately, I have been really trying to incorporate whole and unprocessed foods into my diet. Personally, I know that processed and high-sugar foods affect my digestion and overall mood. Narrowing down other parts of my diet that affect my gut has been hard to do. Since I am a university student who is currently unemployed, there’s not a lot of wiggle room with money. Sometimes it’s easy to say “oh I’ll take this’ ‘ while walking down the snack line at the grocery store because you know it’s a quick pick-me-up and is relatively inexpensive. Finding a balance between buying foods that I can save time with at an inexpensive price vs. ones that I know will take time and may be more expensive at times is no easy task (and I know I’m not alone with feeling that way). I find that the easiest way to find this balance (for me) has been meal prepping which is something I’ll go more into in the next blog post! This cycle can be really hard to get out of because sugar causes inflammation in your gut. What’s interesting about this is that while it feeds the ‘bad’ bacteria in your gut, it temporarily spikes the ‘feel good’ transmitters (ex. dopamine) at the same time! Eating sugary foods causes a really hard cycle to get out of because it can be quite addicting and causes ‘crashes’ that are not great to deal with for some people. As Food for your mood: How what you eat affects your mental health explains, “When you stick to a diet of healthy food, you’re setting yourself up for fewer mood fluctuations, an overall happier outlook and an improved ability to focus.”
This week, I had the opportunity to watch the Netflix series The Mind Explained, and specifically, the episodes on mindfulness and anxiety really stood out to me. As I watched them, I started to think about how I wanted to add my findings to this blog. What I learned was that “meditation causes big changes in the minds of experts,” as the documentary explains, which ultimately backs up the claim “meditation can make you a master of your own mind” (Netflix, 2019).
You Got This Mental Health GIF By YouTube
When one reflects on how their breath feels when they are relaxed or just have woken up in the morning, they will quickly realize that in those situations their breaths are even, slow, and soft. As the University of Michigan states, “deep breathing is one of the best ways to lower stress in the body” (UMHS, 2020). But, how can we slow our breathing to experience stress relief? Two ways the University of Michigan’s Health website explains are;
Belly breathing: This can be done either sitting or laying down (any position that is comfortable really). Place one hand on your stomach, just below your ribcage, and the other on your chest. Taking a deep breath in through your nose, feel your belly fill up with air. Pause for a moment then release the air through your mouth and feel your stomach go back in. Re[eat this process upwards of 5 times and take your time with each breath, really thinking about how your stomach fills and empties.
4-7-8 Breathing: Like belly breathing, find a comfortable position and place your hands on your chest and stomach. Again, feel the air fill and release from your stomach as you breathe in and back out. When you breathe in, silently (and slowly) count to four. Next, hold that breath for 7 seconds. Afterwards, breathe out steadily for 8 seconds. This method can be repeated several times, or whenever you feel calm and relaxed again.
As I have learned over the past few weeks, “mind and body practices such as yoga, meditation, progressive relaxation, or guided imagery use mental and physical abilities to improve health and well-being” (PMC, 2015). In these past two weeks, I have made an effort to swap up my styles of daily meditation from guided youtube meditations/ mindfulness to breathing exercises. I found that this really worked for me on those days that I was busy and didn’t have time to participate in a guided meditation. On those days I found that though I could sit through the video, I wasn’t actively participating as much as I thought I should be and when I finished, I didn’t feel like I cleaned my mind. Practicing different breathing techniques has been great for those days because I find that I’m able to calm myself down in a shorter amount of time with deep breathing. Breathing exercises are all about someone focusing on their own breath so no external factor needs to be involved. I really like that because it’s easy for your mind to get distracted when you depend on an outside factor, at least it is for me. With deep breathing, I am in complete control and can determine when I am feeling calm and ready to continue my day.
Sources:
Vox Media. (2019, September 12). The Mind, Explained: Netflix official site. Watch The Mind, Explained | Netflix Official Site. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://www.netflix.com/title/81098586
Healthwise Staff. (2020, August 31). Stress management: Breathing exercises for relaxation. Stress Management: Breathing Exercises for Relaxation | Michigan Medicine. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://www.uofmhealth.org/health-library/uz2255 Boccia, M., Piccardi, L., & Guariglia, P. (2015). The meditative mind: A comprehensive meta-analysis of MRI studies. BioMed research international. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471247/
GIF: You Got This Mental Health GIF By YouTube (GIFY)
This week, I want to focus on what mindfulness means, why practicing it is a goal of mine, and how it’s useful in the classroom.
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.
Originating from ancient eastern and Buddhist philosophy, mindfulness dates back thousands of years. According to the study The Mindful Self: A Mindfulness-Enlightened Self-view, Buddhist psychology has a great focus on understanding the nature of the self. “The central tenet of Buddhist psychology with respect to the self is that of “no self,” which posits that there is no unchangeable self,” or in other words, there is no such thing as a permanent unchanging self (Front. Psychol, 2017). The word “self”, in westernized psychology, refers to anything connected to both mind and body, it’s a definable knowable entity. Over the past two decades, more and more research is being done on the connections between Buddhism and the methods used to enlighten the experiencing self. Some of these findings are that “mindfulness meditation offers significant positive effects in reducing various physical and mental symptoms, enhancing self-functioning, facilitating self-integration, and altering the perspective of self-observation” (Front. Psychol, 2017). This is a great article and goes on to later explain that the practices of mindfulness meditation can produce positive changes in the social-psychological functioning of the self. I want to list a few quotes below of some findings that really stuck out for me.
Principally, mindfulness in Buddhist teaching is viewed as a fundamental pathway through which to become aware of the causes and sources of suffering and to attain enlightenment or an awakening, thereby enabling the individual to be less egotistical and obtain insight into the state of “no self.” According to Buddhism and its Chan School, when an individual has truly acquired complete enlightenment or insight into the “non-self,” they will have achieved full freedom of the mind.
&
As an essential agent of a functioning mindfulness, mindfulness meditation is a way of looking deeply into oneself in a spirit of self-inquiry and self-understanding by a process of dis-identification or decentering with respect to the contents of the mind, and an experiential movement into a broader domain of consciousness which can make us aware of what we really are beneath the image of the ego
The Mindful Self: A Mindfulness-Enlightened Self-view
In my Wednesday visits last semester, the grade 6/7 class I was placed in practiced morning mindfulness every day. I thought that it was such a unique and great way to start the day. Quite often, before the 5-minute mindfulness practise, the students would come in with so much energy and were chaotic, disorganized, and not in the right headspace to start the day. Once they did attendance and got settled, the teacher shut the windows and turned off the lights. This immediately created a calm and soft environment that grounded the students. Next, she would play a short 5-minute meditation just like the ones I’ve been uploading each week. This practice allowed students to become aware of their presence in the classroom as well as focus on the ‘now’. As soon as the mindfulness was done, the lights would go back on and the windows would be opened back up. Class would begin as normal but that extra act of grounding and reflectiveness truly made the difference in how the students started their school day.
I remember talking to my teacher about why she does this practice every morning, and she explained how it can decrease anxiety and promote happiness in students. In the article Mindfulness for Children by David Gelles, he highlights the parallels between habits and mindfulness for students. It is important to know that habits are formed early in life and impact our behaviors when we reach adulthood. Gelles explains how with mindfulness, we (as teachers, mentors, parents, etc..) “have the opportunity to give children the habit of being peaceful, kind and accepting” (New York Times).
Part of the reason why mindfulness is so effective for children can be explained by the way the brain develops. While our brains are constantly developing throughout our lives, connections in the prefrontal circuits are created at their fastest rate during childhood. Mindfulness, which promotes skills that are controlled in the prefrontal cortex, like focus and cognitive control, can therefore have a particular impact on the development of skills including self-regulation, judgment and patience during childhood
( David Gelles, New York Times).
Reading these articles and seeing this practice being used in the classroom has truly shown me the benefits of mindfulness and has inspired me to practice it with my students in my future classrooms.
Staff, M., Staff, M., Jaret, P., Pal, P., Rossy, L., Whitney-Coulter, A., Naidoo, U., Smookler, E., & Kira M. Newman and Janet Ho. (2021, November 23). What is mindfulness? Mindful. Retrieved February 16, 2022, from https://www.mindful.org/what-is-mindfulness/
The New York Times. (n.d.). Mindfulness for children. The New York Times. Retrieved February 16, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/guides/well/mindfulness-for-children
Xiao, Q., Yue, C., He, W., & Yu, J.-yuan. (2017). The mindful self: A mindfulness-enlightened self-view. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01752
I decided to post another 5-minute meditation this week. I really enjoy this particular meditation and recently, I’ve depended on it when I’m feeling stressed. I find it interesting that this guided video gets its audience to reflect on their emotions then observe, accept, and allow however they feel. I think that sometimes these meditations, as helpful as they may be, try to change your mood too much. In the right settings, these types of mediations are helpful but I also like the ones which allow you to simply reflect on your current state of being with no judgement. I’m not alone in getting caught up in the fast pace of life and I’m a person who likes to stay busy. A downside to that is I’m always seeking a sense of control and that can be hard if I don’t take time to allow myself to be present. I find that this meditation speaks to this problem and has prompted me to repeat “let everything simply be” more times than I can count this month. This grounding tool has been so beneficial towards my goal to be more present and in the moment rather than constantly thinking ahead.
Youtube: 5 Minute Mindfulness Meditation
My Journey So Far:
Wow! January has come and gone. I worked on habit tracking for a whole month and want to dedicate this blog to talk about my goals, how I stuck to them, my experience with motivation, and which habits I started to weave into my day-to-day life.
So, what were my goals? At the beginning of the month, I made a big list of ideas which you can see below;
So, how did sticking to them go?
In all honesty, I am surprised with how well I stuck to my goals this month. One of the biggest factors that motivated me (for a while at least) was the prospect of online school and balancing how to take time for myself. With online school last year, I feel like I got too caught up with school and didn’t give myself much ‘me’ time outside of school. I remember feeling like the days were passing so slowly because I was on my computer for most of it, especially when it was in the middle of winter. Knowing that online school was going to only be two weeks this time around, I wanted to see how I could make the most of the days online. During this period I made an effort to wake up early and get ready for the day as if I was going to go to a physical school. Then, when classes were done I would either go for a walk or run to break up the day and get fresh air. I also took time to not be on my phone and spent it reading and journaling. By the time online school was done, I became so used to my day-to-day checklists and I wanted to keep going! As I got into the rhythm of in-person again, I had to alter some things to balance out my time. Ultimately, I found that these goals have continued to motivate me to make the most of every day. Because of this, I feel like I’ve been able to stay on track with school and my habit building!
I’m currently reading the section on what progress is really like in “Atomic Habits.” Here James Clear talks about the plateau of latent potential which he explains as the line one has to cross to experience change. He uses the analogy of ice melting and I’ll take a snippet from the book and insert it here;
Imagine that you have an ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. The room is cold and you can see your breath. It is currently twenty-five degrees. Ever so slowly, the room begins to heat up. Twenty- six degrees, Twenty-seven, …, thirty-one. Still, nothing happened. Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked huge potential. Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.
James Clear
I found this week’s chapters to be super inspiring! It’s easy to give up when you don’t see the progress with your goals, whichever they may be. Clear explains that when one is struggling to build habits, it’s not because they’ve lost their ability to improve, they just haven’t crossed the plateau of latent potential. I feel like this is an important lesson to weave into everyday life because at the end of the day, change is inevitable and mastery requires patience. Though I have only seriously been trying to build good habits for a month, I have already experienced ups and downs. Reading about how success can be seen as a compounded factor of effort has made me realize it’s not going to come all together right off the bat and that’s ok. I feel like as a future educator, this plateau of latent potential is something that I can teach to my students to motivate them to achieve their goals! Understanding that progress takes time and that big things come from small beginings is a hard process, especially for kids. This blog will become a great tool for my future self to explain habit building to my students because I truly belive that the impcats of goal setting and following can be life-changing.
First off, Before you read this post I encourage you to take 5 minutes to watch this youtube video. Even just 5 minutes of meditation can allow you to pause, clear your mind, reflect, and express gratitude.
So why did I make you watch that video? In this second post, I want to discuss what it means to be 1% better every day. One of the biggest things I learned this week was the impact small changes can have on your day-to-day life.
First off, I want you to think small and reflect on the things you do every day. Whether this is how much you workout in a week, how many healthy meals you have had today, or even your mood when you wake up. I encourage you to think about the impact those actions have on your day. What if you wanted to change those seemingly mundane tasks for the better? I’m not talking about going from 0 to 100 overnight but one small change, 1% to be precise.
I reflected on this and it got me thinking about what I could do to be 1% better every day. Some of the things I wrote down were starting to journal some goals and gratitude for each day, taking time in the morning for myself, meditating, and moving my body more. It felt good to get some of these ideas down on paper, yet these ideas still felt really big and I wasn’t sure where to start. I broke them down even further and decided to list them so I can focus on building one at a time. When I say I broke them down I reallymean it! Down to a point where the task itself is barely noticeable. In the long run, as that 1% builds up every day eventually they’ll make a difference.
In James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” he expresses how when someone strives to get 1 percent better at something for a whole year, they can end up 37 times better than they were at the beginning! As clear states;
“habits are the compound interest of self-improvement” I think something to take away from this is that even though you may see it as a small win right now, it counts and helps bring you towards your goals.
James Clear
One of these small small changes was wanting to practice meditating more. As the Oxford dictionary explains, meditating is to “focus your mind, usually in silence – in order to make your mind calm.” With that in mind, I started small. By taking an extra few moments in times when I felt like I needed to focus and calm my mind. Meditation had been a new year’s goal of mine and over the past two weeks, I’ve made an effort to build it into my routine. Upon learning about the impacts small changes can bring, I’ve decided to take that as an opportunity to weave into this journey. Right now I’m still in those beginning stages but the fact I can start to build a routine in which I feel like I’m working towards something, is both rewarding and motivating. Change can be daunting but breaking goals, habits, or tasks down into small steps can be a way to face a challenge in a way that works for you!
To begin this journey and why I want to do this, I think I got to give some background first. I have always been the type of person to really get into something but get bored of it easily. New year’s resolutions, for example, have always been full of empty promises that I would pick up from time to time throughout the year. January would always be exciting and fun for the first part, completing my goals and working towards a better me! Then February would hit. A burnout. I would feel unaccomplished, disappointed, and tired and then a few months later I would realize that I had just let my goals go. This realization would ignite a fire within me, prompting me to get random bursts of motivation for days, to weeks, to months at a time in the following period. In the long run, however, I never made it last a full year or further. The amount of half-started journals in hopes I would pick up journaling in my room is something I won’t even get into. Other goals have been fitness journeys, yoga journeys, food journeys, and so on. That is until the past few months. Moving out from my hometown, living in an unfamiliar place, having a ton of responsibilities all of a sudden and not sure what to do with them are all new things in my life since my second year of university started. I don’t think I speak alone here and it is likely that my peers are probably feeling the same way from dealing with stresses to having cooking successes and failures. All considered these past few months have been some of the best months of my life!
Despite this, I have had a feeling that something was still missing and going back home for Christmas break made me realize that I was missing the routine. I mean, in a way I had set habits I did daily like waking up around the same time during weekdays, making my bed, having a coffee, and so on. Going back home made me realize if what I was doing fell into routine or habit? I questioned if my day-to-day tendencies were something I did because I did them for so long back at home or were they something I did because it felt natural? I all of a sudden felt a pull towards figuring out what habits are and what they have to do with routine.
And that is the goal of my blog. To better understand habits and figure out how they impact and improve my day-to-day life.
So where am I starting? For Christmas, I received the present “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. Since then, I’ve travelled back to Victoria and have been settling into the routine of school once again. With that, I have made it a goal to read some of this book to start or end my day. As I progress through the book, I will be updating this blog with things I’ve learned, quotes I’m inspired by, and goals I’ve set for myself. To whoever is reading this blog there’s something for you in it as well! I want to strive to end each entry with something you can do to build habits for yourself this year. I hope you enjoy my blog, I’m glad to have you here 🙂
