Hello Everyone!
It’s been a little over a full week into the new year and I couldn’t help but reflect on this brief time period. I did so because I realized this week is not a good sign that this would be a good and productive year. In fact, if this week is anything to go by, I could easily fall into a repeat of 2021 where I struggled to accomplish anything. I was struggling with thoughts on this as I reflected on what I accomplished this week and how little I accomplished. When I talk about what I accomplished, I mean as a means towards my end goals for the year. Considering that a full week is 1/52 of the year, it is something to be considerate about. What I realized was that my habits going into the year would be very detrimental towards my objectives for 2022.
It might seem rather harsh criticizing myself only a week into the year, but I believe self-reflection on a weekly basis is important to review if you might be straying away from your goals. More importantly, there might be habits that we’ve developed over the past two years in quarantine that might be preventing us from achieving our goals and dreams. I know for myself I’ve fallen into a cycle of lethargy where it takes significantly more effort to get myself going than it used to. I find myself spiraling into an endless cycle of YouTube videos and video games rather than reading, writing or drawing, things that mean the most to me in life. It makes sense considering it’s significantly easier to do the former than the latter, but by the end of each day that I didn’t read, write or work on art, I found I felt immensely disappointed in myself.
This disappointment I found was rather exponential the longer I didn’t do any of those three things. Even if I did 2 out of the 3 things, I found myself disappointed I couldn’t do the third which made it harder to continue doing anything productive. It’s an odd and detrimental cycle I’ve noticed in myself and I think it’s important to recognize these habits and cycles early on in the year before they set in permanently.
But while trying to rid myself of these detrimental tendencies, I’ve been trying to take a gentler approach in how I reprimand myself for slip ups. A 100% flawless record for goals and ambitions feels almost impossible and really is for most people I imagine. I’m certainly not perfect in my own ambitions and I’ve come to accept this. This past week was a good example of how I struggled to maintain a consistent schedule to keep up a steady progress. But I think it’s good to take a moment and reflect as to why we fail and how to try and avoid it in the future. More critically, I think, is to acknowledge that we could fail again and be ok with that. The most detrimental thing to progress is losing hope and belief in ourselves to achieve our goals.
Hopefully the last week has been successful for you, but if not at least it hopefully provided some insight as to what you can do to improve. Good luck!
– Raphael
Raph's Cozy Musings 