GOALS and Accountability

It’s January. I love this time of the year. Everything feels new and fresh. It’s a new beginning. I like to take the time to refocus on my goals and figure out what my top priorities are coming up. On Devon Brooks‘ last Periscope stream, she talked about focusing on the next 30 days.

That’s not something I’ve done previously, but I am going to try it out to kick off 2016.

Here’s what I have planned for the next 30 days:

  1. Continue 3x weekly spin and 1-2x weekly yoga
  2. Focus on school aiming high in each of my courses. Specifically: 1 hour of math homework daily, 1 hour every other day for biology and chemistry.
  3. Dedicate 10 minutes every few hours engaging with and developing my community on social media.

These hit on points that I’ve identified as my top priorities. I’m not sure that I’ve hit on community before, but it is blantently clear to me, that I LOVE community. I want to support awesome people around me and I finally put a word to it. Community. That’s what it means to me. Supporting kind people, determined to make their imprints on the world.

SO here we go. As we dive into the first week on 2016, let’s move with a full head of steam.

What are you focused on? Let me know! I want to learn about what you are doing. Maybe there’s a way I can help!

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Post Finals Brain

For the past month and a bit I’ve been in a self-induced academic cave. I was determined to do well on my finals to finish my first semester back at school with a bang. I was constantly thinking about school. Then this past Monday, I wrote two finals. And woooooosh. My brain was finally free to think of things other than academia. It was the strangest feeling.

I mentioned this to a teller at a bank recently, who was also a student, and found we had the same kind of feeling. Isn’t it strange how you can shift your mindset like this? After I left the bank,  I felt a bit odd that I could freely think about almost anything. So much so that I wasn’t sure what to think.

Here’s to getting back to weekly posts as we head into the holiday season, and soon to be new year!

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Narrowing My Focus

Going back to school this past September, has really opened my eyes to a sense of balance. There are four main areas that are top priority for me:
1. School-doing well
2. Personal relationships-maintaining them and treating them properly
3. Wellness-taking care of my health through physical activity and proper nutrition
4. Financial-my back account desparately marks it’s level of importance in my priorities

What I’ve really been noticing is that I am not managing these areas very well. Physical activity has absolutely fallen to the wayside. Nutrition, is creeping its way back up, especially with the support of my boyfriend. Financial, absolutely forced it’s way back in. Personal relationships are currently coasting, I’m not putting an extreme amount of energy into it but they are holding strong. And school. Well school is needing the majority of my time and energy, but it is not getting as much as I want to or need to give it.

I read a post last week, from where I cannot exactly remember but it was from Elizabeth Gilbert, that esentially examined where her energy goes. She originally identified as a low energy individual but upon reexamining her life she found that she was just putting energy into places that were absolutely draining.

This got me thinking. I have also identified as a low energy person. I love my naps. I always have thought there was something wrong with my physiologically causing this. At first, poorly controlled diabetes. Then I got on top of that so it couldn’t be the cause. Then I had low, but not anemic levels, iron. I haven’t addressed this, because I am very inconsistent with medication that requires me to take pills. But as I’m not anemic, I’ve deduced that the level at which I preseve my energy levels to be is far too extremely low to be attributed solely to this. My energy levels are a constant staple in my mind, but often at the very bottom of the priority list of things I need to address. So when I read this post from Elizabeth Gilbert, I stopped and looked at where my natural level of energy was going.

I don’t drain my energy obviously, to myself. I devout most of my time to school. I’m an older student now and realize how I best study, and the enormous amount of time that is needed. But even so, I realize I’m not the most efficient with this time. I need to commit to figuring out a better strategy to retain and understand the most information but also have energy remaining to address the other areas that are a priority for me.

This thought process has really shed light on where and how I spend my time. Have you heard of that saying “We all have the same amount of hours in a day as Beyonce.”? Well I am working on figuring out HOW to be as efficient as possible. It is more of an ongoing process, now that I’m focused on a goal at school. Hoping too that the learning curve is quick as I wrap up my first semester back.

Have you thought much about where your energy goes? Are you spending your time on your top priorities? Leave a comment, I would love to know!

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Start Before You’re Perfect

You know when I came back to school in September, I was excited. Actually I was incredibly scared and excited. What really pushed me to pursue this experiment was that it was a big goal that scared me.

However, in the last two months, I’ve been incredibly overwhelmed. I’m met with anxiety, a constant battle in my mind, and a debate on whether I could actually do this or not. What the voice I’ve concluded is actually saying is, “you don’t know this. There is so much you don’t know. Why are you bothering?”.

Pause there. That’s incredibly harsh. I was speaking to myself with those words that I would NEVER say to someone else. Why was my mind running away and dwelling on these negative thoughts? Honestly I don’t know. Insert this comment from my dear friend and mentor Paulina Cameron, “Be kind to youself as you do all that hard thinking.”
Be kind to yourself

I posted this earlier last week, at a point in time where I was feeling completely overwhelmed. And since then I’ve been battling with these types of thoughts and Paulina’s comment was a proding nudge to be kind to myself. That’s a great reminder, but boy is hard to do. It’s almost as if that thought acts as buffer to the harsh thoughts, but it doesn’t completely take the negative thoughts away.

What I’ve deduced that these thoughts are encouraging is that I shouldn’t start before I know everything or before I have it down perfectly. Once I put that phrase front of mind it gave my demon a face, a metaphor of sorts. Since putting a finger on it, I’ve felt a bit better at addressing this concern. So what if I don’t know everything? Who has done anything impactful or meaningful in life, knew EVERYTHING that they were doing? I”m going to venture a guess and say no one.

I do a lot of thinking. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to these thoughts in the past few months and boy if I didn’t have some education as to how these thoughts work or come about, I would be beyond overwhelmed. I studied thoughts like these but it is still an uphill battle trying to combat them.

An earlier post this week as tomorrow is a day to reflect and honour those who fought for our freedom (and so we could have thoughts like these and can blog about them). Thank you to all the veterans of Canada.

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I’m Back!

I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from social media in the past three months. I made a decision at the end of August to step away from a career in public relations. Let me back track a bit and explain what my thought process was.

At the end of my third year in my undergrad degree, in psychology, I decided I was not ready to pursue a Ph.D. This was definitely the right decision at the time, as I would not have put my whole being into what I was pursuing. So I took an extra 2 years to complete my degree and three (which turned into five) co-op terms. This was a great experience as it exposed me to three very different arena that my career could go. Firstly with the Canadian Space Agency (federal government; psychology focused), followed by Dixon Transition Society (non-profit; adminstrative and event based), and lastly with the BC Lions (private sector; event based). At the end of this, I discovered public relation and enrolled in short and sweet nine week pr certificate. I was lucky enough to intern and work before I started in pr, and immediately after I finished my certificate. This was a great direction for me to pursue at the time, as it hit a lot of the interests that I had: social media, building relationships, and events. However, after nearly a year and half in the industry it really dawned on me that pr wasn’t the right fit for me. I loved what I was doing, I worked with great people, but I didn’t feel like I was thriving.

I am discovering my values and recently realized that I really want to make an impact in my career. This notion led me to the idea of medicine. Now that is a whole lot of schooling. I know. And a completely different direction. So what I am doing is testing out the physical sciences. The last time I picked up a physical science textbook was in 2008. Needless to say, I am putting myself in a bit of an experiment. In the next year, I plan to finish intro biology and chemistry, and will then make a decision to see if this is the path I want to be on.

So there you have it. A bit of a left turn in my career trajectory, but a challenge and goal that I am excited and scared to take on. And that I feel is the biggest indicator of something you should do.

Now for the goals of this blog. I wanted to keep doing some of the things I was doing including attending events, meeting new people and developing relationships, and sharing ideas. So I created this space, when this name dawned on me. I’ve attended quite a few events in the past to the point where some people started to recognize me off of social media. Now I thought that was a bit weird. But I thought why not utilize my event attendance to help support my developing writing skills. And so That Girl in Vancouver, was born.

Here’s to a year of fruitful lessons, endeavors, and writing!

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