2018 – Becoming Proactive

Tip Tuesday: The Fastest Way to Grow

jeremy-bishop-74123-unsplash — Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

You might have clicked on this expecting a miracle, that after reading this article you would know the secret to getting that hot bod, great grades, amazing relationships and all the friends that you can ask for and get it straight away. I’m here to tell you that unfortunately there is no miracle way to get what we want, whenever we want. This post is not about getting fast results but to create change that stays for the rest of our lives.

From my past experiences, when we give in to quick fixes, it often does us more harm than good. I have found that I could never complete a diet or gain more friends after using a quick fix. I realised that the reason why I could never follow these was that I would have to deny a part of myself in order to make myself look better, look prettier and be friendlier. I would need to cut out all the things that I things that I enjoy, such as the foods that I ate, the hobbies that I enjoy and other things that I love completely.

Depriving ourselves in order to achieve results in the short term never works and things can backfire when we do. What we need to do in order to create change is to put in effort bit by bit every day to create positive change in the long term. For long-term change to stick, we need to be patient and willing to reinforce those habits each day. And that comes to my tip today.

My tip for today is that the fastest way to grow, in whatever we do, is to set challenges for ourselves.

Challenges can be whatever you want them to be. You can set the difficulty, measure your progress and personalise it to how you’d want it to be. By placing challenges on ourselves, we grow from the struggle and we will not see it as hard work as we aren’t depriving ourselves of anything. We need to be realistic for ourselves, identify the problem that we’d like to solve and continually work on it by approaching it in a way that is enjoyable and making us feel that change is not an impossible task.

Challenges are a great way to reinforce habits and allow us to work on any areas that we want to improve in our lives. If you want to lose weight, challenge yourself to eat more vegetables and walking every day. If you want to learn a new skill, challenge yourself to do something to learn that skill every day. Challenges can be as enjoyable as you want them to be and can be done at your own pace. Life is one long marathon and it is the challenges that we face along the way that build us!

I hope this helps and that this encourages you to identify an area in your life you’d like to improve on and take steps to change!

*Side Note: As of writing this I have decided to challenge myself and will be taking part in this months art challenge, MerMay on Tumblr! I have made my own prompts list and decided to stick with that. The aim of the challenge is to draw Mermaids every day with a design around the prompt of the day! I shall be posting my end results at the end of the month!

*Side Note: I have also started a fandom zine on Tumblr and in the middle of organizing it. I have taken this as a challenge on my organization, project management and time management skills. Plus, it feels amazing to contributing to one of my fandoms in a big way! If anyone is interested in reading about it I will write an article about the zine. Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

The Question Of The Post: What are your thoughts on the post? What are some of the things that you do to make changes in your life?

The Importance of Picking Yourself Up

Due to a hectic week last week, where I had deadlines to meet, for university and for art projects I broke my streak of writing and posting content for at least once a week. While this may seem insignificant to some (in retrospect, it is just one week!) to me it holds a lot of significance not because I missed one post, but has a deeper meaning for me. Instead of getting discouraged by the fact that I didn’t keep up with my goal I’ve decided to turn it into something productive and positive by writing about it.

Whenever I would start something new, a habit or a new skill, I would fall into a pattern: I would start by keeping it up well, be on track with it and put a lot of effort into it and everything would be great. I start to feel positive that I can change and nothing could possibly go wrong.

Something goes wrong.

This could take in the form of life getting in the way, lacking creative drive or even, missing a goal or failing to meet a milestone. After missing to do a habit for a day, this starts to pile up and one day becomes one week and so on until I stop doing it altogether.

I am the type of person who easily gets discouraged when one thing doesn’t go the way I want. When this step happens, everything becomes undone and I am back to square one. I start to think that I’m not cut out for. Due to this way of thinking, I have given up a lot of good habits over the years and tend to think that maybe, maybe if I kept going instead of stopping at the first sign of difficulty, I would have accomplished something by now.

Surely, I’m not the only one out there that’s like this. To you, who gets easily discouraged and who believes that you will never change because that’s just how you are, this is for you.

You are not alone. My message for you, and everyone today is that it’s ok to fall short of our goals, as long as we pick ourselves up and continue. It is easy to feel discouraged and think that we are incapable of changing for the better. This post is a reminder for myself and for everyone out there who has felt or who currently feels this way, that it’s ok to miss that one day in the gym, to miss that one post, to miss doing that positive habit.

Life gets in the way at times, sometimes the things that happen are out of our control and it is completely normal to put things aside for a bit. What’s important is that we constantly make an effort to change and that we pick ourselves up and carry on, as soon as we can. I’ve learned from this that I need to manage my time better and to set a reminder for myself to write, otherwise I will forget. Hopefully, this will prevent me from forgetting to update the blog and thinking about things this way has motivated me to do better.

By picking ourselves up whenever we fall down, we learn all the things we can improve and become better. Whenever life gets in the way, we must see the good in the situation and see what we can learn from it and carry on straight away.

The Question Of The Post: When you’re knocked down, what do you do to pick yourself back up again?

What Proactivity Means To Me

anna-sullivan-575433-unsplash — Photo by Anna Sullivan on Unsplash

Happy Easter Everyone! Here in Australia Good Friday and Easter Monday are considered public holidays, so it’s a long weekend for us! I hope everyone has a wonderful Easter today and may you receive a lot of chocolates from the Easter Bunny!

As Easter was originally a celebration of renewal and rebirth, to me that includes looking inward, examining ourselves and making changes to be one step closer to our best selves. There are always parts of us that we can improve on (and if you don’t have any room for improvement anymore, lucky you 😀 !) and Easter is a great time to do just that! If you’ve lost track with your New Year’s resolutions, now is the time to pick back up again!

To celebrate Easter and inviting in positive change, I’d like to talk about proactivity, what it means to me and why my blog is called Becoming Proactive.

In my teens, I felt that there was always something missing in my life. I was unhappy and, my parents used to point out on multiple occasions, angry at the world. No matter how much I denied it, this was heavily reflected in my actions.

I was so reactive. I would blame everyone and everything else whenever things didn’t go my way, I would complain a lot whenever my mom told me to do something for her and I always felt that maybe if I fixed my attitude, more people would like me.

After graduating high school and moving to Queensland, I felt that I achieved nothing in the past five years. I felt empty. I was scared that I would remain the same and repeat the same mistakes for the rest of my life.

One day, while cleaning up my room, I found a book that I bought during my past holidays to the Philippines. This book would be The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

My personal copy of The Seven Habits. It’s been through a lot with me!

Back in 2014, I got it for the sake of pleasing my parents (even though they didn’t really need me to buy it). Back then I’d spent most of my shopping money on anime merchandise and fiction books, so I thought that having this would make me seem like a sensible teen and be taken seriously by the adults (I was 16 at the time).

I never opened the book until 2016. I found it lying under my bed, covered in dust. After finally deciding to read it and try the book, the moment I opened that book, I slowly felt something inside me change.

I realised that the reason why my life was the way it is, was not because the world was out to get me and people wanted to see me fail. The reason why I felt unhappy was that of how I responded poorly to everything around me. I felt helpless, and that there was nothing I could do about it.

This book was cathartic for me. I became aware of the way I treated the people around me and the way I treated myself. I felt that for once in my life, I was fully in control of my life. As I started to take responsibility for myself, I felt the personal power within me grow and started to believe in myself, that I could achieve whatever I wish.

The reason why my blog is called Becoming Proactive is that out of the seven, my most favourite habit is Habit One: Be Proactive. It is my favourite as I feel that it’s the habit that start’s everything, not only in the book but also in life. Whenever I see the blog’s title, I am always reminded of the things I want to achieve and to share with others the things I learn throughout my journey.

So, what is proactivity? We hear it all the time, but we’re unsure of what it actually means. According to Covey, proactivity means that ‘we are responsible for our own lives’ and that ‘we have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen’.

While I agree with that definition, I feel that proactivity is more than that. To me, proactivity also includes accepting ourselves entirely. When we become proactive, we accept our flaws and our human-ness. Whenever we fail, we have been scripted by society to see our failures as irredeemable faults, that our mistakes define us and are a part of who we are. From past experience, I would always beat myself up for making a mistake, following it up with saying that maybe if I wasn’t X and more of Y, I wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Now, after becoming more self-aware, I’ve realised that by being responsible for myself, means that I own up to my mistakes and look at them in a reflective way and not emotionally, to be able to grow from it. By being proactive, I’ve learned to accept that my failures are a result of a lack of knowledge, not from a lack of personality. That we have the choice to learn and grow from our actions and lastly, and that it is perfectly normal to make mistakes and that we should forgive ourselves for doing so.

mark-adriane-259950-unsplash — Photo by MARK ADRIANE on Unsplash

I don’t mean to say that focusing on proactivity and self-development has made my life perfect. There seems to be a misconception that after reading self-help books, everything falls into place and instantly we are the best versions of ourselves. This is not true. Aiming to improve ourselves is a lifelong journey and there are no shortcuts. To make life-lasting changes, we must work day in and day out and be consistent.

Since I started my journey of personal growth, life continues to have ups and downs. I still make mistakes. There are days when I don’t feel like I have a good relationship with myself. The only difference I have now is knowing that I am more than these ups and downs and that as I long as I stay focused, I will achieve success.

May everyone a wonderful Easter weekend, and that you all enjoyed reading my post! Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

The Question Of The Post: What was your life-changing moment and what inspired you to make that change?