This holiday season felt like a blur to me, with barely any time left to actually sit down and think about new year’s resolutions. I guess that’s why I decided to write and publish this blog post a little late but, better late than never, right?
January has always been marketed as a fresh new start, and the beginning of your ‘best year yet!’ However, I felt that this January felt very much like a letdown and nothing particularly special and maybe even more of a downer than anything. Maybe it’s because it’s my first post-grad January, so there’s none of that excitement to be starting a new semester and going back to school. I’m simply going back to work like any other day. For the first time in a long time, I haven’t truly felt the motivation behind a new year and setting goals for myself until most recently. I think it took me a bit of time to adjust back into the routine of things and out of the holiday mood that was cast over us. Now it seems like I finally have some sense of routine again with my work, social life and volunteering work.
With my goals, I’ve always kind of bucketed them around certain categories and tried to set long term goals and derive shorter term goals from them. Then sometimes I even try to start building habits that will contribute to reaching these long-term goals.
Let’s start off with health goals since this one has been a focus of mine for a while. In 2019, I think there was a point in time where I was incredibly healthy while I was still in school, but it definitely fluctuated ever since I graduated, with changing schedules and trips, I was never able to build a routine that I was able to stick to consistently. I also slacked on being mindful of my eating habits and kind of looked at everything like it was good enough, or I would do better next time. In this new year, I want to explore new ways to exercise, with doing various at home workouts and maybe even trying different workout classes that I’ve been interested in for a while. With my eating, I simply want to be more mindful of what I’m putting into my body and want to try to substitute packaged foods for more whole foods. Specifically, I’ve found myself snacking a lot in this post-grad life (as my mother tends to buy lots of snacks from Costco, a blessing and a curse). I’ve realized that I haven’t truly eaten fruits in a quite a while so one habit that I want to implement into my life is to eat more fruits and vegetables as snacks.
With my financials, this has been something that I’ve recently focused in on, now that I have a consistent income and am pretty much fully in charge of how I spend it. Something I’ve been doing is tracking my expenses which has allowed me to see what I’m spending my money on, on a monthly basis. From this, I want to be more active in cutting down expenses that I deem as unnecessary and put more of my income into my savings. Another thing I want to start this year is investing my money. Growing up, my parents were very conservative with their money and didn’t invest much regularly, so it was never something I was aware of until I learned about the stock market in high school and saw my friends investing in university. I feel like there’s so much to learn from investing and it’s something that my finances could benefit from so that’s on the top of my list for this year. In general, I want to learn more about personal finance and to figure out where I should be putting my money in order to reap the most benefits.
Now moving onto some smaller resolutions…
- Reading a book once a month! I used to be obsessed with reading books all the time, but life has been occupying my time and my stack of unread books have just continued to accumulate so I want to start making a dent on that this year.
- Journal and practice gratitude. I’ve found that writing things down has helped me alleviate my mind when I feel stressed or overcome with emotions. I’ve also wanted to start practicing gratitude as I want to take on a more positive mindset in my day to day life.
- I want to be more creative, in terms of exploring my passion for creating things and dive deeper into hand-lettering.
- Make my bed every morning! This was a habit that I had when I was in school but it was something that fell off when I started working full-time, but I remember how refreshing it was to come home to a nicely made bed every night.
- I also want to stop putting things off, especially if things only take 5 or 10 minutes, I want to start doing them right away to cross it off my list instead of accumulating a long list to to do’s that seem overwhelming.
Ultimately, these goals and resolutions have been in my mind for some time now but I’ve read that it’s always better and more likely that you’ll achieve your goals if you actually write them down to hold yourself accountable. So here’s to a building new habits and working towards becoming your best self in 2020!
