My Resolution for the New Year — Consistency

Inspired by mediums journal prompt, this is a post about why I want to focus on consistency this year and why it matters to me.

Over the last several years post college, I have found a love for self learning. I have been interested in self development and trying to incorporate the things I have learned from books, educational videos, and inspiring individuals into my life.

I have always felt like I am going too slow and I rush into trying too many things at once and it usually causes me to experience burnout. During these phases of unproductivity, I spend most of my time not doing anything at all. Since our minds do not like resistance, I have fell into the trap of spending long periods of time not doing anything but watching shows. Most recently, I binged watched all of Naruto Shippuden in less than a month (its 500 episodes long).

This year I want to be more consistent in the tasks I set for myself. It starts with not setting too many because if I try to do too much I will eventually burnout. This slow consistent process will allow me to manage the 8 major life areas more effectively than I have in the past.

The 8 major areas of life are:

• Health and wellness
• Family and friends
• Love life
• Career/business
• Physical environment
• Fun and entertainment
• Finance and wealth
• Spiritual and personal development

In order to remain consistent, I need to ensure I have attainable goals for the new year. Since there are 8 major areas of life, I cannot work on all 8 all the time as that will result in the inevitable — going back to just binge watching shows on Netflix, play video games, or be stuck on social media and ultimately let it consume my day.

I have spent the first few days of the new year focusing on journaling my goals and what I want to obtain. With these, I have been able to group areas of my life by doing certain activities. I realized that there are goals that I definitely want to achieve this year and with consistency, I hope to achieve them.

Taking Online Courses

I brought several courses during Udemy’s Black Friday sale event. These courses are tailored to things that I enjoy and want/need to learn. I have opted to take a course in memory and reading improvement as I think the biggest factor to losing an interest in reading was how little I was able to retain. This course would hopefully help me retain more information and complete more books at a faster rate.

My passion project and business idea revolves around self development and helping people improve their lives. The teachings I have learned over the years have helped me vastly improve who I am and how I think. My goal is to pass these teachings to others in different mediums such as articles, videos, podcasts, and coaching. I have brought courses in blogging and podcasting to improve these areas of my life and give me guidance on how to get started. Similarly, I have brought courses in life coaching, CBT, neuroscience in hopes to achieve my goal of being a coach one day and helping others.

I have also brought some courses in wealth management that will help me better manage my finances and also help generate passive income through investing. I have told myself I will do this way before I even started college but it has been a slow process and I have not used my money effectively to do so. With inflation rates increasing, this area is definitely going to be needed if I want to stay up to par with consumer prices.

Being conscious about my health

Last year I put a big emphasis on my health goals. I was able to lose a whooping 12 lbs during the first 6 months, but because of health related concerns and simply spending more time on the coach than in the gym, I gained it all back and then some. This year I want to try again but without burning all my energy so that it makes working out fun.

I plan to play basketball- my one true love when doing physical activity as it not only keeps me active, it makes me happy and feels like a form of therapy to me. I want to focus on mobility and stretching this year as last year I did close to none and the injuries I had were related to a lack of good posture when working out. This will be a day to day effort where I try and make sure I am thinking about my body.

Last and most importantly, I need to focus on what I put inside my body. I eat a lot of snacks more than anything and it is all unhealthy. Nothing is better than watching a Netflix show while eating a bag of family sized snacks — all to myself. I need to proportion my food and increase my water intake. I plan on documenting what I eat more regularly so I can make sure I am still getting my daily nutrients and not excessively eating.

Putting more effort in relationships

I used to hate staying at home and spent most of my time outside of the house. Sometimes alone and sometimes with friends. However, in the process, I became distant with my family and I had negative opinions about them.

This year I want to ensure that I take the time to be present with them and learn from them. My parents are old and the biggest regret I will have in life is not really understanding who they are and what their life meant to them. I plan on talking to them more and spending time doing activities they already do to connect.

I was pretty social in school and so I made a lot of friends. However, I never tried to stay in touch and honestly only spoke to them when they reached out. I want to make a conscious effort to reach out to them and make the first move. Everyone I know is smart and has a uniqueness about them that I can learn from — while still having fun by spending time with them.

There was a saying somewhere that said that you should focus on yourself and not the people around you as they come and go. I still believe this, but I also believe that I can have a healthy balance where I still show up to certain events for my friends as it shows that they mean something to me. I want to hone those relationships as these are people that I hope to grow together mentally and physically (we need to have walking stick races when we are older!).

Managing my money more closely

This past year has provided so many blessings in terms of finance as I got more money from promotions and new employment. This also means that I spend a lot more money on random unnecessary shopping sprees. This year I will look at my money and see what I am doing. I will use the courses to better manage my investments in a way I can pay attention to them.

I do not care about money that much anymore as I worked my way out of low income — but I do care about maintaining it. There are so many great apps to track spending that I have but do not really spend time to look at deeply. My investments usually involve me buying something and not looking at it again but has caused me to miss out on taking my investments out on all time high stock/crypto prices. I hope to be more conscious of this too.

Overall, there are a lot of things I outlined and they are not in the form that most people would say is attainable. They all link to the 8 major areas of my life that I have mentioned.

This post was just an overview on my year ahead. have detailed the specifics of the goals and how to achieve them in my personal journal so that I can achieve them — but it will require consistency. Each day I need to have the right intentions and be mindful of what I spend my time doing. If I can do that, all the above goals and wants that I hope to accomplish can be achievable.

The year of consistency, here I come (and it starts with writing articles like this!).