Monthly recap : April 2021

Day 30/30

Aah, it’s the end of April and with it ends my least productive month. I haven’t even reached close to completing any of my goals for this month and that’s OKAY. This month has been tumultuous with the second wave of covid hitting India, constant rise in covid cases, my closed ones getting infected and hospitalized thus causing us trying to battle anxiety and fear every single day. It has been a hell of a month. And I’m glad it’s over.

Although it shouldn’t be the case but I feel motivated by the start of a new month. It feels fresh with new possibilities and hope. A fresh new start to my goals, it’s like hitting the reset button and starting afresh. And I need this refresh more than ever this month.

I’ve planned a lot of things for May in my head. Will write it down in my journal tonight. But I’ll refrain from making huge commitments here. I really want to stick by all my plans this month. The most important aspect surrounding all of my goals for May is developing mental strength and inner happiness. What I’ll be doing differently to make sure I stick to my plans is to track my time (every tiny detail for at least a month) so that I’m aware of how well (read horribly) I use it. I’m pretty excited for May.

Mental health

• Meditated for 16/30 days. No excuses, no genuine reasons. I was lazy on some days, anxious on others but in general not disciplined enough to follow my routine
• Journaled/documented my day for 0 days. Nil, absolutely none!
• Practiced gratitude journaling for 0 days. No where to hide!

Personal Growth

This section is for a new skill or talent that I’ve acquired in this month, tried a new activity or thing that has pushed me out of my comfort zone.

• I gave a job interview that was pretty tough. I’m glad I ventured out of my comfort zone and faced my fear. It was a good experience!

Workouts

• 1 long run in this month. 13 kms on my birthday
• HIIT workouts twice a week during the weekdays (ranging from 20 to 30 mins). Longest workout streak of 5 days last week.

Education

• Zero progress with CFA level 1 curriculum.
• Zero online courses completed in March

Entertainment

• Completed reading 0 books 
• Watched 2 amazing movies this month that I couldn’t stop raving about. Bollywood movies Paglait and Ludo are an absolute must watch.

May, let’s get it!!!!

Paradigm shift

Day 28/30

I signed up for a “time management course” to learn how to eradicate my procrastination once and for all. Guess who has been procrastinating on completing the minuscule 90 min course, ME! I can’t stop laughing thinking about this.

Anyways, time to get back to serious business. So I did try to make few changes in today’s routine based on whatever I could recollect from watching the first half of this course in an absolutely sleepy state. I made a very detailed hour by hour schedule yesterday for today and the best thing I could achieve from the extremely elaborate schedule was my meditation and workout. I have been off the radar for more than a month now. The plight of our country during the covid 19 second wave and the unexpected death in my extended family has put me in a very distracted state of mind.

There is no one way to calm an anxious mind. Anxiety partially comes from the feeling of losing control of our life. And I wish to tackle this specific aspect to win over my anxiety. Taking control of our life starts from the decision to try and take action. If there’s one thing you’ve been procrastinating on from quiet sometime for no apparent reason, like ordering a thing from your wish list or calling a friend, try and force yourself to do that very thing tomorrow and you’ve begun your journey of reclaiming control of your goddamn life. It’s honestly really weird that it’s our mind who wishes to achieve great things in life and the only thing that stops from doing all that is again, our MIND! How is that even possible?

Now that it’s established that everything that you need to change yourself is in your MIND, what stops you from working on it?

Is there a vision of a new you in your mind? A skill you want to develop, a language a want to learn, a job you wish to get, a life you wish to own? Make a list of all these things. Everything your best version should be doing and break it down into a daily routine. Don’t underestimate the power of compounding my friend! Oh, but what do we do to keep the lure of “instant gratification” at bay?

Apply the 1 level up rule. Tomorrow, make a plan to get 1 level better in your goals from yesterday. For example, one extra rep in your workouts or 1 extra page of your book or 1 extra chapter in your studies. Just 1 level up. It’s a relatively small number so won’t be difficult to achieve. However, every drop counts to make an ocean, this 1 level up progress will make a considerable dent in the progress of your goal. Sounds easy? So should we get a head start on the biggest project of our life? The future me that I would be proud of.

Let’s do this!

Just a reminder

Day 27/30

Pat your back

“It takes strength to be proud of yourself and to accept yourself when you know that you have something out of the ordinary about you.”

–Abigail Tarttelin

Day 23/30

I gave a job interview today and it was brutal. The interviewer asked me some really tricky technical questions which I’m sure I gave inadequate answers to. In a normal scenario, I would have been really tough on myself, felt really embarrassed and indulged in negative self talk till I would break down.

Not today.

I feel proud of myself for attempting to give this interview while fighting my fears and anxiety about it. I feel proud of myself for trying very hard and giving my utmost best throughout the difficult session. I feel proud of myself for taking action and doing things that scare me the most.

I’m always hard on myself but I don’t want to do that this time. I absolutely cannot change the past. This interview has widened my thinking capability and has been an incredible learning experience. That certainly can’t be counted as a loss.

Instead of being your worst enemy, try and become your best friend today. The outcome of any situation in life cannot be predicted but you can align your thoughts to be more helpful and positive. And I’m training my mind to do just that. To see the good in every situation and take everything as a learning experience.

Be proud of yourself and pat your back, for a change!

Move on

“You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It wont happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, ’I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.”

– Joel Osteen

Day 22/30

I woke up today feeling irritated and frustrated. In the past couple of months, I have gone through 2 specific incidents with regards to my career and personal life that haven’t panned out in the way I want. You wait for a long time for things to work out your way, to encounter something that lights your soul, to experience something that sparks joy. After an excruciatingly long wait, the Universe decided to give me a glimpse of those things. Everything looked perfect on the face of it, it looked like my wishes have been answered, finally! But, turns out it was just a sample or in technical terms, a trial version. The outcome of these experiences are inconclusive. While I’m waiting for the end to be positive, somehow my mind keeps saying that it might not be so.

I’m frustrated but I’m done being frustrated. I’m done feeling like this. I’m done allowing rejections of any kind, to get the best of me. I don’t want to get into that phase of life where nothing and no one make sense anymore. Where I keep blaming my stars for everything wrong that’s happened in my life. Where I stop being grateful about the good things in my life and only concentrate on the ones that didn’t turn out as per my wish. I’m done.

While I’m horrible at the art of moving on, I want to fight back these negative feelings till the last ounce of mental strength and energy. How am I planning to do it? By taking care of myself and showing up for myself, each day, every day.

“With every act of self-care your authentic self gets stronger, and the critical, fearful mind gets weaker. Every act of self-care is a powerful declaration: I am on my side, I am on my side, each day I am more and more on my own side.”

– Susan Weiss Berry

There are many different ways in which one can indulge in self care activities throughout the day. Don’t be fooled by the name “self care”. Though these activities are meant to make you feel better, most of us will easily trade it with lying around and doing nothing. These activities require you to “take action” which is easily one of the most difficult tasks to do when we feel under the weather.

Here’s a list of random self care activities that one can choose from. I won’t make big promises and write down huge self care goals. I’d rather follow them for sometime and share my experience after a month or so. I wish you a happy and healthy state of mind. You deserve the best, you deserve to be happy!

Break the chain

“And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them.”

-Charles Duhigg

Day 21/30

Ever since I started this challenge of blogging everyday in the month of April, not once have I been able to upload the blogpost during the course of the day. I procrastinate till the end of day, convince myself that “end of the day” is when my mind is at it’s creative best and somehow anxiously manage to upload the blogpost in the 9th hour. Same pattern goes with my reading habit too, I have been meaning to get in 50 pages of a book everyday but I procrastinate it every single day. I have been following a similar pattern with my goal of waking up early as well. My goal has always been to wake up at 5 am but these days I’ve got into the habit of sleeping late and eventually waking up between 7.30 am to 8.30 am in the morning.

When I think back to how I was able to consistently follow my fitness journey back in 2018, it was a deep resolve to lose weight and one decision that I stuck with the very next day, the decision to eat clean. I thought about it, planned to start with clean eating right away and broke the chain of junk food that very instant. The reason I was able to stick by it for a long time is because I gave my mind the confidence that I could do it by following that single thought of eating clean. I broke the chain of negative thought loop by one positive action.

It’s time that I make a change to my lifestyle once again. I’ve fallen into the loop of certain habits that are digressing me from my goal to alleviate my life to the next level. It’s time to break the chain by posting this blog during daytime. This is just the beginning, my aim is to get into a focused and goal oriented routine as soon as possible. This is my attempt to start the process of a lifestyle change. I’m super inspired by a fitness influencer named “Tanvi Parikh” who managed to change her life for the better and stuck by that decision for over 4 years now. Of course there are days we fall off the wagon but she has been consistent for most part of these 4 years. I wish to do the same, starting today.

I’m excited to begin this new journey. Here’s a post by Tanvi that I found to be extremely empowering. Hope it helps you too. This doesn’t just apply to fitness but any big lifestyle change that you wish to bring about.

Deconstruct to reconstruct

“Every day, you reinvent yourself. You’re always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward.”

—James Altucher

Day 18/30

Sometimes you just burnout. Your daily routine doesn’t seem fruitful anymore. You get upset by the end of the day because of your procrastination on important tasks throughout the day. You feel lost, demotivated and desperately seek a fresh start. You write down a to-do list for next day, it consists of everything that you wish you would do but you’ve never attempted it even once in your whole life. Like waking up at 5 am (when your usual timing is 8 am), reading 50 pages of a book (usual count 0), workout for 30 mins (usual count 0) so on and so forth. You get the point. Things don’t exactly transpire the way you’d wish for the next day and thus begins the endless loop of self pity and unproductivity. How do you get out of it? Let me lay down small tips that might help!

• Deconstruct your day : Find out 3 key tasks from your daily routine that you’d wish to change. It can be very simple tasks like drinking 1 liter water or reading 10 pages of a book.

• Reconstruct it step by step : If you are habituated to have a bath in the evening, try having it in the morning the next day. Skip junk food for a day. Make it very simple and short and challenge yourself you attempt just these 3 tasks the next day. Since the tasks are simple, attempting them shouldn’t seem too difficult. Once you accomplish them, you’d have the confidence to increase the level of these targets the next day. Take each day as it comes. Don’t try to become wonderwoman the very next day!

• Convert your mind into a trainer : You know those taskmasters in the gym who set your goals, motivate you to achieve them every single day, envision your long term targets, keep a tab on your progress and make sure you succeed! You have an in house trainer that wouldn’t cost you a dime, YOUR MIND! I know this works since I’ve tried it before. Our mind has 2 voices, one always recommends the easy way out (the procrastinator), the other motivates you to chose the right path (the taskmaster). Try to concentrate on your mind’s chatter for a day. Your mind always gives you 2 choices. Your intuition always knows what’s right for that moment but there’s another voice which makes your procrastinate everything and choose the lazy route out. Force yourself to listen to the taskmaster at least 3 out of 5 times and you’ll be sorted.

That’s it for now. These are very simple and basic steps that has the power to change your lifestyle, slowly and steadily. A big change in our life might not take overnight but we can make sure to change our life, one brick at a time.

Action replay

“All it takes one song to bring back 1000 memories.”

-Anonymous

Day 9/30

While mindlessly scrolling through YouTube today, I stumbled upon an old song that I was addicted to as a kid. I played the song and it felt like I was transported back to my childhood days when I used to listen to that song on loop. Who needs a time machine to revisit your past when you have music? I relived every single memory I had of those times when I used to listen to this song, my thoughts, aspirations and dreams during those time and most importantly, my innocence. Before all the setbacks and failures, the roller coaster like ups and downs in life, I was a young kid beaming with POSITIVITY and HOPE for the future. I used to think and believe that I will achieve all my goals and get everything I ever dreamed of. After all, hope is all I had during those days.

I also experienced deep emotions. I used to smile, laugh and also cry a lot. Now I’ve turned into a zombie who rarely cries and can literally count on her fingers, the last time I experienced the feeling of exhilaration and excitement in life. Life was so different back then. I had envisioned my life in a much different manner as a kid. I’m grateful for all the opportunities and blessings in my life. But, I want to be hopeful again, in the same manner and passion as I was as a kid.

There were certain things that I thought I’ll experience for sure (especially after watching countless rom-coms) which still haven’t panned out in my life. There are many things that have happened in my life that I could never dream of, I’m extremely grateful to the Universe for bringing abundance in my life, in the form of food, financial stability and opportunities.

I am currently reading a book called “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. If you’ve seen the Arabian Nights, you would know how Aladdin felt when Genie told him that he will grant him 3 wishes (anything that he could dream of). This is how I feel with this book in my hand. The tagline of Flow is “The classic work on how to achieve happiness“. That’s what I need, I want to be happy, in any circumstances. Even if I fumble or fall, I want to bounce back stronger.

In Csikszentmihalyi’s words, flow is “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (1990)

Now imagine if you know how to be in flow, always. You’ll have a much better quality of life and be HAPPY effortlessly. That’s what I seek. I plan to read this book over the weekend so that I can reset my life and start afresh. I want to completely get rid of the feeling of being STUCK in life and I trust this book to get me out of this dilemma.

Let’s do this.