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“You’ve come a long way baby” Weekly Review: Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2019

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It’s been well over a month since my last journal entry. Something that I’ve been neglecting is hearing, listening and actually heeding what my gut tells me after a pretty fucking tough 2018.

The main theme of 2018 is that I’ve coped with stress in unacceptable and unhealthy ways that impacted my energy and the people around me. It was something that was something that slowly crept up on me. Sparing all the gory details, I think I’m on a much better path after taking stock of my situation and viewing everything through the lens of gratitude, with my trusty and dusty 5 Minute Journal that’s the cornerstone of just feeling like I’m on solid ground.

Something I revealed to two dear friends of mine was that I was just tired of disappointment. Setbacks professionally and personally felt a bit too much to handle and I didn’t have the outlets that I previously had to maintain some semblance of emotional resilience were whittled away from the boundaries and stresses of work I was ever so slowly ceding. It wore away at my self-worth. I created threats in my head. There were also countless things that I had started but never followed through on which put me further down a spiral and the self-created pain had created such a heavy burden that all I could think of escaping and placating myself with sleep and other unhealthy ways of dealing with stress.

It all led up to me having to reach out personally to trusted friends, and eventually seeking professional help in the form of a therapist.

But this post isn’t about all the little fuckups and set backs. This post is about the little victories and wins. Every hard fought inch that is slowly helping me turn around and navigate back into not so stormy weather if you will.

As with my previous reviews, I’ll be covering categories of improvement, which for me are:

  • 💪Fitness/Mental Health
  • 🤑Personal Finance
  • 🤓Learning.

💪Fitness & Mental Health:

This category is a hybrid one that encompasses not just fitness in the traditional sense, going to the gym, the consistency, the meal planning etc. It’s also everything else that doesn’t take place in the gym, the rituals, the sleep for recovery, the mental health practices that involve meditation and self reflection. All of that adds up to overall health and a healthy outlook on life and having the resilience to deal with whatever fucked up shit comes our way.

This past week was awesome, not because I went to the gym 3 times, but because I once on my own without much cajoling and twice doing some workouts from P90X with my partner. It was really fun and I highly recommend it working out with your partner!

Other than that, I made an emphasis to sleep earlier to give my body some time to adjust and recover, but to also allow myself to not be a complete grumpy rat bastard when I’m running on only 6 hours of sleep (or less).

Most importantly, I’m carving out time for myself in the evening to wind down before bed to reflect on my day, do a rough plan of my day ahead and then give myself a dose of 7+ hours of sleep.

During my mornings, I’m finally putting to use my Muse meditation headband that has been lying around and collecting dust for the last 2 and a half years. I squeezed in 4 sessions, starting off with 3 minutes, and the fourth session being about 12 minutes. I’d like to meditate every weekday for at least 15 minutes before heading into work.

🤑Personal Finance:

My relationship with my finances hasn’t been the best, but after having paid off my student loans and now that I’m on the last bit of my line of credit, I’m starting to build up savings again. Roughly, I’m planning for saving at least $1500 a month as a conservative amount after I factor in all my expenses and vacations.

Might go further into to detail, but I’ll definitely be sharing more details about my consumption, savings and approach to building wealth later on.

🍜Learning :

One thing I’d like to do is focus on learning a new thing a week. While it has never been a consistent thing, I’d like to actually write about what I’m learning and how it’s bringing more structure and happiness to my life. One of things that I’ve often neglected is doing creative things with my hands(tm). That may entail cooking or some sort of art like origami or gloving or learning how to DJ, which is most likely next week..🎛

This past week, I learned how to make traditional Vietnamese pho (beef noodle soup) for the first time after my mom sent me a pretty decent recipe. If anything I should be learning more things from my mom in the future.

This week, I’m going to be digging into wrapping my head around some SQL queries for work.. maybe I’ll abstract that and turn it into a mini blog post.

Going forward…

My goal isn’t to be relentless and beating myself up for not being able to hit all my high falutin’ and lofty goals. It’s more so being more gentle to myself and the language and internal dialogue I have with myself, while still moving forward. As cheesy as it may sound, I’m more interested in the journey that’s more kinder and gentler to myself. However, that’s not to be confused with flip flopping or backing down on the promises I make to myself. Consistency and resilience are things to keep in mind for myself.

Managing Energy

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I’ve been questioning how I approach my work and how I handle anxiety levels. Yes, stress is the norm, but it should be harnessed to help focus and prioritize where we should devote our energy in a given day.
 
I’ve been thinking a bit more granularly about my energy expenditure. 
 
So a question I’ve been asking myself is on a day to day basis – how do I manage my energy and time during the day?
 
While I am tasked as a “Solutions Engineer”, what the hell does that mean when everything is of equal importance and of equal urgency. I usually get stuck spinning my wheels, but doing something as simple as writing down the “Most Important Tasks” I need to accomplish is determined by how much time I should spend and how important a customer is (re: $$$). 
 
So this is what I devised.
 
Plan for 2 things to get done by a certain time 12 PM? and work relentlessly to get those done by 12 PM. Purely for building momentum at first.
  • From there, I’ll take on mini-tasks first and then bigger task after that
  • If it takes more than 30 minutes to get any significant progress – ask for help or delegate

From that point forward, it’s all gravy.

Excuse Tracker. No Excuses.

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I’ve been making a fuck ton of excuses as of late, which I admitted on Facebook and stirred a good amount of discussion. I may be borderline depressed I think, but I think I can salvage this through journalling and more reflection which I have very seldom done on a week to week basis.will lam excuses
 
I figure I should make it as visceral and visual as possible. To the point where I wince. I’ve tried to be aspirational in the past and plan around being forward looking, innovative, etc. But when I look back at what I set out to achieve over the last say, 10 years or so, I don’t have much to show. Lots of tough learnings, but, lots of lumps and bruises, and nothing substantial or meaty that I’ve made significant progress in and stuck to through the years.

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2012 – A Brief Year in Review

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This is my last review of the year! It’s certainly been a year full of more downs than ups, but has certainly ended off with a strong finish due to taking on a lot of upfront short term pain for long term gain.

It’s been interesting to see how my year has evolved where my areas of focus have been whittled down from 5-6 areas (which wasn’t really sustainable) down to 3 areas. It used to include “Productivity” and “SEO/Career”, but I found those redundant as the goals tied to Career were closely related to “Learning”. Productivity was an area that was getting a bit redundant as I was more or less writing about the same stuff over and over, and didn’t feel it was a valuable exercise as I had RescueTime running the background at all times. One thing to note, is that having moved back to iOS after picking up an iPhone 5, I’ll be losing much more granular data on the smart phone level, which I will sorely miss. Perhaps that will merit a blog post in and of itself.

Financial Freedom – It’s been a lot more relaxed this past month in terms of how closely I’m monitoring the purse strings due to the holiday season and boxing week 🙂 I’ll be around a manageable “low few thousands” mark in terms of outstanding debt, which was forecasted and accounted for.

Milestones to work towards: pay off the rest of my credit card debt and finally have savings! And finally create a stream of passive income.

Fitness Phenomenon – I went to Muay Thai this past week for the first time in ages after Gabe had nagged and bugged me and finally reeled me in with a free class. Of course, I got my ass kicked, as it was weird doing wide arm push-ups with boxing gloves on. I was wincing in pain like a little girl because my poor shins hurt, but it was great nonetheless. A great cardio exercise overall. I’ll take up Muay-Thai classes in the future, but for now, I’ll stick to Crossfit until I get the swing of things in the new year. I should probably vary the styles of push-ups I do instead of doing exclusively military hands-removed push ups.

What I’ve done – worked on improving form and briefly touched upon Olympic weightlifting and found a love for it. Finished Murph in 1:01:14 back in August 2012.

Fitness Milestones: Be a lot more vigilant in terms of what I eat. Going to the gym 4 times a week regularly (up from 3) and putting a strong emphasis on strength rather than metabolic conditioning in the WODs. Can’t wait to start digging into Starting Strength! Make the Crossfit Toronto competition team by June 2013.

Learning – this is something I’ll have to aggressively pursue and narrow the scope during the new year. This past year has been mainly SEO/Inbound Marketing due to working at Powered by Search, but for the new year, I want to have a broader outlook in terms of online marketing. Specifically, I’ll be learning about “Growth” – be it lifecycle email marketing, growth hacking, technical marketing, SEO, Content Marketing – anything and everything related to growth, programming (for automation) and data analysis would be within my scope of learning for 2013.

What I’ve done: finished my last course at Ryerson University! 🙂 While I didn’t continue with Corporate tax, I chose the path of least resistance and made the switch to Ethics in Finance and am thankful for it.

Milestones for learning – finish Udemy Excel course, finish Udemy Growth Hacking course, learn Adwords, finish and keep up to date with DistilledU, learn how to build a simple Rails app, learn the ins and outs of WordPress.

Some other areas I’d like to add would be “Travelling” to expand my horizons so-to-speak, but I’m not sure if I’ll be doing that frequently enough to be able to write about it. A safer statement would be to visit two continents outside of North America. I think I should be half way there by March’ish due to the Startup Weekend/Startup Digest Worldwide meetup in Rio De Janeiro, but we’ll see.

Anyway, 2012 was a challenging year, but onwards and upwards for a stellar 2013!

Weekly Review – Sept 16, 2012

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It’s been a few weeks that I’ve posted a weekly review.  I’ve kept up in my Moleskine journal, but I was a bit lazy in transferring it to the blog and editing out more private details.  In any case, here’s this past week’s review.

Financial Freedom – definitely a step back due to a variety of factors.  Just have to leave the credit card at home…

Fitness Phenomenon – I went to Crossfit 4 times this past week, so going to the gym to get a workout isn’t really an issue.  The bigger issue stems from focusing on having a healthier nutrition plan.  I was toying around with the idea of trying Leangains approach along with Paleo, but that might too much to tackle so soon.  I’ll just try out a “Paleo’ish” diet that strips out white carbs and still have fruits in it.  Additionally, cutting out beer is a must do in order to cut through the last bit of fat.

Learning – I’ve rounded out my schedule to pave the way for my Ethics in Finance course now that I’ve switched out of Corporate Tax.  Right now, I’ve begun the process of inputting my refined notes into my Wiki.  All I need to continue focusing on is the habit of reviewing my Wiki during random pockets of time in the coming weeks.