Hi. My name is Shellz, I had Kentuckaaay Fried Chicken for dinner last night (#noregrets), and this is the first post of my first annual Blogtober.
YES! That's right, I'll be attempting to blog EVERY OTHER DAY in October ... I know that in the past I have been flaky with daily blogs. But this is the Oct. de Triumph, y'all (couldn't help myself with that one). I'm holding myself to it!
Today's topic (very topical to Blogtober) is Honoring Commitments.
The reason I feel that I can actually do Blogtober this year is that I have gotten much better at honoring commitments this year, starting with my New Year's Resolution, which was to give up "bad drinks" so that I can drink more water. If you still haven't had a chance to watch my "Giving up Soda and Alcohol" vlog, then please feel free to give this lovely link a click ;)
Not that I'm an expert by any means (because HELLO unused gym membership and expired groupons), but I think I have made substantial progress in the past year. Here are some of the things I learned about holding promises to yourself and others:
1) Walk, don't run: Your parents' pool-side warnings are just as relevant for real life and keeping promises. In the past, I had a lot of difficulty maintaining a good presence in my extracurricular activites while attending school. I think the reason is because I wanted to be in at least two million of them. And also be on the executive board of at least one and a half million of them. But that just doesn't work out, with there being just 24 hours a day and all. So now I try to make fewer goals but hold myself to each of them a lot more. I've found it fulfilling to to excel at 3 goals rather than just barely meet 10 of them.
2) Teamwork goes a long way: I think this holds for group goals as well as personal goals.The more obvious example is group goals. Here, you have to work with people who are just as committed to the project as you are. I'm grateful that the environmental group I volunteer my time with is super-super committed to the sustainability of my town. It makes it much easier to motivate yourself to keep doing good work when others around you are also putting in their best efforts. The second way that teamwork helps is if you surround yourself with supporters. Luckily for me this year, my best friend has also become a blogger/vlogger. And when my videos aren't up in time, she definitely shoots me texts about getting myself together (and of course, I do my best to annoy her about getting her posts up too). Thanks, A!
3) Give yourself "outs": I've always found it hard to give something up cold turkey, so I like to give myself an "out." One example is giving up soda and alcohol for 2015, which has made it difficult for me to go out with friends and certain work events where there is an open bar and everyone has a drink. So I told myself that if I do find myself in a social situation where everyone has a drink, I could get a gingerale. For some reason I've always thought of gingerale as the least egregious of all carbonated drinks, but it's probably not? But so far this year I've probably only had gingerale like 5 times this year, which is much better than 2014 when I had 3 coke's by 3pm!
xoxo,
the closing belle
