Welcome back to my blog. Today we will be talking about PGP, or Personal Growth Plan. This is a new course for me. This is the first section we are going in the course. For this section, we are reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, as well as doing work with positive brain training(I will explain this more later). We would then present an answer to the driving question, “how does balance in my life create opportunities?”, in a learning portfolio post. Let’s get into it.
Driving Question
“How does balance in my life create opportunities?” Having balance in your life can lead to increased productivity, happiness, and health. When you balance your life, you can get what you need to do done, while still having room for the things you want to do. Balance may also leave time for you to explore new things which will in turn create opportunities for yourself. Balance also leads to organized systems, which will make everything simpler and easier.
Positive Brain Training
We started with watching this video, a TED talk titled “Happiness: The Wisdom of Play”. As we watched this video, we practiced taking notes and summarizing. You can check out my summary of this video here. After doing this, we started taking one of the five things said to improve your happiness(Mindfulness, Conscious Acts of Kindness, Exercise, Journaling, and Gratitude), and doing them on a specific weekday. Supposedly, doing each of the things every day for 21 days can rewire your brain to work more optimistically and more successfully. I think that this activity would have been more successful for me if I dedicated more time to it and did it more consistently. I ended up not really enjoying the positive brain training. I felt as though it was another thing I had to do. One of my main problems with a lot of the work we do in PLP is that things that I may have done in my own time are assigned as school work, which made it much less appealing. For example, I had heard that journaling could be enjoyable, and I was thinking of trying it out on my own. But once we started doing journaling as part of positive brain training, I started not wanting to do it at all. It became associated with work, which I normally don’t want to do.
Atomic Habits
Once we had been doing our positive brain training for a little bit, we started reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. We then set up a reading schedule to ensure we got all of our reading done in time to write this post. I thought that this book was very interesting. It had many cool ideas. The one that I found the most interesting was the idea of systems. You create small, easily repeatable habits as part of a system, and you make systems for everything you need to and when you stick to your systems, you achieve what you want to achieve. This ties in to the idea of habit stacking. Doing one big habit consistently, will not be as successful or as easy as doing many small habits consistently. Although this book was very interesting and had a lot of useful ideas, I found it was a struggle to get through. After reading for a little bit, it just became the same thing repeated again and again. This along with way to many anecdotes made this a difficult book to maintain interest in.
7 Habits
All the way back in grade 9, we did a project with the 7 habits. You can read my post on it here. It was very interesting to see the parallels and contrasts between the two books. For example, they were both focused on habits, and they were both self-improvement books, however, 7 habits told you exactly what habits to have to be an effective person, whereas atomic habits told you how to create the systems and habits that you specifically need to achieve whatever you want to achieve. Because of this, I found atomic habits to work slightly better for me. I like the idea of creating my own systems and habits to achieve what I want to achieve rather than following a bunch of habits this random guy told me to do so that I become an “effective person”.
Conclusion
Overall, I think that this was a pretty good project to start of PGP. It built on things we had already learned, and it was a fairly straightforward project, and it wasn’t to difficult to complete. I think that this project taught me a lot about creating systems to achieve what I want to achieve, balancing my life in order to get what I need to do done and have room to do what I want to do, and training my brain to work and think more positively.
Leave a Reply