How My Dream Became A Reality

One thing that I have been constantly working on throughout the year that hasn’t been posted on my blog here, is my Performance Growth Plan. The goal of PGP is to help us PLP learners find a way to achieve more through a process of expanding what we already know about goal setting and self reflection. Over the course of the school year we have read 2 books and completed numerous assignments coinciding with the books. 

The books we read: What Do You Really Want? and 7 Habits Of The Highly Effective Teen have helped me rethink my perspective on myself and the many things I wish to achieve in life, both short term and long term. The work that accompanied those books was work that was different than usual ‘homework’. Instead of demanding your memory of content-based knowledge, it required me to think deeper about myself. I had the answers in me, and there was no right nor wrong answer because it was all up to me. I thought this was a nice break from other coursework and allowed me to tap in to a different part of my brain for a little bit.

Completing PGP over the year has truly been an awakening journey, as I have learned so much that I have already implemented in to my daily life. Without even thinking too much about it, just hearing and learning about these personal improvements I can make on my mind has caused me to automatically adapt myself. Because of this, it’s kind of difficult to really highlight and acknowledge the actual principles I learned because it has more or less become one large blanket that falls over everything in my life.

To cap off the year, we were tasked with the Time Machine project. Our job was to create a summative artifact that encapsulates what we learned in PGP in to something that we wish we could show our past selves from the beginning of the year. Instantly upon hearing this I knew I wanted to steer away from what I suspected a lot of people would be doing, which is creating a video where they directly talk about the Habits and acknowledge PGP. Instead of doing that, I had a vision to create something much more conceptual and less direct to PGP itself. Because this project allowed so much creative freedom, I was able to do this. I wanted to show my past self the future success of something I was struggling with at the time; dunking. 

For much over a year now I have seriously been aspiring to be able to dunk. Even with my height I always struggled with it and it annoyed me because I would always get asked “can you dunk?”, and having to say no every time and watching the disappoint on their face was really irritating. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to just magically increase my vert however. So, thus began the journey of me dunking.

Before PGP, I was lost. As I talk about in the video, it is absolutely crucial to have a vision of what success is, because without it, it is very easy to be taking the wrong path towards what you want. That is why I believe that the Habit I learned that affected the birth of my new dunking abilities is Habit 2: Begin With The End In Mind. Because I knew what I wanted my success to look like, I was clearly able to know that I had achieved my goal. For so long every hoop I would walk by I pictured myself taking off and dunking the balk through it. I think this really helped me because I had seen so many of these visions in my head that all that was left for me to do was put in the physical work.

Another aspect to my goal that PGP really helped me with is productivity. As I mention in the video, I faced a lot of physical hard work in the gym, and that takes time management and being productive. Managing multiple avenues of life such as school, basketball, social, personal can be really hard, but by finding a streamlined process to keep myself on track I was able to balance my life to a point where I was comfortably uncomfortable (if that makes any sense!). A new addition to my life; time-blocking, helped me manage my life around my practices and workouts. This is something that I will continue to use throughout my daily life because now that I know it works, it would be silly not to utilize it especially with its ease.

Time-blocking in my calendar helps me plan what work I’m going to do, and when.

The “Things” app helps me keep track of my tasks

Overall, I have never experienced something at school that makes such a difference in my everyday life as PGP. I’m grateful that the teachers made the switch from more conventional goal-setting to this heightened, deeper-learning in which they have pushed me to better understand and improve myself. I look forward to seeing how these new ideologies make a positive impact on my life.