Opportunities for Balance

Welcome back to another post. We just completed our Personal Productivity System which I   talked about in another post and now we have completed our Creating Opportunities from Balance project. This project focused on Positive Brain Training, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens which we learned about last year, and lastly Atomic Habits. The driving question for this project for this project is “How does balance within my life create opportunities?”. We learned how to start the path to do that with the topics mentioned above.

Starting this project off we watched a video and made notes on it. We then watched it twice more adding to our notes to really make sure we gained all the information it was talking about. My notes in the document down below explain the video but the main point was that you can have a happier mindset, which means a more productive life by training your brain with positive habits. When using strategies like gratitude, journaling, exercise, meditation, and random acts of kindness you can develop a happier mindset. Positive thoughts and actions improve your opportunity to be happy. This leads to the improvement of your everyday life. When you only acknowledge whats negative in your life rather than whats positive it doesn’t allow your positivity and performance to get to its full potential.

So we started incorporating those five strategies into our everyday lives. Monday was meditation, Tuesday was conscious act of kindness, Wednesday was exercise, Thursday was journaling and lastly Friday was gratitude. 

Monday Meditation, the whole class would either watch or listen to a meditation video then we would take a daily note of positives and negatives. I feel out of all five this is the one I struggled with the most but as we continued to practice throughout the weeks I got better. 

Tuesday Conscious Act of Kindness. We ended up only completing two conscious acts of kindness as the timing was off and we did not have time to do more. The first one we did was interact positively on someone’s social media that you wouldn’t normally do. The second one that we did was a love letter to a family member because it was Valentine’s Day. I chose to write a letter to my older sister. 

Wednesdays Exercise. I think the exercise days were my favourite out of all of them because we had a chance to go for a walk outside and get fresh air for most of them. When reflecting we mentioned how we felt before and after as well as how we could incorporate more exercise into our week. Down below is an example of what a daily note looks like ⬇️

Thursdays Journalling. When Thursday’s came around we were given 3 writing prompts that we could journal about in our daily note. You can check out some of the prompts are down below ⬇️ When looking at the journal prompts I felt I often wrote about multiple and as soon I was done writing about one I would move onto the next. 

•What is something that always puts you in a good mood?

•What is the best way to lift someone else’s spirits?

•Do you consider yourself to be an optimist? Why or why not?

•Imagine your perfect day and write about what it would look like?

•Who is the most positive person you know? How do you feel when you are around him or her?

Friday Gratitude: 

Just like journalling there were gratitude prompts. I feel like this was another one that was easy for me to accomplish as it just came naturally. I found I was often grateful towards my family and friends when answering the prompts.

Then as we continued to complete our daily strategy we reviewed the 7 Habits and started reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. Before we could start reading we all completed a reading schedule in things to ensure we got all our reading done on time. I feel that the schedule helped me stay organized as I made it so that I would only have to read a chapter a day and if I stuck to this schedule I would get the reading done ahead of time. This gave me lots of time to reflect on all the information I gained. Throughout the time that I spent reading Atomic Habits I made sure to take notes and highlight anything that stood out to me. When highlighting I tried to colour things that I could change or start to incorporate into my life one colour and just other notes in a different colour.

One of the habits I have been starting to build is from using the habit stacking strategy. This strategy suggests that you take one habit you already have and build another habit off of it. For example every morning I wake up and open my curtains. After this I would normally just go eat breakfast or brush my teeth but I have been stacking a new habit after I open my curtains where I also make my bed and pick out my outfit for the day. I’m someone who’s always bad at making my bed so doing just this small task every morning makes me feel more productive and also makes my room seem more tidy. While I’m doing this I’m also trying to reprogram my brain to enjoy hard habits as James Clear talks about in chapter 10 of Atomic Habits. I feel like being positive and looking at the bright side is something people have always told me to do but its not something I’m necessarily good at but I would like to improve.

Overall, it creates balance through the atomic habits and all the activity’s we did like meditation, random acts of kindness, journaling, exercise, and gratitude. Although I struggled at first to get in the momentum when reading the book once I started to take notes and really put all my time into understanding the information I thought it was really interesting. Thanks for reading this post and I will be back with more soon!