A Good Year, or How to Change Your Life in 2016

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

To change your life in the new year, you need to set the right goals and develop good habits. In this guest article, PR manager and blogger Alina Rodina offers an interesting method of self-development by months. You can use her plan for 2016 or get inspired and create your own.

How many times have you made a promise to change your life in the new year: learn English, find a new job, lose weight, start eating right and running in the morning, quit smoking, take a trip, fall asleep under the stars?

But the truth is that most of these goals just wander from one year to the next, waiting for their "right" time. Do you want your plans and desires to come true in 2016? Me too! That is why I plan to live this year developing and instilling new useful qualities in myself every 30 days.

Everything is simple here: you come up with some task for yourself - get up early, read 50 pages of a book, learn 10 foreign words a day - and strictly fulfill it for a month.

You've probably heard that 30 days is about the length of time it takes to get a new habit or get rid of an old one. What are you waiting for? You have 12 whole months to train 12 useful skills. Here is a visual plan that I got.

January. Planning skills and goal setting

This is perhaps the best period for taking stock, analyzing the outgoing year and planning for the future.

Main tasks for the month:

1. Write a detailed report for 2015, your findings and lessons. Analysis helps to see opportunities where others see only obstacles. That is why this point is so important.
2. Formulate new tasks / goals / desires and the trajectory of movement towards them.
3. Learn to keep a weekly planner and plan your day in the evening.

Setting goals, following a plan, and getting things done is a process that allows you to learn about your true abilities and resources. It is in movement that our soul develops.

If you do not have a global goal or you cannot come up with one for yourself, just select it and start walking. Only in the process of this new doors open to us, and our consciousness moves to a new level, where the voice of the soul becomes clearer and clearer.

February. Development and harmonization of the right and left hemispheres of the brain

I will be left-handed this month.:)

For a long time I have been thinking about why we are all taught to write with the right hand? Why not both at once? And on the Internet you can find a lot of information that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for irrationality, the ability to think creatively and … for the left hand.

Have you heard about the superpowers of ambidextra (people who are fluent in both hands)? Well, let's test this theory. Main tasks for the month:

1. Practice writing / drawing with your left hand daily.
2. Move the computer mouse to the left.
3. Do all the routine things with your left hand: brush your teeth, surf the Internet on your smartphone, and even scratch yourself.

March. A month of sports and good mood

A sedentary lifestyle is bad for your well-being. It's time to rectify this situation, and the first month of spring is the best time to start exercising and lose weight. After all, very soon summer will come! Plan for this month: not a day without sports and interesting walks.

So it's time to download a pedometer application to your mobile and try to walk at least 10,000 steps a day, and also give up the elevator and accustom yourself to basic morning exercises.

April. Do you speak English? We pump English

I must say right away that my English is at a good level: I speak, write, speak. But I'm not going to stop there, my goal is to publish my articles in English-language editions. What will I do:

1. Read daily in English (online portals, original books).
2. Listen to English. On the same YouTube, you can subscribe to American or British bloggers who broadcast on any topics that interest you: beauty, health, online games, and so on. In addition, no one has canceled watching films in the original, and more recently I discovered films-performances (the project "British Theater in Cinema") and a real English-language theater, which is located in Kiev.
3. Speak in English. In addition to visiting banal conversation clubs, you can pretend to be a foreigner and talk to “ours” in English. I already wrote about a similar experiment once in the article "". And, as it turned out, becoming a foreigner for a couple of days is a great chance to see yourself and the mentality of your country from the outside.

May. Time to get up early and have more time

Getting up early is a very healthy habit. Firstly, you start to feel better and more cheerful (but only on condition that you go to bed before 12 at night!), And secondly, in the morning, while everyone is still sleeping, you can do so many useful and interesting things.

The task for this month: to get up every day at 5 am and thus get yourself additional invaluable hours of free time. This time can be spent on your already pumped March and April skills (sports and English), as well as on any other activities that you wanted to do, but did not have enough time.

June. An anti-refined sugar-free life

In order to finally put your body in order and tune in to the wave of health and positiveness, it's time to take a more serious approach to the issue of proper nutrition.

That is why I want to live this month without baked goods and products that contain industrial sugar. I already had this practice, and this time I plan to hold out for at least 4 months, including September.

And in the summer, adhering to such a diet is best, because there is an abundance of fresh fruits, berries and vegetables around. In addition, the sugar-free life has a number.

Monthly plan:

1. Sugar and rolls, goodbye! And also snacks and fried-boiled!
2. Long live fresh vegetables, fruits and nuts - at least 5 servings of raw food a day.

July. A month of traveling and discovering new places

Have you ever heard of the raptor instinct? No? And you have it.:) This is one of the first human instincts - the need for scouting.

Most animals move by studying the environment, this is the oldest of our programs, only slightly inferior in importance to the instincts of self-preservation and procreation.

If you make daily five-kilometer marches, periodically changing the route and looking at passers-by, shops, squares, fields or cars, your lizard will be pleased.

If you exist in the "house-car-office-car-house" mode, the lizard will start to mope, and you - along with him. I think that's why we all love to travel so much.

I don’t know how things will be with my vacation in July, but at least I can promise myself to walk every day, walk at least 5 km and visit new places.

August. Not a day without a good deed

It's not just the poor who benefit from philanthropy. In one psychology journal, I read the theory of "indirect reciprocity".

She says that in many social species there is a principle: an individual occupying a high position in the hierarchy demonstrates this by caring for those below it.

That is, for example, a starling occupying a leading position in a flock will feed those who are weaker than him. But if a weak male tries to shove a grasshopper into an alpha male's beak, then after such an insult he risks missing tail feathers.

Whoever is stronger than everyone cares about everyone - this is what indirect reciprocity is, which has become a winning evolutionary strategy for social species. When we help other people, we begin to evaluate our social position higher and we feel happier.

I also noticed that each person has his own area of "specialization" in the issue of good deeds. For example, for some people, helping stray animals is more joyful and more responsive than Saturday volunteers or donating money for dyslexics.

Therefore, this month I plan to figure out whether good deeds can really make a person happier and what exactly I can do good for this world.

September. I develop communication skills

The ability to communicate with people is a skill that will help you achieve success in any area. The business season is just beginning in September, and all kinds of conferences and business meetings are "pecking" almost every day - and this is where the ability to have, ask the right questions and charm future potential partners with your persona will come in handy.

I have identified 2 components for myself that I will need to work on:

1. The presentation of information is how you speak, write, what phrases you use, how well your voice is delivered and your diction is worked out.
2. Psychology of communication - to learn to better understand the interlocutor in the process of communication, to be able to adapt to his emotional state and communication style, to follow the gestures, facial expressions, intonation, emotional coloring of what was said.

The task for this month is to recognize at least one effective communication technique every day and apply it immediately.

October. Maximum concentration and increase in labor productivity

Working as hard as possible is not always the right path to success. Sometimes you can get better results by working less.

Once I read that the longer a person's working day, the less efficiently he uses his time. After all, if you are busy with something, it does not mean at all that you are productive.

Being productive is less about being able to manage your time, but about how to properly allocate energy. You need to learn to spend as little energy as possible in order to get as much benefit as possible.

Plans for this month:

1. Learn to live in the moment.
2. Plan your business properly and stop working overtime.
3. Learn to concentrate on the current task and not be distracted by trifles until I complete the task.

November. Financial literacy

Oh, perhaps this will be the most difficult experiment for me, because creative people and budget planning are incompatible things. But to manage money, you need to know how much you have, where it comes from and where it goes. This is what we will devote our November to. Among my plans:

1. Start a financial diary and keep track of personal finances.
2. Reduce impulse purchases.
3. You will also need to figure out how the economy works and sign up for an educational course like "Finance / Economics for Dummies.":)

December. Do-it-yourself miracles, or How to cook a New Year's fairy tale

The final 30 days of 2016, I would like to live creating my own fairy tale. After all, we all in the depths of our souls expect miracles from the New Year, an unforgettable holiday, and we believe that something good must certainly happen. But sitting and waiting for Santa Claus is stupid, so I propose to start acting on your own.

To begin with, you can decorate the house with homemade snowflakes and paintings, "painted" tangerines, make unusual gifts for loved ones with your own hands, play winter games with the whole family - and then the last days of the outgoing year will be remembered for a long time, and the New Year's Eve itself will give bright emotions and a boost of vigor for whole year!

This is how I plan to live this year. I tried this technique in 2015 and realized that if you really want something badly, you can do anything in 30 days. It's also a great way to become the best version of yourself.

I also decided that since people are social beings and we need mutual support like a fish needs water, it is worth creating a special group for all those who want to go a similar path. I named it "Good Year!"

Here I plan to keep an online diary on my adherence to my plan, as well as write about life hacks and inspirational ideas that will help develop this or that "skill of the month".