July Progress Report
“Acceptance also means acceptance of yourself, that not only what happened has happened, but that you did the best you could at that moment in time.”
OBJECT LEVEL (what did I do?)
Self-feedback:
This month has been the most extremes of ups and downs, more personally rather than professionally. I’m learning a lot about myself, communication, and relationships with others.
I’ve also finished 2 weeks of Good Time Journal with a dear friend! It was so helpful to keep each other accountable and do an analysis for each other afterwards. More on the GTJ later in the report; also shifting from the growth marketing validation project as I’m finding myself gravitating more towards writing, learning and creating educational content.
Here’s where I’m at for goals:
Previous goals:
- Writing: publish at least 5 posts
- Video: edit 5 hours / week
- Dance: 3x / week
How I did:
- Writing: check. I’ve written three posts on themes from Design Your Life and a Medium publication actually reached out to me for my writing to be featured!! I’m also including the June Progress Report as a post (okay I won’t count it for next time). My favorite and what I’m really proud of, is the article I wrote on the memories from spending 48 hours with a dear friend, the format inspired by Nayyirah Waheed’s style in Salt (which I love love love).
- Video: check. Made 3 videos in total this week: a travel recap of BANFF for a friend, a July video recap as part of my ongoing monthly projects, and something I’m super excited about: Flower piano piece — the first video that I was able to showcase feelings and emotions through playing piano and intertwining it with select poems from Salt. Often, videos only include the highlights so I was really happy and excited to push my creative boundaries and capture as well as convey how I really felt at that time.
- Dance: semi-check. Can’t say I hit 3x a week consistently, especially towards the end of the month where it was pretty crazy with moving out. I did however, fit a recording session in, where a really great videographer friend helped me film incredibly awesome shots and I’m super excited to edit that soon!
July’s Connection Project
- I made it to half way through the month, where I either reached out or reconnected with someone every day. It was actually a beautiful beautiful thing, resulting in serendipitous shared time together, potential business partnerships in the future, and a very exciting trip to see friends in NY, Boston and D.C. at the beginning of September.
- I really liked how it gave me that little push that I needed to take initiative and grow my boundary zone. This is definitely something I want to try again in the future and follow through on the 30 days.
Insightful posts:
- Productivity: productivity is about understanding what you really want to do, then building systems to make it work for you. Real productivity gives you freedom and flexibility because you’re consistent 95% of the time. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, get the fundamentals down first (environment, sleep, work) then move on to psychology (set boundaries, handle setbacks, and be positive and resilient), and then worry about the details like what app to use.
- Who You Really Are (Neale Donald Walsch): there is a way to be happy in relationships, and that is to use relationships for their intended purpose, not the purpose you have designed. Relationships are constantly challenging; constantly calling you to create, express and experience higher and higher aspects of yourself, grander and grander vision of yourself, ever more magnificent versions of yourself. Nowhere can you do this more immediately, impactfully, and immaculately than in relationships. In fact, without relationships, you cannot do it at all.
It is only through your relationship with other people, places, and events that you can even exist; absent everything else, you are not. Once you clearly understand this, once you deeply grasp it, then you intuitively bless each and every experience, all human encounter, and especially personal human relationships, for you see them as constructive, in the highest sense.
- when human love relationships fail (relationships never truly fail, except in the strictly human sense that they did not produce what you want), they fail because they were entered into for the wrong reason.
- *wrong, of course, is a relative term, meaning something measured against that which is “right’. It would be more accurate in your language to say “relationships fail — change — most often when they are entered into reasons not wholly beneficial or conducive to their survival
- Most people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather than what they can put into them. The purpose of a relationship is to decide what part of yourself you’d like to “show up”, not what part of another you can capture and hold
*I’ve noticed that as I started creating more, I started consuming less. yay #goals.
Books read:
- Art of Communication
Currently reading:
- The Defining Decade (re-reading)
- Education of Millionaires (re-reading)
- The Little Book of Letting Go
Experimental section: senses
- Grateful to feel on a spectrum of emotions: to have loved and cared so much that it hurts deeply, to have experienced so much that there’s constant longing and reminiscence, to have been crying and laughing through tears
PROCESS LEVEL (how did I do it?)
Belief updates:
- Accountability works! I’ve always worked on areas I wanted to improve in by myself and didn’t think working with others would make a big difference. It really does — I have two examples. Recapping activities at end of each night for the Good Time Journal was made much easier by exchanging my daily entries with a friend. Even if I wasn’t motivated for myself to write it, the thought of the promise we made each other and the reaction on her face when she reads mine was more than enough to push through. I also really like the feeling of growing together and helping each other accomplish what we both wanted to do. The other example is paying a friend upfront a certain amount ($400) and with each post that I write, I get $30 back. In the end, I don’t lose any money but the action in itself helps me commit to a number of posts that I want to write, and the feeling of getting money for doing something I want to do (and may not have completed otherwise) makes me very dopamine happy.
- GTJ: Good Time Journal includes activities for each day, level of engagement, level of energy (how you feel afterwards), detailed description, and whether you’ve felt flow for each activity (would a spreadsheet be helpful?). Some takeaways: I noticeably created more during this time frame, and as I was tracking my activities, I felt more empty while doing busy work or consuming content. This definitely helped give me a positive feedback loop to create more and intrinsically motivate me as being in flow felt really good. Below is a screenshot of how the sheet looked like after analysis:
- Writing: I’ve been experimenting with a couple of ways I can fuse work and play with writing
→ working / co-writing with entrepreneurs to help them tell their personal stories
→ help others with brand messaging from a marketing perspective
→ create educational content on topics that fascinate me like flow, habits, etc.
- Art of communication: your thoughts are your actions. Each form of communication either nurtures or harms a relationship. Thinking of actions as food that feed the soul: you are what you eat, you are what you think.
META LEVEL (why did I do it?)
Right now, these three areas are on autopilot, in the sense that these things are what I’m drawn to and I’ve incorporated them well into my daily routines.
I’m also thinking about agency a lot: how much agency I think I’m taking vs. actually taking. I noticed that for a significant amount of time, I am waiting on decisions made by others that would shape my path.
I wonder how I can take more direct control?
In the meantime, I’m actually back home on the east coast for August. Since there’s not really a space to practice dance nor a lot of content for videos, I’ll be changing it up a bit.
Goals for next month:
- Writing: start transferring posts over to a blog and start creating more intentional content around specific topics related to life design
- Video: 1 video / week (priorities: cruise video, dance video, Iceland video, August video + mini-tourist video ft. Swedish friend)
- Dance: stretch everyday (splits)+ work out 4x a week (core, arm, headstand, floorwork)
- Also want to try out horseback riding :)
Monthly project:
- Increasing typing speed (that seems to be one of the most upstream things, given how much time I spend using the keyboard everyday)
Thanks for reading! What has been the most exciting project for you this month?
This is #6 of my monthly progress reports. You can check out the previous one here:
