Tag: creating your best self

Three Easy Steps To Mastering Any Skill

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Hi friends!

Happy Sunday!

This week, I wanted to discuss something that’s been at the forefront of most of our minds since about one year ago, when lockdowns began. (Crazy how it’s been pretty much exactly one year to the day now, right?). As soon as we all became locked inside with nothing to do, a sudden craze broke out across social media — and it urged us all to use our newfound free time to master new skills. Be it baking, cooking, exercising, writing, or art — suddenly everyone seemed like they were trying something new.

The whole concept, as I’ve discussed before, was a bit of a double-edged sword — on one hand, it’s always great to try new things, learn something new or push yourself like you haven’t before. On the other hand, however, there was immense pressure on social media to be using our spare time during one of the most stressful and unpredictable times of our lives to be productive. That being said — there is always benefit to learning new things. A year later on, I’m sure we’ve all seen skills that our family and friends have learned that we would love to learn to do ourselves. But how, exactly? Starting a new skill from scratch isn’t just challenging — it’s daunting as well. However, it isn’t impossible — in fact, it’s far from it. At the end of the day, you really only need three simple things to master any skill your heart desires: practice, passion, and patience. By the end of this post, I’m going to share with you exactly how you can master whichever skill it is you’ve been tempted to try — no matter your level of experience. (And of course, the most important step of all at the end of the day, no matter what skill you want to master, is just to START! Start now! There’s nothing stopping you. If you start today, you’ll just have that much more experience in a week than if you started tomorrow. Don’t worry about having it all be perfect from the get-go. You’ll get there, so just go for it.)

Practice

The first, and most obvious step, to mastering a skill is practice. Or perhaps it isn’t to most obvious — it seems so many people believe that “natural talent” is somehow key excelling at things, but that isn’t the case. Let me be clear — you do not need to be naturally talented and something to become great at it. Think of your skill as you would exercise (which works especially well if exercise is somehow related to the skill you wish to master): anyone who works out will become more fit with time. Sure, it takes a while, and perhaps we all move at different paces. Maybe some people have a bit of a head start, and maybe others don’t. However, with practice, anyone and everyone can become fit. However, no matter who you are — it takes a LOT of both time and effort to become incredibly strong and muscular. But really, the only thing stopping you from being the person who becomes super strong is how much you practice. This doesn’t mean that you should push yourself beyond healthy limits, though — what I’m trying to say is that anyone can build up a skill to the level of a master. It takes time, but there’s no need to rush — you’ll get there.

A little extra note that I’ve found really works for me as well — I find, personally, that I benefit significantly from practicing skills for, say, half an hour putting in my best effort and I do putting in four times as much time at only 50% effort. The quality of my effort, for me, matters. If I’m feeling distracted, or lazy, or trying to rush through practicing simply to finish, it doesn’t really get me anywhere — and it doesn’t show me results that I’m proud of.

Passion

The second thing you’ll need to be able to master a skill is passion. Let’s not get too deep here — I don’t mean that whatever it is you intend to learn has to be your life’s sole and absolute devotion. In fact, you’ll be able to cultivate more passion as you go. But as you start out, you simply need to be passionate enough about whatever skill you wish to learn to feel excited about it, and look forward to practicing it. Let’s say, for example, that your passion is drawing (just like me!). Ideally, if you’re looking get started as an artist, you should be excited to practice drawing and look forward to practicing it when you can. This will reflect in your life in any number of ways — looking forward to purchasing your artistic tools, getting excited about looking for reference images or drawing subjects, or feeling inspired by other’s art that you come across online. All of this passion should, hopefully, not only inspire you to practice — but to practice often. The best part of this step, at least for me personally, is that your passion and excitement grows as you see your hard work pay off. Every time I complete a drawing that I consider to be my personal best, it ignites a newfound wave of excitement to keep going and create something new.

Patience

The final step to mastering any skill is the hardest — patience. Do not feel discouraged if you don’t see results as fast as you think you’re supposed to. Learning takes time, and the path to mastering a new skill is seldom linear. Sometimes you’ll feel like you’re making huge amounts of progress, and others you’ll feel stuck in a rut. Whether you feel it or not, though, every time you dedicate yourself to practicing, you’re making progress. Slow progress is still progress. It may take months, or even years, to truly master your chosen skill — and even then, you’ll still always have more to learn. Even if you feel you had a good momentum the first few months and then stopped seeing progress, I’d encourage you not to give up — I’m sure you’re still making progress that even you can’t see. The smallest increments, with time, will get you to where you want to be. And what’s more, you never know when you may have that moment where you can feel everything fall into place; where you feel like you finally get it. If you’ve started and feel lost, that moment will come. Just keep working towards it.

Be sure not to compare yourself to others — some people may experience quick learning in the beginning, some people may take a while to get the hang of things — but the point is, is that ANYONE can master ANYTHING with proper dedication. You do not need to be naturally gifted to become great at something — in fact, most people that are started off just where you are now. The only reason, I believe, that people who are “naturally gifted” tend to excel in particular skills is that they’re motivated by their results early on that drive their passion to continue practicing — just as you will with time. Keep at it, and one day you’ll realize how far you’ve come since you started — and it’ll only drive your passion to keep going and learning more.

Now, I know what some of you may be thinking. To some extent, art has always been my thing. How do you, or even I, know whether I’m good at it because I followed these steps, or if it’s just because I’m inherently an artistic person? My evidence to show you otherwise is twofold — firstly, while I was pretty active in practicing art back in high school, after first year I pretty much gave up on art all together until after graduation (save for a couple of doodles in the margins of my notebooks). When I first started drawing again, I was no where near the level I was in high school. After just a few years of non-practice, while I didn’t have to start entirely from scratch, I had lost any so-called natural talent and had absolutely no ability to even draw a simple proportionate face. (I’d share a photo with you all of how my first few drawings looked when I was starting out, but I’m honestly too embarrassed. When I say they’re bad, I mean — they’re REALLY bad). There’s no shame in that, though — I had to start somewhere. On top of that, once my line work started to improve in quality, I still had another obstacle to beat — I wanted to learn how to use alcohol-based markers, and draw in colour (which was NOT something I had any previous experience in). Back in high school, I almost entirely drew my art in pencils, or in greyscale — I almost never used colour. I didn’t paint often, and even though I used colour pencils on occasion, it was pretty rare. Learning how to shade in colour is an entirely different skill from pencil and grayscale shading — as well, I had never tried alcohol markers before and I had no idea how to blend and use them. Honestly, it took a lot of time. While I hit a couple ruts along the way, I’ve had not one, but multiple moments where I felt things beginning to click — and those moments really revolutionized my own abilities and revived my passion to practice.

My second example, however, is much more recent; I’ve been trying my hand at digital art. Digital art is something I actually tried once (although briefly) in the past, but gave up on. This time, however, I’m going in with a little more dedication, and I’m following my own advice. When it comes to digital art, I know absolutely next to nothing. Drawing on a tablet does not come easily to me in any way, shape or form — I don’t find it intuitive, or at all similar to drawing with pencils and paper. It was really discouraging at first, honestly. I kind of ended up avoiding practicing for a month and a half, opting to continue with my marker-based art because I was so daunted by having to learn something from scratch. Even though I’ve had a slow start to it, however, I finally had a moment last week — I felt something click. It’s not like I’ve suddenly become an overnight expert (far from it in fact, I still have a long way to go), but for the first time I felt like I kind of knew what I was doing. I really lacked patience with my first few digital drawings, to be fair — I rushed through them and had quit on every single one so far partway through when I started to feel that each piece was beyond help. With a little time and effort, however, I finally created an outline that may not be perfect, but that I am proud of. I still have a long way to go — how to colour in digital art is still something I have next to no idea how to do — but I don’t have to get there right away. I’m sure one day, I’ll be able to figure it out.

I wanted to share a little bit of my own personal progress with you all, to give you a little idea of what I’m talking about (or perhaps some inspiration to get started on a skill of your own!). I, personally, love drawing cartoon style — most of my drawings are characters from my favourite TV shows and movies. These two pictures were taken six months apart: the drawing on the left (Aang from Avatar: the Last Airbender) was one of my very first that I used alcohol markers on, and the one on the right (Armin Arlert from Attack on Titan), was from a few weeks back. Neither of them are perfect, sure, and I still have a long way to go. But look at how much I’ve improved! Six months may sound like a long time to take to improve now, but it won’t feel that way if you’re constantly putting in effort and enjoying yourself, rather than counting the days. Who knows just how good I may be in another six month’s time.

As for my progress in my digital artistic endeavours, this is the outline in question (Eren Jaeger from last week’s episode of Attack on Titan). I’m still in the process of colouring it in, but as I said, I have a lot to learn and it’s taking me a while to get the hang of. However, this line work is by far the best I’ve done so far in my digital art journey, and it was the first time EVER that I felt like I kind of knew what I was doing. Once again, it’s far from perfect — but who cares! I’ll get better eventually, and frankly (especially when you compare it to absolutely any of my other attempts), I’m pretty proud of it.

I hope you’re all having a great week, and have another great week ahead of you! I won’t lie, you guys — I had no idea it was daylight savings today, and I spent a good half of my day being awfully confused. I’m not complaining, though — the days are getting longer, and we’ve had a few days here in Vancouver that have finally started to feel like spring. The last few weeks of winter are always the longest — more so this year than others — but it seems we’re finally at the end of winter, and possibly through the worst of COVID (fingers crossed). It really is starting to feel like things are finally returning to normal, and that there are better days ahead.

Until next Sunday,

Meredith

HOW TO: Keep It Together During Busy Weeks

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Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash

Hey y’all!

Sooooo, once again, I’m delaying my Lash Lift post. I know, and I’m sorry! At this point I’ve had it done — I just really want the time to take good photos where you can see the effects and really perfect the post for you guys. It’s a post that’s been a long time in the making, so I just want to be sure it’s the absolute best and most informative it can be!

That being said, unfortunately, I’ve still been having a crazy week (clearly…my apologies for the delayed post — again! I swear this is the last time it’s going to happen). Between having a term paper due Thursday, Poetry class assignments (also due Thursday, because of course), a crazy busy week at work (between the amount of Canucks games, Lacrosse games and UFC Fights this week, its been a little overwhelming) and getting ready for my trip to Mexico (!!!) exactly one week today — I have been overwhelmed as heck.

Since I once again had to delay the post I had planned, I figured I’d share with you a little list of ten tips on how I’ve been surviving this week! Hopefully, for those of you with crazy weeks of your own coming up, you’ll find some advice here that’ll help you get through the busy and stressful times and make it to the other side in once piece.

  1. Get some sleep!!! It’s tempting to stay up super late to get everything done, especially when you’re on a roll. But not only will you end up regretting it the next day, but it’ll slowly start to build up and take more of a toll as time wears on — making it harder for you to keep up.
  2. Make sure you’re eating regularly. This one may seem super obvious — but when you’re having a really long day and feel like absolute garbage and can’t quite figure out why — you probably just need to eat more. Plan ahead for days when you know you may have to delay meals (for me, this is longer work days) and stock up on some snacks. My personal fave to get through long shifts are Clif Bar’s Nut Butter and Fruit Smoothie filled granola bars — soooooo good.
  3. Make sure you’re still keeping in touch with friends and family — you really need that support.
  4. Set aside daily time for self-care, but don’t overdo it! Taking time to take care of yourself is a necessity — but there’s a line between what you need and just procrastinating. If you’re having a ridiculously busy week, try to limit yourself to maximum one hour a day. You can always make up for it next week if you need to! But anything more than that may just be a guise to put off important tasks. If you need good self-care ideas to formulate a structured one-hour plan, be sure to check out my list here!
  5. Plan everything out well in advance. Even if you don’t follow the plan to a T (stuff always goes wrong — you can’t sweat it!) just having everything written down will ensure you don’t forget anything.
  6. On that note, be sure to limit tasks that need to be done ASAP to busy weeks — everything else can be taken care of later. Even things that feel super important to you and keeping your life together, such as cleaning, meal prepping, laundry, etc., can slide for a few days if it helps you complete all your tasks on time. Just remember — it’s all about balance!
  7. Obvious one — but stay hydrated.
  8. If you have a lot of tasks that are going to take a while to complete, try to break them up into smaller segments and switch it up every few hours. Maybe it’s just me, but I find this really helps me avoid burning out.
  9. Don’t overdo it on caffeine! It’s hard, I know. Sometimes during the crazy weeks it feels like that coffee is LITERALLY the only thing that’s going to help you survive the next few hours. However, if you’re already feeling kind of exhausted, you don’t want all that caffeine to impact your sleep. Even if you’re still falling asleep quickly, too much coffee can impact your quality of sleep — meaning you won’t wake up feeling refreshed and ready the next day. (If you really feel you can’t go without it, try decaf! If nothing else, hopefully the placebo effect will have you convinced it’s what you need).
  10. Be sure to reward yourself for completing tasks. You’ve been having a rough week — you deserve it! Not only that, but rewarding yourself for checking tricky tasks off your checklist will help to incentivize you to keep going. (It’ll also help to refresh you so you don’t feel like the week is one never-ending struggle — you need breaks!). Try to stick to little rewards after each task, and try to take a whole day off after you finish everything up — you need it! Take the day to relax and catch up on all the self-care, sleep, and alone time you’ve missed since your life got so hectic.

Happy Sunday everyone, and hopefully this next week goes well for you all! (And if it DOES happen to get a little intense, at least you have a little advice that’ll help make it easier!). If you have any other advice that helps you get through the tough times, or just want to vent about the week you’re having, drop a comment below! This week is going to be a bit of an intense one, but once I make it through to the other side I get to head down to Puerto Vallarta for a week, which is making it all worth it. Be sure to stay tuned for next week’s post about my experience getting a Lash Lift (seriously this time, I promise!) as well as TWO new travel posts coming out in the following weeks.

Here’s to surviving this week — or even thriving, if you’re lucky! I hope you all achieve your goals — we’re almost halfway through February, after all!

Much love,

Meredith

HOW TO: Create The Best Possible New Years Resolution!

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Happy New Years, everyone!

Now that it’s officially the new year (hello, 2020!), it’s new year resolution time. January is often a stressful month — it feels like you have so much to catch up on after the holiday season, and you’re just thrown right back into work or school without warning. And you have to come up with the perfect New Years resolution on top of all that?

It can be super overwhelming, which really is the opposite of what you want. The best kind of resolutions should feel like they’re pushing you a little, but not so much that they feel unachievable or cause anxiety and stress. Ultimately, while it’s great to be ambitious, if your goals are too much to complete in one year, it’ll deter you from trying at all.

If you’re struggling to come up with the perfect resolution, only have a half-baked idea, or are stuck on how to make the theme of your resolution something you can stick with and achieve — don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. With these useful steps and tips, I’ll have you prepared with the perfect goals to make 2020 your best year yet!

Choose A Theme

What aspects of your life exactly is it that you’re looking to grow or improve in? The best way to set resolutions is to simply start off with a theme, instead of a statement. This way, you can be more flexible with your goals, and adjust them to fit your needs as the year progresses. You probably already have a good idea of what this theme is if you’re looking to set a resolution this year — maybe its health, fitness, studying, organizing, self care, skincare, socializing, tidying, or something else entirely. This is all personal to you, but starting off with a theme, rather than a set statement or singular goal, is a nice, simple place to start when creating your resolution. (Plus, this way you can choose more than one resolution, but set different goals for each theme — just because you have serious goals for one theme, doesn’t mean you can’t improve a little in some others as well!)

Select Specific Goals

Now that you have your theme, you have to select specific goals to help you towards achieving everything you want to by the end of the year. Obviously, just choosing “wellness” or “professional growth” is a little vague — you’re going to want to choose one or more specific goals to help clarify what you’re hoping to achieve. The best way to set goals is to think about a goal that sounds achievable, and then push it just a little further. For example, if your theme is studying, you may want to set goals about the amount of hours you’re going to study per week, or the final average you’re hoping to earn by the end of the semester. So, if it sounds like a perfectly realistic goal to study 20 hours a week and end the semester with a 80% average, try pushing your goal to be studying 25 hours a week and ending the semester with an 85%! In order to change and grow, you have to push yourself a little — if you’re completely comfortable, it means you’re not growing.

Something important when setting goals, however, is to also ensure you’re not choosing anything that requires you to be perfect to achieve them. The problem with doing this is that if you ever slip up (even just a little), you’ll likely end up feeling like you’ve failed your goal. This can be pretty damaging to your self esteem (even if you’ve already achieved a lot), and can even cause you to give up on your goal all together. So, for example, if your “studying” themed goal is to attend every single class during the semester, but you end up needing one day off to catch up, take a sick day, or just look after yourself — you may end up feeling that you’ve failed your goal even when you’ve made a crazy amount of progress. If you really want to set a goal that requires absolute perfection to execute, ensure you set a couple of margins to allow natural slip ups and days off — none of us are perfect, and we shouldn’t expect ourselves to be. (As well, if pushing your goal a little from achievable lands you in the range of needing to be perfect, you might want to consider other themes and goals that could require more work instead!)

Break It Down

The one most important thing when setting a resolution is to break it down into manageable steps, rather than one large goal to have completed by the next trip around the sun. This is important for a number of reasons — first of all, it helps you keep track of your goal, and ensure you’re progressing forward with it as the year goes on. Secondly, it makes your resolution a lot less daunting — it is impossible to make massive life changes overnight (otherwise we’d all do it all the time!). If your goal seems too large or unattainable, it very well may end up deterring you from even attempting it at all. Think about it, how many times have you set a resolution and done absolutely nothing to achieve it? You’re not lazy or unmotivated — it’s just too much to take on a massive life change in one go.

There’s two ways to break down your goals easily — you can choose one or the other, but I’d personally recommend both at once. The first one, and my personal favourite, is to make one of your goals to set monthly, or even weekly and daily, goals that fit the theme of your resolution. For example, if one of your goals for the year is to reach a certain amount of views on your blog or followers on a platform, break that number down into how many you think is achievable in a certain month and make it your goal to reach that milestone over the next 29-31 days. From there, keep track of your progress and feel free to adjust your monthly goals as you see fit. It really helps you to realize how simple your goal may actually be when you put it into the perspective of smaller goals. Plus, it helps you keep track of your progress in a much more precise way, so you can actually see change and improvement — which will only help to motivate you more!

The second part of this is to start small and work up to larger steps as you adjust to the changes you’re making in your life. As I’ve said, you can’t expect yourself to make massive life changes overnight — even if you manage to stick with it for January, odds are it’ll eventually seem like too much when life starts to pick up and you’ll end up dropping your resolution entirely. It’s better to start small and adjust — it’ll help you get used to the change, so that when you have a period of time when it seems like you can’t keep up, you’ll have already made a habit of it.

To use a classic example, if your goal for the year is to exercise more, try starting off just working out one day a week for January and build your way up from there! If your goal is to start working out five days a week, but you didn’t see the inside of a gym once in 2019 (we’ve all been there), it’s a lot of stress to just jump in to a full-time workout routine. Even if one day a week seems too easy at first, it’ll help you to grow your confidence and create a habit of going regularly so that before you know it, it feels like a regular part of your life. You’ll already be used to working out regularly and feel like you know what you’re doing by the time you increase to two times a week, and you’ll reach five days a week before you even know it! This way, when you have a crazy week and have to take a step back, you’ll still be used (or even want to) hit the gym at least once, and you won’t fall out of the habit entirely if you need to take a week off.

Some goals may only work if you break them down in the first way, and some may cater a lot more to the second. However, for all the goals you set, be sure to break them down at least a little bit — and try to incorporate both methods into any goal or resolution you set! I promise, it might seem silly or unnecessary and first, but it’ll help you start and maintain your goals over the course of the year.

Write It Out

Now comes the final step — finding a way to write down and track your goals. There’s countless ways to do this — whether it’s making a mood board, writing weekly goals in your agenda, setting reminders in your phone, leaving yourself sticky notes, or just the good old notes app in your phone. Personally, this year I’ve started a bullet journal, where I’ve written down my themes, annual goals, as well as created a page for each month’s goals — as well as anything else I may ultimately end up including. It really just depends on what works best for you and what you’re hoping to achieve.

This step is incredibly important, however, as you not only might end up forgetting your goals if you don’t put them down in writing — it really helps to put them down and make them concrete. Take the time to write it out, break it down, and make it important so you’ll not only remember to check up on your progress, but track it as the year goes on. So many people give up on their resolutions after the first month — or even week — of the year, so take the time to transfer it out of your head and into your life. Make it real so you can’t ignore it or forget about it. You may not see results in the first month, but if you stick with it you’ll be amazed by how much you’ve accomplished by the time 2021 rolls around.

Don’t Rush It

(Yes, I know, this was from an earlier post but I just love it so much and it fits so well!)

This last part is less of a step and more so a reminder. You do not already need to know exactly what your yearlong goals are, or even what your theme is. It’s better to take the time to work out a well thought-out plan than to create something and stick to it simply because January 1st has passed. If you already had a plan but feel inspired to make changes to it, nothing is stopping you! You have no idea what your life is going to be like six months from now, so there’s no point in limiting yourself. The whole point of a resolution is to be open to change. Setting monthly goals also helps to adjust your goals to help improve your life as it moves forward throughout the year and keep you on track to ending up where you need to be. At the end of the day, as long as you’re happy with the path you’re on and the progress you’re making, this year is going to be a huge success.

Also keep in mind that not all progress is immediately visible. Making adjustments and serious changes to your lifestyle isn’t something that can or should be done overnight — it takes time. If in a months, six months, or even a years time, you’ve been working at it and don’t feel as though you’ve made any progress at all — take a look back to where you started. I promise you’re going to have come a lot further than you’ve ever thought you would when you started out, and you’re only going to go further from there!

I hope you all had an enjoyable and relaxing holiday and had a much-needed reset before the new year and heading back to work. New years can often be daunting and feel they carry a lot of weight — but don’t stress. Ultimately, as long as you keep your head up, your best interests at heart, and keep moving forward, it’ll all be okay. If 2019 wasn’t your year (relatable) hopefully 2020 will be, and if you had the best year ever in 2019, may this year manage to top it and be even better!

Xo,

Meredith