#oneword2018

Welcome back, colleagues! How are we feeling after the first week back? Are you chugging coffee? Do you have a headache? Are you hoping for your first snow day of the year?

As I INHALE my coffee this morning, I'm reflecting on last year and setting goals for this year. Last year, my #oneword was self-care. I was really struggling with my then job. I was over-working myself, so I was not taking care of myself. I was having quite a go and found myself interviewing for jobs for three years. It made sense, then, that I needed to take care of myself. Thus I began blogging about self-care. It helped. It really helped that I got a new job (and desperately needed change), but I discovered how to relax and what I needed to do to take care of myself.

It was evident that my #oneword2017 was complete and I needed to pick a new word for the year. Which one did I come up with?

I've always been a pessimist, "negative Nancy." I am cynical. I look at a situation and scoff. I make jokes when I'm uncomfortable and make others laugh, at inappropriate times, when sitting in meetings. I'm the "bad" kid that people don't see coming. I know in this new position that I need to be better - I need to just, and I quote, "Look on the bright side of life." So how do I do this? How can I be more positive?

I can't promise that I will behave during meetings or when I'm uncomfortable. That's asking a lot of me.

But I need to find positives every day that can help me more optimistic and thankful for the good things that happen. I was inspired to do this when, of all things, I was trolling Buzzfeed. You know, sometimes, I just need to take another quiz to remind me that I AM a Gryffindor! Anyway, I was reading about new years resolutions and getting organized when I stumbled across a post about bullet journals. In my definition, a bullet journal is a way to quickly journal every day. You make it personal to you, whether you are tracking habits, food, health, or you need to vent or you want to doodle each day. It's keeping a diary but without a ton of writing each day. That's what makes a bullet journal something desirable to me... it doesn't take a lot of time or effort. I don't have time for that!

So I am committing myself to "journaling" once a day. Most of the time it will be me sketchnoting something positive that happened that day. It won't be much doodling as I love writing in different scripts with a variety of pen colors. It doesn't have to be anything significant - just something funny, cute, or happy that happened. The other day, for example, I was e-mailing a teacher back and forth about a student and parent. In the end, I e-mailed a rolling eye gif. That was the entire e-mail. How it became positive was when the teacher made a point to find me after school to tell me how funny she thought it was.








That's a positive!

Thanks for reading. I'll see you next week :)

- Rachel

@historicalipad

My Teacherspayteachers website