Author: lawlozano93

⏰ 5.5 minute read

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Ten years ago, when you first became an adult, you had no idea where you were headed. You were lost, unsure of yourself, and constantly felt inadequate by comparing yourself to others. But now, as you look back, you can see how far you’ve come. Your hard work and dedication to achieving your goals have paid off, and you’re now in a place in your career that you couldn’t have even imagined back then.

Over the past ten years, not only has your career path changed, but you’re also a better person now. You have more self-assurance, confidence, and compassion. You’ve learned to love yourself for who you are and stop comparing yourself to others. And you’re grateful for all the challenges and hardships you’ve faced, as they’ve helped shape you into the person you are today.

As you reflect on your journey, you realize the importance of being kind to yourself. It’s easy to focus on our flaws and shortcomings, but it’s just as important to recognize and celebrate our achievements and successes. Taking time to practice self-care and remind yourself of your worth and value can make all the difference in how you feel about yourself.

You’re content with where you are now, even though you still have goals and aspirations for the future. You know that life has its ups and downs, and the phrase “this too shall pass” is a constant reminder that no matter how difficult things may seem in the moment, they’ll eventually pass and you’ll come out stronger on the other side.

As you look back on the past ten years, you can see that you’re currently at your best. You’re better than you were ten years ago and have the potential to be even better in the next ten years. You’re grateful for all the lessons you’ve learned and the person you’ve become. And even though you may still feel like a failure at times, you know that you’re exactly where you’re meant to be and have the ability to keep growing and improving.

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If you want to read more of my blogs, you can head to https://voiceinthenoise.com. Feel free to share this with your friends and loved ones. Maybe with this blog, you can help turn around somebody’s life from being demotivated to being the best version of themselves.

6.6 minute read

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At the start of the year, most of us feel like we haven’t accomplished much, and a lot of things left behind. However, here’s another year that will start. Another opportunity that will allow us to accomplish the unaccomplished stuff. This time, we’ll not do it like in the past years, it will be different. We’ll create a Personal development plan.

What is a personal development plan?

“The PDP (personal development plan) usually includes a statement of one’s aspirations, strengths or competencies, education and training, and stages or steps to indicate how the plan is to be realized. Personal development plans may also include a statement of one’s career and lifestyle priorities, career positioning, analysis of opportunities and risks, and alternative plans (Plan, and a curriculum vitae (CV).” Somehow, reading that seems like it will take so much of our time, effort, and a lot of planning. Do not fret! It’s just actually easy.

Identify key areas of your life

For me, I call my plan the Refresh Plan. It’s easy to remember. Just look at your keyboard and look at the refresh button which is F5. The 5 F’s or the 5 key areas of my life plan are Finance, Fitness, Faith, Future, and Family. You can actually create your own if you want but for the sake of this discussion, we’ll use a key area of the Refresh Plan as an example.

Once the key areas of improvement/development have been decided, for every key area, we have to create a mission statement.

Why do we need to have a mission statement?  It is actually for us to easily remember what we want to accomplish. Remember during elementary times, we say a pledge to our country at every flag ceremony. That’s actually reminding us what our duties and responsibilities of being a citizen. This is the same with our personal mission statement. We remind ourselves of how we improve ourselves.

Here’s a sample. For my finance area, my mission statement is “To be able to live a comfortable life being debt-free and not worry about expenses by doing proper financial planning”. In that statement, there are two important components:

1. Problem/Area of improvement
2. Action to resolve the issue

In the first place, we created the personal development plan because we have a problem that we need to resolve. Since we have written the problem, it is actually us acknowledging it that it is a problem. Sometimes, we fail because we focus on the wrong outlook. Like if we want to lose weight, we have to acknowledge the fact that there is a need to be healthy not just lose weight. We are sometimes too focused on just wanting to lose weight and we lose track of the idea that the end goal is to be healthy, losing weight is the result. Without a proper end goal, the action’s meaning will be easily forgotten.

Going back to my statement, the problem that I have is debt and inconsistent financial planning. Knowing that these are my issues, I could then create an action plan for the year. I’ll create a plan on how I can pay all of my debts with the current resources I have. Since I’m doing that, I would create also a systematic way of doing my finances every month. If I can have a proper system, the only thing to do next is to execute. Once I’ve already identified my issues and solutions, it would look like this in the end.

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FINANCE – To be able to live a comfortable life being debt-free and not worry about expenses by doing proper financial planning

Actionable items:
– Current debt is $XXXX.00 – Set aside X amount every month for the next 6 months to pay off debt
– Create a budget for the month that includes the debt payment

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I’ll not go deeper with the actionable items since there are a lot of resources on how we can tackle different kinds of issues. This will go the same way with the other key areas of our lives.

Do note that we have to limit our actionable items to 2 or 3 items. Best actually if you have only one actionable item for each key area. This is to ensure that we don’t have so much stuff to do that it would overwhelm us. The purpose of the Refresh Plan is to guide us accordingly and it helps us have a framework for how we live our lives. Knowing the key areas that we need to improve, all our actions will be in line with our mission statements. This was the thing that made us fail the past years, we had little to no framework on how we go about improving ourselves.

The best time to create a personal development plan is now. The only thing that we need to do is execute and live the plan.

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If you want to read more of my blogs, you can head to
https://voiceinthenoise.com. Feel free to share this with your friends and loved ones. Maybe with this blog, you can help turn around somebody’s life from being demotivated to being the best version of themselves.

I saw a tweet before and I find this timely.

💡 “My favorite part about SPIDER-VERSE is that it is not just about the question “can I rise to the occasion?” but specifically, “can I rise to the occasion when there are plenty of more capable people in this world?” and it uses the oversaturation of superhero lore to express that”.

For context, the movie shows you that there is an infinite number of Spiderman existing in the multi-verse. Going back to the tweet, it made me think that this is the same as being with the people we want to become. When we are with people who we see are successful, we sometimes feel bad about ourselves and think that we can’t be like them. They are better. We are not worth it. What’s the use of improving if there is somebody else who is better. The same goes for the first day of the year. A lot of people post and celebrate their accomplishments and dreams.

The Importance of Culture

It may be overwhelming to see all of these posts but we forget to realize that we have the opportunity to see the people who we want to surround ourselves with. The first lesson Spider-verse showed us was the importance of being part of a culture. In the movie, it was Miles realizes that he was a Spiderman and he had to accept that he actually belongs. Being part of a culture gives us a sense of identity. It even to a point guide us on how we go about our daily lives.

The culture we put ourselves in helps us have a better trajectory of where and what we want to become in the future. If we want to be successful equities/forex traders, we surround ourselves with successful equities/forex traders. Remember, this goes the same as having a negative culture. If we surround ourselves with people who don’t have any drive will rub off on us and make us feel unmotivated as well.

The Importance of Mentorship

Once we are already in the culture, we should ask “Who is someone that I admire that I could reach out to? This is the 2nd lesson Spider-verse has been telling us. As much as the culture can help, having a mentor makes it easy to navigate through the culture through their guidance. We learn from their experiences and if it would possible we engage with them.

Most of the time when we hear the word mentor, we think about successes but one big learning that we must take in from them is their failures. They are not successful because they did not make any mistakes. They had a lot of mistakes throughout their journey and kept on improving themselves until they achieved their successes. We can learn from their mistakes even more.

We are our own hero

Lastly, like in the movie, there is one Spiderman for each multi-verse. The same goes for our lives. We are our own heroes in our personal life. We are the ones living it not somebody else. That is why we rise to the occasion of being the best version of ourselves. As much as we see people successful, that’s their own stories and we have our own stories to write. We were not made to be someone else. We are our own unique superhero. We choose our own choices. If we want to live a better life, we have to do it ourselves. If we want to be better, we ought to do things that make us better.

To sum it all up, we align our plans and aspirations with the culture we belong to; guided by the mentor that allows us to become the best superhero of our lives.

My girlfriend and I were on a taxi ride going home and we overheard the taxi driver talking to his friend via a walkie-talkie app. Usually, what we’ll hear are their updates where traffic is or if there is an accident somewhere; the sorts. However, their conversation was somehow unexpected.

He kept on talking about what the other driver needed to do so that he’ll earn more. They discussed ways to not get sleepy and where to find the best place to lose drowsiness. Summing it into a strategy of drinking coffee and having some small meals in between just to give energy throughout the day. They kept on saying that if you rest too long, the opportunity of earning more goes away. Basically what they were saying was “If you snooze, you lose.”

Little did we realize, our driver was mentoring the other driver. There was something to learn from that moment. To be good at something, you surround yourself with the people that will help you be the best version of yourself. What they did was maximize the opportunity for growth. If you think about it, they are basically rivals. They are actually competing with each other but what happened is completely the opposite.

Sometimes, we’re too afraid to reach out to these people if we look up or ask for help from someone who is an expert because we think that they are already on a different level. However, it’s usually the exact opposite. They would be willing to share their thoughts and allow us to pick their brains because they know what we’re currently experiencing. They know that if they mentor us, they are cultivating a culture of helping one another; making sure that there is always an opportunity to be better not only for themselves but for everyone.

When we want to be good at something that we like, we should be surrounding ourselves with the people who are already doing it. Learning from the experiences that they have gone through. The common quote “Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are” may sound cliché but it is actually on point. If we want to identify ourselves as successful, we mingle with the successful. Be with the people who we want to become.

The majority of us would dread the idea of Monday and we even have a catchphrase for it: Back to reality. How about we look at this differently.

The fact that we say that Monday is the reality means that our weekends are just imaginary or nonexistent. It could be also that we think of our weekends as our escape from our said reality which could be our 9-5 jobs. But let’s not forget that weekends are also part of our reality. It is our reality that we rest or enjoy during Saturdays and Sundays. But we must not forget, our weekday realities allows us to have the weekend realities. Our jobs give us the opportunity to be with our families and friends. Without it, weekends would suck and without our jobs, we would long for the weekday realities of others.

I remember one thing my supervisor told me, “The job that you are in could be somebody else’s prayer.” I know that our work sometimes is frustrating and tiring but let’s not forget that we could look at it from a different perspective. It is our opportunity to strive so that we could enjoy more our weekends. The better we become at our work, the more opportunities that would open for us. If we look at our work as difficult, then we’ll struggle at it even more but if we look at it as a challenge, there’s a positive outlook that we could just do it since it’s just a challenge, just a speed bump.

We forget that our weekdays actually is an opportunity for us to be at our best. It is our opportunity to be the version that creates opportunities for a better life. As a reminder, we could ask ourselves this during our weekdays: What would be the best version of myself do?

I remember late December, I kept on telling myself that 2020 will be an amazing year; a year of clear vision; a year of execution. Little did we all know, 2020 would be a significant year in everyone’s life. It has come to a point that we are all cornered into our own personal cages.

Since we can’t go outside, let’s make this lockdown a time of preparation instead. This will be a time of making this setback into a setup. We have to come out of this as better and well-prepared people.

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Let’s start with chores

Before we talk about specific things to do, it would be best to list down first all the chores that you have to do like cleaning your room or doing all the laundry. These will be the first things that we should act on since, in the future, these will also be the usual distractors when we’re trying to do something productive.

When we’re usually about to start to do something productive, there’s always a chore that pops up and prevents us from being productive. We end up doing the chore, get tired afterward. We then rest. The productivity task will be pushed back or worse, be forgotten after making rest the next priority.

Create a list

After all the chores are done, get a notebook and a pen. Sit down. Put your headphones on and turn on your Lo-Fi playlist for the background. Start writing down all the things that you think is important for you. It could be work-related or things you want to do for a long time. Don’t forget to set a timer for 5 minutes. Why 5 minutes? With the time pressure, most of the time, the things that we think are important are the ones that we first write. The pressure somehow filters out some of the unimportant and unnecessary things.

One thing that could be done is to follow my refresh plan. It’s easy to remember. Just look at your keyboard and look at the refresh button which is F5. These will be our key areas in creating our lists. The 5 F’s of the refresh plan are Finance, Fitness, Faith, Future, and Family. Within the time limit, write as many as you can in all the key areas.

An example list would be something like:

Finance:

• Create a budget
• Pay bills
• Set up payment automation

Fitness:

• Exercise daily
• Create meal plan

After everything is written, rank the key areas based on priority. If you just added it all in one big list, it’s fine. Re-write it from the most important to the least one. This will be necessary for the next step.

Schedule it all

Since we already have the list, we start creating a schedule for all the tasks. The first thing to the plot is the usual stuff that is non-negotiable like work hours and mealtimes. We then add the priority tasks. We could put those before or after work hours. Also, it is important to really put a timestamp for it so that it is easier to follow.

Since most of the time we will be staying in our homes, we have to make sure that we put our bath and exercise time pre-work. It will be easy for us to get lazy if we do it late in the afternoon. Also, it’s uncomfortable not feeling refreshed. It would be a distraction throughout the day. Doing these tasks early would also give us the drive that we are being productive.

On a side note, after taking a bath, wear something casual or something that is not used as sleeping clothes. This is to put us in a mindset that we are off to work.

Learn or Earn

Some of the tasks would be a one-time thing and the schedule spot is already vacant. This would be the best time to learn something new. Probably a skill that we’ve been wanting to learn. And if you’re reading this, most likely is that you have the means to connect to the internet. The internet will be our teacher. Because of the current crisis, there are a lot of sites that provide free courses in different fields.

Aside from learning, it is also the best time to plan out and set up the businesses that we can do during and after this crisis. One thing that we can look for is business ideas that can be done remotely or services that can be provided regardless of whether there is a lockdown. Set out a plan and if possible execute the business idea. It is also the best time to connect with people who we can consider mentors or people who can guide us with our goals and ambitions.

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Some of our friends would be watching shows and sharing their watchlists nowadays. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with that. I even urge you to include a portion of your schedule for this for entertainment. I think it would be better for us to share as well our productivity lists alongside our watchlists. Putting out for everyone also gives us a sense of accountability. Lastly, it may inspire also others to do the same.

The main idea of setting up all of these is that we coming out of this lockdown a better person. Better. Faster. Strong. Knowing also that we’ve put all of these on a schedule, we aim to turn these tasks into habits; not a one-time thing.

To end this thought, I give you this question.

Which would you prefer to be called, watched 200 hours of Netflix Guy or Better Faster Stronger guy?

You decide.