It’s official: New Year, New Me is in effect
The New Year brings a year of abundant opportunity and festive spirit. It is a time that we redefine and reevaluate our personal goals and ambitions. Unwillingly, it also brings about a bland confidence in our own capacious mind. Pumped with merry and gleeful spirit, we chasten our sensibilities and gloss over possible barriers to our own success. It’s not our fault. We just too often become infatuated with unrealistic expectations of ourselves and others.
That is the sour apple to losing our discipline.
We skip from 0 to 3 without counting 1 and end up with a griping fascination with disproportionate, idealistic ideas of our ability.
This year, I strive to set goals which won’t necessarily invoke a spirit of dramatic liveliness to others. I promise it won’t be filled with ambitious goals and spacey admiration- or so I hope. I am trying hard to start with small steps towards my goal of feeling an empathetic earnestness for the goodness of every day. Seems like a bit of a reach, doesn’t it?
I plan to do this by showing emotive appreciation for the people we interact with on the daily- a simple recognition or note for those who fill our heart with emotional warmth.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
I wanted to share this inflamed optimism with my residents and the staff of Preston Residential College.
The residential staff received “mountain” door decorations to start off this semester. Let me explain why. The platform for my hall this year is "2016: Climbing Mountains". Why? It is because this is the year that we, as a group, will be setting our goals and ambitions high through recognizable “smart” goals to lead us to our ending aptitude. We will be climbing steadily towards overcoming our personal challenges with invigorating discipline. I can’t promise it will be easy, but I’ll be DAMNED if anyone tries to stop us.
I am working on creating a visual representation of these goals where residents can write short, medium, and long term goals/accomplishments for this semester. Furthermore, I also want to instill a buddy system where each resident will be paired up with another to share their daily goals and progress in order to empower one another.
I can’t say that I have all the answers of how this will work out, but I earnestly believe that we have infinitesimal power within us. We ARE the movers and shakers of this world, we Will jump leaps and bounds towards our goals, and we will make an impact on the community of USC. The only thing that will stop us is our own mind.
Thank you for taking an interest in my personal goals,
Naimik Patel