Tag: Life

Celebrating 2023: A Month of Gratitude – Day 13

Today I did a quick course at work on how to get your team to change. It was an interesting little course. The instructor shared a few interesting examples that illustrated various attempts to digitise the farming industry. I was fascinated by what’s available to farmers today. That wasn’t the point of the exercise though. The point was to illustrate how to get people to adopt new behaviours.

While I have had many firsts and quite a few wins this year, there are goals that I have not met so I need to go back to the drawing board. There are two goals in particular that I have not met:

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I have not achieved my weight goal

In fact I am further from it than I was at the beginning of this year. I am very disappointed but it is what it is. One of the lessons learnt in today’s course is that the change needs to have few barriers to entry for easy adoption. Well I have done myself a disservice by joining a gym that is essentially out of my way. I had done so that I my son and I could attend it together but it is so far out of our way in the evening that we just never get there. I have one of two choices. Join a gym that is closer or let go of the idea of going with him and find something else to do together. The gym is not really out of my way as it is close to work. If I choose the latter option, I can work it into my lunchtime schedule and make a big dent in that weight loss goal.

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I have not created an organisational system that works

Yet. It’s not for a lack of trying all year long. As I mentioned previously, I like the idea of the system shared in Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, but it’s not intuitive for me so I am figuring out how to make the principles work. Which brings me to another principle I learned today, which is that the system needs to be user friendly. The fewer sets you have to get things done, the more likely you are to have a positive attitude about it and do it. I am trying to get my system down to 3-4 steps at most to store information and retrieve it. I get can quite get lost when I have to click on too many things to find what I need.

The system must be implementable immediately

If a system still needs to be modified and adjusted or you need to buy additional equipement to get started, it’s pretty likely that you won’t achieve your goal. The first time I logged onto my MacBook Air, a YouTube video popped to show me how to use my new computer. It was a few minutes long and it showed me how to do the basics and I was good to go. I am so grateful for that video because I would have been very frustated with the laptop and regretted my purchase. I also would not have used it as much as I would have liked. I was able to get to work immediately after that video which was a huge bonus.

So I failures are a great way to learn and I have enjoyed the challenges that I have faced this year. I experienced more challenges than just these two this year and I am very grateful that I come out standing strong on the other side.

Do you have any tips on how to adopt new systems/habits? I would love to hear form you in the comments. Thanks for reading! Be Blessed!

Celebrating 2023: A month of gratitude- Day 12

Hello again! I’ll keep it short and sweet today.


Today is my late Gran’s birthday. Every year around this time, I receive a blessing. It makes me feel like she always has my back. Happy Heavenly Birthday, Granny Molly and Thank you!


So we started the day with the fantastic news that my son passed Grade 9. I am officially the mom of a grade 10’er! Whoop whoop! I am so proud of my child.


I also had a good laugh today. Here I am, so proudly patting myself on the back for my courage this year, when the Universe popped in to say that I need to dig deeper because it has a new work challenge for me. I mean, comfort zones are overrated, right??? So, in 2024, I get to be involved in a project that really excites me. It’s going to be a challenging and enriching year. Even more than 2023 has been. I am very, very excited and very grateful.

That’s it for today! What are you looking forward to in 2024?

Stay blessed!

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Celebrating 2023: A month of gratitude – Day 10

Join me as I recount my laid-back day and reflect on my accomplishments of the past year, including professional development, academic completion, and personal growth.

Today was a lazy day. I was also a day of reflection of the year that was and all that I had accomplished.

I cannot tell you when last I slept so much through the course of a day. I put old episodes of Law & Order on and snoozed ever so often while watching. I love Law & Order and am thrilled to see that there is a new season. I love listening to that New York accent and guessing who did the crime. It also helped that it was a cool wet day as well. Perfect for reading, watching TV and napping.

I have also enjoyed long calls and quality time with great friends. This has been a soul restoring weekend. Just what the doctor ordered.

In addition, I spent the time reviewing what I had wanted to achieve this year as well as planning my goals for 2024. Below is a list of some the goals I had set and how I performed against them.

  1. Becoming disciplined: I set myself the goal of creating a system that would lay the foundations of becoming more disciplined. I also started reading ‘The Daily Stoic’ and ‘Discipline is Destiny’, both by Ryan Holiday. I didn’t finish either book so that tells you how close I came to achieving that goal! Lol! I did finish ‘Building a Second Brain’ by Tiago Forte though and that did help me create a system that allows me to store information better. I still have work to do on it though. The Universe also sent two highly disciplined new members to join my team at work. I think It saw that I was a bit of a lost cause so I got disciplined people instead :).
  2. Read more: I set myself the goal of reading 45 books this year and am sitting on 23 which is two more than I read last year. I will end the year on about 25 or 26. I may not have achieved the 45 but I did read more than last year so it’s a win in my books.
  3. Complete my Honours Degree: I also knew that I had to complete the last two subjects required for my honours degree this year. I am so thrilled that I have achieved this!
  4. Present more often: At work I came out of my shell and presented more often. It absolutely terrified me but I am still standing so I guess it wasn’t that bad. I presented at least once a month to a forum in which our Africa leadership team was present, led 2 training sessions for the same forum and joined our wellness team and ran a training session through this team as well. Considering I probably presented once or twice in the same forum last year, I would say that I outdid myself this year! Oh wait, the icing on the cake was the training sessions I ran as part of a workshop in Nigeria this year. I was so nervous as our Marketing VP joined my session first but, once again, I survived and in fact, I felt like I thrived! Whoop whoop!
  5. Develop an abundance mindset: I worked hard to change my mindset from that of scarcity to abundance. I have definitely made progress but I still have work to do. Here I have focused on asking myself “How can I afford it?” vs “I can’t afford it” as an example.
  6. Exceed expectations: I won 2 awards at work recognising my contribution to a squad I was apart of. That blew my mind. I did not expect it.
  7. Be More Visible at Work: Lastly, and very importantly, this year I felt seen and appreciated by the right people in the right places at work. I am very grateful that I was able to achieve this while dealing with a grieving son and completing my studies amongst other things.

Three commitments that I made to myself this enabled at least 90% of these accomplishments. I committed to:

  • feel the fear and do it anyway
  • be authentic in everything I do
  • Trust that God opened the door/put me in the room for a reason. My job was to do the work and always put my best foot forward. He would take care of the outcome.

This has been a very good year in so many ways. It’s definitely been a year worth celebrating! I am very grateful to have experienced it. I look forward to experiencing all the good things that 2024 brings and it will be an even better year!