Co roku podejmujemy postanowienia noworoczne – New Year’s Resolutions. Niezwykle łatwo jest zdecydować o czymś nowym tym bardziej, że wszędzie dookoła mówi się o tym. Trudniej jednak jest wytrwać w postanowieniach. W dzisiejszym odcinku podcastu wysłuchaj, co może być pomocne nie tylko w wytrwaniu w postanowieniach noworocznych, ale też w osiąganiu celów. Dowiesz się również, że prokrastynacja, czyli odkładanie rzeczy na później także jest przypadłością, z którą można wygrać. Skorzystaj z zawartych porad. Odcinek jest w języku angielskim możesz więc trenować rozumienie ze słuchu.
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#68
In January every year lots of people make new resolutions – about their dietary habits, about taking exercise or about learning something. We read about it everywhere around, don’t we? Sometimes it makes me really fed up. We find plenty of encouragement to take new resolutions. And people do. Psychologists claim that it is very positive for us as it boosts our self confidence and helps us to think over our life.
The peak of making the New Year resolutions is within 2-3 weeks after the New Year. Then things go back to normal.
According to statistics, though, it is in fact the worst moment of taking decisions about something new. Why? Because year by year we are used to giving it up. Every year we decide on something and every year the decisions fly away… and we learn that year by year we can just forget about our resolutions. We can just resign from doing things.
I checked the most popular pieces of advice on how to keep the New Year’s resolutions. One suggests connecting a decision with an external factor e.g I will be jogging 3 times a week after 6 p.m.. or: I will learn English if I eat my dinner. Other plausible advice was to divide every resolution, or let’s call it an activity, into ever smaller pieces or steps to take, e.g. I will start running – buy new shoes, go out for a 10 minute walk in the shoes, after a few days run for 1 minute and then go back to walking. Suddenly all decisions which are divided into such small steps are getting really easy and enjoyable.
The subject of the New Year’s Resolutions is of course very often closely connected with learning a language, and in our case it is the English language. And here we may apply also the above mentioned ways how to keep the resolutions – e.g. connect the activity with an external factor – I will learn every day when I have cooked dinner or divide them into every smaller pieces – I will learn just 3 new words a day.
And keeping the resolutions is on the other hand very closely connected with organizing and managing your time both in private and professional life. And time management quite naturally will lead us to the concept of procrastination. It seems that constant putting things off for later is the result of bad time management, although not always.
And again for time management there are plenty of solutions and techniques. One of the most plausible ones which I personally find quite helpful is the pomodoro technique. It is based on the idea that you should work on a given subject matter for a pre-set time of let’s say, 25 – 30 minutes but – under one condition – it should be with no distractions. So, turn off your email alerts, turn off your phone and generally any alerts that usually you tend to check. Don’t go to prepare your coffee and don’t check your email box. Just focus only on your aim. Work on your goal. Stay concentrated only on one thing. After the pre set time you may get a break. Just 5 – 10 minutes of doing whatever you want – again stay focused on your goal. Keep working on it. Without any distractions. Such working time sets you can repeat until you’re really tired. But this technique will help you reach your goal and work towards your goal. Getting rid of any alerts that may take you away from your work within this pre set time will really help you work towards the goal you want to achieve.
No matter what technique we apply any of them may fail due to one reason many people face – procrastination which mean putting things off for later. And again there are plenty pieces of advice, but now I will give you one which has appealed to me the most. In a very amusing way it was presented by one of my favorite bloggers – Tim Urban. In his entry as well in a ted talk regarding this subject he claimed that between a mind of a “normal” person and a mind of a person who procrastinates there is just one tiny difference. In the mind of a procrastinator there lives a monster who continually tells the mind to choose something pleasant like watching tv or scrolling the facebook rather than doing the job you’re really supposed to do. With this mind, when we realize that it is the monster telling us to stop work we can easily move it or kill it or promise the monster that it may come back a little bit later because now we are really busy with an important task. Just imagine it is the bad monster that only looks for pleasant and nice activities – it is easier to fight it then and allow it enter when we decide that we have time for it to play.
