On November 20, 2021, I started another new Coursera course called LIFE 101: Mental and Physical Self Care, as taught by Dr Mahtab Jafari, of the University of California, Irvine.
As a part of my own personal accountability to complete the online lecture workshops I sign on for, I’m going to be sharing on my online journal here, the work I do in these courses as I work through them. As such, I will update this post each time I complete an exploration of a weekly topic.
WEEK 01: Adopting Good Habits for Self Care
Week 1 was a discussion that focused on examining one’s own habits and patterns in life, especially those that might block one from achieving what they want to achieve out of life. I found the process to be good, helping to cement, organize and reflect on things that have been blocks in my own life. I started the process off by answering the questions in the notes program on my iPhone, and then I organized them into a table in MS Word so I could more easily reference what I wrote later. Many of the points are things I’ve written subverted selfie project posts about, so I don’t mind sharing the information here in this PDF document.
What is your take home message from this week’s topic?
My take home message from this week’s topic centered on the importance of being mindful about the habits (or patterns) in one’s day to day life. This mindfulness will help to root out more detrimental habits while focusing on the more positive and productive habits, in a process that’s more intrinsic for myself as ultimately, I’m the only one who can decide to implement positive changes in my life.
The reflective prompts that appeared across several of the videos also helped me to identify eight habits that I want to change, as well as the reasons why I want to change them. Identifying why I wanted to change them was good as it helped shift things from a negative mindset to a more hopeful one. The prompts also helped me identify some of the habits that have circumvented my past attempts at overcoming those negative habits. Knowing what those triggers are can help me in hopefully avoiding those negative patterns in the future. Overall, it was a good process for me, something I’ve tried doing before, but never superbly finished. I could see this as being a good steppingstone for creating both short- and long-term vision boards.
Artifact 01 - TEDx. “Big Problems: Small Wonder.” YouTube, 18 Nov 2016.
RESOURCES
Artifact 02 - WSL: World Surf League. “A Surfer from South Central.” YouTube. 28 Oct 2019.
Artifact 04 - TEDx. “The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong | Amy Morin.” YouTube, 04 Dec 2015.
Artifact 03 - TEDx. “How to motivate yourself to change your behaviour.” YouTube, 28 Oct 2014.
Artifact 05 - TED. “Tim Urban: Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator.” YouTube. 06 Apr 2016.
Artifact 06 - Fight Mediocrity. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” YouTube, 28 Mar 2015.