Mariam Zihiri, Period 2, 3/27/23

Atomic Habits & Growth

• At this current point in time, what specific standards have you set for yourself?
• How and why did you come to craft these standards?
• How do you demonstrate resilience towards achieving these standards?
• How do you assess yourself? What adjustments do you make? How often?

At this current point in time, I am at the point where I am almost done with receiving all of my college results back and I am now preparing myself for the end of my senior year. I’ve reached a point where I need to start researching the opportunities that I have been given and decide what will be the best thing for me to do in my next four years of education. I have noticed that there have been times where I have lost motivation or have not been able to put as much effort into my work as I used to, but I almost always quickly recognize when I fall into those patterns and work on changing them almost immediately. A standard that I am setting myself up to this year is to bring myself back to my old work ethic and allow myself to think of the consequences of my actions before I do them. I came to craft these standards during the first two months of the year when the second semester started because I knew that this was it for me, I was done with my college applications and the rest of the year would be, what I believed, “a walk in the park.” I let myself ignore responsibilities and would never think about the consequences beforehand because I had the mindset “it can't be as bad as before.” When I started to continue with these patterns for weeks, I finally started to feel the effects of them with things like the new policy changes in the school during second semester and with deadlines that I kept missing that would affect my grade greatly. I knew that I had gotten to a point where I could not continue like this, and eventually sat myself down and planned ways to bring myself to the work ethic I had in the first three years of high school.

Holding myself to a goal like this would prove to be very difficult, especially since I was getting all of my college results and was seeing all of these offers and potential future opportunities I had for myself. When I saw my future being given to me, I lost motivation to do anything at the moment, and felt like all I wanted to do was relax. But, I knew that there was no way I would be able to go on like that and not have it affect me in the long run. I was able to stay resilient towards these standards out of fear that it would continue onto my future and hurt me. I have to assess myself by looking at the number of missing assignments that I had, I assess myself on how much work I need to get done and how much time I have to do it and physically map out a plan on when I will do it. I had to schedule almost every aspect of my life in a daily plan to get back to some organization to make my life feel normal again.