Tag Archives: goals

2020 has been a very tumultuous year, but it’s been a year of tremendous growth for me. The reason I’ve decided to share this is, it can be very easy to feel like you haven’t achieved anything, especially when looking at it day to day because you don’t see the progress you have made. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but progress was made in a year. When you zoom out and look at your year, you will definitely be surprised with how much you actually achieved.

Below is a summary of my goals from 2020 which I created in January, a grade and reflections/reasons for that grade. I’ve really enjoyed spending an afternoon doing this and funnily enough, it has energised me and got me ready to go again for next year. I think it is so important to learn from your mistakes, as well as congratulate yourself when appropriate. If you want to do something similar, but didn’t have goals at the start of the year, you can come up with three aspects of your life which are important to you, for example, work/studying, relationships and mental/physical health and reflect on them.

If you aren’t examining your life, you’re not growing as much as you could be.

My Goals:

Do my rehab 100%

• Grade: A-
• I have come a long way in terms of my self-control and willingness to hold back whilst still pushing the boundaries. I was aware when I was on the edge of injury and managed my niggles really well. Earlier in the year I kept active even when I couldn’t really do much. I also made a lot of mistakes along the way being too eager, but I don’t rate myself down for that because I feel as though I learned a lot from them. Examples include going back into cycling on the road too soon, I got sore pretty quick, then rather than pushing through that, I did more frequent indoor, controlled session, pushing up to higher intensities and essentially replicating the load outside. It took me several weeks of patience but It made me much more able to go outside with confidence. Similarly with my gym work, I threw in olympic lifts back in too early and the eccentric load was a bit much for my knees, after a week or two I identified this as the change and removed it, removing the issue. Same thing with the running, I’ve been pushing the boundaries but not overdoing it, and if I do overdo it a bit, I gave myself a week or two deloaded for it to recover, coming back better than ever. I’m at a point now 13 months post surgery where I am running ~30km per week, with no surgical pain, only residual musculo-tendinous pain (patellofemoral pain, tib post pain) but overall my knee’s are feeling really good, and I can feel myself improving in every aspect. I had to turn down AFLW this year as a Feb return would just be too soon, and it’s not worth me cutting it that fine, another mistake from 2018 I learned from. The reason for an A- was because I’m still not prioritising my rehab first, which I think is normal, it’s a very high priority for me but sometimes I let it fall to the side, like today. I stayed at my girlfriends house (who likes to stay up and sleep in later than me) and didn’t want to wake up early to get my session in so I did it in the middle of the day, which was WAY too hot (30+) for 800 repeats, so halfway through I bailed on the 800s and did a few 200s and called it a day. I wasn’t sore but it was so uncomfortable and I was soft, not finishing the session. Other than these few occasions, I’ve been very good at doing my rehab to the book whilst listening to my body. Both myself and my physio are very happy with where I am at the moment. So an A- it is.

Spend more time focussing on personal development

• Grade B
• I began this year wanting to invest more in myself. In the final year of university and really not too sure what I wanted to do after uni I thought this was a very important point to focus on. I put my hand up for a lot more extra-curricular things, like stepping up within the exercise physiology society and really taking charge when the leadership was absent, I took on extra research projects and have spent a lot of my time introspecting, figuring out what it is I really want. I started my own blog, which I began posting weekly posts, which I did consistently, before 4-5 weeks ago where I decided to post something every day to really develop my writing ability. This effort has been good but I feel like I got very comfortable with the fact that my first 100 posts (the classic idea that you’re first iterations will never be good so get them out of the way) won’t be very good, so I began not putting too much effort into them. This was mainly during the days I was very busy or had a lot on, which isn’t an excuse but was one factor. This tells me a lot about me when I get given a task, I often want to do it to the best quality, but I’m not very good at polishing it is something I’ve realised and get a bit sick of it. What I’m thinking about when I write this is my IsoExBP research project, I had to make several edits and major changes and it was a lot of effort and editing, going back to change things, which I have become a bit jaded with. This really reinforces the importance of planning. I’ve never been much of a planner but having a leak-proof plan, I believe, would remove the jadedness I’m facing at the moment. Going back to my effort to focus on personal development, I’m pretty happy with how I’ve done, but when I get busy with uni, I have found myself putting my life to the side a bit and grinding to get the work done, hence the B-. Although on that, I think the level of insight I have into all that is very good, I understand and am consciously choosing to prioritise my study over all else, but only for a short period of time. I think it is so important to continue investing in my personal growth because that is what will dictate my future success in whatever path it is that I go down.
• The area’s I focussed on this year were:
  • Upskilling myself in a language (German), which fell away as soon as I began my research in June. I still would very much like to improve my language skills, but I think the best way is to study for 6 months before going on a trip overseas to the country where I can speak the language. This may just be a cop-out though as I think another way that would work is by going to an actual language school or meeting people who keep me accountable to practice the language with.
  • Becoming more confident online. I made my website and routinely did my blog posts which was a big step. I need to continue developing this muscle, putting more things on different platforms, where my identity is more tied to it, rather than sitting behind the comfort of the screen and text. I also started a podcast for Running Science, which was rather successful and I really enjoyed but politics came into it and the Boss said I had to stop, unfortunately. After that, I have wanted to start up something new but I’ve not been confident that I have something important to talk about, I need to continue to overcome this.
  • I stepped up and lead the Exercise Physiology Society throughout the year. Technically, my role as treasurer and social media director, both typically low profile roles, but leadership was lacking and I was ready. This is one area I’m really proud of myself for. The society became stagnant throughout the year, understandably throughout COVID and with the help of Chris, one of the lecturers at the uni and the ‘liaison’ between the society and staff, who was instrumental in pushing me to energise the society, I (attempted) to do just that. I started meetings with MedSoc, the medical society and we had ~5 meetings which energised me further, seeing the passion they all had for their society was infectious, and really gave me the confidence to put more energy into ours. I set up more regular meetings and whilst these all weren’t successful I think I’ve laid the foundations for the society going into next year, where there are a few people who may step up and take on a bit of the energy I have had about it and carry it forward. I also ran a few events and webinars which were successful in my eyes, not because they were an instant hit, but because they have shown others how easy it can be to create change.
  • Research. I was very proactive in seeking out an interesting research project and I got myself on an interesting project with a good team. I was also lucky enough to have a PhD student reach out to me to see if I wanted to do my internship with him, so I took on a smaller role within that project, but that was one of the best decisions I made all year. Not only did I get to help out on another project, I then got exposed to that group’s meetings and discourse, which I learned so much from. Before the internship, I knew I would be doing a systematic review as soon as COVID hit, so I read through the Cochrane Handbook of Systematic Reviews, which is a 700 page textbook on how to conduct a gold-standard systematic review. This was something I did every day on the hour-long bus ride to and from uni, and this is one thing that I attribute my development in research to. The book gave me the base I needed to be as independent as possible with my internship. This allowed me to be exposed to as much as possible, and boy was I. I was involved in every step of the systematic review we conducted, doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but also was actively involved in determining the direction of the project, which changed many more times than I would have liked throughout the 20 weeks. I learned how to write a protocol, create search terms, conduct searches, create a data extraction sheet, extract data, use R (a statistical coding language) and analyse data for a meta-analysis, and understand the theory behind it all. I also learned how to transform data when needed in different methods.
  • I have also spent a lot of time thinking about meditation and have recently committed to doing an hour a day (at least until the end of the year). I’ve been on and off with doing meditation but have been very interested, which has led me to be fascinated by Buddhism and its philosophy. I think this is going to be a very big focus for next year.
  • One more area I progressed in is having a clearer understanding of what success looks like to me and what it means to be happy; as well as how that ties in with life in the workforce. I’m increasingly not seeing myself in a full-time ‘regular’ job, and I’ve recently realised that Academia is just that, so I’m not sure where that leaves me. I think if I ‘HAVE’ to go and do something every day I will fatigue and inevitably learn to hate it. Something I have said for years is that I don’t want my ‘day job’ to be my primary source of income, and I still strongly believe that. This has shifted my mindset from simply following the path set out in front of me at university, that of ‘finish uni and aim to get a full-time job,’ into more of an entrepreneurial mindset of always thinking what I can create that may one day support me, or contribute to that goal.
  • I have also become less focussed on the pursuit of money, I try to not let it influence my decisions and part of prioritising my personal development was to move away from the mindset that the more money you have the better, because that path may have led me down a path of working more retail hours where I am not growing. I’ve optimised for growth rather than income this year. I’ve grown the most when I’ve earned the least money. I’m lucky enough to be in a situation to be able to not HAVE to earn money, living at home in a house where we have food on the table reliably. Another area I need to continue to develop is becoming comfortable putting things online for the people I respect to see, ie. my research team. I need to try to marry the person I am to them to what I’m putting out online, currently, I’m too scared to for some reason. Really there is nothing which is stopping me and no tangible reason I haven’t been sharing it to them, other than the fact that it is more personal development things not research-related. I need to marry these ideas better.

University Medal

• Grade D
• This year I made it my goal to get the University medal, an award you get if you graduate top of your cohort with an excellent mark, usually >85. This was a very ambitious goal that I needed to have acted on earlier, I calculated I needed 94ish in each subject in my final year to achieve an average of 85. This was not impossible, but it was going to be difficult. That was, until COVID hit and the uni made T1 pass-fail so that my two marks did not count towards my WAM. This was very unfortunate as I needed every subject I could get to count towards my WAM and made getting an 85 near impossible. I excelled in my marks this year getting just one overall mark <90%, and I’m proud of that, but it was simply too little too late for me and I think it’s highly unlikely that I will get the university medal.

Listen and Support

• Grade C
• This was my final goal for the year because I found myself always trying to fix people’s problems when they simply wanted someone to talk to and support them. This was namely in the context of my relationship, but extends further to friendships as well. I think I have made progress in this, identifying when I should just listen and provide sympathy and support, but it’s still not 100% of the time. Improvement is improvement. Over the year I have become more aware of how others are feeling, and more sensitive to how I act around them at those touchy times. I’m giving myself a C because whilst I’ve made progress, I’m not there yet and have to continue working to be really thoughtful and mindful of others feelings and how I treat them when they are coming to me to vent or with a problem. I think the mindfulness meditation I have done has been a big contributor to my progress in this goal, allowing me time to catch myself before I jump into my natural ‘fixer’ mode.

Things to stop doing

• I would like to stop being self-conscious at all about anything I put online, or investigate why I am self-conscious. It may be that I’m not putting up ‘authentic’ content and thus embarrassed to share it. Whatever the reason, this is something to focus on for next year. The reason I want to put more online is because it allows me to reach more people and extend my circle of influence, opening myself up to new opportunities and friendships.

Overall, I’ve had a really good year. I feel I’ve made a lot of progress as a human being and have much more insight into how I’m feeling, what success means and how to be happy. I’ve grown an incredible amount this year and attribute that to stepping out of my comfort zone more than I have in the past. I’ve taken on a lot of responsibility and have had to make it work, and make it work I did. I’m really proud of myself this year, and I think it’s important to tell myself that. We all need a pat on the back every now and again, and doing a yearly review is the best way to do that.