Because we are trending towards the end of the school year, most classes are finishing up. Final projects are being handed in and blog posts are being written. This is no different for the students of PLP.

This year, a new class was introduced to us PLP students. It was called PGP, which stood for Personal Growth Plan. In this course, we learned lots of valuable things throughout the year including goal setting, productivity and the 7 habits of highly effective people.

At first, I was not really on board with this course. It was added to all the PLP students timetables without us knowing and the classes were held after school. However, throughout the year I learned lots of new and interesting things from this course. It provided me with new ways to think about doing my work and how to live my everyday life.

PGP was split up into three different sections and we learned 3 different things in those sections. The first was goal setting.

For this part of our course, we read a book called “What Do You Really Want?”. It was written by Beverly Bachel. The author focused on setting relevant and important goals and not just setting goals for the heck of it. Goals are meant for you to push yourself each and every day to reach those goals.

An important thing I took away from this book was SMART goal setting. It was an acronym for how goals should be. Without further ado, the smart acronym.

Savvy

Measurable

Active

Reasonable

Timed

In this book, there were also forms we had to fill out. I had a binder where I filled out my forms. I like how these forms were written out because it made it more permanent and it really settled in your mind, as opposed to just typing it down on your phone or iPad.

Here’s an example of a form I filled out

There were about 15 forms I filled out in my binder.

The second section of the PGP course was centred around productivity. There were two aspects to it, which were time management and time blocking. In terms of time management, we were given an app called Things.

Things is an app with a unique concept. It allows you to add to-do’s into your iPad and categorize them into your school subjects. Then, whenever you get assigned homework or something you need to do, you can put it right into Things. Using things, you can add due dates, make the app remind you when to work on it and categorize them. You can also see what you’ve completed and what assignments you have coming up. I added golf as a category into my things in order to personalize it a bit more.

Initially, I wasn’t really on board with things. Why would I add my assignments into here if they were already on Showbie? For one, I learned that you could add sub-notes into your assignments into Things. I really liked this because I could explain the assignment to myself in these notes in case I forget later on. Secondly, I found that it was really satisfying to complete your assignments in Things. You check it off and it disappears and it feels like a huge weight has been taken off your shoulders and that everything is going to be ok.

Another thing we learned from this section is time blocking. For this, we used the calendar app that is given on any Apple device. This was fairly useful to me. I blocked out my school schedule onto my calendar.

However, it seemed a bit daunting to block out every single hour increment of my day into an app. If I have a lot of homework, sometimes I will subconsciously time block in my head. Like, “ ok, my humanities will take 1 hour but my PGP blog will take 3 hours so I should start working at (looks at watch) 11:30.” One thing I should work on going forward is being more responsible time blocking this into my calendar.

The last section we learned about was the 7 habits. We read a book titled “ The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens”. In the book, there were 7 habits. If you follow these 7 habits, you’ll become an effective person.

The habits, listed in order, were:

Being proactive

Begin with the end in mind

Put first things first

Think win-win

Seek first to understand, then to be understood

Synergize

Sharpen the saw

The book we read was separated in 4 parts. For each part there were a few habits summarized and we had to make a creative reflection and fill out workbooks for each section.

One habit from reading really stuck with me. That was habit 4, which is thinking win-win. This led me right into our final project.

For our final project in PGP this year, we had to create something. It could have been anything, but it had to be based around something that really stuck with us from the PGP course throughout the year. The idea was, what could we make that we could send back in time to ourselves a year ago that would make us a better person?

I chose habit 4 from the 7 habits, thinking win-win. This one really stuck with me because it occurred to me that in life I’m faced with a lot of situations where I come out with a lose-win or a win-lose. The few times where I do end up with win-win situations, I feel a lot better about myself and the whole situation at hand.

So, I asked myself “how I can I create win-win situations as much as possible?” Well, obviously in sports it’s hard to create win-win situations because sports are designed with a win-lose mentality. However, little conflicts in your life can easily be solved just by thinking about it and communicating with the other person to try and find the desired win-win solution. I decided to make a video describing win-win situation and also showing the different varieties on how a conflict can end (win-lose, win-win, lose-lose).

If I could have shown myself the power of creating win-win situations at the start of the year, I think I could have made it a much happier year for myself. I always feel good when both people win and I think learning about this earlier would have been a much better experience for myself.

Now, to reflect.

At first, I wasn’t sure about PGP. But, I think it grew on me. I believe that everything I learned can help me become a better learner if I apply it the way it’s meant to be applied. If I can commit to using everything I learned in my everyday life, I think I would live a much better life.

I believe that everything that I learned will be helpful to me at some point in my life down the line. Things like timeblocking and thinking win-win are things that will hopefully stick with me forever.

To conclude, this course has and will make me a better person.

Thanks for reading,

Nik