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Month: April 2025

Habits 1, 2, and 3

Habits 1, 2, and 3

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Have you ever blamed all your problems on someone else? Wasted days on end, binge watching your favourite TV series? Decided to scroll on TikTok instead of doing your homework? All of these things don’t make you feel very good right?

I’ve always known I did these things, I’ve always noticed how awful they make me feel, and I’ve always wanted to stop it. However, Ive never known how…that is until I read the first 2 chapters of ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens’ by Sean Covey. 

What is the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens?

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens is a self improvement book created for teens. It highlights 7 habits that are the key to a successful life. In this post we are going to talk about the first three habits, Habit 1: Be proactive, Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind, Habit 3: Put First things first.

The Ghosts of the Present, Sean, and Future

We were assigned with creating a short video highlighting the first tree habits. My team member and I created a video inspired by the Christmas Story: Scrooge. Watch it here:

The Habits

Be Proactive

What Is It?

Being proactive means you take responsibility for your actions, choices, and things that happen to you. It means owning up to your mistakes and accepting your circumstances rather than blaming them on other people. The opposite of being proactive is being reactive. 

My Experience

Being proactive has never been something I have thought about until reading this book. After learning about this habit I started to be more aware of how much I blame things on other people. For example I am often in a time crunch for finishing my homework, when this occurs, I have a habit of blaming it on the teacher. “They are giving me too much work”, “Don’t they know I have other classes”, “They don’t consider I  have a life outside of school”. These are common sentences that come out of my mouth. Although blaming it on the teacher is the easy thing to do, that is not proactive of me. 

What I am Going to Change In Order to be Proactive

My struggle in getting my work done on time is not my teachers fault, it is mine. It is often a result of my perfectionism. Rather than wasting time complaining about my teacher (reactive), I need to focus on the things I can control, overcoming my perfectionism (Proactive). I will overcome my perfectionism by focusing on doing what is asked of me first and then, if I have time, I will go in after and add the extra pizazz. This will help me complete my homework on time. 

Begin with the End in Mind

What is it?

What kind of person do you want to be? What are your values? What do you want to achieve? Beginning with the end in mind means you have a clear vision on what you want your future to look like, and a plan on how you are going to make it happen. It means you have goals, and you do things in order to reach them. The opposite of this habit means you don’t have a plan and you waste your life parting and doingu unimportant, dumb things.

My Experience

I believe that I do a pretty good job with beginning with the end in mind. I have a very clear plan on what I want to do with my life. I want to one day become a social justice lawyer, I have a pretty solid plan on how I’m going to get there, and I make my everyday decisions based on what will help me reach it. However, something I could work on is spending more time completing my goals. 

What I am Going to Change In Order to Begin With the End in Mind 

I have already completed a goal ladder, now I need to focus on actually climbing up it. From now on I am going to commit to doing one thing a day that helps me reach my goals. This could be studying, volunteering, researching, working on my passion project, etc.

Put First Things First

 What is it?

Putting first things first means you focusing on the most important tasks and managing your time wisely. This doesn’t mean cutting out all fun or easy activities, It’s about making sure the priorities come first, so your not rushing or stressed later.

My Experience

Putting first things first is a habit I struggle with the most. I always know what I should be doing, like working on an assignment or doing my chores, put Ill end up procrastinating or getting distracted by things like TikTok. 

What I am Going to Change In Order to Put First Things First

In order to improve my procrastination problem, I am going to st timers when I have to focus on something important. For example when I am doing homework, I will set a 20 minute timer in which I will put my head down and do work. When the timer goes off I get a 5 minute break and then I set it again. This will give me something to look forward to when working and help break it up so it is not so overwhelming

Conclusion

Being proactive, beginning with the end in mind, and putting first things first are 3 very crucial habits in order to become a highly effective person. Some of these things I struggle with and some I am well on my way to mastering, however there is something I can improve on in all 3. Going forwards I am going to start focusing on overcoming my perfectionism, I am going to commit to doing one thing a day that will help me climb my goal ladder, and I am going to set timers while doing work.

Destination Imagination – Provincials!

Destination Imagination – Provincials!

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March 1st, 2025, I was floating through space trying to find a new planet for humankind to live on. Earth was being destroyed and time was running out. 

43 days later…I found myself doing it all over again.

How can you being on the exact same crazy adventure twice?! You may ask…well I may be lying just a tad bit. I wasn’t in space per-say…but I was doing a pretty good job at acting as if I was. In the 2025 Destination Imagination provincials tournament. 

What is Destination Imagination

Destination Imagination (DI) is a global academic competition. Teams of all ages develop solutions to challenges and present them live at tournaments. This year we had a choice of 4 challenges, technical, fine arts, engineering, and scientific (my challenge).

Worlds beyond – 2025 scientific challenge

 

Our Solution

In order to learn about my group and I’s solution go to my post I made about my experience in regionals here: 

Destination imagination – Regionals

Preforming at Provincials

I truly believe that there was hardly anything we could’ve improved within our solution. Everything went so smoothly and came together perfectly. We all knew what to do, what to say, where to go, and when to do it.  I am very proud of our team and what we created.

What Changed From Regionals

Technobabble Depictor

Something we upgraded since regionals was our technobabble depictor. Before, we did not get the best points for our original invention. It was very flimsy and we used ‘paper engineering’ which wasn’t the most interesting or appealing method we could have used. For our new and improved version we create a box out of rainbow popsicle sticks, and then used hydraulics to open it, in order to reveal the water. I think his was a big improvement from our last and our points went up a drastic amount in comparison to regionals. 

Hyperball Explanation

One of our team choice elements is creating a new sport combining all of the ones we play. When we communicated this to the audience in regionals, it was a long, hard to follow, paragraph of speaking. It was very disengaging and lost us a lot of points. We decided to fix how we explain our sport and act it our while speaking. This made it so much more fun to watch and helped us gain more points to our solution.

Skills From Last Year That Helped Me

Looking back at my journey from last years D.I to this year, I can definitely see growth. One habit I brought over from last year is my enthusiasm during the tournaments. I learned last year to not care what others thinked, to go all out with the acting and to be extra cheesy during the instant challenges. These skills really helped us optimize our teamwork points, and created a much more engaging presentation.

Skills I Learned

Communication and Collaboration

This year my team helped me improve my collaboration skills. They encouraged me to let loose and to trust them with creating high quality work. This has been a very hard thing for me in group projects, however our team had such a positive group dynamic it really helped me give up power.
Ever since the first day I sat with my team, we all really connected. I was very worried about working with the grade 10’s because It made me feel shy. However, they were all super welcoming and I became comfortable with them very quickly, which improved my confidence in planning, execution, and preforming. Everyone in my team was so driven and motivated to create a successful solution. There was hardly any slacking off, everyone was okay with meeting outside of school and determined to win.
There were some instances within our teamwork when some people were not doing their fair share in work. Instead of getting mad or accepting it (like I would normally resort to), we all decided to throw a team meeting which was very beneficial to our teamwork and solution, and put us back on track. This definitely paid off because we were able to cruise through D.I. with minimal stress while still creating a masterpiece. 

Check out their perspective on Provincials here:

Sydnee

Kennedy

Siena

Charlie

F.A.I.L (First attempts in learning)

One area where we F.A.I.Led this year is our instant challenges. After a very unsuccessful attempt in regionals we promised ourselves we would improve. We made plans to meet up and practice and we had intentions of giving each other roles. Unfortunately, we didn’t follow through and it showed in provincials when our poor performance in instant challenges costed us the win. In the future, in order to prevent this we need to follow through with practicing instant challenges, and giving eachother jobs. We need to prepare so we are going in confident and ready rather than unorganized and stressed. 

Results

This tournaments results were very disappointing because I was so confident in our solution, I was positive we were going to win. We did end up getting the most points in the challenge, however because of our F.A.I.L in our instant challenge, we ended up getting 4th place.

Although we didn’t do the best, my spirits were lifted when we won the Renaissance award, this award is given to a team for outstanding skill in the areas of design, engineering, execution, or performance. Winning this made all of the hard work pay off, it made me feel proud that we made something that will be remembered.

The Path Towards my Future

The Path Towards my Future

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What do you want to be when you grow up? This is a question I have been asked all throughout my life. When I was four I wanted to be a singer, when i was six I wanted to be an actor, and when I was 8 I wanted to be a vet. When I was 9 a certain book changed by entire perspective on life, singing and acting became unrelavent, changing the world was all I could focus on.

You may be wondering, how could a book change your whole life?!…you will find out later in this post in my Unboxing Me Video.

The Project

Ever since I read that book when I was 9, I’ve always known I wanted to be a Social Justice lawyer, but I never knew how I was going to get there. This project provided me with an answer to that question. I was assigned with creating a 2-4 minute video that displayed who I am, what my goals are, and how I am planning to get there. In order to come to my conclusion I read a book, adopted new habits, and reflected, all while trying to answer the driving question, How might I tell a story about who I am and where im going? This all lead me to compete my final video:

My Answer to the Driving Question 

In order to tell a story about who I am, I need to reflect on the things that have shaped my worldview. These are the things that shape who I am and help me decide what I want to do with my life. 

How Did I Get There 

What Do You Really Want

Something that helped me answer the driving question was reading the book, What do you Really Want By Beverly K Bachel. This book really got me thinking about my goals and what I see myself doing in the future. It taught me how important goals are and how to make S.M.A.R.T goals.

 

My Goal Tracker

While reading What do you Really Want, I created a Goal Tracker. A goal tracker is a journal I kept while reading, I did several activities that were included in the books. This gave me the opportunity to write down my thoughts and helped me understand how I am going to become a social justice lawyer.

Managing Me

Adopting time blocking and things are strategies that are going to help me get to where I want to go. These things will help me stay origanized, break down my goals, and help me be more successful in the future. The task management app Things allows me to visualize all my tasks and motivates me to click the checkmark by the deadline. Time blocking allows me to lay out each day’s schedule, which makes it easier to stay organized and strike a better balance between my academic and extracurricular activities.

Story Boarding

In order to film and edit a successful video that lives up to how I wanted it in my head, I storyboarded it first. I drew out a stop motion version of how I wanted my final video to look like. This helped me also in he long run, it gave me a detailed guide that I could go to while filming, making the process smooth and fast.

F.A.I.L (first attempts in learning)

If I were to do something in this project again, I would commit more to time blocking. There were many days I forgot to write in my calender and I was very inconsistent. If I were to go back and change something I would have written my schedule many days before hand so I was more up to date.

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