Early in January, I was debating if I should carry on writing these monthly blog posts, part of me felt like a broken record, saying the same things over and over again, and not really making any progress towards my life goals. However, I thought about the reason I started doing it in the first place back in 2019! Yes, this will be my 5th year of writing these posts. I’ve just read that post and OMG I HAVE come a long way since then!
The main reason I started to write these was mainly selfish really, giving myself time to reflect each month before I career head first into the next without acknowledging events that have happened as well as being a cathartic release of anything that was bugging me.
I mentioned my hesitation of carrying on to a couple of close friends and both said how much they liked reading them and often could relate to what I’d written, so here we are again folks! Strap in, as I feel this year is going to be one hell of a ride.
As always in January, social media of full of “new year, new this, that and the other” and I get it, a new year can feel like a brand new chapter in our lives & an opportunity to do things differently. But this can also be quite hard to read, depending on your mindset it can feel like “What is wrong with my life as it is?!” and have to admit, that during the month as much as I wanted to embrace this newness, I also wanted to stick 2 fingers up to it as well.
The year/month started in a pretty full-on way, I was straight back at the uni on the 2nd January, and that week there was lecturing and inductions to be done. The following week I had been assigned one of our post-graduate diploma modules to teach and to say I was bricking it is an understatement. I still struggle a lot with imposter syndrome as an academic at a university, yes ME an academic, the girl who at 16 was told she was too thick to do A-Levels and should busy themselves with something vocational (I am so glad that careers in schools have improved since the early 90s!!). The night before the first day of lectures, I had a quiet word with myself and decided to be true to who I am and to go with it, so I embraced my inner Firecracker and just delivered the lectures as I would if I was doing in my business, it might not have been everyone preferred type of lecture, however, I did get some really nice comments at the end of the 2nd day so I was pretty proud of myself!!
As the month progressed, I got into a rhythm with the work at the uni and found it less stressful and I started to feel my groove with my own work and focusing on my new side hustle/business. I made a pact with myself that come 1st February 2024, I would stop being so frightened of launching this side hustle (more about this in Feb’s post), it’s been in my head/planning phase for over 2 years! So this is the time to move it from being in my head to making it happen. I’ve invested a fair bit of money in and although that isn’t a deal breaker I do want to see how far it can go! I went to a few networking events and spoke openly about my plans which were received with lots of positive comments and love, which again helped to silence the mind goblins somewhat.
Here is a sneak peek at it though…
Lincolnshiregirl 