End of Year Reflections, Past Year Review

Hi, All!

How are you feeling? 😚

I’m usually quite excited about December.

It’s my cloak of invisibility.

G and I don’t have any family obligations, and the rest of the world seems too busy to care about what I’m doing.

And I, gratefully, get to draw inward.

End of the Year Exercises

When you get this letter, I’ll be on my way to the Philippines — gone kiteboarding.

But besides beach-bumming, I’m also taking the time to reflect upon the past year and to make decisions and wishes for the one to come.

I’ll be doing this using two exercises that worked great for me in 2018: the past year review (an idea I got from Timothy Ferriss) and making true decisions (a concept I learned from Tony Robbins).

⏰ Blast from the past: 10 Reasons Why Every Girl Should Learn to Kiteboard is the first post I wrote that went viral. It’s also the post that I blame for making me way self-conscious about my writing.

Past Year Review

For the past year review, I get some paper and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.

Then, I go through my calendar for last year and note which activities, artist dates, people, etc., sparked joy or helped me grow, and which didn’t.

The latter end up in the negative column and on my not-to-do list for the new year.

🎧 If you’re interested in learning more about the past year review, you can listen to the podcast episode What I Learned in 2016 by Timothy Ferriss.

True Decisions

Making a true decision means committing to achieving a result, and then cutting yourself off from any other possibility. –Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within

Making true decisions is what helped me send a letter to you every month for the last year, become a developer, stick to only drinking alcohol every other weekend, and quit sugar.

Along with the past year review, artist dates, and lady luck paving the way for me, I was also able to achieve my ideal weight, get my first freelance gig as a web developer, stop chasing the negative leaders in my life, and cross off learn to do a cartwheel from my bucket list.

Words

I updated my Travel Archives with stories and recommendations for Japan · Tokyo and Sri Lanka · Colombo.

If you only have time for one story, make it #456 or #437.

And, if you missed last month’s letter, you can now also catch it on the blog Self-Care.

📸 In case you forgot what I look like, here’s a photo of me taken in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago.

With sprinkles of pumpkin spice,
and so much love,
Mirha
✨

P.S. If you happen to live in Boracay, let’s get together for eggnog.