It’s that time of the year when I think of my word for the year — the one word to rule them all (well, at least how I live my life for 2023). After thinking about it for a few days last December, I finally chose my word. The word that I chose was DETERMINED.
I am determined.
I am determined to reach my financial goals this year. Last year, we started the year with the entire family having COVID. This really derailed me from the financial plans that we had. It was quite a rocky start to the year, but that didn’t stop me. Although I was 30% short of my financial targets, it’s fine. I still got to at least save and invest last year.
I am determined to help Zeeka enjoy learning via homeschooling. Last year, we also decided that we’ll definitely homeschool Zeeka for 4th grade. We finished two quarters already, and so far, it has been fun. Daddy EJ teaches Math, Science, CF, Digital Literacy and I teach Language, Reading, Filipino, Social Studies and Art. We’ve all been enjoying it!
I am determined to help our employees become more skilled and fulfilled. This year, I think my theme for work is to help the members of our team grow — in skills, knowledge, confidence, experience, maturity, etc. I’ve been reading this book No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention and it has made me realize that you have to trust your people fully, so that they can shine.
I am determined to be a loving wife. We’ve been married for 13 years, and a lot of things have changed. With 2 kids now, we hardly have time for ourselves. But, this year, I am looking forward to more alone time with the hubby — more date nights!
So that’s it…
If you want to read my past articles on One Word, here you go:
What’s your one word for 2021? I’ve been choosing one word for the past several years. For 2020, I chose the word COMMIT. I think I did a good job of sticking to my commitments. I successfully committed to creating more Youtube videos. For 2020, I have created and published more than 70 videos with the intent of helping people learn something new everyday.
As for my health and physical fitness, for most of the year, I have stuck to “mostly” a plant based diet. I occasionally ate fish towards the end of the year and let go a little bit this December and ate meat. But as for exercise, I have continuously moved and exercised even while at home.
For my one word for 2021, I intentionally chose RESET. I chose this word because I want to learn and do a lot of new things this year. I learned a lot of things last year, and I enjoyed it. From 2013 to early 2020, I focused on helping other people learn. Since I needed to make learning events for my business, learning became too mechanical. And maybe, joy was even stripped off a little bit from it (for me). This 2020 though, I had so much fun again focusing on my own personal growth and learning.
For Manila Workshops, I decided to stop creating learning public learning events already. I think I will stick with it being a community where people can share their events and learn from one another. 2021 will be a year of new learnings for a lot of people, and I’m hopeful and positive that this will be a good year for all of us.
To start the year right, I started planning for the year. Some of you may say that it may be useless to do this since a lot of our plans really didn’t pan out last 2020, but personally, planning and goal setting gives me a sense of control (over at least some stuff that I can control).
I asked a lot of people to answer a survey recently and I love all the plans that they shared. In the survey, I found out that most of the people (got around 28 people o respond) who answered the survey had these things are their priorities: 1) Go for additional sources of income or grow income; 2) Better themselves (become healthier or learn a new skill) and 3) Want to travel or relocate.
If you are curious to what my plans are, well, they’re really simple goals. They are very aligned with my one word for 2021.
Extra Sources of Income while Having Fun and Learning
This busy bee here, apart from handling Taxumo, plans to just focus on content creation as an extra source of income. In 2020, I think I have done a good job of creating fun, engaging, and educational content for my viewers. I continuously want to improve, so please do let me know if there are topics you want to discuss. Feel free to engage with me on IG, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok and Twitch.
I also discovered how fun it is to stream games. A balance of work and play is really necessary! So you will definitely see a lot of Mommy Ginger in the world of streaming this 2021. Please do follow me on TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/gingerarboleda
Increase Savings and Investment Rate
An additional financial goal that I have is to increase my savings rate. Here is a short clip on what savings rate is.
To help others find accountability partners for their savings and investment goals, #TeamArbo has started a 52 week Saving Challenge on Mommy Ginger’s Facebook page. It’s not too late to join! When you follow the Facebook Page, every week (Fridays), it will notify you to add to your savings. Once done, just comment “DONE” on the post reminder. Check out the mechanics here: https://fb.watch/2MOo6KLMYe/
Declutter
Another thing that I plan to do this year is to fix and declutter our home. We have limited space so we really need to think long and hard before adding additional stuff. I really want to take a step closer towards becoming a minimalist this year. I just think that there are a lot of “wasted” things around us — things that we don’t really appreciate as much that can be the source of delight for other people. Let’s see if this year can take me a step closer into becoming a minimalist.
Learning
As for learning, these are the topics that I want to learn more of this year: streaming, optimizing time, content creation, setting up / building my own pc and more of the usual things I love learning about (marketing, branding, investing and productivity).
I turned on my Skillshare account again for the entire year. Skillshare is a platform where you can learn about these topics that I mentioned above. A lot of the people I look up to are on Skillshare. If you haven’t signed up to Skillshare yet, you can do so by visiting this link: skillshare-ambassador.pxf.io/ginger This link gives you 14 days FREE trial so you can sign up now.
That’s it! Most of my goals are really simple since this year will be about resetting and learning new things.
What about you? What is your one word for 2021? What are your own goals? Hope you can share it with us!
In life, there is comfort in knowing that we can easily change our minds later on. If we feel that we can’t decide, oftentimes, we don’t. We don’t take action and we just wait for things to “fall in place” — in a place where we are more comfortable to make decisions.
And sometimes, even if we have already decided, we oftentimes change our minds.
Not too sure if we want to eat burger or pizza? No worries, I can easily change my mind later on. Thinking about completing a task today? Oh, I’ll just to that tomorrow, so I can finish watching my favorite series today on Netflix.
This flexibility is great, but it can also be the root cause of inaction and lack of decisiveness. It can also lead to lack of accountability. We comfortably blame forces beyond our control for our lack of commitment.
“Wala pa akong pera…”
“Wala pa akong time…”
“Tsaka nalang pag di na ako busy…”
“Tsaka nalang pag di na ako stressed…”
“I’ll work on it if I’m in the mood…”
Have you ever said these words?
For the longest time, I, too, have been failing to commit to a few things in life. I always give being ‘busy’ as a reason to not to commit. So this year, I’ve chosen COMMIT as my one word.
As I analyzed the past year (2019), I successfully started going to the gym. The reason why I regularly go is that I book sessions with a personal trainer the week before. I know how valuable time is that I also value the time of others. So, when I tell Coach Daevid that I’ll be there on Monday and Thursday, I make sure that I don’t book any meetings or work during the times that I commit to going to the gym to have the session.
This made me think that if I actually commit to doing more things, I would probably have a better year ahead.
So this year, I won’t make excuses anymore for things that I need to do. I won’t make excuses for not meeting friends and for not going to social functions. I won’t make excuses for fixing stuff that I need to accomplish.
I will make this year awesome by COMMITTING and sticking to my commitments.
How about you? What is your one word for this 2020? Share it with me by commenting or posting on social media with #GINspiration 🙂
