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:
I’m finally posting my one word for 2022 article! I usually post my one word article on the first week of January, but this year made it seem impossible to be productive during this first week. I’ve been reading a lot of posts of family, friends and random people sharing that either they have COVID or people that they know have COVID. In our case, our house helper went on vacation and was supposed to come back this second week of January. During her quarantine period though (we asked her to isolate herself first in a different place), she found out she had COVID.
Zeeka also had fever last Friday, which led us to think if she may have contacted the virus during one of our get – togethers with family. She’s better today so we’re 80% sure that it’s probably not COVID. Although, we will still have her tested this Wednesday (that’s the earliest schedule we could get) for us to know if we still need to continue isolating her and daddy from me and the baby.
So about my one word for 2022, I was thinking long and hard of what that word may be for this year. This first week of January might have inspired me to choose this word.
My one word for 2022 is tenacity.
To tell you honestly, I really felt like a slacker in 2021. 2020 was all go-go-go and rah-rah-rah for me. Last year was a bit of a challenge.
Yes, I could blame the fact that for the first quarter of last year, I was so nauseous because of the pregnancy that I could hardly do anything. I could also blame the fact that during the last trimester, I was having a hard time moving because of the weight. BUT, I now that I could have done better. I know that I was excusing myself from achieving things because I was pregnant. My husband would definitely argue though and say that “making a human inside my belly” is a great thing! 🙂
But this 2022 though, I am bent on making things happen. Tenacity is the quality of being very determined and I am that now. It’s also the fact of continuing to exist. I really want to make my presence felt this year though the work that I do.
I am so excited for the things that I have planned for 2022 for my work in Taxumo, for my relationship with my kids and husband, for Manila Workshops and for my career as a content creator.
I know that 2022 will be a great year even if we had a rocky start!
How about you? What is your one word for 2022?
Check out my past one words… (I started writing my one word yearly since 2015)
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!
As a professional blogger, I need to be observant. Observant of the things happening to different people, observant of what the latest trends are and observant of what will come out in the market and the different innovations that products bring. That’s one skill as a “freelancer” that I have and I need.
This past year (2018) though, I’ve been looking out a lot. And looking at other people’s lives didn’t make me feel good, and it just made me compare my life with them. Obviously, I’m smart enough to know that what you see in social media is not the entire reality. But, looking out still didn’t make me feel good about myself.
Aside from looking out, I was so caught up with just doing things for the sake of just doing it. I got caught up with my day to day tasks as an entrepreneur and a freelancer that I forgot to take care of myself. I also “semi” forgot how feeling passionate about my craft was. I don’t know if this was just the feeling of being burnt out, or if this was being frustrated that things didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to, or if it was just me being impatient, but I hated the feeling.
I’m not a complainer. I just end up feeling tired. Although, I am thankful for having a super duper great support system (family and friends who are uberly great!), but I end up tired and feeling sad about my life.
The thing that helped me a lot this year are our prayers at night and my quiet time in the mornings when I run. In the evening, we take turns in the family to say what we are thankful for. Then in the morning, I love the stillness. I love that everything is so quiet, and it would be just me and my thoughts.
I’m grateful that I just need to look out my window to feel inspired!
So my resolution for this year for both my personal and professional life as a freelancer and entrepreneur is to do more looking in rather than looking out. I promise to do more introspection. I know that this will lead me to become more self-aware and self-awareness is the key to happiness and success. Why? When you truly know who you are, you capitalize on your strengths. You become happier with yourself, and when you are happy, you make other people happy.
So this 2019, I promise to:
Look at my strengths and weaknesses again and use it or act on it.
Try new things.
Blog about what I feel and what I think about things more frequently.
Set aside time to improve myself and my craft.
Spend more time with family and friends and have deeper conversations.
Build deeper relationships with people.
Continue to fix systems and process for my freelancing career and my business so that I free up time — time that I can use as “ME-Time”
I know that by doing this, I’ll be a better wife, mom, freelancer, entrepreneur, etc. I’ll be good at whatever role I need to fulfil in 2019.
Last year, I was on an emotional roller coaster. Some days were filled with joy and happiness and some days were just bad. In some days, I felt as if I were on top of the world, while on other days, I felt like quitting. I thought that being busy would make me NOT think about things, but it actually made things worst. My emotions rose and dipped at extreme levels.
Welcoming the New Year wasn’t easy for me either. This is the reason why this (first blog of the year) came in pretty late in January. By the way, I can’t believe that it’s almost the 15th of the month. Anyway, going back to my story, it wasn’t a “happy” new year for me. First of all, joy wasn’t in the air when I noticed that my blog was hacked by some random hacker. This made my host take down my blog for almost a month.
Next, the yaya that we had for almost 5 years just didn’t return after going on vacation. I was furious! It wasn’t so much that she was gone, but it was more of that she didn’t have the decency to tell us that she wasn’t coming back.
And then, the worst thing that happened, was that Zeeka got sick. It’s the worst feeling in the world for a parent to have to bring her kid to the emergency room (again — twice within a month) after having intermittent fever for 5 days. Oh myyy!
But then, that’s life right?
You might be wondering, “then why the heck is her one word JOY after having a few episodes of unfortunate and definitely, sad circumstances?”
I really thought about this for a long time. For the past few days, this sat as a draft in my blog. I wasn’t too sure about the word either, until…
Until one day, I listened to the blink on Blinkist of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s all Small Stuff by Richard Carlson. That’s when I realized that being happy or joyful is a choice that we need to make. And I also realized that the things that we deem to be urgent, important and life changing or threatening aren’t always such a big deal.
Maliit na bagay lang pala.
There are things that we don’t have control over. There are things that happen to us that we obviously didn’t wish for, but what we can control is how we react.
So, what I did FIRST was I analyzed why I felt the way that I felt. What I found out was that…
1) Hacking incident – I felt so sad that people would waste time hacking into other random sites of strangers. I was feeling that way because I didn’t know if we would be able to restore it (which we did! Yey!)
2) Yaya Incident – I felt furious because I hated adjusting again to a new rhythm and new way of doing things again, especially that I have a ton of things to do.
3) Zeeka’s sickness – I felt like I didn’t pay much attention to Zeeka last year and I felt like I wasn’t a good mom. That made me hate myself.
So there. I analysed why I was feeling this way, and it was because of things that I could actually control. So what if my blog was down? I could converse with my readers via social media. So what if I had to adjust to a new way of doing things again? It’s not as if I didn’t have new things and ideas every time. Haha! So what was the difference, really? So what if I failed last year at being a mom? I still have a lot of time fixing my mistakes and focusing more on Zeeka this year. Maybe this scenario of being yaya-less is actually a blessing!
So this is why I chose the word Joy. I need to find those little things that I can be grateful for. This word that I have chosen will constantly remind me that life is great. Living is great. Even with the many challenges that I face, I know that I’m strong and I know that I will make the most out of it.
Living a life with no regrets will bring Joy. Saying I have loved will bring Joy. Striving to be the best that I can be will make me happy. Picking myself up after failure will make me love life more.
