This year as a grade 10 student I pushed myself towards new goals and new challenges. This year I got to learn that I have the ability and skillset to handle responsibility and commitment to specific things. Before I would be often not confident in my overall social skills and scared of taking responsibility in fear of failure and me having to face the blame for the outcome, it was a fear I didn’t think about defeating until I started looking at my peers and seeing how they deal with such circumstances. I eventually decided to push myself forward because I realised that school is the best opportunity to learn how to handle this role and can save you time in the future. Taking responsibility and being able to help your team are valuable assets to be seen as a valuable member of a community and can push you further in your life, and I wanted to get that opportunity until I missed it.
Coming from a big family I realised the importance of taking responsibility of not only yourself when your parents cannot but also being responsible for your younger siblings. Although not a very exact reference to working with my peers it still taught me the lesson of that the people you work with will not always be working in your favour, which was a challenge getting used to and building patience without the will of giving up. Being the eldest child I had to learn quick to take care of myself when my younger siblings came along, the importance of self-awareness plays a big role in understanding the difficulties and advantages of being yourself and how to play along to it.
My aspiration which I could see as the hardest to tackle in terms of its vagueness is being good at communicating with many people and having the energy to not get tired of it. I am not the most social person and sometimes it could be that I don’t have the willingness to talk to others out of fear or just not having enough energy to commit to different relationships. In grade 9 I learnt that having a good friendship is very emotionally taxing, this was a new discovery to me because I always thought that people were born a specific attitude which ultimately determined how many friends they would have. But after getting to meet new people and find some more new friends I realised that anyone can be social it is just depending on your own ability of put in the work.
Unlike my other aspirations this is the most challenging because it focuses on emotional wellbeing and how to control that, we are often told and shown how to be physically well kept but managing your emotions within a relationships and how to control is not as popular and as straight forward. This makes me see it as more of an intriguing challenge, since I know how to be kept physically well-kept I want to learn how to keep myself emotionally controlled and how to work with them instead of against.
I could start working on this goal by closely analysing my emotions and me more aware of them, for example consider: “Why do I feel this, why this reaction specifically? What caused this? How can I deal with this in the most productive way?”. As well as it being similar to physical education I will push myself to endure something emotionally that I would be not be able to without backing out. I have already practiced this before, for example when it came to political debates on controversial topics I would listen to the opposing opinion with the aim of being able to show understanding and not backing out and having a big reaction. This however should be carefully worked on as to not push myself too far at once but gradually build resilience and confidence. This overall would hopefully build emotional intelligence which I could use to be more in-tune with my emotions since they have a big impact on my every-day life, and learning how to work with them can improve a magnitude of things.