You're Not Always Going To Be Motivated. So You Must Learn To Be Disciplined.

You're not always going to be motivated. So you must learn to be disciplined.

Hey, please read this, just getting this all off my chest helps a lot itself.

I am Layla, a 17 year old student from India. I currently study at Woodstock International School, which is one of the schools here in Mussoorie, India. I've been inactive recently as I was very busy with my A levels exams and my household situation. My mom is from Bangladesh while my father is Indian. Recently, due to him getting unemployed 3 months ago, our family has been going through some very tough times. I in my school am on scolarship and much of my tution fee gets waived off but recently our condition has worsened and my parents are in a lot of mental stress due to our school fees (me and my 2 other siblings) as a major part of their expenditure are payments for our education. I really dont want my education to suffer and can't see my parents stressing about my tuition fee.

11,000 INR is needed which is around 135 USD

Paypal

This is my family's account (my fathers') for all of the donations and incase this doesn't seem to work or you need some more information, please feel free to mssg me or send an ask.

Sorry for making this long, but i really had to swallow my pride while making this. Please help out if you can, and again, thanks for reading. Every type of donation or reblog would really mean and matter a lot. <3

i disappeared because i have to take a lot of exams this month. sorry for the absence. i'm praying to pass the math exam tomorrow.

Prioritising: how to prioritise + use it effectively to take control of your life.

Hi girlies🐩💗 So yesterday i was incredibly lazy and unproductive and pathetic. I didn’t do any work and i was mostly on the screens. The worst part about it is that it was unintentional. Meaning that if it was planned as a “off day” bc i did a bunch of work that week, it would be fine. But it wasn’t planned. And it felt utterly horrible.

So i decided to take control of my life because i have no one to blame but MYSELF. I am in complete control of myself so now i am going to use that to my best advantage. It’s time to…

✨prioritise what matters✨

This is a step-by-step guide to how to prioritise what actually matters to you and then acting on it. So without further ado, lettuce(random pun sorry) begin :)

Step 1: figure out whats important to you/ your goals.

What’s important to you in life? Is it being online and scrolling on your phone all day? Or is it getting good grades, staying healthy and happy? What is it? Identify this first.

For me, its:

Time with loved ones

Enough sleep

Good grades + being smart & educated

Looking and feeling good + taking care of myself

Having hobbies & skills

God

This is the first step to learning how to prioritising things. It’s not about doing a bunch of hard work for something that you dont even care about, it’s so that you can do a bunch of hard work for something you do care about, so you’re working towards a goal.

Step 2: make an action plan to achieve/ accomplish these.

So now that you know whats really important and what matters to you (aka your goals), create some bullet points/ things you can do to achieve those goals.

For example;

Goal: spending more time with loved ones

Spend time with my sibling

Talk more to my parents

Call grandma / friends

Goal: getting high grades + being smart & educated

Study study study. Study for tests at least a week in advance

Read a lot. Not just what you normally read, read outside your comfort zone! (So for me this would be history, classics, arts & fashion, etc.)

Listen to podcasts about different things

Goal: feeling & looking good + taking care of myself

Wash hair 2x a week

Skincare

Pamper yourself + self care days

Exercise

Going outside/ walking

Posture!! (Calling YOU out)

Final: execution

Once you know these mini goals/ habits/ steps you need to take, then its time for the most important part:

Execution.

Doing all this, is completely USELESS if you don’t apply it to your life. So now it’s time to actually do it.

“B-b-but i dont have time!”

Um okay.. but you have time for scrolling? Use this thing i once heard called “time stealing”.

Whenever you catch yourself scrolling or doing something unintentionally unproductive, then stop yourself and use that time instead on doing something that moves you towards your goal.

Having the steps you can take to reach those goals written down somewhere means that whenever you feel bored or need something productive to do, you have those things to go to!

Xoxo, Vanilla.

starve your ego, find your peace

these are my personal thoughts, an outburst. if you want to share your opinion in the comments, i welcome it, but please be kind. if you just want to insult, go elsewhere. if you're not interested, don't read <3 i remind you that english is not my first language, so there may be a few mistakes.

ego, what an interesting word. it is a latin lemma which literally means "I", it indicates

the self, especially with a sense of self-importance.

(psychology, freudian) the most central part of the mind, which mediates with one's surroundings.

a person's self-esteem and opinion of themselves.

in a society like ours, we fight against our ego every day, the anxiety of constantly being in the spotlight, the overwhelming thought of having all eyes on us.

the idea we have of ourselves is the strongest chain that prevents us from freeing ourselves from this mental cage. both positively and negatively. if you have a distorted idea of yourself and low self-esteem, you will never be able to become your higher-self, to take that extra step that allows you to transform your daydreams into a solid reality, if you think you are unintelligent, you will tend to take this truth for granted. "i'm not smart enough for this" and you'll give up your dreams of a higher education, or of getting all A's on your finals, or of having a great and fulfilling job.

but sometimes we think too highly of ourselves too. i always joke that i make study plans like i'm a genius who studies 200 pages in a day, but the truth is, i'm not joking at all.

many of you will recognize themselves in the stereotype of the burned-out gifted kid, especially when you move to a higher level of education (from middle school to high school, or from high school to university) and at that moment all certainty of your acclaimed intelligence collapses. you are no longer in the pond with the small fish, now you are in the big tank with the big fish, relating to a much bigger world (at least in italy, the difference between high school and university is abysmal) and your brain will do everything to maintain an accurate simulacrum of your self-image.

in fact, your brain spends less energy processing two pieces of information that agrees rather than disagreeing information and since our biology is based on self-preservation, your mind will do everything to preserve its rightness. when i started university i was incredibly afraid of taking my first exam, why? because i didn't want to find out that i wasn't good enough for a more advanced education, that i wasn't the straight A's student i thought i was.

but waiting for the fear to go away will lead to you staying in the same place forever, because the fear only goes away if you face what you are afraid of, and yes, being afraid of exams may seem silly, but i'm sure many people who follow this blog will understand what it means to identify so much with your grades and to crave academic validation more than anything else.

so i did it, even though i was scared, i had to have the certainty that this was the right place for me, i studied hard, and i definitely rocked my exams. but then the spring exam session arrived, and the fear returned. tired and burned-out from the winter session i had little or no desire to study, so when the exam date approached, i was afraid of not achieving the same results as just two months before, so i postponed, i procrastinated, until the day before, i knew i had to study otherwise i wouldn't pass the exam, yet my brain continued to do everything to protect itself, to protect that completely crazy idea of myself that i could study the entire program in two days (i wish). i don't even have social media (tumblr and pinterest excluded), which is why i found every excuse possible not to study. i didn't want to sit at my desk and realize that i wasn't going to pass that exam, that i should have studied harder, try harder.

that is until i realized that it wasn't laziness or procrastination that was stopping me, or rather, procrastination was just a symptom of a bigger cause: a distorted image of myself. understanding this in my first year of university will perhaps change my next academic years, or perhaps not. i don't know how many of you have drawn these things or reached these conclusions, i just hope that you soon understand that you are not lazy, nor procrastinators, you are just humans who are afraid of failure like all other humans.

the problem arises now, how to change this image? i don't know yet, honestly, but i won't let it stop me from living my life.

uptade in the end i was so fucking lucky and got a 30/30 on my exam yesterday, but still at the cost of a lot of sanity, sleep and unjustified stress.

gentle reminder that things take time. whatever it is you’re working on, tangible or otherwise, be graceful with yourself. it will happen in its own time, which is also your time.