Week 8 Growth Mindset

GM Strengths

In general, I'm a pretty growth-mindset-oriented person. I really gravitate towards the idea of self-improvement and enjoy learning about a lot of different things. I accept that change is a necessary part of life. Though it is often very hard to deal with, I ultimately think change is for the good.

GM Weaknesses

This section is going to be somewhat longer because I am a persistent self-critic. Whenever it comes to school, I have a hard time keeping my growth mindset. With due dates and midterms, it's hard for me not to think of everything as a grade. I often have to remind myself why I'm even in school. I have passions in my schoolwork, but I tend to lose sight of them when there's a cold, numerical evaluation attached to every effort I put forth.

The Next Step

For the next half of the semester, I'm going to try to tie my passions out of school to my academic coursework. This will require more effort, certainly, but I think it could work to my advantage. Since I have to spent a certain amount of time on academics, I might as well try and enjoy myself and push myself to do better.

With this, I would also like to stop neglecting my outside hobbies and passions. I can't remember the last time I read a book for fun or played a new video game.

I miss books.

Image via pexels

Week 8 Reflections

1. Reading

I've done a pretty good job of taking notes on the readings. I don't take notes on every story, but I try to find interesting narrative choices or characters to cling onto.

I will say that sometimes I'm not always looking forward to a story. In the weeks where I didn't write a story, a large part of it was because I didn't really have any inspiration from the readings I did.

For the next half of the semester, I'm going to try out a few different note-taking styles instead of just trying to take notes on every story within a reading.

2. Writing

My stories have really been hit or miss. Sometimes I get really into the idea that I've thought up, but other times, it seems like a complete struggle to get words out. I'm not sure why this is. I think I just need to start doing more of it and maybe increase the quality of my note-taking.

If I spread out my story writing over a few days, it should be easier. It'll be like I'm exercising my writing muscle more than just doing it in one large chunk over the week.

3. Connecting

I have a hard time giving criticism. I often find very easy mistakes, like typos and misspellings, but the bigger mistakes, like story choices and writing advice I'm not so good at. It might be due to the fact that I'm not a great writer myself, but really I have no idea. Also a lot of this stuff is subjective, which makes it harder to give valid criticism.

via Flickr user Celestine Chua