GERARDO: So I think a lot of students try their best to either keep an online calendar or to keep a journal. I do a little bit of both. And so I can probably, not necessarily– like I can say that one uniform thing about keeping a journal, keeping an online calendar is that at the end of the week, sometimes when you’re planning out your next week or something, what ends up happening is you look at your last week and you go, oh, man, look at all these things I didn’t do, or I look at all these things I had to move around.
But something that I feel like a lot of people don’t do is they don’t look back at their week and they say, look at all these things I did do. And so something else that I found very, very helpful when I was trying to kind of go on this journey of self-compassion was to kind of like, instead of doing a week in review, things I need to do, it was more like a week in review, things I did do. And I would write down things like, oh, today I was able to run– like this week I was able to run all these interesting experiments, and I went out with friends this week, and I also, like, you know, went exercising for this many days a week.
I think a lot of times it’s really easy to focus on the things that take us back a couple of steps, when in reality there’s a lot of things that push us forward during the week. And there’s a lot of things that we do that are really great.