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Showing posts from August, 2020

How I use journaling to pull myself out of a rut

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  Journaling is one of those things that I hear about everywhere, but I’ve never really had the discipline to instil as a daily habit. I’ve dabbled many times but usually only when I’m knees deep in stress or a rut and writing out my thoughts and reflecting has never failed to pull me out. So, journaling has always been my “in case of emergency button” to give me a kickstart in breaking a bad habit or building a positive one. Recently, I’ve also tried to adopt it almost daily and found it super useful as a tool for self-reflection and optimising productivity as well as generating creative ideas. I believe there is power in the process of writing and externalising your thoughts, to me it is almost like giving myself advice and a conversation with myself. Most of the time when we seek advice, we are just confirming beliefs we already hold that either haven’t been put into words yet or that we are not ready to act upon. Therefore, often times looking inwards and laying out your own wisd

Calorie Tracking and Intermittent Fasting - How I made a profound improvement to my diet

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I’ve had this goal in mind ever since early 2019, I knew that tracking my diet and regulating my eating schedule was important but I would always say to myself “I don’t have time” or “I’m too busy”, I deluded myself into thinking that it was too hard and not worth the time. Excuses, costly ones too. In retrospection, not only does tracking my diet only take about an extra 20 minutes every day to do, it is an investment that would elevate literally every major aspect of my life I value most: school, fitness and sleep.   Why I started doing this I’ve always been interested in nutrition and fitness, I’d listen to podcasts or watch a couple of videos regularly on dieting but have never mustered the discipline to meaningfully apply any of the knowledge until now. I’ve had a decent-ish diet, I’m not really big on junk food, I never drink soft drinks and I stay away from most sugary snacks, so this isn’t a zero-to-hero story. But I’ve always known I could do better. I’ve put in a lot

A 99+ Student's Reflection on VCE - Advice and experiences

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  My Reflections on VCE   Being at home gave me a lot of time to think and reflect lately, I’ve always been a reflective person and this is my way of learning from my own experiences as well as a form of thank you to all the people who have lent me advice, help and inspiration during my journey in VCE. As I can not directly repay them for their time and energy, I hope instead to pass on the favour and extend my experiences, advices and reflections from my VCE journey, to those who need it. NOTE, this is not content or subject specific advice but rather a collection of the most valuable insights and tools from my experience that has helped me achieve at a high level.   Context : I graduated in 2019 from JMSS with an ATAR of 99.20 and is currently a first year Biomedical Science student at Monash. I studied Methods, English, Physics, Chemistry, Specialist Maths and Chinese SLA.   The mindset My goal was simple: to achieve the highest ATAR I could without sacrificing my he