dream girl diaries

🪻🩵🩰🕊️🌷🪞 xxiv falling in love with myself

[iammyownshootingstar]

🪻get to know me🪻

natalia, art history student

infj, enneagram 4w5

gemini (may 25), scorpio moon and cancer rising

🪻things I like, hobbies, and interests🪻

kpop and kdramas

reading and writing

making art and being creative!!

spending time with my friends, family, and dog Larry

learning languages

🪻about this blog🪻

I will be posting and reblogging posts related to self-improvement, health and beauty, psychology, and achieving goals

I made this blog with the intention to support myself and provide inspiration in my personal journey

I hope to become more confident and will respond to advice as best I can

🪻other important info🪻

this is not my main blog, so I follow from @casualinfj

posts made by me will be tagged #natalia speaks (as long as I remember to do so hehe)

I don’t currently have a schedule to posting, nor do I have a regular tagging system for categorizing posts, but will update if this changes

I’m always looking for more friends and people to be inspired by, so interact if we have similar blogs <3

thank you for being here!! here’s to our dream selves🩵

updated 18.12.2023

[theambitiouswoman]

Toxic ambition vs Healthy ambition

1. Why you’re doing it

Toxic: To prove yourself

Healthy: To grow yourself

2. How you feel

Toxic: Never enough

Healthy: Proud + peaceful

3. Your pace

Toxic: Rush, rush, rush

Healthy: Steady + balanced

4. Self talk

Toxic: “I’m behind”

Healthy: “I’m on my path”

5. Rest

Toxic: Feels guilty resting

Healthy: Knows rest is power

6. Failure

Toxic: Takes it personal

Healthy: Learns and moves on

7. Comparison

Toxic: Always comparing

Healthy: Focused on self

8. Relationships

Toxic: Uses or neglects people

Healthy: Builds real connections

9. Boundaries

Toxic: Says yes to everything

Healthy: Protects time + energy

10. Success

Toxic: Never satisfied

Healthy: Celebrates wins

11. Identity

Toxic: “I am my success”

Healthy: “I am more than this”

12. Energy

Toxic: Burnt out

Healthy: Energized

[2productive]

[2productive]

Some notes on habits…

* Build routines that still work on your worst day, not just your best one.

* Decide in advance what "good enough" looks like when your energy is low.

* Keep your standards flexible but your commitment non-negotiable.

* Notice the excuses that you frequently make because they usually follow a predictable pattern that you need to learn to break.

* Reduce the number of decisions you make daily so your goals don't compete with decision fatigue. Put your goal related habits on autopilot, ideally as early in the day as possible. You should never have to guess or ‘figure out’ what you should be doing.

* Let your goals determine your actions instead of letting your mood decide them. You don’t study because you feel like it, you study because you want to be a competent lawyer.

* Create a ‘minimum’ version of your routine that keeps your streak alive. Literally the most embarrassingly low effort task that just barely counts as doing the work. But you are indeed doing the work and you haven’t abandoned your mission, and on days like these that's all that matters. Keep moving forward even if it’s millimeter by millimeter.

* Stop checking to see if you feel like it before you do something. Who cares, just do it.

* Learn to recognize the difference between needing rest and simply seeking comfort. Half the time you take a social media break while studying isn’t because you truly needed a break, but because you are experiencing the friction of not knowing something and are retreating to something easy and comfortable. 

* Pay attention to the first habit you abandon, because it often predicts what comes next. Like an evil domino falling. 

* Make restarting/continuing so simple that one missed day never becomes a missed month. Remember, the itty bittiest actions can be the spark that's needed to ignite big changes. Sounds cliche but it’s true!!

* Judge each day by whether you honored your commitment, even in a lowered capacity, not whether you made jaw dropping strides.

[2productive]

Tracking progress without becoming obsessed

* Track overall trends, not daily fluctuations.

* Measure your consistency before you measure outcomes. Sometimes progress is stagnant or delayed, but if you are consistently doing the work that moves you forward, that’s all that matters and the progress will catch up in due time.

* Use your progress to gather information, not to belittle yourself. You can neutrally acknowledge where you haven’t been doing your best and then improve. There’s no need to beat yourself up in the process.

* Take progress photos because mirrors and memories can be misleading.

* Remember that healthy progress is rarely perfectly linear, especially if it’s a long term goal.

* When you reach a plateau, consider that a test of whether you will continue to be consistent or not. It’s pretty much the breaking point between the have’s and the have-not’s.

* Build a life where healthy habits become automatic, and progress becomes a natural byproduct. Being super smart comes from an education-focused lifestyle. Being someone who reads 100 books a year comes from a reading-focused lifestyle. Maintaining your ideal body comes from a health and fitness focused lifestyle. You should just strive for the long term lifestyle of doing the habits, the outcome will happen on it’s own.

[kosmogrl]

deciding one day that you want to build a life for yourself is so scary. like damn I really want to live… I’m new to this. where do I even begin

[2productive]

Starting over resuming after falling off track

* Accept that setbacks are part of the process and are experienced by pretty much every person who has dared to go after something they want. You haven’t failed. You just were on an unplanned break. Resume. Now. Literally right now.

* Focus on your very next forward-progressing choice instead of trying to fix everything at once. Like what can you do in the next 5 minutes to get back on the wagon. 

* Identify what caused you to fall off track so you can plan for it next time and avoid it easier.

* Begin with small, manageable habits, not an overly ambitious plan.

* Clear your environment of distractions and make good choices easier. This includes your digital environment.

* Stop waiting for the "perfect" day, week, or month to begin again. Now is the time to take even a tiny step forward. 

* Use your previous progress as evidence that you are capable of succeeding, not as proof of your failure. 

* Set one simple goal for today and build momentum from there. I’m gonna keep telling you to do something today because you will not get back on track without action. Do it todayyyy.

* Always avoid “punishing” yourself with extreme diets/workouts, or overly rigid schedules. Why would you punish yourself for getting back up and moving forward? You should be congratulating yourself, silly. Don’t focus on how long you were down or lost progress, only focus on how you didn’t stay down and are trying again.

* Remember that consistency is built by returning to your habits repeatedly, not by never making mistakes. Literally everyone is making mistakes left and right but we get to the finish line by never giving up on our habits, even if it takes two or three times longer to reach success than we expected it to.

* Treat every setback as information that helps you create a stronger plan moving forward. Learn about yourself and what throws you off. Make a plan for yourself with this newfound knowledge in mind.

[2productive]

Keeping promises to yourself 

* Start with small habits that are realistic and easy to follow through on consistently.

* Treat commitments to yourself with the same respect you give commitments to other people like your best friends, your boss, your professor, or that boy you have a crush on. You always drop everything to do stuff for him, but not for yourself? Curious.

* Always always always focus on consistency. One missed day does not erase your progress!

* Write down your promises so they feel more concrete and harder to ignore.

* Be specific about what you will do, when you will do it, and how often.

* Avoid making promises based on motivation alone, which is fickle and fleeting. Create personal, lifestyle, and routine changes to support them.

* Follow through even when you don't feel like it, just like how you show up to work when you don’t feel like it and you pay your rent when you don’t want to. Do that for yourself. 

* If a goal becomes unrealistic, adjust it instead of abandoning it completely. It’s good to be malleable for the right reasons.

* Remember that each time you keep your word to yourself, you strengthen your confidence and self-respect.

[2productive]

For those who self-sabotage on your health journey 🍵

* Identify your common self-sabotage patterns and notice what situations, emotions, or thoughts tend to trigger them. Prepare a battle plan ahead of time when you are in the right frame of mind.

* One off-track meal or missed workout does not erase your progress. 

* Set realistic goals that fit your current lifestyle rather than aiming for an all-or-nothing approach that requires an insane level of discipline and long-term self denial that you have literally never possessed.

* Keep healthy foods easy, quick and convenient while making less healthy choices less accessible.

* Create a backup plan for busy or stressful days, such as healthier take-out choices, pre-packaged meals kept in the freezer, and 10 minute equipment-free bedroom workout videos saved in your playlist.

* Never think that you’re above celebrating your small wins, including drinking more water, adding vegetables to meals, or completing a quick workout. Even if it's the same old same old. You should keep celebrating these new habits because a year or two ago you were striving to be this version of yourself.

* Avoid using food as a reward or punishment.

* Track habits instead of just outcomes so you can recognize progress even when results are slow.

* Remember your deeper reasons for wanting to be healthier and revisit them regularly.

* Surround yourself with supportive people who encourage your goals and healthy habits, even through the content you consume.

* Acknowledge your habits that lead to a setback and focus on your next positive choice rather than dwelling on mistakes. Get up, move forward.

[2productive]

Becoming the person who reaches their goals

* Focus on being the kind of person who follows through, not just someone who feels good setting goals.

* Keep promises to yourself. You set out to do them for a reason so stop delaying your own happiness and success.

* Make your goals part of your daily routine rather than relying on motivation.

* Take action even if you don’t feel ready. It’ll probably turn out better than you expected.

* Stop delaying progress by making purchases. Yes, you can work out in your comfy clothes you already own. You don’t have to wait until next week when your skims package arrives. Get a week of progress in the meantime.

* Small efforts repeated daily create big changes so start prioritizing consistency above all.

* Setbacks aren’t failure, just hiccups, so drink some water and overcome it.

* Replace "I have to" with "I choose to" to strengthen ownership of your decisions.

* Spend more time tracking your habits than obsessing over outcomes.

* Surround yourself with people, environments, and content that support your goals.

* Celebrate the progress itself, not just milestones, so you stay encouraged along the way.

* Stop waiting for the perfect time and make the most of the time you have today.

* View every choice as a vote for the person you're becoming.

* Remember that lasting success usually comes from making “hard” things into a daily habit so that it becomes a natural lifestyle, not just a 1 month phase where you locked in.

[academic-vampire]

I am so thankful that books & reading exist

[free-my-mindd]

THIS

[thesophistiicate]

the good life is something you have to DO to achieve. my partner teaches philosophy in high school and noticed his students struggling with the concept that a good life takes action. “ah,” i said. “i noticed this too. some replies on my blog act like you’ve done a hate crime when you suggest a good life takes responsibility for the self and intentional action, it’s not something simply given to you by others.”

this should be common sense, taught to you by parents and books. a life you love will not just be handed to you. you have to create it yourself. of course there’s always external realities that, if different, could make it better and easier. but you can’t rely on those. you have more power than you think to make even teeny tiny changes toward good right now.

[corvid-language-library]

Remember that if you want to do more of something, you have to do less of something else. It's that time of year where people set goals for the new year and they have plans and hopes and it's always focusing on what they want to do more of. More studying, more exercise, more crafting, more socialising, more making things from scratch. Okay, great. What are you going to do less of in order to have the time and energy to do more of those things you really want to do?

[corvid-language-library]

And if your answer to this is "less doomscrolling" or "less bedrotting" then great, but please think about why you're doing those things. No one's doomscrolling or bedrotting because they don't have things they'd rather be doing. Actually, I'm willing to bet you have a lot of things you'd rather be doing and you spend your life internally screaming at yourself to do literally any one of the many things you want to be doing instead, but you don't have the energy for them all and you can't work out how to prioritize them, so doomscrolling spares you from making that decision. Or perhaps you're burned out from taking on too many projects and you need to rest your brain, so you lie in bed because you don't even have the energy to get started anymore.

This is going to be a really hard pill to swallow, but the truth is you might not be able to balance all your hobbies and all your projects the way you'd like. If you want to finish writing that book, you might have to reduce your daily drawing habit to a couple of times a week. If you want to do yoga every morning, you might have to accept not cooking from scratch as often. If you want to spend more time with your family, you might have to cut down on your yearly reading goal. I'm not saying give up on your hobbies; I'm be realistic with your time and your energy and be kind to yourself. Stop expecting yourself to do more and do better every single year. You don't have to constantly be growing upwards and reaching for the stars; you can be content with where you are, or even cut parts of yourself back to make space for other things in your life to bloom.

Think about what your priorities are and make peace with doing less of other things. Less is okay. Less is not failing. Less is self care.

[tordenvejr]

i think if the world overwhelms you to the extent that you're numbing out and losing compassion, you need to simplify. heart + goal + contribution

[thewhimsicalarchives]

Things won’t always go as planned- you might not always do well on tests, you might fail, you might get pushed down, you might stop believing in yourself, you might struggle. But after all of that, after burdening all of the weight that kept you from striving, you have to get back up. Nobody’s journey is smooth and there’s nothing wrong with that because you can always pull yourself up and keep going.

[2productive]