Looking Forward: 2019
Resuming My Training In Counselling Psychology
Currently my Master’s training at university is on hiatus as my course has not arranged any classes for me until coming March. Off my mind, I look forward to classes, batchmates, and university life again. I can already feel the degradation of my learning outcomes from my first semester, even if I have been doing my own share of reading and tape watching. Main hurdles include further mastery of person-centered therapy (moar Carl Rogers tapes), career counselling, and pick up some Compassion-Focused techniques and philosophy.
Continue Tackling Reading Challenges…
….but with less books, new topics, and rereads. Forcing myself to plow through 20 books might have been an impressive feat, but in retrospect I definitely should have spent more time on each book. While I can feel myself losing track of time in certain pages, I still have the damned habit of checking my progress whether by the % bar or the thickness of the book (AM I CLOSE TO THE FINISH LINE YET??). This year I intend to add a dash of politics and economics to my reading list, which includes Billion Dollar Whale, What Happened, Economyths, Our Revolution, and Taiwan’s China Dilemma. I will also drop futurology related readings entirely and opt for a couple of books related to tech organizations instead. I am also going to read my first ever Noam Chomsky work What Kind of Creatures Are We. The rest will consist of the classic mind and brain stuff like [insert Oliver Sacks title, open to recommendations], Incognito, and The Compassionate Mind. Somewhere along the way there will be a couple of campus novels as well!
Make Time For Games and Anime
Hardly a proud declaration but I recently extended the longevity of my Nintendo 3DS with a bunch of new titles. I am not sure if I intend to do comprehensive reviews on the games, but if I do I will likely write them under a different Medium publication. Why is this even something to talk about? I think there is some sort of challenge in organizing oneself to be able to routinely work, learn, and have fun. All this while I have been a all-out person: everything I do, I either see it to the finish line or skip it entirely for something else, often leading me to different degrees of burnout. When I read, I don’t touch my games or Netflix. When I study or commit to an assignment, I skip leisure reading entirely. I see this as an experiment to test the idea that if one cares about something enough, one will make time for it.
