My monthly challenges are typically things that I do to better myself or improve my life in some way. I see them as a way to grow and to challenge myself with something that I might have been scared to do before. Doing something for a month isn’t a huge time commitment and I’ve almost always been pleasantly surprised that I end up wanting those challenges to be a part of my every day life moving forward.
Last month’s challenge was one that I set to work on bettering myself. I did a little bit of online learning every day. I had such high hopes for this challenge and what good things I would be able to add to my skill set. But I think my expectations were a bit too high. While I did enjoy doing the online classes, it felt more like I was sampling the classes and seeing what the subject was about instead of learning. I think maybe my expectations were high because I have done online classes at community colleges before when I just wanted to learn a subject (it’s a pretty cheap thing to do). And these online classes I found for free weren’t the same.
I also might have been doing more sampling of different subjects instead of just focusing hard on one thing. Maybe if I was focused on learning everything that I could about one thing, I would have felt differently. I’m not upset or disappointed about the challenge I did in January, I just had a different end result from what I thought I’d have. But I am grateful that I found so many amazing free online education services because I am going to continue to take advantage of them. I don’t know if it will be a daily thing, but it will be something I turn to when I need to learn more about a subject or want to add a skill set. I might have to build upon the free classes with something I pay for, but it will at least be a start.
But for February, I’m going to make the challenge a bit more than just something for me. While this will benefit me, it will hopefully also benefit other people as well.
I’m a fairly active user of social media. While I don’t always post things to make my life look amazing, I do keep a lot of it positive. Mainly, I think I keep things positive on Instagram and Facebook. I know that I post real and tough things on there too, but it’s easily a mix of good and bad. But on Twitter, I’ve noticed that I have posted more negative or serious things.
I’m sure that’s happening because it’s very easy to share someone else’s post on Twitter. I can retweet from so many different sources with a simple click and I do follow a lot of more serious accounts. And I feel like the serious things that I’m sharing are important things like political issues that I’m passionate about. If I see a problem or misleading information that can harm others, I make sure I express my opinion. Social media is designed to do just that.
But because I share so much serious stuff like politics or news, I feel like I don’t balance it out with more positive things. I do share good things from time to time when I do my daily tweets about my union, but I don’t do a lot of random happiness or silly posts. And when I do post them, like this tweet about my grandma and my aunt and uncle’s new puppy, I always feel good for putting something out there that can make someone smile.
I’ve also done text messages to friends who I know are going through a tough time with silly photos or videos saying that they are to be used when they need a cuteness break. And realizing how happy doing those texts make me has inspired my challenge for this month (and hopefully beyond since I think this is one that I will keep up).
I want to share something on Twitter every day that is just to share positivity or to make someone smile. It might be something I created myself or a photo I took and it might be just me retweeting something that makes me happy from another account. There are a bunch of accounts I can follow that post only things like that and I’m going to use those as a resource to retweet when I don’t have something of my own to share.
While this might not balance out all the serious things I post, it will help. And you never know when someone scrolling through your feed is needing that random smile. Posting something every day is a pretty simple effort but it can have a big impact if it gets to the right person at the right time. And there is a good chance that I will be the person that needs the mood boost from time to time and sharing something online will be benefitting me more than anyone else.
This should be a pretty easy challenge for me to do because I can create a list of good accounts to retweet from as well as set a reminder for myself to post something. I’ve gotten so used to doing my daily union tweets so this will be adding on to that habit.
But just because it’s easy it doesn’t mean that it won’t affect me. I’m excited to know that I’ll be putting more good and positivity into the world every day and I can’t wait to see how much happier I will be by the end of the month!
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