#OneWord2018

Published by Bow Tie Joe on January 2, 2018January 2, 2018

Happy New Year and welcome to 2018! It’s been a while since my last post and I found it fitting that I start the New Year with what I hope will be a bi-weekly post. The beginning of a new year is always an exciting time and as is tradition, an opportunity to create your New Year’s Resolution(s). Not one to necessarily embrace the idea of creating a resolution and following it through, I noticed some of my colleagues within my professional learning network adopting a single word to guide and focus their efforts for the next 365 days and decided to follow suit.

As I sit here and reflect on my professional journey as an educator over the past four years I can’t believe how quickly it has passed and the amount of knowledge, experiences, and opportunities that I have been presented over this short span of time. It was only one school year ago where I became connected and began to seek wisdom, guidance, support, ideas, and growth from outside of my circle. Recently, I’ve pushed myself beyond my limits as I manage being a doctoral student at Rutgers University along with what appears to be a never-ending list of roles and responsibilities within my organization, according to my colleagues. Making up for lost time, if I could select one word to describe the first three years of my career I would choose the word, relentless. I would set a goal, reach it, and immediately set another and continue to do so to this day. If an opportunity presented itself, I took it even if I didn’t necessarily have any additional time built into my schedule that allowed me to do so. I knew that I would ultimately figure a way to balance everything and perform my role to a level that I deemed acceptable. Throughout that time, however, especially in 2017, I noticed that I kept putting my personal endeavors to the side and would focus solely on the responsibilities that I had undertaken. As 2017 ended and I was able to reflect on the year in its entirety I realized that I needed to re-prioritize and spend some time doing things for myself like blogging, developing my website and brand, reading, or playing music, in 2018.

So to kick-off 2018, my one word for the year will be…

Self-Full

Sounds weird, right? This isn’t really a word but a shift in how I think about the word “selfish” as per a discussion with a colleague in my doctoral program. We were talking about how the word selfish has such a negative connotation to it and is defined as being concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure. We asked each other rhetorically, “What’s wrong with that?” More often than not, we often forget or aren’t chiefly concerned with our own personal pleasure and get lost in our work that we execute as per our careers (or find personal validation in said work). I know I speak for myself when I say I truly do love what I do and cannot wait to be back in the classroom with my students after winter break and am guilty of finding and settling for the personal validation I get from being an educator. In 2018, I hope to get back to playing the clarinet (I’ve since joined the Rutgers University Alumni Wind Symphony so this will definitely be a reality), reading books and articles for personal pleasure as compared to reading for the acquisition of knowledge, or possibly starting a podcast with my brother who is a fellow young mathematics teacher.

I’ve realized giving yourself some loving attention isn’t selfish – it’s sensible.

And it’s 2018…it’s about time I started being sensible and get full of myself.

What’s your One Word for 2018?

Bow-Tie Joe