Kamusta sa lahat, maligayang bagong taon mga kaibigan!
It feels so great to be back here once again. The blogging contest for the new month definitely presented some soul searching questions. And I will give my best attempt at answering two of them—the ones that I can answer, that is.
What’s one thing you’ll let go of this year? And Why?
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I love this question because, at first glance, I couldn’t come up with an answer. “Something I’ll let go of?” That’s a new one. I’d been so focused on learning new things and trying to discover new and helpful habits to adopt that I never really stopped to ask myself what I would let go of.
And when you think about the full picture, you can’t necessarily add new characters if you’re not willing to let go of the toxic ones we possess. This caused me to do some introspection, and at the end, I came up with two answers.
After weeks of listening to self-help podcasts, I realized that I have a silent voice that lives in my head. And in certain situations, the voice helps me navigate life, but in other situations, the voice is often a bully.
It’s discouraging enough to have external bullies—people who belittle you. But when your own voice is the dreaded bully, that becomes a huge problem. I realized that sometimes I don’t cut myself some much-needed slack. Sometimes, I tend to get rude and disrespectful to myself, for whatever reason, without being aware of it.
So if I were to choose one thing to get rid of this new year, it would definitely be negative self-talk. These days, I try to be conscious and cautious of the words I utter to myself.
Whenever I catch myself making self-deprecating jokes or just being plain mean, I usually stop midway and caution myself. And so far, it’s been going well.
Something else that I will try to get rid of is the fear of failure. There are so many ideas that usually pop up in my head, but because of my rude inner dialogue, I tend to disregard these precious gems. So for the rest of the year, I will try my best to learn how to embrace failure instead of being scared of it.
At the end of the day, failure is a part of the journey to success, so in a way, it’s kind of inevitable.
What new hobbies or skills would you like to explore this year?
A new skill I would love and need to perfect is “human relations.”. Being an introvert, I tend to find it difficult to talk to strangers or even to carry on conversations with people. This has been rather detrimental to my growth in society, especially now that I am new to the workforce or labor market.
It is tantamount to my overall success in life that I learn how to relate to people of all ages in different social settings.
So in case you have any book recommendations that would help with this, kindly leave them below in the comment section. I would appreciate that a lot.
And these are my answers to some of the questions in the Hive Philippines January Blogging Contest. 
