One thing a day
When life seems totally overwhelming, I find that if I can just achieve one thing a day, I feel so much calmer and more positive.
The Positivity Planner is the ideal way to organise your life and focus on your wellbeing at the same time. As well as daily pages to write lessons plans (in the teacher planners) or to schedule appointments and meetings each day (in the daily planner), each week there is a ‘week overview’ page, which contains space to write your main tasks, meetings and appointments for each day plus:
These tried-and-tested wellbeing techniques are so simple yet effective, and the Positivity Planner makes it really easy to incorporate them into your everyday life.
Why did I create the Positivity Planner?
After many years in the classroom, I sadly became very stressed and ended up leaving my job due to health issues. On my road to recovery, I read up on a number of different ways of reducing stress and anxiety, the most beneficial of which I have incorporated into these planners: gratitude, self care, prioritising workload and focusing on the positive things in life.
I initially created the Positivity Planner for myself, as I had tried keeping a gratitude journal in a pretty notebook, but kept forgetting to fill it in. I had also tried remembering to look after myself by eating well and going to the gym, but kept forgetting what I wanted to do and when. I had tried prioritising my workload with ‘to-do’ lists, but kept forgetting where I’d put the list, or it was so long that it overwhelmed me and I didn’t know where to start!
I found that even though there are so many journals, planners and diaries on the market, there was nothing that included priorities, self care and gratitude as a part of your daily planning. So I created one for myself on my computer and started printing it out every week! When I mentioned this to others, they were intrigued and asked me to send them copies, or whether it was a ‘real’ planner. So, now it is ‘real’ and available for anyone who wants to schedule their time, prioritise their workload and remember to note down the really important things in life such as gratitude, self care and 3 brilliant things that have happened every week!
When life seems totally overwhelming, I find that if I can just achieve one thing a day, I feel so much calmer and more positive.
Inspired by a recent episode of Dr Rangan Chatterjee’s excellent podcast, I’ve created a new worksheet, which I’ve called ‘Breathing Bingo’. The aim is to see how many of these different breathing techniques you can tick off in any given week – you can either go for a line or attempt to get a ‘full…
The latest worksheet in my Positivity Toolkit is about calming anxiety through noticing the things around us.
Why practise gratitude? One of the core principles of the Positivity Planner, and a wellbeing tool that is backed up by huge amounts of research, is the concept of gratitude. Simply taking the time to think about what you are grateful for, either once a day, or even just once a week, can have a…
Why ‘3 brilliant things’? I don’t know about you, but often at the end of a long week, when I’m exhausted and counting down the minutes until the weekend, I find it can be all too easy to focus on the negatives. Therefore, every Friday, I make an effort to reflect on the brilliant things…
What are ‘junk values’? I recently listened to the brilliant (if somewhat controversial!) Johann Hari on the Feel Better Live More podcast with Dr Rangan Chatterjee and found one of his ideas particularly interesting… the notion of ‘junk values’. Hari described this concept in an article in the LA Times: “Junk food looks like food,…
I filmed this earlier on a little walk when I was trying to wake myself up and get some motivation. Just to prove I’m not some ridiculously sunny, annoyingly positive person all the time! I have to work on it every day, just like most people, especially when it’s cold and dark outside all the…
I’ve always found the start of the new academic year to be a great time for making resolutions… much more so than January, which in the world of education is in the middle of the year and dark and cold and somehow already feels too late to be making resolutions. However, in September, I’m full…