Achievable Aspirations: Confidence

For this week's Achievable Aspiration, I challenge you to do something that I find very difficult: be confident!
This doesn't mean you have to be overly loud, or speak to every single person you see, or even do a bit of *gulp* public speaking. It simply means that you are comfortable in your own skin, and feel good about both your strengths and your weaknesses. This is hard, I know. But if you cant be confident; fake it! When you tell the outside world that you're confident by standing tall, putting your shoulders back, and smiling, then you feel confident inside.
When I decided to fake confidence, I started to love myself more, and I actually became confident. By the way, self-love is not synonymous with arrogance. Self-love is healthy; arrogance is not.
Apart from making yourself feel better about the world, confidence helps your relationships with others: it inspires trust, and when you're confident, you are naturally more appealing to strangers. Maybe you could make some friends simply by acting confident just for a day.

Achievable Aspirations: Hobby

Welcome to December's series: Achievable Aspirations! These will be reachable ideas for your 2017 New Year's resolutions because if you're like me, every year you'll make a bunch of resolutions that you won't keep. And then you feel like a failure. But, with these resolutions, you won't fail and break them, because they're actually attainable, unlike a lot of my normal resolutions.

This week's Attainable Aspiration: Take up a new hobby.

I know, I know. This is so cliché for New Year but it's a goodun'. Hobbies are so great, they provide entertainment, distraction, and talent, depending on what hobby you choose to take up. My personal recommendations are any typeof dance, horse-riding (maybe in the Summer instead, it gets very cold), and painting. I adore each of these, even though I'm kind of awful at them all. I used to do a lot of dance and I got very good at one point, but I haven't danced in so long, and it's something I'd love to get back into. It provides such a rush, especially if you're performing. Horse-riding is also excellent at giving you a sense of adrenaline and feeling alive. Once you et experience, you can canter and gallop, and i's so liberating to be in control of such a powerful animal. Painting is different for me, because I've never be very good at it and honestly I don't believe I ever will be. I don't have the natural talent to pursue it as a career, but that by no means stops me from hauling out the acrylics every now and then. To paint is to create, and to allow yourself to put your thoughts into images. I can imagine nothing more freeing of the brain.