Welcome Back to School!

I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year's holiday and are ready for a new semester. The hallways may be empty as we begin in 2021, but that learning buzz continues as I see both teachers and students engaged with online lessons as distance learning continues at IEGS.  

For many, the new year brings much promise for new opportunities to learn, improve, be inspired, take risks and be open to change. The new year holiday is also a time when many people choose to make a New Year’s resolution. A recent study published in the American scientific journal PLOS ONE, on 9 December 2020     reports that how an individual formulates their new year’s resolution is of great importance for the final outcome. This study is based on the resolutions that 1066 people made in the end of 2017 and was conducted in collaboration between Stockholm University and Linköping University. To have greater success in achieving your goal, you should rephrase your resolution from “I will quit/avoid” to “I will start to”. This means that for 2021, we should set ourselves, approachable goals, instead of avoidance goals - meaning we should start something or adopt new habits, instead of quitting or avoiding something – referred to as avoidance goals.

I like this insight into making goals approachable and achievable. One of mine is now rephrased to “I will start to read in the evenings for fun a little bit more!