Watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fPIkTBkm8AY OK, let's be honest. A *full-time job*, great relationships, crushing your goals, maintaining your side-hustle AND dealing with administrative tasks like laundry, cooking, and surprise repairs ... you can't have time for everything. It's impossible, isn't it?! (AND I didn't even include a commute 😲) I'm a university student entering the workforce, and the new 9-5 routine for my marketing internship (which I'm loving, btw!!) has been an adjustment lately. It feels like there just aren't enough hours in the day, and ✨gone✨ is the absolute flexibility of being a full-time student, blogger/YouTuber, and part-time (freelance) marketing consultant. By the time 5 pm rolls around, there are only 5 hours left to start the "life" part of my "work-life" balance. Five weeks ago, my morning workouts completely fell off my priority list, I was going to bed too late in an effort to prolong the day, and I was all-around tired.   ••••• JOIN our virtual Vibely community to continue the conversation: https://app.vibely.io/mistralspirit •••••   I couldn't help but wonder: if this is going to be my daily routine after I graduate, how am I EVER going to find the time again for what matters to me? I furiously browsed through social media pages at 1 am, but everyone I could find sharing their experience was either a full-time student or a full-time entrepreneur. Don't get me wrong - I know first-hand that those careers are REALLY hard too, but they are completely different in flexibility and structure. Where were the working professionals and THEIR semblance of a work-life balance on YouTube? In other words: how do people DO IT?! (Seriously, if you have any book/blog/channel recommendations - please share them! 😋)   ••••• the Challenge ••••• Setting new goals and finding pockets of time to work towards them is an important part of self-development. But when life gets in the way, routines change, and time is scarce, we need to go back to the essentials.  I used the concept of "energy non-negotiables" to reset and re-calibrate my expectations and I challenge you to do the same! Think carefully about what habits you REALLY need to support your lifestyle (not just as goals). Use this question to guide you:   ••••• What do I need in order to: have energy, feel confident and be my best self? •••••   Stress-test your energy non-negotiables with some of these journal questions: • When life gets busy, would I still want to push myself to do this? • Is this a critical part of maintaining a positive relationship with myself? • Have I let go of guilt-inducing habits, and shifted them into the realm of accomplishment instead of obligation? When you're ready, share them with our Vibely community!

I'm a Queen's University Commerce (business) student in 3rd year, specializing in marketing, with my full tuition covered by 2 major scholarships and 5 GPA merit-based awards. Here is how I structured my application essays for Queen's, the 5 steps to get started & write winning scholarship essays yourself, and my advice to anyone going through application season now! I'm sincerely grateful to the Queen's Chancellor's Major Admission Scholarship and the ADP Henry Taub Memorial Scholarship for enabling my wonderful university education + experience thus far, as well as the DECA Inc. Don de Bolt, Edward King Memorial Award, and the Queen's D.I. McLeod Dean's List With Distinction scholarships!  NOTE: in high school, I applied for what felt like hundreds of awards and scholarships, so the first step is to try, and do it early so you don't miss a deadline!

The focus of this episode is on 4 tips to improve your relationships, conversations and meetings using your bullet journal, but I also steered into some personal growth territory! It's really just a long heart-to-heart chat and journal entry mixed into one (which you can now listen to as a podcast!). I chat about something I've been thinking about lately regarding different types of growth we go through, my very inward-focused, psychology growth phase three years ago, and why I'm grateful to have blogs and journals to look back on. Speaking of which, I really should start journaling again... I chat about how you can start your own podcast, and why everyone should write a blog. And I chat about stressful jobs, resilience, some video interviews I've been watching lately and learning a lot from, and the board game Catan. Enjoy! ••••• TIMESTAMPS ••••  00:00 mistral spirit snapshot is now a podcast! 2:21 on different types of growth and journaling 4:35 4 note-taking tips to improve your relationships & conversations 11:39  what I've been doing 12:49 on looking through old blogs & journal entries 15:14 what I've learned & resilience under stress 18:17 what I wonder 18:28 what I'm currently loving

october 15 || I got back into reading a lot more this summer, and from July to September I read these 5 (technically 7) books! Really enjoyed filming short reviews and summaries immediately after each one, so I decided to compile them and make this into a recurring series. As is classic Mistral Spirit style, I'm focusing on a brief summary, my recommendations, and the themes & main discussion points in the books. Particularly had a lot to say about my first time reading Brave New World, even though I didn't like it! :-P   For more like this, follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mistralspirit   And on Goodreads: http://goodreads.com/mistralspirit

august 19 || A month ago, my 6-cup aluminum moka pot temporarily went out of commission after losing an oxidation battle with the dishwasher. What followed was a week of cold-turkey ending my habitual caffeine intake, and a period of severe headaches, fatigue and unhappiness. I was experiencing Caffeine Withdrawal! This got me thinking about the effects of coffee, and whether it might not be good to decrease my intake a bit. I also wanted to find out if decreasing my caffeine dosage in the long-term would make my quality of life worse than continuing to drink a compound that 80% of awesome people drink on the daily.  And so I embarked on the notorious Google Search. Realizing this wasn't the way to go about educating myself (I could make a pillow out of the fluff in those articles), I then went down the rabbit hole of reading scientific studies via Google Scholar, and found some exciting tidbits of information! It's confirmed: I'll be decreasing my coffee intake to get a better grasp on my body's fatigue signals, without fear of losing out on my high-energy, productive lifestyle!

july 23 || In the first of my "Snapshot" series, I'm sharing the story of my sales & sponsorship experience in my 2019 summer internship! This is a lesson that I've applied to interviews, answering questions and everyday conversations. It's all about asking better questions to allow you to give better answers and have more interesting conversations! Toward the end, I'm also answering today's update prompts, and explaining my reason for trying out a new series.