Pagbubuo at Sadya: Celebrating 2023 & Crafting 2024
Isang imbitasyon sa pagbabalik-tanaw sa nakaraang taon, at sadyang pagharap sa darating na taon
Note: I’m putting together Simula sa Sadya, a Pagbubuo x Ugnayan workshop on February 3, 9:00am-12:00nn. Learn more about it at the end of this post.
Maginhawang pasko at may sadyang bagong taon!
After nearly a week of delicious holiday cocooning, reflecting and journaling, leisurely 1:1 chats with some of the people that matter to me, I’m ready to reintegrate with the world and write for public consumption again.
And I’m squeezing in this last post before the year ends to celebrate 2023 and craft 2024!
In this post, I’ll be asking myself some questions, and sharing those questions with you for your own self-reflection, in case you’d like to reflect and mag-balik-tanaw on the past year, and work towards a more intentional 2024.
Pagbabalik-tanaw sa 2023
What was your theme or intention at the beginning of 2023?
What are your highlights or celebrations from 2023?
What are you feeling about where you are today?
Intention | Sadya
* For context on my emphasis on intention, see the post below.
For me, the theme or intention I set at the beginning of 2023 was Mastery. It felt like such a…uh masterful (lol) or ambitious theme. It had a lot of bravado, audacity, or chutzpah1. And I’d say that was the point. I didn’t feel like I had enough mastery nor did I feel I actually did enough to get there. And so, I wanted it to be a focus this year.
It felt like the years prior also supported me in getting to the point at which I would set such an audacious theme. In 2022, it was about Play, and before becoming more masterful, one needs to be comfortable enough to play and make mistakes. And the year before that, in 2021, it was Courage, which is about the willingness to take risks and do new, often uncomfortable things. Though both my 2021 and 2022 themes have an element of paglalakas ng loob, the acts of courage in play in 2022 had more levity and joy.
In 2023, it felt like Mastery still had a sense of Courage and Play, but this time with more intentionality, meaning and purpose.
I lean more into my values of connection, curiosity, creativity, and contribution this year:
I wanted to do more research-oriented work to feed my curiosity. And this would feed my writing.
I wanted to hone my craft in writing — on Pagbubuo on Substack, on The Imaginable Workplace Podcast, in Haraya’s white paper2 and elsewhere. This would satisfy my need to create. At the same time, it gave me an opportunity to connect more intimately with myself and others.
I wanted to develop myself even further as a coach, learn more of the tools I needed to excel in my work with Haraya Coaching. This would help me contribute more to the team and to the people we aim to create value for, our clients — whether they be from the corporate world or the development world (lol at the binary of corporate vs. development, but that’s a topic for another post).
These were all intentions, values, and practices that pointed to how I wanted to show up for myself and for others this year.
Celebration I Pagdiriwang
And while I’ve fallen short on several of the goals I had set out for this year, I really want to celebrate what I’ve actually managed to achieve. My celebrations also include goals that I had not set at the start of the year, but managed to crystallize as the year progressed.
When faced with a decision on whether to say yes to something or not, I asked myself: Does saying yes to this bring me closer to the Mastery I intended?
And so, rooting my decisions in my 2023 intention and my personal values helped ground me and give me a direction in which to grow.
My writing and research | Pagsusulat at pananaliksik
Pagbubuo has been my main outlet for my writing and the distillery of things I learn through books, courses and life.
And while I had set a more frequent cadence for posts at the beginning of the year than I had actually published, and even considered a Pagbubuo podcast (which was not realized at all), as well as some other “moonshot” goals like a book outline and published research, I’m realizing that I’d actually moved forward with all those goals in some way, but perhaps just not in the form or pace I had anticipated. And that’s okay.
To celebrate what I have done, here’s a list of my Pagbubuo posts this year:
Wow. Not too shabby, I’d say. *pats self on the back*
Now, this is not to say that I won’t cringe when I re-read some of these posts. I probably will. And by no means do I think I’m a master at all at this point. But I think the fact that I showed up for my writing, sat my butt on the chair when so many things could have (and did) distract me, and actually hit publish way more than I did last year, is a lot to celebrate.
I stopped not writing. I stopped getting in my own way. The only way to mastery is to suck at stuff first, and I know I’ve made several sucky attempts this year. And I trust that if I keep at it, I will eventually suck less and be more masterful.
In the meantime, I just need to continue reading more of other people’s writing, and most importantly, practicing and low stakes publishing.
My Tagapagpadaloy-ness
While I’ve already been using the word tagapagpadaloy to refer to myself as a facilitator in the past couple of years, I’ve been sharing it with more people this year, and that’s been refreshing, and in a way, liberating, for me. It’s like I’m leaning into the Mastery.
Furthermore, for me, facilitation and coaching go hand in hand. So some ways I had intended to grow that this year was through an advanced coaching certification to level up my coaching. I wound up doing two coaching certifications instead — unplanned and fortuitous.
Also unplanned at the beginning of the year, but latently desired for several years now, is the creation of facilitation or pagpapadaloy tools that were created not only help me, but I really hope will also help others to facilitate their own safe and brave spaces for connection with themselves and others. I found a medium for that with Ugnayan Cards.
Mula sa ilang taon na pag-uugat, nagbunga na rin siya sa tamang panahon.
All the words I use to describe the deck on its packaging feel like a personal purpose statement that I’ve been trying to craft and refine all this years, and it’s found an outlet with Ugnayan. It gives me life to explore how this (and its accompanying community) will grow and evolve in the coming year.
All this reflection on the past year makes me feel proud of where I am at this point, and also very grateful to be surrounded by people who help make these things possible — whether they’ve given me some of the knowledge, skills or experience to help hone my crafts, or they collaborated with me, or they simply let me know that my work mattered to them in some way.
Pagharap sa 2024
What theme or intention would you like to set for 2024?
What practices would you like to hone this year?*3
The theme that I’d like to set in the coming year is Tibay ng Loob or Inner Strength, (which is also one of the themes featured in the Ugnayan deck). :)
I don’t know what the coming year will bring.
But what I do know is that I want to:
express myself more authentically,
discover my different dimensions;
embrace them as part of the whole me;
and nurture relationships that honor
who I was in the past,
who I am now,
and who I want to be.
I think at this point, I’ve done a lot of inner work on my impostor syndrome and my “perfectionism” (which always serves as a convenient excuse for us to not start things at all). I’ve also done a considerable amount of learning through books and courses or certifications. And while the inner work and the learning never stops, what I feel I want to work on this year is having a firmer resolve, conviction and discipline to follow through on the things I say matter to me. I want to be able to soldier on in spite of unfounded fears, and even some of the validated ones.
In practice, this means allowing myself even more vulnerability than in previous years, to put myself out there more — with the knowledge that I am deeply rooted in my intention, values, and personal strengths and convictions, and that I can bend and sway when strong winds push against me. When my work gets scrutinized, I’ll remind myself that it’s all compost (feedback) that contributes to my pagbubuo.
So putting myself out there means more of the regular content on the
Substack, and @pagbubuo Instagram, an Ugnayan podcast (?), and also going back to designing some of my own content or curriculum and running some workshops related to pagbubuo, wellbeing and creativity.In line with that, my first brave move for 2024 is to run Likha Ginhawa, a Pagbubuo x Ugnayan wellbeing workshop on February 3, 9:30am-11:30am in Pasig / Makati / BGC, Metro Manila for 4-8 participants.
The intention of this gathering is to help participants approach the coming year, rooted in intention and self-awareness, and be better guided in making decisions throughout the year, cultivating intentional practices, and working towards courageous goals.
Will be sharing more information for that in the coming weeks via the Pagbubuo and Ugnayan Substack and Instagram, so follow @pagbubuo and subscribe to
for updates. :)
I find the word chutzpah amusing. Sounds like it could be Filipino gay lingo, but it’s a real English word. Anyway. See proof on Merriam-Webster.
Together with two other coaches at Haraya, I led the design and writing for our white paper Handog Haraya 2023 Report: Shaping Organizational Culture Through A Common Language. You can check it out and download the report here.
I invite you to think of practices and not just end goals. Practices will then serve as the smaller sub-goals that ultimately contribute to your desired outcome.
would love to read about your thoughts on “the binary of corporate vs. development” pls!!! i graduated development studies in the ph and im having a career identity crisis 🙏🏼