A few weeks ago, in Conveniencing Ourselves to Death – or Challenging Ourselves to Life?, I wrote about how challenge is a third and better option alongside the usual two we go with in Western society: stress or convenience.
Like stress, challenge is difficult, but unlike stress, you have a sense of control, progress and achievement.
Like convenience, challenge is enjoyable, but unlike convenience, you are stretching yourself, growing, and making use of your existing strengths and abilities rather than allowing them to wither through disuse.
How to have a challenging year (in the best way)
In my guest post How to Set Yourself a Challenge on Goal Setting Guide, I gave a 5-step approach for deciding on and pursuing a challenge. I recommend you go and read the whole thing, but briefly:
- Have a desire for change,
- Believe you can change,
- Find a destination,
- Get a plan,
- Implement, implement, implement.
I’ve talked about having a desire for change (otherwise known as motivation) before too, and also about believing you can change (otherwise known as self-efficacy). Today I’d like to expand on point 3 – finding a destination (or picking a challenge for yourself).
New Year is coming very soon, and while New Year’s resolutions are traditionally more honoured in the breach than the observance, that’s not because there’s anything wrong with the basic idea. It’s because most people don’t know how to carry their good intentions through. So, if you were thinking of setting yourself a challenge for 2011, here are some guidelines (and if you weren’t thinking of challenging yourself in 2011, I urge you to consider it – you’ll thank me later).
Let your heart guide you
A challenge for the sake of a challenge is empty.
What would make your life sing?
What would engage you deeply?
What would you push through pain to achieve?
What do you admire someone else for doing?
What would make you look at yourself in a new way, with excitement and awe?
What have you dreamed of, but dismissed?
What would, in the words of the old comic book advertisements, Amaze Your Friends?
photo credit: Berto Garcia
Let your gut guide you
In my How to Set Yourself a Challenge post, I quote Catherine Caine, and I’m going to do it again because I love this thought so much: “You should always try anything that makes you uncomfortable, and nothing that makes you uneasy.”
If the challenge you’re considering doesn’t scare you at least a little, you’re standing too far from the edge. Go scarier!
(If you think you’d respect yourself less for pulling it off, though, choose again.)
The thing about challenge is that you tend to underestimate yourself. I remember years ago when I had a very motivational team leader in my job at the time. He encouraged us to come up with a “big, hairy, audacious goal” for the team. We chose “we will implement X number of innovative solutions for our customers in the next 18 months.” (We had definitions for “implement”, “innovative” and “solution” so that it wasn’t just business gobbledegook.)
I remember our boss saying to us, “Is X really a challenging number? Do you feel comfortable that you could pull that off?”
We did.
“OK, what’s a challenging number, then?”
He talked us up to a number almost twice X.
And we beat that number with months to spare.
So: Go big, or go home.
Choose something that, even if you fail (and I don’t think you will), it will be magnificent.
Let your head guide you
Your heart sets the direction, your gut sets the intensity, but your head sets the measurement. How are you going to measure your achievement?
Some challenges are easy to measure. You’re on top of Everest, or you’re not. Others, not so easy. How do you measure kindness?
But one of the things that setting a measurement does is tie your challenge to observable things that you control. (That last part’s important. Don’t set yourself a challenge of winning a million dollars at the slot machines, please, because that can only happen through chance or criminal activity, and neither one is a good way of completing a challenge.)
Looking for measurements can feed back into deciding the direction and the intensity, of course. I haven’t numbered these subheadings (heart, head, gut) because they’re not sequential. They’re simultaneous.
An example: My Fighting Fit challenges
I’ll give you an example, because I always find examples make things a lot clearer.
One of my challenges next year relates to fitness. I’ve not been very fit for a long time, and I know I feel a lot better (and function a lot better in general) when I am. I’ve been doing the Hundred Pushups, which is great, and feeling the benefit – thanks to Steven Aitchison’s Advanced Early Riser program, which gave me time in my day for exercise. But I wanted to play a bigger game. Most of what I’ve done so far is also strength training, and I know I need some cardio to get some of the best fitness benefits.
I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords, so I searched for “standard fitness test”. A lot of the top results (including number 1) have to do with the US military’s fitness testing programs, and I started to read about them.
Now, not only am I not American, but I’m more or less a pacifist and have no interest in joining any military force anywhere in the world. But looking at that information, I thought, “That could be a good fitness challenge – get myself up to the standard for the various US military forces.” (Each service has its own test, and they differ in detail of how they measure and what the standard is, so you can arrange them in sequence and have an ascending set of challenges.) All of them combine a strength element and a cardio element.
Now, I’m 43 and have never been all that fit or strong. I could make excuses about physical issues that I have and why I can’t do those challenges, but really I can. It’ll involve focus and determination and a certain amount of discomfort, but it’ll be worth it. Because not only will I feel good physically (and benefit my body and mind both), but I’ll have a significant achievement to point to. “Yeah, I can do the US Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test, going for the Navy SEAL one next…”
It’s an expandable challenge, too, because as well as minimum levels and levels for your age, you can go for higher scores and try to get to the standard of a younger person. (I met a major in the NZ Army recently who’s recovering from a leg injury. He’s in, I would say, his 30s, and his goal is to be able to pass the physical fitness test that 18-year-old recruits must pass.)
I’ve put together a little online tracker for what I’m calling the Fighting Fit Challenges, but I want to use it myself for a while before I release it to the world and invite others to join me. (This is because I have a realistic view of my skill at programming.) It’s likely to be January’s free resource for the people on my mailing list.
So, what’s your challenge for 2011?
Happy New Year to all my readers. Let’s have a good one.
, by Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein. A good, useful, practical summary of one of the most effective mind-body techniques there is for stress reduction and consequent health improvement.