Most people desire to grow and achieve goals in life.
But few manage to realize all their potential. We know that having goals and meeting them are two different things. It’s challenging to sustain one’s motivation over the long run.
It’s also difficult to repeat the same actions over and over again. When you have several goals you want to meet and find yourself falling short of all of them, it can be difficult to keep trying.
One technique that has worked for me is to create a 30-day challenge. This is something you might have come across on social media. There are plenty of 30-day fitness challenges exhorting you to try specific routines for a month to see powerful changes in your body.
We can apply this same strategy to virtually any goal in life. What can these goals look like?
- To wake up early
- To sleep on time
- To do a social media detox
- To drink more water, exercise, and eat better
- To write something every day, like a blog post, a page of your novel, or a single helpful social media post
Essentially, you can start a personal 30-day challenge for any reason you like. I started one to start running and exercise more. This practice allowed me to get fitter and prioritize my health so that I could be a better father, spouse, and business owner.
Here’s why 30-day challenges work and how to optimize it to create the best effect in your life.
Focus on a single goal
When you make a 30-day challenge, you need to pick just one thing you want to improve in your life.
If your goal is to become a social influencer or to just build an audience for your home business, then you could challenge yourself to share one piece of content every day.
You may be tempted to do more than one such challenge, but don’t! The main reason for this is that when you focus on just one goal at a time, you create a very low-stress situation for yourself.
Working on your goal becomes pleasant and easy and as a result, you stick to it and improve every day. You end up saving your mental energy and shore up your willpower to get more done later.
Build a habit
If your goal depends on you doing something regularly, then a thirty-day challenge is right for you.
I experienced great success by using this challenge to develop the healthy habit of drinking more water.
Committing to doing something small, like drinking more water, for thirty days straight gives you enough time to make it a part of your routine that sticks.
What is important is that you actually do work on that single goal every single day. If you’re someone who dislikes social interactions but needs to grow your business, then committing to making a call a day will turn an uncomfortable experience into one that feels more nature.
30-day challenges have an emotional impact
As human beings, we assign meanings to virtually all things in our lives. We look at a new year as the chance to start over. We look forward to summers for the sense of freedom and enjoyment we get with warm and sunny weather. And similarly, the idea of working on something for thirty days appeals to a person’s meaning-seeking mind.
You can choose to start your challenge on the first day of the month and then assess your progress on the very last day. When you set a thirty-day challenge, it’s easy to remember and the dates become significant in our minds.
You can also leverage such a challenge to connect with others.
Be part of a larger community
If you browse on social media, you’ll find many people who create their own challenges for fitness, art, and other reasons.
You can be part of a social movement by joining an existing challenge or just sharing the fact that you’re doing this with your peers online.
You can use hashtags and share social media posts to let people see your artwork, your workouts, or just text content.
It’s also a good idea to join a community online where other people have the same goals as you do and to work with them to complete your challenge.
Over to you
I’ve used 30-day challenges to make some meaningful changes in my life. If there’s something you want to do but can’t work up the motivation, then you should try making a challenge like this too.
It’s a short enough time frame that you’ll avoid delaying on other goals in your life. And it’s long enough for you to actually see an impact.
Get started on your own thirty-day challenge and you’ll make profound changes appear from everyday steps.