This Is Your Sign To Challenge Yourself

January 19th 2021

If you were looking for a sign to challenge yourself more, this is it!

I have come to learn in recent year that the largest changes in life come from challenging yourself above all else. Challenging your own deeply rooted beliefs, habits, and tendencies is a great way to starting ushering in change that your higher-self has been craving. Believe it or not, I am challenging myself right now! I just signed off of a full day of work and I would love nothing more than to lay on the couch playing app games and binging YouTube videos, but instead, I am challenging myself to write.

You see, I find that when life gets in the way, we often forget to pursue our passions—especially when our passions and our career are really tightly linked like with myself. I work in social media and large parts of my day are dedicated to writing and creating content and engaging with people on social media. So the last thing I normally want to do after a long work day is work even more, even if it is for myself. However, today, I decided to challenge myself to write because, if I didn’t, I probably never would and would let my blog slip again until I find another random burst of inspiration and repeat the same cycle of saying I want to write more, followed by excuses as to why writing is too hard for me right now.

But challenging myself is going to have to go beyond the occasional blog post and needs to expand into full accountability for myself and my own actions. I am not fully satisfied with who I have become in the past couple of years and there are a lot of things about myself I want to change or get a better grasp on.

I believe in my previous post, I talked about the 2016-2018 version of myself I often idealize. That version of myself who frequently challenged herself; working a job that offered a major creative push but not to the point of burnout, completing grad school in 2017, taking 5-10 yoga classes a week, making time for at home yoga and meditation practice, spending adequate time with friends and alone, enjoying a healthy relationship with my body, exploring home and away frequently, reading regularly, listening to music, writing 4 blog posts a week, dressing to impress, and so much more. I look back at that version of myself in awe and wonder how I had the time or energy to do life the way I was doing it.

I remember being exhausted sometimes and having a good stress cry, but I don’t remember those times as much as I remember the great memories I made and strides towards growth I had taken. That is very different that how I remember the last 2 years of my life where stress breakdowns seems to outweigh new memories. However, I will say I am quite pleased with my personal growth since June of last year. Yet, I still aspire to get myself back to where I was mentally, physically, and emotionally a few years ago.

So that is where challenging myself comes in. By my personal definition, challenging myself isn’t forcing myself to overdo it, but instead, forcing myself to just do it in general. I have such an issue with wanting to do anything when I am burnt out or stressed and I often perpetuate my own slump cycles by sinking into a period of “blobiness” when I am feeling burnt.

So how do I plan to challenge myself this week?:

1. I want to get ahead on a few blog posts (not just about me talking about getting on track)
2. I want to exercise a little bit each day
3. I want to slowly cut down on carbs
4. I want to make time to read

Those seem like small things but, to me, they are little challenges. If I want to become the person I know I can be, I have to do the things I know that person would do regularly. So, even if I have to start small, I am going to try to get where I need to be!

So, I definitely want to keep up with my progress here and if anyone wants to join me in challenging themselves, let me know in the comments what 3 little challenges you want to accomplish this week!

I guess you’ll see how I’m doing if you see another blog post from me this week~

Jess~