My 60 DAY MEDIUM CHALLENGE
Even before I started my kicking midlife’s butt journey, I had come across the 75 Hard Challenge.
For anyone unfamiliar with it, it involves committing to a 75 Day Program made up of repetitive daily challenges.For the full information check out the link to the official page below
Now I am on a path to kick midlife’s butt I felt it would be worth giving it some consideration.
That said for me personally I have an issue around the words HARD and CHALLENGE, after all life is hard enough at times and we all have enough challenges to get through without choosing to add another one to our list
Don’t get me wrong I fully understand that this is the whole point of it, as the creator Andy says himself 75 HARD IS A TRANSFORMATIVE MENTAL TOUGHNESS PROGRAM. I’m not here to argue with the ethos around this fantastic program that thousands of people have transformed their life with.
However, I’m inclined to agree with Mel Robbins when she said how a lot of these challenges are created by men/woman who don’t have the responsibilities of a full-time job/running a household/looking after a family etc etc it’s just that not everyone is that time rich.
So I have made some tweaks, thus the new title
For example:
1) 2x 45 min daily workouts (one has to be outside) isn’t practical for me unless I want to get up at 4am (which I don’t…I have tried it….one year I spent 6 months getting up every morning at 4.30am to do the whole seize your morning before the world is awake/winners wake up whilst the rest of the world is asleep thing… let’s just say having always been a night owl messing with that did not agree with me and made me one grumpy ass bitch!! So it’s now 1×60 min/day with 2 per week outdoors
2) Drinking 4L of water….I am a huge advocate of drinking water but seriously 4L, having had 3 children I don’t feel I need to go into much more detail other than if I want to have time to do anything constructive in my day that doesn’t involve finding a toilet every 30 minutes (and don’t get me started on how often I’d have to get up in the night to go) I’ll aim for 3l and review depending on aforementioned toilet situation.
3) Take a progress picture every day….my phone currently holds 15,000 photos most of which need going through and deleting, I really do not need to clog it up further with a daily photo of myself-once a week will be adequate.
4) Reading 10 pages of non-fiction….I understand that this is all around self-development and mindset, I do read a lot but I also do a lot of online trainings and listen to podcasts etc so I have incorporated those into this.
5) The 5 min cold shower…for me I’m usually on a tight schedule in the morning I barely spend 5 mins in the shower so have mastered the art of shampoo/conditioner/full body wash from start to finish in this time…2mins warm 3 mins cold will more than suffice.
6) I have added the morning routine as I know the science behind a morning routine sets us up for the day, Tony Robbins has his own morning routine he refers to as “Priming” and I have started to tweak that and develop my own personal routine, which part of it takes 15 minutes and the rest is done alongside doing the mundane things like getting dressed and preparing packed lunches etc. I am currently quite sporadic in how often I do it but do notice a difference in my mood/motivation etc when I do
7) Diet/no alcohol/no cheat meal stays as is.
8) Daily live review to hold me accountable-also this is something that will push me out of my comfort zone ( I feel nervous even just writing this bit down) but hopefully help with my success
The other tweak I have made is to call it “Experiment” rather than Challenge… Recently I did something called the “The 30 day Alcohol Experiment”…the aim behind which was to go 30 days alcohol free (which I did) but there was compassion around it if you didn’t. The big thing I liked about that ‘experiment’ in it not being a challenge was if you did give in to a drink you were not deemed to have failed anything. Instead it was encouraged to analyse the “data” around why you drank and how it made you feel afterward. There was no going back to Day 1. The success came with showing up every day for 30 days to give it your best. At the end of the day that’s all we can ever do.
I feel that without the pressure of ALL OR NOTHING I am more likely to succeed and if for whatever reason there is a day I don’t complete a task it will encourage me to think about why I didn’t rather than quit altogether, was there a genuine reason for not doing something or was I just being lazy and if the latter in turn try and discover the why behind that.
As to why 60 Days……tomorrow (Day 1) makes it exactly 60 days until my Birthday and I don’t care what anyone says you have to have cake on your birthday I have included some links below to the things I have referenced including the weekly check list I designed on Canva if anyone wants to download it and do their own version
https://andyfrisella.com/pages/75hard
https://www.tonyrobbins.com/ask-tony/priming/
