This article is part of a series of articles which the goals are to help you be more successful in your personal challenges. These tips come from my personal experience as well as from the feedback from participants of Challengers (30 day challenges).
Challenges stated in this article can be of many sorts, but in any case are targeting long lasting challenges (i.e. habit creation or new skill learning) which require daily action or near daily action.
Tip 5: Adapt your long term target and your goal
When starting a new challenge, we often don’t know how it will take place. Many variables are unknown, and our original goal is more like a guess. The unknown factors can be as diverse as: how difficult will it be, how much time will I have, how much time will it take, how soon will I get bored, will I get bored, how fast will I progress …
With so many unknown variables at the beginning, it is unsurprising that a few days or a few weeks into our challenge we realize it is not actually the right goal we have, or does not correspond to our expectations.
The great thing about your challenge though, is that you set the rules. You chose the rules at the beginning, but you can also adjust the rules according to what you discover along the way. There is no point of staying of strict rules if it does not correspond to your expectations or if it does not motivate you.
Adjusting your challenge can be because you are having difficulty accomplishing your daily target. But it can also be the opposite, because your challenge is not challenging enough. Either ways, it will be uncomfortable. The objective in setting the goal is to be in what is called the “the Goldilocks zone” which is when it is challenging enough to be stimulating, but not too hard that it demotivates you.
Once you have practiced you challenge for a bit and that you have learned more about it, how much you can put into it, and what you can expect from it, it becomes a lot easier to define a clear and reasonable goal.
Some of the different ways you can adjust as follow:
– Change the daily length of your challenge
– Change the intensity of your challenge
– Change schedule of your challenge (when you do it during the day, morning, noon, or evening…)
– Change the duration of your challenge (instead of 30 days, extend to 35days, 40 days …)
– Adjust your final objective
These are just examples of what can be done. Feel free to adjust it in any way you feel comfortable.
Adjusting your goal can be interesting to get an extra boost of motivation in difficult times. So don’t hesitate to do so. And adjusting your challenge is not limited to only one time, you can adjust you challenge as many times and as often as you like. Life is unpredictable and your challenge should be able to match the variables you get.
With Chinese new Year coming up, many of us will have a different schedule and availability. Instead of putting your challenge aside during this period, try adjusting it and see how much you are comfortable accomplishing during this period.
Next tip: Tell your challenge
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