30 Days to Life-Changing SUCCESS

byParthaB

4.1K followers

Updated 4 years ago

Day 3

Little voice in my head:

Are you kidding me?

You’re never going to do this for 30 days straight.

Just give up now…I’m bored!

Day 10

It’s that voice again:

I can barely lift my arms above my head.

A good plan would be to get back under the covers and stay in bed for the next 20 days.

You tried, you failed, so what.

I’d expect nothing more (or less) from a loser like you.

Day 16

And the negative chatter-chimp in my mind says:

Okay, well done, you’ve made it past half way.

Surely, you’ve proved your point.

16 days in a row is great, but stop punishing yourself.

Day 21

He’s back:

Oh My!

I cannot believe this isn’t over yet. In fact, you’ve still got over a week to go.

I mean come on, you must have been doing this for 219,457 days in a row.

Or so it seems.

Day 27

Guess who:

You’re almost there.

The finishing line is within sight.

You’ve pretty much done it, you’ve got nothing else to prove.

Stop, give up, go home, and let’s eat ice cream.

ICE CREEEEEEAAAM

Day 30

My inner voice:

Wow!

What an accomplishment.

You can be truly proud of yourself.

What a fantastic achievement.

I didn’t realise you had it in you.

I don’t know about you, but I feel on top of the world.

The Enigma of the 30-Day Challenge

I’m not entirely sure where I first heard (or probably read) about 30-day challenges.

But it seemed like a sound concept to me.

Something to test myself (hence the word “challenge”).

Perhaps even something that could be used to create a new habit (Oh, I like that).

Is it 7 days, 21 days, or even 66 days, of doing something every single day in order to create a new habit?

Who knows?

All I know is for me, if I’m doing something consistently for a couple of weeks a new habit typically forms.

However, there was something very enticing about the 30-day challenge in my mind.

I never viewed it as a way to form a new habit, but as I say, a way to test myself.

Many of my 30-day challenges have been based around physical challenges, but in truth I found that I was in a battle against my own mind on pretty much every occasion.

Do Not Try This At Home

My first 30-day challenge was to complete the “Murph” for 30 days straight (obviously).

For all you Crossfitters out there you’ll know exactly what the Murph is, and you’ll also appreciate how utterly insane this is to attempt (did I mention that I like to push myself to my limits every once in a while?)

For those who are unaware - the Murph is named after the late Navy SEAL, Michael P. Murphy, who sadly passed away in 2005, but was awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Murph consists of:

• Run 1 mile
• 100 pull ups
• 200 push ups
• 300 squats
• Run 1 mile

And yes I somehow did this for 30 days in a row.

That’s 60 miles worth of running.

3,000 pull ups

6,000 push ups

And 9,000 squats

All within the space of a month.

I’m not going to lie, it was tough, not just physically though.

As I’ve alluded to in my introduction, this 30-day challenge was taking a toll on me mentally. There were many days I just wanted to give up.

I remember on day 10 I couldn’t get my arms high enough in the air to shampoo my hair while showering (don’t worry I had help, but this is a family show, so I’ll keep it clean).

I was ready to quit, time and time again.

But, do you know what? I kept at it, and the pure jubilation and utter ecstasy I felt when I completed the challenge were literally - Life Changing (well I’d never had a hernia before, so that was pretty life-changing! I JEST)

It taught me the following - we are pretty much capable of ANYTHING. The ONLY thing that stands in our way is our own mind.

You shut that annoying little voice up in your head, and success is just around the corner.

My Other 30-Day Challenges

Over the past 30 months I have completed a number of 30-day challenges.

One of my least favourites (initially) was to get up at 5am every morning and work on my personal development for an hour (typically reading and writing). But, after a while, it just kinda clicked, and I am most appreciative of how it made me feel.

I started each day on a high, feeling calm, relaxed, educated, and ready to tackle the world.

Other challenges have included:

• Not watching TV for 30 days.
• Starting a conversation with a different person every single day, that I didn’t know, for 30 days straight (I cannot begin to tell you the number of strange looks I got, as well as the number of people who thought I was hitting on them - male and female).
• Doing something charitable for 30 days in a row (food for homeless people, giving clothes away to a charity shop, etc.)

What Did I Discover From These Challenges?

I generally only watch TV in the evenings, maybe a couple of hours at night, occasionally more. Well, my productivity sky-rocketed during these 30 days, as I found plenty of other things I could be doing. Never again (hopefully) will I say, “There aren’t enough hours in the day”.

Plus I felt happier. I’m guessing this was because I wasn’t constantly exposing myself to “bad news”, which the news channels love to share.

Talking to people - well that was tough. But, it made me feel more confident, and I didn’t actually mind being rejected by the end of this 30-day challenge.

Would I be right in thinking that in life we tend to avoid doing a lot of things because of the fear of rejection?

I also feel I learned a lot from this experience, mainly about human nature, but for those willing to stop and chat, well, it was truly educational (I now know how to cook a vegan spaghetti bolognese - not sure how much use this will ever be in my life, but still).

On a side note, I should add - London... probably the only the place in the world where you can walk up to someone you don’t know and say, “Hi, how are you?” and receive the reply, “Do you wanna fight?”

Being charitable - this made me feel really good about myself. I wasn’t doing it for any personal gain or reward, I’ve just read many times about the “power of giving”. And, oh how true this is. I had this real warm glow inside.

Although I don’t do any of these things on a daily basis anymore, the habit has now been ingrained, so they are things that I do frequently.

My Wealthy Affiliate 30-Day Challenges

So, I decided to see what 30-day challenges I could attempt while at Wealthy Affiliate.

I’ve completed 2 so far, and have already planned my next one.

Firstly, I decided I wanted to write and publish an article to my site every day for 30 days.

Funnily enough, the same as my “Murph adventure”, and with practically every other 30-day challenge I have undertaken, my mind and my thought processes played a pivotal role.

I wanted to give up on this challenge on at least 7 or 8 occasions during that 30-day period, but I saw it through.

I’ve said that I never really looked at these challenges as a way to instill new habits, but in a way they do anyway.

Okay, perhaps I haven’t continued writing and publishing a new article every single day, but barring the last 3 weeks (I have been concentrating on other things you know), I have managed at least 5 articles a week, every week.

My next 30-day challenge was actually quite enjoyable, as I limited myself to a maximum of 90 minutes a day, and it also paved the way to literally hundreds of new ideas.

I choose the first 90 minutes of my working day.

I would use Jaaxy for keyword research and find 3 great longtail keywords.

I’d then plug these into Google (often I used “Google Blog Search”) and find competitors in my niche who had already published around this subject.

I would read 2 articles for each keyword and leave a comment on their blog. There was no form of self-promotion, no ulterior motive (well sort of no ulterior motive, but good things happen to good people), I just read and left comments.

So, in total, on a daily basis, I was reading 6 articles and leaving 6 comments. Well actually that isn’t strictly true, as quite often I ran out of time (remember 90 minutes). But, no harm done.

I made an Excel sheet and added the urls of all the articles I had read and where I had managed to leave a comment. By the end of 30 days, I had 90 new keywords to write articles around. I had only managed to read a total of 147 articles (but think of all that new knowledge floating around in my head just waiting for me to put a proverbial pen to paper).

And I only managed to leave 132 comments (but think of all those backlinks and potential new readers who may read my comments and decide to pop on over to little of me’s website).

In fact, I’ve made a few great relationships with niche-related website and blog owners through doing this, and I’ve been lucky enough to have some of my articles tweeted, shared, linked to, etc.

This has on occasion led to nice upsurge in traffic and hopefully some long-lasting business relationships (still no ulterior motive, but you get me, right?).

My next 30-day challenge (I’ve decided to wait until the 2nd August 2020) is to start from article number one on my website, see if it needs updating, should it be rewritten, is it linking to other related articles on my site, could it do with a relevant video, or new images, etc. 30 days, 30 articles, let’s see what happens from that.

In the meantime, I am still writing, I am still compiling keyword research, article reading, blog commenting, all regularly, just not every single day.

However, these GOOD habits have now been formed

What Have I Learned From 30-Day Challenges

• I’m an idiot, bordering on insane.
• Have a specific goal in mind, either numerically or time-related.
• Your mind is going to tell you to give up over-and-over again. DON’T.
• Be accountable to someone else (in terms of what you do here in your business, blog about your 30-day challenge, or start a free siterubix site and write about it. Just let people know what you are doing, as you’re more likely to follow through).
• Log your progress.
• Have support, someone you can turn to, when you feel as though you may falter.
• Reward yourself (whether this is after each success or at the end… ICE CREEEAAAMM).
• Focus on ONE thing per 30-day challenge

The final thing I have learned is that the emotions you feel inside upon completing a challenge, well I simply can’t explain them.

You’ll have to try for yourself to experience that feeling of euphoria.

What About YOU?

What’s your next 30-day challenge going to be?

And I don’t mean business challenges either?

Think about areas of your life you’d like to work on or improve.

I am currently doing a 30-day gardening challenge (only 20 minutes a day).

Day 17 tomorrow...never have I wanted it to rain so much before in my life.

Thank you for reading

Partha