Last month I wrote almost daily about my self improvement challenge. Writing daily was exhausting, but it helped me stay on track and reinforced all the new positive habits.
This month I wanted to write once a week about the 30 Day Challenge, but I haven’t written about it until now. You also might notice from my progress page that I have larger gaps in meeting goals this month than I did last month. Gasp! Horror!
Here are things I wish I’d done better so far this month:
- Strength Training – I had significant emotional resistance to going to the gym mostly because I haven’t been in months and I worried about how sore I’d be. Plus, it’s a bit of a drive to my gym. Lo and behold the universe stepped up and sent me a piece of junk mail for a free month at a nearby 24 Hour Fitness. Of course, once I worked out, I felt much better about fitness and everything else. Duh.
- Wake up before 7:30 – What was I thinking? This is the month where we lose an hour of sleep to the time change. I want to be a self made superman, but come on…
- Daily memory exercises – I read through The Memory Book, and did the early exercises, but this item is just too low of a priority compared to my other goals and consulting obligations. That said, it is cool stuff and I was able to use it to remember “linked lists” and people’s names. When I’m better at this I’ll post about it.
- Meditation – This is the one I feel badly about. Far too many gaps in this. My thought is that if you can’t commit to a 15 minute a day meditation practice you need to look at who or what is in charge of your life because it sure isn’t you.
Happily there has been more to this month than gaps:
- I’ve been much more busy with web design consulting (actually I’d rather be doing less of this, but I can’t retire quite yet). It seems like new business opportunities and relationships are falling into my lap every other day even though I’m trying to hide and work on other stuff.
- Blogging is now a huge part of my personal and professional life. I’ve written 19 posts in 16 days, and 99% of them have been substantive. Learning how to write headlines, posts, and putting together funny (to me) images has been immensely fun. I’ve also done quite a bit of blog optimization and technical stuff like merging my social bookmarks so readers can see the internet in patent-pending NathanVisionTM (like beer goggles, but nerdier).
- I feel healthier than ever. I’m not losing weight as quickly but I’m down 2lbs. so far this month. There have been too many gaps in exercise and I only just started lifting weights again, but any progress is good. Again, not eating beef is awesome… so awesome that I’m considering not eating poultry.
- Most importantly, I’ve overcome a huge creative and business block that I’ll talk about in a subsequent post. Seriously, even if I accomplished nothing else this month, I would judge the 30 days a success based on this one accomplishment.
So there you have it. While last month felt technically better because I “made my numbers”, this month feels qualitatively better. Maybe that’s the way it had to be. Last month was an experiment that required a certain rigor and rigidity so I could build momentum and see what worked. This month I’m actually prioritizing and putting more energy into the areas that will generate the most rewards.
