Hey Reader

Before we get into this week's tip, just a heads up that the Summer Creative Retreat is happening! 🥳

Long story short, it features 60 free workshops from a bunch of awesome artists and creatives (and me) for a week of creative fun.

If you’ve been feeling a little creatively burnt out or just want to try something new, we'd love to have you with us.

All the workshops are free to attend and replay throughout the week, or you can grab the Permanent Vacation pass for lifetime access to all the workshops (which is on sale until the end of the live event 💪)

Hopefully you can make it along, but for now, back to our regularly scheduled programming 😝

The hardest type of goals

A lot of the goals I'm working on for the 3 Months to Change Your Life challenge are based on building or maintaining routines.

While building these routines will make a positive impact for me, habit-based goals are the hardest goal type to succeed at.

This is for a range of reasons, with the main ones being:

• They require sustained effort over a longer period of time
• Seemingly the smallest things can derail them until they're established
• They're the easiest to put off working on

With other life areas pulling more focus recently (e.g. organising a wedding), completing those not-yet-established habits becomes even harder.

While some routines have been mostly unaffected, others have seen a definite decrease in completion.

This week, I've been working to make my routine completion easier and more likely, and this all started with challenge planning 😈

Let's have a look!

The idea - Challenge plan your goals

Challenge planning isn't planning to have challenges, but more so planning how we will respond when we face challenges.

Often, a lot of initial goal plans are unintentionally based in fiction 😝 I am also someone who falls victim to this.

We start off planning a new goal, habit, or routine with a lot of excitement. There's so much possibility for change and improvement 🥳

However, the heightened enthusiasm often leads to setting unrealistic expectations of future-us. This could be in the form of overcommitting, or just expecting future-us to not be as burdened with the realities of everyday life.

It's one thing to say we're going to become a morning person who wakes up feeling fresh and ready to tackle the world as soon as the alarm goes off. It's entirely another thing to actually do that 😅

When the unexpected happens or difficulties pop up that make the plan hard to execute, this is when we fall off with our goals and those routines get left by the wayside.

This is where challenge planning helps.

By challenge planning our goals and the routines we're trying to build, we can account for the fact that things aren't always perfect.

We are going to face difficulties in working towards these goals and habits, but we don't have to let them derail us.

How to challenge plan

In its simplest form, challenge planning involves:

1. Brainstorming the challenges, and
2. Brainstorming ways forward

Having a closer look though, brainstorming challenges means considering what is and could hold you back from taking action on your goals or completing your habits.

For example, considering the routine I'm building of exercising daily, some of the pain points that came up for me were:

Thankfully, these mostly had easy fixes, but once you have the actual and possible pain points outlined, then it's time to brainstorm the ways forward.

Here we want to consider:

• What would make the challenge less likely to happen at all, or
• What positive responses can we have if it does happen

Some of the ways forward are going to be one-and-done solutions that you only need to action once, while others are going to be "if X happens, I will Y" responses.

For my exercise routine, the solutions were:

Your "fixes" don't have to be perfect, and you can definitely change them as you experiment with what works best for you.

There also doesn't have to be just one solution for any challenge you identified! It can sometimes be helpful to have a range of possible solutions so you have multiple ways to tackle pain points.

Am I expecting you to come back to this challenge plan list every time a challenge comes up?

No, that would be a bit unrealistic. I don't even do that 😝

But by acknowledging the possibility of challenges and thinking through how you can lessen them or respond to them, your goals and habits are much more likely to happen 💪

Let's take action

For one of the goals or habits you're struggling with, ask yourself:

We're not going to respond to challenges perfectly every time, but putting in some forethought as to how we'd like to respond can help make sure challenges don't derail us as often or as easily 😊

Until next time!

- Jess

Sick of setting goals that don't get achieved? Learn the system everyday goal-getters are using to make EPIC things happen.