Using Challenges to Develop More Discipline

One way you can develop more discipline is to use challenges. This makes it more like a game and less like a chore.

Also, there can be the element of competition with others as well as having others help hold you accountable. Both improve your odds of success.

Find a Challenge or Create Your Own

Challenges are very popular and you can find them in many places. Or you can make up your own and share it with a group of people. The goal is to find a challenge that motivates you to develop more discipline.

When determining if a challenge will benefit you, look for some of these factors:

• Is the challenge realistic? You want to stretch yourself, but not to the point where you have no chance of success. For example, you could challenge yourself to lose 30 pounds in 30 days, but that is not very realistic. You don’t want to set yourself up for failure. Nor do you want to have a rebound effect. A pound or two per week is more realistic.
• You also don’t want the challenge to be too easy.
• Do you have the time to devote to it? Be sure to include time for learning new things. For example, if you challenge yourself to build a new blogging website in 30 days and you’ve never done one before, allow time for learning how to develop a website. If on the other hand, if you already have a website, you could set a goal for the number of blog posts to write. Even then, if you set a goal to write one post per day and you barely have time to write one per week, your goal isn’t realistic. It would be better to set a goal to write one per week and then celebrate the accomplishment. If you find that it was too easy, bump up the goal a bit.

Milestones for Large Challenges

For large challenges, are there clear-cut milestones along the way to help you have a sense of accomplishment? If your challenge, for example, is losing 60 pounds in a year, you need to set up smaller weight goals along the way so you can keep up the momentum.

Milestones also give you the opportunity to tweak the challenge, either up or down. If you lose 10 pounds in about two months, you are right on schedule. If you have only lost five pounds in that same time period, though, you may need to lower the amount you plan on losing in a year. On the other hand, if you lose 15 pounds in two months, you may want to raise the amount you plan on losing in a year, or cut the time down to say 10 months.

I recently created a Blogging to Be Found workshop. I set the date that I wanted to start it and then set mini goals along the way. Each week, I had a certain goal. Each one moved me a step closer to the ultimate goal of taking my workshop live.

Benefits of a Group Challenge

When you do a group challenge, you have some added benefits. There is a sense of camaraderie when working together on a goal that you do not get just competing with yourself.

Other people can give you ideas, too. For example, if you are in a group losing weight, people can share healthy recipes and support.

Getting an accountability partner is very helpful too.

Just remember that the primary person you are in competition with is you!