If you are interested in growing mentally or physically in life, you should be challenging yourself. It is crucial for growth in life to take challenges head on. These challenges can be anything, no sweets for a week, make a certain amount of cold calls at work, show up 15 minutes early to your shift for a month, run a marathon, and anything else you can think of. Anything you see or think of that sounds difficult or something you do not currently do, you can make a challenge.
What is very important with these challenges, is completing them. If you decide to do something, you need to take it seriously and work towards it. If you do not, you will be letting yourself down, which will be contradictory to your goal of strengthening yourself. In order to strengthen yourself mentally or physically, you need to show up with consistent, positive actions to get you closer to your goal of completing your challenge.
Sam and I have discussed doing challenges or learning new physical activities every 6 months or so and tracking it. Essentially we will choose a task, such as surfing and then spend 6 months learning how to surf. We will track our progress along the way and document how its going, so everyone can follow along and see if it is something they are interested in doing. It would be a challenge for Sam and I to learn to surf but to also track everything and document it for everyone to see. So we will start with something more trackable to begin with.
As a spur of the moment, I decided to do a weightlifting meet with one month to prepare. I will be competing this Saturday in Minneapolis. I will be competing in Snatch and Clean and Jerk. I have not trained this type of lifting in over 5 years and have not competed in weightlifting in 6 years. It has been a fun train up and I am excited to lift this weekend. It is a nice little challenge for me and I got to reminisce on a type of exercise I do not do anymore. I decided after I finish the meet Saturday, I am going to start training for an ultramarathon (50k) on Sunday morning. I asked a friend who has ran marathons if he wants to do it with me and we decided we are going to do it. The run we have picked out is in the middle of October. This gives me three months to train from not being a runner to running an ultramarathon. It is going to be a massive challenge and one I cannot slack on.
I am looking forward to this challenge and I want to track it so everyone can see my journey. I will track how far my runs are, how many days a week I am training, the gear I will be using, and how miserable or fun the experience is :).
Challenging myself mentally and physically is something I love to do. I enjoy seeing what my body can handle and what my mind can endure.
Go out there and find a challenge for yourself, it’ll help build you as an individual.
Your life Tutor
-Shaun Tutor
Tutors of Life 