Challenge yourself: A different approach to goals and resolutions
My challenges really started when my sweetheart and I moved to Detroit a few years ago. I’m not talking about the kind that involve high auto insurance or petty crime; I mean the kind that push us out of our comfort zone and encourage us to grow.
We wanted to motivate one another to explore a city we already knew fairly well by visiting new venues of all kinds.
So we set a goal to go to 200 places we had not seen, or had not visited in at least 20 years. The 200 would be in our first year back in Detroit. Friends recommended places and we took Sunday drives to explore new neighborhoods, dropping in at artist studios, shops and parks. Favorite restaurants were ignored in favor of new-to-us eateries.
Our list grew and grew and we hit 200 just a couple of days before our one year anniversary in Greenacres, our Detroit neighborhood.
My next challenge seemed more ambitious, though the numeric goal slimmed down significantly. I challenged myself to experience or taste 52 new foods, places, activities in a year. This once-a-week #52new challenge revolved around taking risks and experimenting — and encouraging myself to tackle some of my bucket list. In some ways, it conceded that as I advanced in age, I needed a challenge to stay fresh, to seek out new experiences.
Some of them could be serendipitous and some needed to be carefully planned. So my overnight in a tree house in Puerto Rico required a reservation and some careful navigation to find it while commissioning a poem from a street poet happened spontaneously while visiting New Orleans. I visited a tarot card reader named “Grace” and bought a round of drinks for everyone in a hole-in-the-wall bar a couple of miles from my home. It was a small bar, just right for my freelance writer’s income.
Such challenges have been around for hundreds of years. Pilgrims challenge themselves to walk El Camino de Santiago in France and Spain and pioneer women challenged themselves to make the best dessert for the fair or cake walk. More recently, vloggers have challenged themselves to add cinnamon or taste test of exotic sodas or Bloody Marys to spice up their YouTube videos.
Clearly challenges increase our creativity, our spirituality and our sense of community. Sometimes they increase our incomes, such as when I challenge myself to write a story in an hour (though I always spend another hour or two editing and polishing it).
Pushing yourself through a challenge has many benefits, and researchers say it is useful for students too, who may feel greater self esteem as they achieve challenging goals. (Harvard University has a 14-page paper on the power of self-set goals, from more motivation to increased creativity and learning.)
So how are challenges different than goals? I haven’t found anything definitive about this in the research I’ve read on goals and success. It seems to me that challenges may be more internally focused, and more about experiencing life more fully. They are less likely to be about success and more about the moment.
Coming up with challenges for yourself is in many ways setting a new habit — a habit to discover what else you may learn or experience. In a YouTube video, Vishen Lakhiani, an author and founder of MindValley, suggests three questions to ask as you set goals. One of them is “What experiences do I want in my life?” (Lakhiani also urges us to go after the “end goals” — the really big thing we want instead of the incremental gains along the way.)
Here are three lessons I’ve learned about challenges:
Taste the joy. Choose challenges that delight and energize you. Choose those that enrich your life and your life story. I love to eat — so some of my 52 news involve food I’ve never tried before, from my first Senegalese dinner (in Detroit) to a turnip cake (purple) that I enjoyed in Queens.
Strange cities make some things easier. Allow yourself to experience a new city and meet your more offbeat or embarrassing challenges at the same time. You may feel more at ease visiting a tarot card reader or an erotic art show in Boston if you live 300 miles away. I employed this often. Yet I attended my first erotic art opening in Detroit. Research your choices carefully whether at home or away.
Make them huge and tiny. Challenges may be gigantic — climbing a mountain or eating a salad a day for a year. So intersperse something smaller, easier into your plans and be glad it only took 13 minutes to walk around the block backwards in Times Square. (Yes, I did that, a 52 new in 2015.)
This coming year, I am striving for two big challenges:
First, I intend to write more, both here and in paid freelance gigs and possibly in a book project. My challenge: Write about topics that matter, to me and to the world, to encourage generosity and creativity and connections.
Second, I’m recommitted to my 52 new challenge— going for new experiences, foods, places and more. Certainly, I’ve already tried the dreaded durian fruit and kissed 101 people in a day — thank you New Orleans! — but I still want to earn money busking on the streets of Miami Beach or Los Angeles and learn calligraphy. My first ride in a hot air balloon and my first bit part in a film may take place this year.
How do I expect my challenges to grow and change me? That is something I will see in a year or three. I know they will introduce me to new people and ideas and places — and those are worth the challenge and effort.
© Vickie Elmer, 2017 — © 2023
