How To Build Your Own Mindset Challenge

I recently discussed a group of different mindset challenges that I did for myself, one still in progress. Since this is a rather broad challenge topic, I thought it’d be helpful to offer a bit of guidance for those who would like to go about doing their own mindset challenge but aren’t sure where to start.

Firstly, I’ll start with a brief description to what a mindset challenge is. The purpose of this type of challenge is to address any changes you want to make to your mindset. This can be both adjusting as well as maintaining, though I’d say it mainly focuses on the changes needed. It helps with addressing limiting beliefs, pushing past anxiety, lowering your stress, and prepping for the next chapter or phase of your life—all at once or separately.

The scale of your mindset challenge is up to you. If you’ve never done one before, however, I would suggest limiting yourself to a single area that you want to work on such as addressing a single limiting belief or only working on one skill you want to develop. The best place to begin, therefore, with designing your challenge is to figure out your focus. If you’ve done a few informal (or formal) versions of a mindset challenge, then you may have a list of areas you want to work on developing. Get clear about what you are going to do. Will you focus on all at once in smaller pieces or only pick one to three to work on in more depth?

The category you choose will largely determine the challenge you do as different things require different ways of handling it. Although a lot of areas of life overlap, there would still be a difference in how you approach aspects like building your courage compared to addressing your limiting beliefs around money and abundance. Tackling anxiety about career changes will need a different set of tools compared to deepening your spiritual practice, and so on.

Once you know what you’re going to work on, you’ve reached the major brainstorming step. Look at what you picked and for each thing ask yourself, “What type of action can I take that addresses this?” For something like getting comfortable in the uncomfortable, doing a meditation challenge, working on affirmations, as well as going out to eat by yourself could all address this. For addressing something like a limiting belief about your artistic talent, it could be journaling about how you feel with your art practice, finding a way to post your artwork once a week, or taking a class to develop a skill you feel insecure about.

These are just examples, within them, there are even more options and variations. I’ve done some different challenges before with boundaries that ranged between journaling about relationships to changing up my routines or doing week-long detox challenges to hold boundaries with myself and get intentional about what I was doing like getting to bed on time, not hitting snooze, not checking emails outside of work hours, and doing a daily yoga practice. Boundaries for you may look entirely different and could be more focused on relationships or strictly about your work-life balance. Get creative and list everything down, even if it’s only tangentially related.

From this, you’ll have a great field of options to pick from to start building your challenge. I recommend picking a mixture of long and short tasks, of journaling and action, and generally mixing it up so there’s a wide variety. This can help both keep you interested in the challenge as well as build in a buffer in case something doesn’t work like you may think it will. There’s plenty of other things to try.

In general, keep it simple and lower the number of things you do for each. Maybe you want to do a month long meditation challenge, but start with two weeks or even 10 days. Bring down the big levels you’re reaching for and don’t give yourself too many steps to follow. This is, after all, about changing your mindset and that can be hard, no matter how motivated you are to change things. You’re going to likely have a bit of an uphill battle to begin with as you address the changes you want to make, so don’t make it more challenging for yourself than you need to.

From this point, you can design the structure of your challenge. You could make a progress bar to fill in, a bingo board, a game board like Monopoly, a rewards tracker, a weekly journal or form to fill out, or a wheel to spin to decide what you do next. Whatever your mind can come up with and then some. The main thing is to find some way to track what you’re doing. You just did all this work to set up and define what you’re doing and why, don’t lose that information. As well, having a way to track it all will help keep you accountable in filling it out and keeping up with your challenge instead of letting it fall to the side as life keeps you busy.

My last piece of guidance is to take it slow and steady. While it can be exciting to put a time crunch on the challenge and try to do it all at once, remember that this is about changing your mindset and that is no easy task. Just like keeping it simple and easy to begin with, you don’t want to put too much stress on yourself by adding in too small of a time allowance to get the tasks done. Likely, you won’t want to try doing more than one of the tasks you’ve picked at once. Too many changes and you’ll do more harm than good in shifting your mindset and instead confirm the overwhelm and pull back into the comfort zone that you wanted to get out of.

I know this isn’t an exact fill-out form to set up a mindset challenge, but I do hope that it’s offered you some guidance in how to construct your own mindset challenge and maybe even got you thinking about the areas you may want to tackle and how. Whatever you do, know that while in the immediate time period, you may not see drastic results, later on you’ll feel the positive impacts from putting in the work to keep shifting your mindset for the better.