I’m only 9 days into the month, but I’m already rethinking the monthly challenge that I set for January. I said that I wanted to have all my reading this month be self-help or self-improvement books. This challenge was something I chose because I realized I was behind in my more serious reading because I was enjoying my fun reading too much. I have gotten books that I know I need to read because they will teach me something I need to know but I just kept putting it off. I didn’t want to have that excuse anymore and I wanted to get through my book list. I knew I probably had enough to read for the month, but I also thought maybe this challenge would help me find more self-help books that I should read.
I really thought this would be a great challenge for me. I knew it might not be easy because I do like to have some fluff reading in my life, but the idea of a challenge is to push myself. And I thought this would be a good push and that I would be able to do it.
But 9 days later, I’m thinking that this might not have been the best challenge for me.
Reading has always been one of the ways I relax and escape. I love getting lost in a good book and getting sucked into a story. It’s something I do every night when I’m getting ready to go to bed. And even though I can read something serious or intense when winding down for the night, it’s not the only thing I want to read. I need to have some of that entertainment and escape from time to time. Sometimes I have a stressful day and all I want to do before going to sleep is to have something easy to read that will calm me down a bit.
And I have had some of those stressful days the past few days. It’s nothing horrible, but I haven’t been calm and relaxed when I was trying to sleep. And I continued to read the self-help book that I started this month as my bedtime reading, but it just was starting to stress me out a bit more. The book isn’t about anything crazy, but it is something that is making me think a lot and that keeps me up later when I already can’t quiet my mind about everything I dealt with during the day. I pushed through when I could, but on Tuesday night I had a bit a breakdown and realized I just needed to switch up my books and read some fluff.
And honestly, reading that fluff that night was exactly what I needed to do. I was able to be a lot calmer as I fell asleep and I slept a lot better that night. I know that things haven’t been completely normal for me lately, but I still felt so guilty that I had already failed my monthly challenge. I hate knowing that I won’t be able to be successful in what I set out to do.
And I let that feeling sit with me for a day before I realized that I didn’t have to make this challenge a fail. I could change what the challenge would be. There’s nothing that says I can’t change the challenge if I realize that this isn’t going to work for me. And this might be a good opportunity to change it to fit what I need the challenge to be. I’m still playing around with what I would want the new version of the challenge to be, but I’m thinking about making a list of the top 3 or 4 self-help books that I want to read this month and making the challenge completing the list. I’m not sure that’s what I want the new challenge to be, but it gives me a starting point for reworking it.
I’m glad that I was able to change my mindset and not think of this as a failure of my monthly challenge but an opportunity to find a better way to challenge myself. But it still bugs me a bit that I wanted to push myself to do something that I knew would be hard and I wasn’t able to do it. I know I’m very competitive with myself and that’s probably something I need to work on. But I can’t help thinking that I can accomplish any goals that are within my control. But I guess it’s a sign of growth that even though I have those feelings that I was still able to reframe it and make the situation a bit more positive.
I’m going to take the rest of this week to figure out what my new version of the monthly challenge will be, but I probably won’t be posting about it again until I do my challenge recap. I don’t think I will need to change it more than once, but I also want to give myself permission to do that if I need to.
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