There is but one word to bring to the center of your mind, which can define the path to an engaged life and mobilize the great energies of potential within you: challenge.
It’s important to differentiate between goals and challenges. A goal can simply be an item on a to-do list or checklist. Nothing in setting a goal demands the most of you; a challenge, on the other hand, is something that stretches your efforts and abilities. Goal thinking is destination thinking–it’s all about getting something. Challenge thinking immediately inspires thoughts about the journey–it’s about giving something more of yourself.
Activator #1: Choose Fulfilling Challenges
How do you choose “good” challenges? It helps to know that the kind of challenges that bring full engagement and fulfillment in our lives have five things in common.
- Singularity of focus
- Stretch of effort and capability
- Scoring of performance
- Sense of completion
- Sharing of experience and result
Activator #2: Focus on the Journey and Don’t Fear Rejection
Be in the moment during the journey: Enjoy it, live it, and learn from it. Pay attention to what’s in front of you one step at a time, relishing in your efforts and the new knowledge, skills, and abilities you’re picking up along the way. Learn to enjoy the process of taking on your challenges and celebrating your own effort as much as your results. The more you focus on the journey, the more challenges feel engaging and surmountable.
On the road to your destiny, who and what are you going to pay attention to? The seven or eight mean people–whose judgments were much more about themselves than you–who are in your rearview mirror? Or the thousands of cheers and encouragements you’ve received that are now lining your path to progress? You choose.
Activator #3: Set Monthly Thirty-Day Challenges
Whatever your challenge, realize that it’s often not the name or topic of the challenge that makes all this so important. It’s simply setting real challenges that mean something to you, that stretch you, that make you a better, stronger human being. You can become the master of your own fate by setting up real challenges and knocking them down, enjoying and sharing the process all along the way.
Charge Points
1. The next big and bold challenge I’m going to take on in my life is to…
2. If I stopped fearing rejection, a challenge I would have taken on earlier in my life would have been to…
3. The thirty-day challenges I could set for myself over the next twelve months include…
* Source: The Charge by Brendon Burchard