One of the main benefits of a 30-day challenge is the opportunity to create new habits and routines. Habits and routines that give us positive outcomes.
My goal in starting the challenge was to give myself and those who participate a platform to create great habits.
However, it’s important that we not do our routines by rote. Consciously changing a behavior will have more lasting change than simply going through the motions.
Take affirmations. Let’s say that someone set their target for the 30-day challenge to be saying daily affirmations. When 
they first started, they had to create the affirmations. Perhaps they wrote the affirmations down on paper or put them in a file on their computer.
The first few days of reading and saying their affirmations, they were very focused AND very conscious about what they were saying.
Yet, within a few days, their reading was done by rote with very little thought put into what they said. Therein lies a huge challenge. Affirmations are meant to get us focused on a specific action, direction or behavior.
When we consciously affirm what we want, energetically, we are creating change. If we give very little thought to what we are affirming, it’s likely we will get minimal results.
When to Change Up Routines
Routines are good… to a point. To grow, we may need to change how we implement the actions of our routines which means, get out of our comfort zone.
Whether it be the routine at the gym. The morning routine at home we’ve grown accustomed to. Or a routine at work.
If we do something over and over, we tend to get good at it. We also tend to not be fully conscious of how we do things. We are moving by rote.
Changing things up, doing something we are afraid of, getting out of our comfort zone, can apply to virtually any area of our life.
After work, we often go through a routine that lands us on our favorite easy chair…. day after day after day. Why not skip the easy chair tonight and go for a walk? Or play a game with your kids? Or take your spouse out for a surprise drive… just because.
What to Do
Let’s use the example of affirming what we want. During the 30-day period, do the affirmations but change up where and how you do them.
If you find yourself mindlessly saying your affirmations, change the location where you are doing your morning affirmations.
If you normally sit down when doing your affirmations, try standing up. If you have not been looking in a mirror to say your affirmations, try standing in front of a mirror, slow down the speed in which you are saying them and really let yourself feel what you are affirming.
As with anything, we can get bored with the process of developing a new habit. Allow yourself to be fully immersed in the process of the 30-Day Turnaround Challenge.
If you are losing interest, go back to the blog post from Day One and establish your WHY. The more you know your why, the more likely you are to stick with the change.
