When we challenge ourselves, we’re raising the bar, pushing ourselves to strive for more–possibly beyond our limits. At first, it feels like an impossible task, but when we hold ourselves accountable, we’d be surprised at how much we can achieve.
I remember when I was writing a novel years ago and setting up daily word counts for each writing session. At first, it was something low, like six hundred words. It was hard for me to stay focused, and often, I wanted to get up from the chair and do something else, since it was hard to continuously come up with the next line, the next sentence.
I told myself to write, even if it was bad, ignoring typos and punctuation errors, just letting my thoughts flow like I was transcribing my thoughts rather than trying to be precise about what the next word should be. After several days of struggle, I became accustomed to flow, writing as if it was simply natural. And once that goal became attainable, I raised the bar to a thousand words per writing session. Soon, that became surmountable without difficulty, and I was starting to write somewhere between two to three thousand words per writing session.
It’s as if the writing muscle needed to be strengthened after a long extended break, and once it had become accustomed to the exercise, it became natural for the writing muscle to push itself beyond what it was previously incapable of.
Challenging oneself is a test of endurance and ability. Not only that, it is a mental test–one that test our mindset and attitude about what we’re capable of achieving. Once we’ve passed the test, the next one is not the same test, but one that is like it that asks us to go beyond where we’ve left off.
Fallton Havenstonne 