Balance is a daily challenge. Most of us know what we need to do and what we should do, but finding the time to do it and knowing where to begin can often leave us overwhelmed and burnt out. The 11 day challenge is designed to get you to make small but significant changes each day for eleven days to get you to increase your overall physical, mental, and spiritual health while decreasing the stress, anxiety, and clutter in your life.
To start, focus on a change you can make today that will move you one step closer to getting healthy, to eliminating debt, to de-cluttering, to improving a relationship, etc. Each day after, continue to think of something else you can do to improve your situation until eleven days are up. After the eleven days, take time to reflect on the changes you've made, and what you will do better in the future.
Keep track of your activities, and stop by Twitter or Facebook to let us know how you are doing. Below, I have provided some ideas from my book Balancing Blessings and Obtaining Order to help you along on your 11 day challenge.
- Step 1/Day 1: Reflect for a moment on the fact that you are loved, blessed and forgiven by God. How do you feel?
- Step 2/Day 2: Take stock of your life and determine what is working and what needs to change.
- Step 3/Day 3: Schedule a few hours away from friends and family members to pray, review your priorities, set goals, rest, and organize your planner or PDA.
- Step 4/Day 4: Plan a week's worth of healthy breakfast meals, and make a commitment to only eat from those options until the end of this challenge or until eating a healthy breakfast becomes a habit.
- Step 5/Day 5: Make a list of the clutter eyesores in each of the rooms in your home; then, for the next seven days focus on conquering one category of clutter in each of those rooms using the triple "A" principle for de-cluttering. To assist you, you may want to download a snapshot of my clutter worksheet (password: "BBClutter").
- Step 6/Day 6: Take an initial step to turn a weakness that you have into a strength.
- Step 7/Day 7: Determine what you can do to revive or cultivate a relationship you are concerned about, and do it.
- Step 8/Day 8: Take a spiritual gift evaluation. Your local church should be able to provide you with a free spiritual gift evaluation packet and with guidance on understanding and applying your spiritual gifts.
- Step 9/Day 9: Pull your credit report, obtain your FICO score, and create a household budget.
- Step 10/Day 10: Think about how you can model Christ like character and discretion in your dress and appearance.
- Step 11/Day 11: Make a laundry list of things you would eventually like to do to improve the appearance, and up keep of your domain.
If you have completed the eleven day challenge congratulations; don't forget to tell us about it.