Day seven of the 7-day writing streak challenge
I had a busy evening planned for today, including a local event at 8PM. And since I didn’t know how long the event would last, I knew I absolutely needed to get my writing done before leaving the house, or else risk breaking my writing streak.
It took quite some effort and time management, but I’m happy to say that I did manage to squish in a half-hour writing session right before leaving, which I’m very proud of. With all the things I had to do this evening, it would have been very easy for me to take some time off to just sit and chill before the event, but instead I pushed through and got my writing done.
And since I wrote today, it means that I have reached the seventh day in my writing streak, which also means that my “7-day writing streak challenge” is complete!
I’m so proud of myself for having pushed through and stayed consistent all week. And in all honesty, the more I think about it, the more I’m sure I’ve never been this consistent before.
I don’t know what my previous writing streak record was exactly, but I can guarantee you that it wasn’t very long, and I don’t remember having ever reached seven days before.
This means that today is a double celebration for me: first for having completed the challenge, and second for having had my most consistent writing week ever.
It’s funny because this is not the first time that I’ve tried to write consistently every day, but until now I had always failed, and I think the reason for that is because I would set myself goals that were way too hard or ambitious. For example, at the beginning of this year I’d told myself I would write every day this year. But the thing is that when I decided this, there was a part of myself that knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t succeed – especially since I hadn’t been able to pull through the previous year, nor the year before that. And even though I genuinely wanted to succeed in writing every day this year, I also knew that it would be almost impossible and that I would, without fail, miss at least one day eventually, which would have ruined everything. And this “knowledge” that I would fail, ultimately made me take my goal much less seriously. And this meant that when the day did come during which I really didn’t feel like writing, or during which I was so busy that it would have been hard to squish in a writing session, my brain, instead of fighting for my goal, was already ready to accept defeat since somewhere, it had known that failure was a given all along.
The difference this time is that I set myself the goal of writing every day for seven days, which is a relatively short period. When I set this goal for myself, I almost laughed at it, thinking that it would be ridiculously easy to do.
Since you already know that I’d never managed to write every day for a full week before, you already know how silly this reaction was. But at that moment I hadn’t realized the truth of it yet. And because I was so convinced that it would be so easy, the idea of failing never even entered my subconscious. Failing was never an option. And because of it, when faced with a tough situation or a lack of motivation, my entire conscious and subconscious were ready to do the most possible in order to achieve my goal. It was only when I was already halfway through the week that I realized I’d never really written for seven consistent days before. But by the time I became aware of this, I only had three days left to go. And since I knew that I could for sure write for three days in a row, there was no chance of me failing this now.
This is how, thanks to an absurdly “easy” challenge, I ended up breaking my previous writing streak record.
Once again, I’m fascinated by how our brains – or at least my brain – work.
Simply because I presented it with something so easy that it thought failure wasn’t an option, it was ready to fight a lot harder to succeed than it would have if presented with something hard, and for which it had already accepted defeat.
This is why I’m so grateful to Sara Lubratt, who motivated me to try out this challenge when she recommended it in one of her videos. I might never have tried this challenge without her recommendation, in which case, who knows how long it would have taken me to finally break my writing-streak record.
Talking about writing streaks, now that I’m on a roll, I’ve decided that my next challenge will be to reach a 14-day writing streak. And since I’m currently already on day seven of a writing streak, I’m already halfway there!
And now that I know that I can write for a whole seven days in a row, my brain knows that this goal is absolutely achievable.
So for my next challenge, the same rules apply as for the the first, and this time my goal is to reach a 14-day streak.
Let’s get going!