Today was a long one, and not the best performance I’ve had in this challenge!
For starters, Sundays are always a little hectic for the Challenge tasks with a family breakfast and church in the morning through noon. I always get my morning workout in beforehand, but everything else ends up waiting until after lunch and should be completed before we go to church in the evening, which doesn’t allow for much time. The honesty here is that I was a little behind on my reading of my book for this week, so that didn’t help because I needed to get it done tonight! I have to start a new book tomorrow! I was able to get my Master Class video in while doing my exercises in the morning, so count one more checkmark!
I was able to get my walk in just after lunch and got 2.99 miles in exactly 60 minutes, which was great! I am STILL suffering from allergies and still have a cough, so with all the rain today I had to get it done at the gym on a treadmill, or else I wouldn’t be able to breathe. The pollen this year is the absolute worst even the long-term locals have ever seen! That gives me confidence that it won’t be like this every year at least. With the rain I was able to get my Mindfulness done in the car on the way to and from the gym, so one more check mark there! With both workouts completed and Master Class and Mindfulness complete I’m half way there with three checkmarks!
From there it was a matter of getting all the little things done, writing in my Gratitude Journal, having a meaningful conversation with someone, finishing my reading, getting this blog post up and then I can finally send my 6 to JVC at Mission Six Zero. Yes, every day he sends a request for a check-in, and asks if you got all 6 domains of the challenge complete to send him a “6” via e-mail. Shortly I’ll be sending my 35th “6” in a row!
The biggest struggle was getting the rest of my reading done. I had completed some reading every day, but had fallen a little behind just these last couple of days, not getting my average daily pages read completely. So today I had to finish the last 90 pages of Blink, and I got it done!
Blink is an interesting foray into the subconscious and our snap judgements and first impressions we get and how they can be useful and how they can also be dangerous in certain high-stress situations. It’s something that can unexpectedly hold onto certain biases in some people, and when they make these snap judgements the may find that they are preferential towards males or a particular background or heritage. I’m not saying that any of that is right, or should be allowed, and neither is the author of the book! But there are a number of studies that show when people make snap-judgements, they can be problematic for some of these very reasons, those same people don’t take the time to clear their opinions or biases from their mind first and make the truly “right” decision every time.
The book was a little anti-climactic for me, as it was 250 pages of examples, and a whopping 20 pages of the “What can we learn from this” portion, which sort of left me hanging a little. I thought there would be, and could see the potential toward, making it a little more profound in the results. Maybe a section of why do we still do this, maybe we should think about it, etc.? I don’t know…but I do know that the book was a little tougher to get through than the rest of my reading for the last 5 weeks. With this and the fact that I was behind today and had to stay up late to finish (almost 11:30 pm), today Deliberate Discomfort became A True Challenge!