Embracing my 75 Soft Life...Let's Start Together and Staying Strong

By now we've all heard of the 75 hard challenge. I'm guessing most of us have even tried it. I think I've attempted it twice and made it maybe to day 10. I just don't think that type of tough love, no excuse, do it anyway mentality works for me and it seems like it doesn't work for most people. The 75 Soft has similar "rules" but seems more palatable for real life, especially life with a toddler. I of course have goals that I would like to acomplish but I also have a life, and a toddler and most importantly I'm not a robot. At this point in my life, I just don't think it's reasonable that everyday is going to look the same.

That being said, I'm going to attempt to create my own "challenge" that looks less like a challenge and more like a way of life. The 75 Soft Life. My idea is to combine aspects of different self-help programs in a way to works for my life while also allowing me to reach my goals.

I like that the 75 hard/soft is trackable and a very distinct period of time there is an obvious end of day check point with two kind of larger check-ins during the overall process. In my brain cutting a 75 day challenge up into 3-25 day incriments feels natural, if that makes sense. But on the other hand, I feel like having a hard stopping point, the 75th day, easily invites you to go back to your old lifestyle or the habits you've spent the last 75 days building.

My Challenge is going to be 75 days with a daily tracker and a review at days 25 and 50. Then at the end of the 75 days there will be an easy transition to start the next 75 days by updating goals and adjusting the daily habits accordingly.

One thing I like about the 75 day model is that it doesn't line up with days on the calendar. If I start on January 1 (which is what I'm planning) It will end March 17th which is a Tuesday. So there isn't the tendency to push it off to start on a Monday or I missed this one so I'll start the 1st of next month. The challenge can start and end on any day of the year.

I feel like, overall, the structure is similar to The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington. While I liked the book I feel like it's really structured for the work place. Overall it had a very corporate feel to it which just didn't translate for me and my life as a SAHM. I looked up trackers and watched multiple youtubes on creating the plan for the 12 weeks but again none of it resonated with me and my life. Maybe this tracker will be similar but We'll see. And even though 12 weeks is a seeminly random 84 days I feel like the weekly structure lends itself to "I'll start monday" or "it was a bad week, I'll do better next week" but now instead of losing a day you're losing a whole week.

In my attmept to prep for this I'm going to re-read Atomic Habits by James Clear and find a few other books in this same realm to pull from. I've read a lot of self-help books and of course there are a lot of great nuggests in all of them. But I've never read a book where I felt like I could impliment all the items from the book and get to my goals at the end. I really resonate with The Alchemist by Paulo Cuelho but the ideas are a little more abstract and very much left to interpretation. I think I need to re-read that and write down the points that speak to me. Maybe this will be my guide to becoming the Alchemist.

Ok so let me get into the actual work of this plan. I'll show you my to-do list as an example. I think I'm going to make a printable for all this...again I've never found a printable that easily works for me. I want something I can easily follow begining to end and get to my goals. Let me see what my brain can come up with...