This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Erik Bertrand Larssen for IZEA. All opinions are 100% mine.
I am entering into the second half of my Hell Week challenge based on the book, Hell Week: 7 Days to Be Your Best Self by Erik Bertrand Larssen that can be bought on Amazon. I think everyone needs to take this challenge and I have been writing about it all week. I introduced the book and the challenge, I wrote about how I prepped for Hell Week and I have given a play by play for each day here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. Each day has presented a new focus and a new way to stretch myself and Day 4 was no different.
Day 4 started exactly like its name. I woke up to no Internet. No internet means no productivity and working. It seems like every little thing that could go wrong to sabotage my Hell Week Challenge this week went wrong, from food poisoning to a rained out volleyball and consequent late night of playing and having to go to sleep late. Now with the internet out, I can’t get everything I planned on doing done. It’s making me laugh right now as I write about it. You wanted me to step out of my comfort zone? I think the universe kind of took care of that by throwing everything it could at me this week to PREVENT me to getting things done. If there was any doubt in my mind on whether I would repeat the Hell Week, it’s no longer there.
I am repeating the damn challenge as soon as I am back from my Minnesota trip for 4th of July.
On Thursday I was supposed to pull an all-nighter. As I wrote earlier that wasn’t feasible at the moment because I have to take care of Lexi, drive her an hour to camp and an hour back and play volleyball Friday evening (when I would have been up for over 24 hours). However I really want to do it (I love all-nighters). So I am going to do it Saturday night and I am pretty excited.
I dropped Lexi off at school on Thursday morning and went straight to the gym, pushing as hard as I could, working out. Then I spend the day at a local organic restaurant working (doing specifically something I had planned for hell week).
Then we spent a nice calm evening playing and went to bed at the right time. Very simple good day.
Day 5, Friday, was meant to be a rest day after the all nighter, but since I didn’t do the all nighter, I treated it like any other day. Once again I had Lexi on Friday so my work time was limited. I had to work out of a cafe so that I had access to the Internet, got a decent amount of work done.
I find it extremely challenging to be hyperfocused when I know I only have a few hours of work, before having to return to mommy mode. And it’s even more challenging to be hyper focused IN MOMMY mode. Being a mommy and being a super productive worker are on completely opposite spectrums of mental function. Not doing intellectual or intensely physical activities (like playing kid games) is energy draining for me (I am sure many mommies can relate that a day of playing Legos and talking about characters can be mind numbing), so I sort of turn off and that makes me tired. I need to find a way to get into hyperfocused mode when I am a mom, not just during work. I can tell that it is going to take more than a week to find that strength and get into the zone, but this is a good start and a good motivator for me.
So when I picked Lexi up, I forced myself to come up with a new activity rather than just go with what we know.
On the way home, we made a detour to a local PetSmart to go see pets. Lexi is at the stage where he is in love with little animals and has been asking for a little kitty as well as obsessively petting our cats at home, so this was a great trip. She squealed and awwwww’ed and was just absolutely enthralled by the little kittens and fish and mice and hamsters she saw at the store. This was a good spur of the moment trip. On the way home, instead of listening to music or playing the old and tired iSpy game, we played the game of calling out letters and coming up with words that start with that letter, as well as describing of things and trying to guess what we are trying to describe. She did surprisingly well at both of those games and got exponentially better the more we played ( we have a 40 min to an hour drive home from her camp). I felt better about actually engaging into things actively rather than passively, but I still think there is room for improvement, that I can push myself further to be better in mommy mode.
Friday is my volleyball day, and I was set at being focused and pushing myself further than usual. As a result, I won every single game of the evening except for the last one ( we usually play about 8 games back to back in the course of the evening). Another proof that I don’t give it my all consistently and when I do, I can see the results.
At 9:15pm I rushed home, took a quick shower to wash off all the sticky wet sand and was in bed by 10:30pm.
Overall, I think I had a successful day in terms of the #hellweekchallenge, but I can’t help it but feel that I could push even more, do even better. I feel like this could become my every day mode, a better improved. But I want to really feel the pain doing the challenge. I guess the simple fact that I did not need to change my eating or exercising habits automatically makes it much easier, but I want to really feel challenged and persevere.
Today is Saturday, the all-nighter, I am very excited to see how it will go. I will need lots of coffee.
nice blog.keep it up guys.