Set yourself a 5-minute challenge!
March 23, 2016 Ken 0 Comments
You can do almost anything for just five minutes. It’s not a long time, or a huge thing to ask. Just five minutes. And the amazing thing is it can be the key to making progress in all kinds of areas of your life. You can start by setting yourself a challenge to work on something every day for just five minutes. You have to stick to your decision though, that’s the rule! You don’t have to do it every day actually – you can decide to make it a Monday-to-Friday thing, giving you the weekend off (y’know, ‘cos you might be exhausted after doing something for five days in a row, for all of five minutes!!).
Fitness
Set yourself a 5-minute fitness challenge! Determine to spend just five minutes every day doing something related to fitness (and no, tidying and organising all your various pairs of trainers in your wardrobe doesn’t count!).
You don’t have to do five minutes non-stop exercise. You could just do a bit of stretching, then get in the plank position for 30 seconds or a minute … then move on to something else. Maybe do a few freehand squats, or a few push-ups. You might prefer to do a few V-ups, or an abdominal hold, amongst many other possible exercises. Just five minutes, that’s all.
You can do it! It’s really do-able. Nobody’s telling you to spend an hour at the gym, or run a 10k before breakfast. You have the freedom to do what you want, and to do as much of it as you like. The only rule (if you can call it that) is that you have to fill five minutes with it.
So every day, all you have to do is some stretching, a few light exercises, or a little running or skipping. Or whatever you choose. The benefits of this aren’t just the benefits you get from five minutes of exercise. Oh no, you gain far more than that.
You’ll find you’re building a habit, one day at a time. Exercise is becoming acceptable to you, maybe even enjoyable. And you might even find yourself looking forward to it! Because you’re in control, and nobody’s telling you what to do.
Stick with this five-minute-a-day routine and you’ll see some major benefits, although they might start slow and deceptively easy. Like I mentioned, you’ll be creating a habit, and that’s the most important thing you can do. Once fitness becomes habitual you’re on your way to achieving real fitness goals, and reaping the benefits that come with it.
Each and every day you’ll be feeling the benefit of being more energised and more in touch with your body. You’ll feel like you’re more in control of it. Your digestion will improve, and your elimination too. Trouble with either can cause you untold health problems. Your posture will improve. Long standing aches and pains might start to gradually disappear, although you may not even notice that. That’s what fitness does; it creates changes and improvements right across the board, and sometimes they even go unnoticed.
Health
Do you have a health problem? Nearly everyone would answer yes to that question! It might be something serious or even life-threatening, more probably it’s something fairly minor but still a problem for you. Either way, you’d be better off it you could improve the situation, right?
So set yourself a 5-minute health-improvement challenge! Determine to devote just five minutes a day to working on improving your health. Maybe you could spend the time listing things you could do to improve your situation, such as exercising more regularly, eating a healthier diet, learning more about vitamins, minerals, etc, meditating, laughing more … whatever you think will give your health a boost.
Maybe your five minutes (or part of it) will be spent deep breathing, or performing a few slow motion exercises, in the style of t’ai chi. If you’ve studied t’ai chi, great, you have something to work with, and if not then just do some fluid movements with your hands, and move your feet slowly and purposefully as you step this way and that. Remember, the individuals who pioneered t’ai chi started exactly like that – just allowing themselves to move fluidly and to try to experience the flow of natural energy through their bodies. What’s stopping you doing the same thing?
You could start to put together some health affirmations, or spend some time repeating them if you’ve already created a few. Do them with mental focus, vividly imagining the truth of the affirmations, and not allowing any trace of doubt to creep into your thoughts. Apply yourself fully to it – remember, it’s only for five minutes at most! Anyone can do that, right?
Prosperity
Set yourself a 5-minute prosperity challenge! If you’ve been stuck in a rut, financially, now’s the time to take charge. But don’t try to change everything overnight. Instead, go for the stealthy approach 😉
Spend just five minutes tackling things to do with your financial situation. If you’re in debt, tackle it! List the things you can do to get yourself out of that situation. List them and number them, in order of priority. Determine to tackle number 1 on that list, and don’t take any excuses.
Create a list of wealth and prosperity affirmations. These are carefully worded phrases that you can use, repeatedly, to communicate with your subconscious, and direct it to do your bidding. Your subconscious is not the greatest at thinking things through and making decisions, but boy oh boy, does it make up for it when it comes time for action!
Your subconscious literally directs you in everything you do. Give it the right information and it’s up and running. Tell it, quite bluntly, that you are wealthy, that you are enjoying financial freedom, and that money is coming to you easily, and it will do everything in its considerable power to make those things manifest.
Does this sound too much to do? Or too much to expect? Remember, I’m only suggesting you devote five minutes to this. Five minutes a day, that’s all. That’s only 0.34% of the day … less than half of one percent of the day! Is that really too much to dedicate to something important?
You can do that. Anyone can! No excuses! Just devote less than half of one percent of your day (five minutes), every day, to focusing on your financial situation. But NOT in a negative way! Don’t make the mistake of mulling over your financial problems for five minutes, that won’t help, in fact it will only serve to make them worse. No, you have to focus on improving your financial situation, or just daydreaming about how great it’s going to be when you’re enjoying true financial freedom. That’s what will help you change things.
Apply the five-minute challenge to anything!
You can use this approach to tackle any problem you have, or any project you’d like help with.
You could use it to deal with problems that are mainly to do with your approach to things, such as …
- overcoming shyness
- overcoming procrastination
- overcoming the tendency to never really get fully ‘into’ a project
- improving your self-mage
You could use it to help you make progress with things you want to do but never get round to, such as …
- tackling that backlog of reading … (admit it, you have a stack of books and ebooks you keep meaning to read!)
- same goes for audios … (I bet you’ve got a stack of videos and audio recordings you want to study but somehow it never seems to happen)
You could apply it to things you’d like to learn, such as …
- a foreign language
- a musical instrument
- a programming language, or web design
- a particular area of arts and crafts
- drawing or sketching
- gymnastics or dancing
The fact is, you could apply this approach to any area of your life, and you’d see some amazing results.
How can just five minutes translate to real success?
Amazing things happen when you use the five-minute rule. For a start, well … you actually make a start! What previously seemed almost impossible, you’re suddenly tackling, because you can believe it’s possible to devote just five minutes to your chosen subject successfully.
Next, it’s quite enjoyable. Because you’re only committed to five minutes you tend to become really focused and truly devote those five minutes fully to your subject. And because of that, it becomes enjoyable. If someone suggested you spend 45 minutes exercising, the thought of it alone would probably be enough to make you feel queasy. But if you decide you’re only going to do five minutes of exercise, it feels okay to dive right in and give it your best shot. Five minutes, is that all? Easy!
And finally, once you’ve got into the habit of exercising (or whatever it is you’ve committed to doing) for just five minutes, you’ll often find that you feel like carrying on after the five minutes is up. The rule is five minutes, at least – there’s no upper limit!
And how can this make you successful at anything? Well, five minutes on its own is a pretty poor thing, but when you do it every day, the cumulative effect becomes staggering over time. Spend just five minutes or so sketching every day, or example, and see how you’ve progressed in three months.
I’m willing to bet you won’t still be drawing stick men and two-dimensional images that a child might scribble. You’ll have learned something about depth and perspective, and shading, and proportion. You’ll have investigated these things yourself, out of curiosity, and maybe studied them in books and videos. The result is that your sketches now are more competent and professional, and something to be proud of.
The same goes for anything you study or focus on. Start with just five minutes a day and keep it up, no matter what. It’s vitally important that you don’t break the chain your creating. Build up momentum and even if you stick to just five minutes a day you’ll be improving beyond words.
