Start here, start today.

Record a 30 second video on yourself on your phone, introducing yourself – who you are, what you study or work on, and what your hopes for the future are. Do this upto 5 times and use the video you are happiest with. 

• Step 1: Play back the video without looking at the screen, and just listen to the words you used, the pauses in your speech, your cadence and speed.
• Step 2: Watch back the video without sound – notice what you are doing with your hands and where your eyes are drawn to. Notice your posture – and whether you look confident.
• Step 3: Watch the video with sound and notice any other observations. What are your overall impressions?

The purpose of this exercise is to firstly make you aware of your communication style, and secondly – to improve it! After completing this exercise, it should allow us to become aware of how many filler words we use (‘err/hmm/like/you know’), how quickly we speak, whether we make eye contact and whether we are appropriately gesticulating with our hands. The tweaks you make will carry over into your day to day and in person communication.

Feedback is a gift. While both positive and developmental feedback is important, given this is unrequested feedback, choose something positive. The purpose of this exercise is to firstly, notice how the recipient receives the feedback. You are actively helping them to develop. Secondly, you’ll consider how it makes you feel to give somebody else this positive feedback – does it make you feel good in turn? Imagine managing a team in the future, and giving this feeling to them. Finally, it will make you more receptive to feedback yourself. Again – feedback is a gift, both positive and negative. 

Find someone you admire in your life – it could be a parent, auntie or uncle, parent of a friend, neighbour – whoever. Ask to shadow them for a day to understand what they do. This is less about their career and job specifically, though that could be interesting too, but more around seeing the day to day micro actions that make someone admirable. Seeing the little things that they do, will allow you to target being someone you admire in the future, via achievable small steps and goals. Additionally, it demonstrates a willingness to learn and develop. When asked about work experience in an interview, if yours is limited, this is a great piece of initiative to show that you are doing what is within your power to grow.

For one day, take absolute pride in your appearance, down to the minutest detail. This will mean different things for different people, whether its clean and tidy, hair combed, collared shirt, ironed clothes, clean shoes etc – it is relative to your normal appearance. The purpose of this task is twofold, firstly, how do you feel when you take care of your appearance to this level? Do you feel more confident, more proud and more able? Even if that’s by 1% – that’s quite an increment if regularly attained. Secondly, how do other people treat you? Do they treat you with a little more respect and seriousness? While appearance is secondary to how we feel and act, they are very linked, and dressing the part can you make you feel the part. 

On waking, write down 3 things you’re grateful for on paper or in a journal, prior to touching your phone. If everyone threw our problems in a huge pile, on seeing everyone else’s, most of us would be very quick to grab ours back. It is so important to bring gratitude in our lives – it makes us happier and more confident. What you can write down can be something very minor or very significant. Perhaps you are grateful to be waking up pain-free, or perhaps that the sun is shining and its not forecast to rain.

Go out of your way to help a friend or loved one with a task without them asking. It could be a DIY project they are working on – or cooking a meal – but walk right upto to them and start helping or ask how you can, rather than whether they would like help. Notice how they react to you, and how it makes you feel. Not only will this small gesture likely make you feel good, it could also improve your relationship, and make them feel more inclined to help you in the future, though that is secondary. 

We all have an inner monologue which is running almost constantly. For 24 hours, pay attention to your inner voice, and notice how you are referring to yourself. Generally, we can at times be very hard on ourselves (“why did I do that / I don’t deserve that / I am not as intelligent as others”) and that is normal! For this day, treat yourself like someone you love. Would you vocalise those things to a parent, sibling or best friend? Absolutely not! Therefore, be kind to yourself, challenge this negativity whenever it arises, and replace it with warm encouragement. Notice how this makes you feel, and whether you can build that into your future monologue. 

As human beings, we have a tendency to hoard ‘stuff’. This can lead to a cluttered home, but also cluttered thoughts. Really challenge yourself to think about at least one thing, whether that’s an item of clothing, or an item, that you no longer use and likely will never use again, but could have value to someone else. Donate this item to charity. In doing this, we both remove some of the clutter, physically and mentally, as well as doing good to somebody else! A real win – win. 

Acts of kindness can make the world a happier place for everyone. They can boost feelings of confidence, being in control, happiness and optimism. They may also encourage others to repeat the good deeds they’ve experienced themselves – contributing to a more positive community. It is important to realise that we can all make a difference to others, regardless of our resources, with the smallest of gestures and effort.

We have talked about giving feedback, now we are going to focus on receiving it. Requesting feedback from someone you admire will firstly help with our self-awareness. Effective feedback, both positive and negative, is very helpful. Without fail, it will give a view of ourselves that we have never considered before – and we must be somewhat open to that. With feedback, you get a clear idea of the things you are doing well and the skills you need to improve, which can help us to formulate better decisions to improve and increase performance.

While this might seem trivial, it is a lesson in controlling what we can control. By taking care of your immediate environment can you then move onto bigger challenges. If you want to change the world, you start with yourself and work outward, because you build your competence that way. Doing this task will leave you feeling more confident and capable of going out into the world and giving an active contribution to those around you.

Getting a sufficient amount of sleep has a huge amount of physical and mental health benefits, including less frequently sick, staying at a healthy weight, reduced stress, better able to concentrate etc. By actively getting more sleep, we will be able to improve all the elements of our lives around us, and have more time and energy to put into projects we deem worthwhile. 

While there are some factors around sleep we cannot control, the majority we can, by building a sleep routine. Simple things such as going to bed and getting up again at similar times each night and morning, keeping your room cool, avoiding screens right before bed, not hitting snooze on the alarm clock, getting sufficient exercise and being mindful of quantity and timing of alcohol consumption.

Volunteering on even the smallest scale not only makes a positive difference to people’s’ lives (reason enough to do it!), but it has plenty of benefits for the volunteer, as well. This can include improved self-esteem, confidence and wellbeing, by using your skills and knowledge to benefit your community. That said, many volunteering opportunities do not require any pre-requisites or knowledge, just your time! (A great example is befriending with Age UK). In addition to these benefits, you could also gain invaluable work experience and potentially receive training and develop new skills.

You have come a long way. We rarely take stock of our journey, but more often our current destination and how its short of where we’d like to be and get to. In reality however, this is a real shame, because every individual has achieved so much to become who they are today. Write a letter to your past self, thanking you for your developments. Think about challenges you’ve overcome, lessons you’ve learnt and relationships you’ve built that you are truly happy exist today. Thank yourself for your character traits or qualities that your best friend would call out in you (kindness, protective, loyal a good listener, encouraging, optimistic, etc).

One method to give ourselves affirmation about who we are, and where we’re going, is to write a letter to our future selves covering our values and future goals. This exercise will really assist with self-awareness and help you focus on what’s important. Merely by putting pen to paper we trigger a thought process in our mind which means we are far more likely to reach our goals – for a start we now know what they are!

Like journaling – there are no rules. This can include anything that’s important to YOU, or that you think you’d want your future self to remember a year, five years or ten. 

Talk to yourself like you’re your best friend. By that we mean you can keep it casual, but also be kind. In addition to your goals and fears, set out questions to ask your future self (Are you living a life true to yourself? Do you enjoy your job? Are you happy?). Store it away and put in your calendar when you plan to read it in the future.

In addition to the obvious physical benefits, this task also has significant mental benefits, and merely by creating a routine of daily activities, creates discipline that we can apply to all areas of our lives. The mental benefits include a reduction in stress, a sense of wellbeing and achievement, a greater level of focus and a natural energy boost. Also we can hopefully choose something which we find fun! Or that we can do in a team to build a sense of community.

Try this challenge for 5 days – it could be running, yoga, weightlifting or walking – and see how you feel at the end. If it was not already part of your routine, could it become so?

Food is fuel for our bodies. But it doesn’t just give us energy, it can also impact our mood. Our gut (also known as our second brain) is home to billions of bacteria. The food we eat directly affects our gut health and influences the production of neurotransmitters (our body’s chemical messengers that are constantly carrying messages from the gut to the brain). When things aren’t going as we want, or we are short on time – we are more likely to reach for a sweet treat or something convenient. For 3 days, try to plan in advance nutritious meals and snacks which will sustain you through what you have planned, while also making us feel good both in our bodies and the decisions we have made. Once you have started to get in the right mindset on this one, there might be no going back!

Cold showers have a host of physical benefits, including improved circulation and metabolism, reduced inflammation, boosted immunity and even increases in mood. More importantly however, starting every day with something slightly uncomfortable builds discipline, and helps us to understand that we can overcome challenges in our lives. If we are willing to DELIBERATELY expose ourselves to something uncomfortable, imagine what we can endure when we have to? Try this task for consecutive days, perhaps getting a little colder everyday, and document how you get on.

We are the generation who are never without their mobile phone, and we must be careful it is not all consuming. Whenever a moment of boredom strikes, the natural reaction to reach for our phone can be stifling to any creativity and problem solving, because we are not giving ourselves any time to think, and its often in these gaps that our minds solves problems. 

This challenge is a simple one – take your commute to school, university or work, without looking at your phone. Don’t even listen to music. Think about what you can see, what you can hear and what you observe. It might surprise you! 

If you have completed the 19 challenges above – congratulations! 

The final step is to document how you found the challenges overall, use your Challenge Journal for this. They will be slightly different for each individual, and some will resonate more than others. Think about which of the tasks were once and done, and which you may repeat, or even incorporate into your daily life.