So glad you’re here for Fitness Blender’s Five Day Mindset Shift Challenge!

When unexamined, our thoughts can get in our way. Metacognitive skills — or thinking about thinking — is not a natural process, and we often have to be taught how to do this in order to do it well. Many people are convinced that thoughts are Truth with a capital T, and trying to change them feels forced. 

Have you ever noticed, though, the way the exact same situation/scenario can elicit vastly different reactions when we are in a different headspace? This was recently highlighted for me when I dropped and broke a glass on a day where I was doing well mentally and just laughed and brushed it off. Just the week before, I had broken something else in our kitchen (I promise I’m not typically that clumsy!) but, being in a bad headspace, it was too much for me to handle and I both felt out of control and yelled. Now, we can’t always predict when things like this will happen and change our mindset on a whim. However, we can put into place practices on a daily basis that can help us with a generally improved mindset. 

Therefore, this challenge was developed by a licensed Psychologist with the express purpose of helping people harness their minds for the better. It uses evidence-based practices to support shifting your mindset in various domains of life: mindfulness, psychological flexibility, non judgment, self-compassion, and gratitude. While there is no “cure all” for anything in life, shifting our mindsets toward patterns of thinking that are helpful to us can have a significant impact on the way we view ourselves and the world. 

In this program, participants will engage in one meditation per day that will help them to shift their mindset. It is recommended that folks choose one arena of their life — fitness, diet, social life, etc. — to focus on throughout the whole challenge. We recommend doing the challenge multiple times, each time with a new “focus.” 

The meditations last 9-16 minutes total, progressing with each meditation being a bit longer than the last one. We also encourage you to spend a few moments following the meditation for intentional reflection and introspection on the topic. 

The goal for this program is that you experience some mindset shifts that help you out in some arena of your life. However, we suspect that you might also experience shifts in mood and emotions, social relationships, stress, and more. Be sure to check in with yourself to see how you are doing each day and discern any progress you are able to notice.

How to get the most out of this program:

1. Stay Open: Though open-mindedness is one of the explicit topics in this challenge, participating in this type of challenge requires some open-mindedness to begin with. It is difficult to shift one’s mindset if they are not open to the idea of that happening. So, go into this with a sense of gentle curiosity and openness to confronting and changing thoughts that don’t serve you any longer.
    
2. Schedule the Meditations: For these particular prompts, there is no specific time of day when it is best to practice them. They can be done at any time and therefore it is helpful to find times when you have at least 15-20 minutes to sit and pencil it into your schedule. Without this commitment, it can be easy for something like this to fall toward the end of our to-do list and not get done.
    
3. Journaling: It would be a great idea to keep a “journal” to accompany this challenge. I put journal in quotes because it doesn’t have to be a physical journal (though I encourage that). It could be a digital document you type into, a scrap piece of paper you write/make lists on, or even recording yourself speaking. The goal with this is to extend the meditations to fit the daily topics into your life. Figuring out how you can put the themes into practice is an important part of keeping this mindset shift going. Journaling is a great way/space to do that.
    
4. DefiningYour Progress: Determining whether a mindset shift works is a highly individualized process. One thought process may work for one person but not for another. It may work for you on one day but not the next. Therefore, it is important to do ongoing reflection on whether your current mindset works for you right now, in this moment. That being said, when you take the time at the start of the challenge to pick the area of your life that you intend to work on, be sure to also define what you would ideally like your mindset to be like. For example, if you’ve been struggling to consistently move your body lately for any number of reasons, maybe your goal for this is to be less self-critical, more open to different ways of moving, and grateful for all the things your body can do. You can see here that success isn’t dependent on you getting in an hour workout every day (outcome goal), but rather on how you think about and approach movement (process goal). This will hopefully set you up with a more positive and sustainable relationship with movement in the long run. 

As always, share your thoughts, questions, or general feelings you have with the community as you progress through this program! 

Strive on!
Haley