So It’s Sunday, and once more we stand on the verge of throwing ourselves into yet another week. A week of personal growth – If you choose to. As always, I choose to – it just makes life so much more fun!

In this video, I’m going to present a little social challenge for you and me to do each day, Monday through Friday. Is it going to be hard and fill you up with anxiety. So Why the heck should we do this? Well, I don’t know about you, but I believe in pushing myself to those uncomfortable places to develop the social skills I so long for. Being able to enjoy every social situation, anywhere, any time. I’ve come far, which means I more and more often get to connect with and truly enjoy social situations.

We’ll always have problems in life, but we can choose what kind of problems we want to have. Much of our happiness is born out of solving problems, hence it makes sense to choose the areas we want to have most of our ‘problems’ in.

“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.”

― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck:

It’s important to understand that it’s about the process – who you become on your journey to that end goal. And how much fun, excitement and joy it adds to your everyday life when you have small little mini quests to overcome. If you don’t enjoy the journey, it isn’t going to last. I try to see life as a game – and I want to level up and have a blast doing so!

And by putting up small ‘end goals’,  we get to celebrate often. The sense of proudness you feel when you’ve pushed through and done a tough social challenge is just… Well, let’s just say that it’s worth all the hustle (check out this video if you want to see me experience this)

Last Sunday I talked about how to implement three social habits ( link ) and if you want a great video on thw whole conept of habits check this one out. And in this week’s challenge I thought I’d iterate on one of those habits. You see every time I run home from work, I have a three kilometre distances where I’ve implemented the following habit:

Cue: Stepping of the train.

Routine: When passing a girl that interests me in some way, I try get eye contact and then say hello/hi. That’s it.

Reward: Sense of proudness for doing a socially uncomfortable thing I sat out to do

Skill development: Lowering the bar to ignite a conversation with girls/anyone

The 2.0 version of this habit :

Routine: When passing a girl that interests me in some way, I try get eye contact and then say hello/hi AND start a conversation with her. Telling her that I wanted to talk to her because she looks cool/cute/interesting/nice ( whatever feeling I genuinely had for wanting to talk to her).

Skill development: igniting a conversation with a person I’m attracted to

As part of this challenge, I will also be doing a very short live stream daily (Monday – Friday) when I get home just after doing this. Sharing my experiences and reflections, but also trying something new with the channel. Would love for you to join in and share yours too.

But so, the challenge for you is to do this as well, tweak it if necessary to suit you or pick another social challenge. Remember It should be a small daily thing, and it should be pushing you out of your comfort zone. But not overdoing it. Then you’ll just run the risk of creating an emotional scar if it fails badly. Or not do it at all. Also, I want you to design it as a habit; defining when, where and how you’re going to this (que, routine, reward – read more here:). Eliminating as much needed willpower as possible. Remember to remind yourself for why YOU are doing this.

I don’t know about you, but my initial willpower driven New Year’s resolutions efforts have decreased some. Hence, my secondary focus this week is to work on optimizing the use of willpower in my life, making sure I have enough for the right things. For instance, not failing on my weekly challenge quests just because I spent all my willpower on shitty decision like buying crap or what food I’m going to eat today.  Now I addressed this in my live stream this Friday, but I also wrote a blog post about this yesterday.

In practice it will look like this:

• I’ll be looking over my life and see which areas I spend unnecessary willpower through choices that doesn’t matter
• Remove as much temptations as possible so I don’t have to fight urges.
• Sleep more
• Utilize standby mode sessions
• Meditate more

So that’s is, see you tomorrow in the livestream around 1800 Swedish time!

/Alexander

P.S This week’s bok is Fingertoppskansla, By Henrik Fexeus