Jason Spencer – GPS For Success

To embrace life more powerfully, we must embrace it by living consciously in the moment. Reverend Will Bowen in A Complaint Free World challenges us to sport a purple rubber bracelet as a form of metacognitive awareness training (thank you Timothy Ferris for this poignant observation) in what Bowen calls the 21-Day Challenge. You have to go 21-Days without complaining, criticizing or gossiping. Having just completed 85% of the book I can say it’s a challenging concept.

A similar conscious thought policing was proposed by Anthony Robbins in his book Awaken the Giant Within about 15 years earlier. Tony calls it the 10-Day Mental Challenge. Robbins focuses not just on complaining but more importantly on refusing to have any crummy thoughts, feelings, questions, words or metaphors and that to me is the added bonus.

My fellow blogger and mischievous collaborator from Aurora (Mr. Christian Brooks) has also recently decided to embrace this with me further with a few changes and alterations. I propose a simple combination of the two to create a 21-Day Mental Challenge hybrid to redefine our minds or as Will says reformat the mental hard drive. I thought it was important to combine the two because the wrist band really helps us to create awareness of our actions. The 21-days straight is pretty much the popularly accepted amount of time it takes for us to break in a new habit or to change a bad habit. Here’s my take on it:

Rules

Using a wrist band, your goal is to go 21-days with out switching arms with the wrist band:

• Go without complaining
• Go without criticizing
• Go without gossiping
• Go without using any vulgarities (vulgar language or vulgar jokes )
• Go without  hanging on any crummy thoughts, feelings, questions, words or metaphors for more than 5 minutes at a time.

If you violate any of these rules then you have to switch the wrist band to the other arm and start the count over again.

Now any suggestions (rules, ideas or advice) about how to adjust this conscious living experiment would be greatly appreciated. Similarly, is there any one else up for the challenge who is willing to join us?