In case you missed it over on Instagram, I recently participated in the 30 Day Reels Challenge. We celebrated the release of Instagram’s new Reels feature (short video format similar to TikTok) by completing 30 unique reels over 6 weeks. As someone who had never even made a TikTok video beforehand, the learning curve was steep for me. But I created a structure for myself, found the support I needed, and made it happen — and I was chosen as one of the 30 winners of the Challenge, to boot! Achieving this goal was a massive accomplishment, and I’m excited to share some of the goal-setting lessons I learned from tackling the 30 Day Reels Challenge. Let me know which one resonates the most with you in the comments!
Accountability is Key
If you’ve heard it before, you’ve heard it a million times: support is a game-changer when it comes to accomplishing your goals. This was very clear for me during the 30 Day Reels Challenge. We had two main sources of accountability:
- A challenge group chat where we’d post our new Reels, ask questions, and hype each other up
- My own Instagram audience, who started looking forward to new Reels each weekday — I got this feedback several times throughout the Challenge!
If I were working on this Challenge in a silo, there’s no way I would have stayed on track. So make sure to secure your support system before you get started on your next big goal!
Connect Your Goal-Setting with Your Core Values
I’ve written before about the importance of goal-setting in alignment with your core values. It’s what solidifies your “why” and ensures that the outcome and process of achieving that goal make sense and are important to you.
This concept showed up for me numerous times during the 30 Day Reels Challenge. For example, my core value of consistency was running the show over the 6 week Challenge. I really got in the groove of receiving the daily prompt, planning out my approach to it, recording and editing in the evening, and then posting the following morning. Was it tough to stay on top of it? For sure — daily reels wasn’t something I’d keep up forever (more on that in a bit). But the alternative was to wait for the weekend and “batch” my Reels all in one go. While I totally see how that would be an excellent long-term approach, I knew that leaving my Reels to a single “batching” day would have me falling off the wagon altogether. I chose to tap into my core value of consistency instead!
Another clear example for me was the need to connect to my core value of authenticity. At the beginning of the challenge, I’ll admit that I was a bit overwhelmed by some of the prompts. I wanted to execute them to the letter because I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. So when a prompt came up that included a specific TikTok dance, I cranked it out… But I had a meltdown in the process. It’s not that the choreography was particularly difficult. It’s that doing the dance felt super inauthentic. Once I figured out how important it was for me to complete the Challenge in alignment with authenticity as my core value, I had way more fun and produced much better content. (Here’s the Reels video I struggled with, and here’s an example of using the format more authentically!)
Expanding Your Comfort Zone
When I started the 30 Day Reels Challenge, I had recorded a total of four Reels videos. Honestly, they weren’t great. I had no idea how to proceed. The more challenging trends like lip-syncing, dancing, or funky transitions were way too intimidating. If it weren’t for this Challenge, I definitely wouldn’t have had the courage to expand that comfort zone. But jumping in feet-first gave me the perfect opportunity to try some new things!
This is totally applicable to any new goal you might be taking on. What possibilities will your goals unlock for you? What fears will you conquer, or what will you be proving to yourself, once and for all? Conquering a challenging goal is a great way to permanently expand your comfort zone and push the envelope for your goal-setting in the future.
Taking the Goal Sustainably Into the Future
While completing the 30 Day Reels Challenge was such a rewarding goal to achieve, I know for a fact that posting a new Reels video five times a week is simply not sustainable for me. However, the Challenge gave me enough experience with creating Reels to know the amount of time, energy, and research needed to come up with my next one. So while you won’t see a new Reels video from me every day, expect to see a couple a week over on my Instagram feed! Whenever you’re coming up on the completion of a goal, it’s always useful to ask how you’ll carry that success into the future, even if it looks a little different than the road you’ve taken to get there.
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