In this Day 21 session of the 30‑Day Healthy Habits Challenge, Cheryl McColgan guides participants through a weekly reset. She emphasizes that the challenge is flexible—habits are short (5‑15 minutes) and missing a day isn’t a failure. The reset involves three steps: (1) review the habit tracker and celebrate three wins from the past week, (2) identify one habit that felt difficult and brainstorm ways to make it easier for the next week, and (3) use habit‑stacking and environmental cues (e.g., placing water by the bed, putting shoes by the door) to reduce friction. Cheryl warns against an all‑or‑nothing mindset, encouraging participants to view missed days as data, not judgment. She highlights the importance of consistent movement, especially outdoor walking, and suggests planning it into the calendar. Finally, she points listeners to a “10‑year core values and goals” worksheet on the Ultimate Wellness website to help translate the 30‑day habits into long‑term lifestyle changes, urging participants to think beyond the challenge and embed these small habits into future wellness plans. The tone is supportive, instructional, and enthusiastic, with frequent encouragement to celebrate progress and stay adaptable.
Chapters
Hey everyone. I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, and welcome to day 21 of your 30 Days of Healthy Habits Challenge. So day 21, we've made it through the third week. And if you've been doing the challenge along with us the whole time, then you know that this is time for the weekly reset. We reflect and adjust. So again, you don't have to be perfect on this challenge. That's why all the habits have only taken 5 to 15 minutes a day is so it gives you some things to try. It gives you some things to see which habits could really work well in your life, what could help you the most. And knowing that you don't have to start over again if you miss something, you can just do the little habit along with the next day's habit, or you can just jump right back in. It's not anything— one of these challenges where you have to start over if you miss a day. This is meant to be very flexible, to fit easily into your life, and to just give you some new ways of thinking about habits that might be helpful to you and that you might want to integrate each and every day going forward instead of just trying it on these little, uh, 5-minute, 15-minute intervals. So today's habit is look at your tracker, celebrate what you did, and then choose one habit to make easier next week. So some of these, if you've been going through, you know, I've encouraged you, you're just trying the one habit each and every day. But if you found a habit that speaks to you or that was super easy that you wanted to add in for the entirety of the challenge, maybe you've been doing those. And so notice if you told yourself, hey, I was going to drink that glass of water every single morning before I drank coffee. Have you stuck with that? Have you You've done it and just notice what's making it more difficult to keep that habit in. Is it that you didn't put the water next to your bed like I suggested? Or maybe you go downstairs and you just go straight for the coffee and you forgot one day to do the water first. So whatever it is, just look what it, what's making these easier. And so I've been sending out the emails at 6:30 AM Eastern time. Eastern time. That's probably not the perfect time for everyone in the whole world that decides to do the challenge, obviously. But noticing if it's harder to integrate into your day because you just got it later, maybe you kind of set it a day behind where you read today's habit and you actually do that tomorrow so that you can plan ahead for it and know where it best fits in your day, that sort of thing. So again, we're just looking to make these easy. We're looking to make them fit with the habits that we already have, trying habit stacking, you know, putting one habit, sticking it with another that makes it easy. Like we had the idea about taking supplements when you brush your teeth kind of thing, or putting your running shoes next to the door where you have to see them with before you go outside to go to work and remind you to take your bag with you for the gym. You know, whatever it is, you're just trying to Plan ahead so that you make things easier and repeat it every day until it becomes a habit. So the consistency is the key. Again, not every day's gonna be perfect, but making these small adjustments on a week to week really prevents you from getting to this all or nothing mindset. Like, oh, I already missed 3 days, so now it's too late and you just forget about it and you never come back to this. It's always noticing that, evaluating the week. Okay. Yeah, maybe I wasn't perfect this week. I missed this and this. How can I do that better next week? Maybe I'll come back to those habits cuz I actually missed them this week and I wanna try them. But just, you've gotta celebrate the progress and reinforce the behavior so that it feels rewarding. So we wanna notice the positive. We always wanna be training our brain to notice those positive things, have gratitude for the things that did work this well, easy this week, and then set your mind up for noticing which ones were more challenging and figuring out a way to make that easier for yourself the next time. It just, you know, also keeps the momentum going. So we just want these small wins. And I want you to list out 3 wins this week, even if they were small. Ideally, they're related to the habit that you did. You were able to, uh, try this one that you weren't so sure about, but you could also just start with 3 wins, period. Just evaluating your week and thinking about the positives and then choose one way to make it easier. So if you missed some of your 10 minutes of movement every day this week, how can we make sure that you hit that every single day next week? Because really, I think that that is one of the most beneficial habits that if you don't have already integrating that, you will just do yourself so much good. And specifically, like I mentioned, if you can make sure that you walk outside on a regular basis, you know, not always being in the gym on the treadmill, something like that, but being outside, connecting with nature. So if that was one of the friction points when you were having your habits this week, maybe plan out next week where you look at your calendar, you figure out what's your biggest day, busiest day, and then figure out where you're gonna fit in your movement, figure out where you're gonna fit in your 5-minute habit. And then again, We're just resetting the missed days. They're just data for you. We're just observing. We're not judging. We're just noticing what went well, what didn't. That's it. So don't look for, you know, I didn't do enough. I didn't, you know, I messed up. No, no negatives like that. We want it to keep it all positive and just frame it in a way of learning and noticing the data so that we can make it better the next time. So keep your focus on being consistent, doing the little habit every single day. We've got 7 more days to go at this point, and I hope you've enjoyed it up to this point. Like I said, there's, there's gonna be habits where you might do them and you think, okay, that's, that's not really for me. That doesn't resonate for some reason. Or maybe there's some habits that really do resonate. And then you look in the literature on it. You look at the research. I just gave two links, but there's most of them. There's many more links that you can look at for these habits. So just choose the ones that you wanna dig into and notice what might be better for you going forward. We've got, like I said, only about a week left. So at some point you're gonna come out of this and you're gonna need to have a plan for maintaining these habits. Cuz I'm assuming if you've practiced this the entire time, you really wanna create new habits in your life. So we wanna figure out a way that we can keep carrying that forward, not just after 30 days, but 60 days, 90 days, a year, year after year, repeating those small habits that are going to get you to your bigger goals. And I think I mentioned it before on one of the other podcasts is I have the, the, uh, 10-year core values and goals worksheet for you. So that's at the website. If you go and search, uh, what is Ultimate Wellness, the link for that form is in that article. And it also just talks about, you know, figuring out what is wellness for you, figuring out what habits work for you on a day-to-day basis. So the article's kind of all about that. And the worksheet helps you notice like, what are your core values? What's important to you? And it kind of goes back to the very beginning when we picked the 3 focus areas for this challenge. You know, that'll give you a good hint into what might be your core values and what might be these overarching things where you wanna plan out for the next 5 years, 10 years going forward. Um, you know, creating those small daily habits that will support that. So anyway, that is it for day 21. I hope you have a nice little reflection and reset. And as always, I would love to hear in the comments what you found challenging, what, what were your wins. It's just always exciting to celebrate along with you. So that is it for today. I will see you again tomorrow.
