This post is the first in a series of posts about my experience working through Charity Craig’s Manifest Abundance 60 Day Challenge. This particular post is about why I joined the challenge.

Back in 2014, when I started this blog and wasn’t entirely sure what I’d do with it, I joined the Influence Network and signed up for a small group focused on writing. It was a wonderful experience, introducing me to other bloggers and giving me the chance to give and receive feedback on work, which wasn’t something I had much experience with.

One of my favorite people in the group was Charity Craig. She was quiet and wise, read other people’s writings with such care and grace, and she was a few steps ahead of me in life given that she already had four kids and I was still in the pre-kid phase of my own life. She was blogging in the midst of her own heartbreak, putting her marriage back together after her husband’s affair, and she wrote about it in such breathtakingly honest ways that I continued to follow her blog and social media long after our small group experience was over. I cheered when she and her husband made it through the darkest time in their marriage, and I rejoiced when they made the decision to move to Orlando to fulfill some dreams there. I got to learn even more from Charity when she started her business, Lillian & Co., by which time she felt like an old friend, in that strange way the internet makes us feel like we’re old friends with someone we don’t actually know because something about what they post speaks to us and keeps us coming back.

In March, right at the start of Covid shutdowns, Charity posted something about her 60 day challenge on Instagram, and I clicked over to her site and signed up, not even entirely sure what the challenge would be about but already on board because Charity was the one behind it. The timing seemed good since it would run May-June. At the time, I thought we’d be getting back to normal then–ha!–but I also knew that by May I’d have an answer to a pretty big life question, namely whether or not we’d be having another baby, and that I would be ready to make some permanent life decisions based on that news

You see, we’d started IVF in October and transferred the lone embryo we ended up with on March 5, right at the start of this madness. More on that in another post, but I knew that by May we’d know if we would be a one child or two child family and could make plans accordingly

Loose plans. If I’ve learned anything in the last year, it’s to make loose plans and not count on any element of them coming to fruition.

But I figured something with a little structure would help me work through whatever that time would bring, whether it be choosing baby names and getting the nursery set up again or donating all my maternity clothes and the baby items we’d packed up so hopefully. Thankfully, it was the former, but I still had no idea what I was getting myself into. Every other self-improvement-type challenge or workshop I’ve done before has been very direct, involving setting a goal like lose ten pounds or clean out your closet or read a book a week for three months, but this challenge was not like that. Charity set out to help people get down to the very core of their being and purpose in the world, and she guided us to discover what’s been holding us back (spoiler: it was myself). Luckily, I learned in the first few sessions that I was going to be doing more than freshening up baby stuff. A whole lot more.

I did manage to get my house in better order, thankfully, but the challenge also led me down a path of figuring out how to get myself in better order, something I didn’t think I really needed to do but am so very glad I did. Next week, I’ll share the intention and goal I set for myself at the beginning of the challenge and how Charity helped guide my intention and goal in a way that made this experience completely different from anything I’ve done before.