You Have 90 Days to Change Your Life

Every year, right around this time, I notice the same thing happen. Fall arrives, the weather changes, Halloween decorations appear at Target approximately twelve minutes after Labor Day, and suddenly the end of the year feels like it’s already here.

And listen, I LOVE this time of year. It’s literally my favorite. I want the sweaters and the pumpkin patch on my front porch and every kind of soup they make. I want Thanksgiving and Christmas movies and all the things that make the last few months of the year feel special. But over the years, I’ve noticed that if I’m not careful, in all of that holiday excitement, I will accidentally start to let go of the things I’ve been working on.

Have you ever experienced that?

Maybe you’ve been really consistent with working out. Maybe you finally figured out a morning routine that actually works for your life. Maybe you’ve been making progress on a goal or drinking more water or being intentional with your time. Maybe you’ve spent the last nine months slowly, imperfectly, becoming a version of yourself that you’re really proud of.

And then October hits and your brain says, Well, the holidays are basically here. I’ll get back to it in January.

This is the part I want us to pay attention to.

Because the problem isn’t that you don’t know how to make progress. You’ve already been making it. The problem is that we have somehow normalized abandoning that progress for the final quarter of the year and then spending January trying to rebuild the momentum we already had.

I don’t want to do that this year. And I don’t want you to either.

The Year Is Not Over

There are roughly 90 days between the beginning of October and January 1st.

Ninety days is not nothing.

Think about where you were 90 days ago. Think about what can change in a season when you’re actually paying attention. You can get stronger in 90 days. You can write a first draft in 90 days. You can save money, clean out your house, start walking every morning, make enormous progress on a business idea, reconnect with someone you love or finally begin the thing you’ve been talking yourself out of all year.

You can change your life in 90 days.

Not because you’re going to become a completely different human by New Year’s Eve, but because 90 days is enough time to create evidence. Evidence that you can keep going. Evidence that you can follow through. Evidence that the promises you make to yourself matter even when life gets busy.

If you’ve been around here for a while, none of this will sound new. I’ve been doing some version of the Last 90 Days Challenge with this community for nearly a decade. We started it because I kept seeing the same pattern, in my own life and in the lives of people in this community: we’d work hard, make progress, build momentum, and then somewhere around the holidays we’d decide the year was basically over. We’d loosen our grip on all the things that had been making us feel good and promise ourselves we’d pick them back up in January.

And that’s the cycle I’ve always wanted Last 90 Days to interrupt. Even if you miss a workout or sleep in or eat your weight in stuffing on Thanksgiving. Life is going to interrupt you. Kids get sick. Work gets crazy. You travel.

The problem isn’t the interruption. It’s turning an interruption into an ending.

I’ve written before about why your morning routine needs to work for the season of life you’re actually in, and I think the same principle applies here. The goal isn’t to execute some flawless routine for 90 straight days. The goal is to keep returning to the things you know make you feel like yourself.

What If You Didn’t Abandon Yourself This Holiday Season?

That’s really the question underneath all of this.

What if you could fully enjoy the holidays without losing sight of yourself in the process?

I am not suggesting that you bring Tupperware filled with steamed chicken to Thanksgiving dinner. Please don’t do that. I am also not suggesting that you turn down every holiday party because it interferes with your bedtime or become the person doing burpees beside the tree on Christmas morning while everyone else opens presents.

I am talking about something much less dramatic.

Keep doing the things that make you feel good.

Keep moving your body. Keep drinking your water. Keep making a little bit of time for yourself. Keep paying attention to what you’re consuming, physically and mentally. Keep remembering that the woman you’ve been working so hard to become doesn’t disappear just because there are mashed potatoes.

You can celebrate and take care of yourself. You can eat the cookies and keep your goals. You can travel and come home and begin again the next morning instead of deciding the entire month is shot.

Those things are allowed to coexist.

And if you’re reading this thinking, Rach, that’s great, but I actually haven’t made any progress this year, I want to talk to you too.

The year is not over.

Maybe you had enormous plans in January and life had enormous plans of its own. Maybe the goal didn’t happen. Maybe the routine never stuck. Maybe you spent most of this year taking care of everybody else and somewhere along the way you disappeared from your own list.

Okay.

You still have 90 days. Or if your find this article later on, you still have 72 days or 53. It’s not about the number of days guys, it’s about the intention.

You don’t need to accomplish everything you hoped to accomplish this year. Pick something. Pick one area of your life and ask yourself what could be different by January 1st if you actually gave it your attention for the next three months.

You might surprise yourself.

The Last 90 Days Challenge

This is the whole idea behind the Last 90 Days Challenge.

I’ve done versions of this challenge for years, and it’s built around five daily practices I call the 5 to Thrive. They are incredibly simple, and that’s intentional. I don’t think you need a complicated 47-step plan during the busiest part of the year. I think you need a handful of anchors that remind you to keep taking care of yourself while you’re taking care of everything else.

The five practices are: wake up one hour earlier and use that time for yourself, drink your water, give up one thing that isn’t serving you, move your body for at least 30 minutes, and write down five specific things you’re grateful for every day.

I’ve written a whole article about the five daily habits that changed my life, so if you’re new to 5 to Thrive or you want the deeper explanation behind each habit, start there.

None of these things are groundbreaking. That’s sort of the point.

We have access to more information about wellness, productivity, habits and personal development than any group of humans who has ever lived. Lack of information is not our problem. Our problem is continuing to do what you already know works when life gets full.

And life is about to get very full.

I’ve talked before about how your habits determine your future, and I believe that even more now than I did when I first wrote it. The things we do repeatedly become the way we live. Which means these next 90 days count just as much as the nine months that came before them.

Come Do the Last 90 Days With Us

You can do the entire Last 90 Days Challenge for free. Seriously. I just gave you the whole thing and we made this handy graphic if you want to screen shot and add it as your home screen.

Write down the 5 to Thrive somewhere you’ll see them. Put them in your Notes app. Tape them to your bathroom mirror. Start today and see what happens when you keep returning to those five things for the rest of the year.

But I also know something about myself after doing this work for a very long time: I am better when I’m surrounded by people who are trying too.

That’s why we’re doing the Last 90 Days Challenge together inside Premium this year. We’ll have thousands of people working on themselves right alongside you, and once a month I’m teaching a live class to help us stay focused, reset when life inevitably gets messy, and keep moving forward. If you can’t make it live, the replay will be waiting for you.

Premium Podcast is $10 a month and our first live class schedule is:

October: Saturday, October 3 at 12 PM ET
Replay + worksheet available: Monday, October 5

November: Saturday, October 31 at 12 PM ET (my favorite day! I might teach in costume 🧙🏻‍♀️)
Replay + worksheet available: Monday, November 2

December: Saturday, December 5 at 12 PM ET
Replay + worksheet available: Monday, December 7

JOIN PREMIUM AND THE LAST 90 DAYS CHALLENGE

Imagine it’s January 1st

I want you to imagine waking up on January 1st and realizing you don’t need to start over.

You don’t need to undo the last three months. You don’t need to find your motivation again or rebuild all the momentum you had before the holidays. You don’t need to make some giant declaration about becoming a new person because you’ve spent the last 90 days taking care of the person you already are.

Maybe you missed days. Maybe you ate every carb available at Thanksgiving. Maybe December was bananas and some weeks looked nothing like the plan. But you kept coming back. You didn’t turn one hard day into a hard month. You didn’t turn the holidays into an excuse to abandon something you worked all year to build.

And if you’re starting from scratch today, imagine what it would feel like to wake up that morning already 90 days into becoming the person you want to be.

There are going to be millions of people waking up on January 1st saying, Okay, this is the year I’m finally going to change.

You could wake up already knowing that you have.

You have 90 days. Let’s see what you can do with them.

I love you. I’m rooting for you.

Rachel