HAVE A HAPPY MEAL: jULY'S BEST YOU CHALLENGE

Hey Queen! It's that time of the month again. It's time to review June's Best You Challenge while getting ready for July's challenge. I think you're going to like this one. But before we dig into the new challenge. Let's recap last month!

June's Best You Challenge

For June's Best You Challenge, we spoke positivity, success, love, and happiness over ourselves through affirmations. The challenge was to write down ten affirmations and repeat them to yourself in the mirror every day for twenty-one days.

This was something I've been wanting to do for a very long time and I'm so glad I was able to sit down and actually get it done! I've always wanted to speak affirmations to myself every day in the mirror. I've also always wanted to record my affirmations and listen to them on a loop while I sleep. This challenge helped me do both of those. Don't you love it how different aspects of your life can come together and help you in your growth and achievements?

Here's a YouTube video, I've put together, of all of my affirmations!

This was something I definitely enjoyed and proved to be a great way to end my morning routine. I look forward to continuing this habit in the future. I'm contemplating doing a whole different set of affirmations at night while I do my evening skin care routine too. We shall see!

July's Best You Challenge

My favorite podcast is The Read with Kid Fury and Crissle. I've been listening to this podcast religiously every week for about three years now. It's a pop culture podcast straight out of New York hosted by two of the funniest, most real, black and gay personalities of our generation. Last year, they started a new segment at the height of the pandemic that is referred to as a Happy Meal. In this segment, Kid Fury lists three things that made him happy in the last week. This is something I quite enjoy because Kid Fury has a way of making every day life happenings hilarious and entertaining.

For this month's challenge, I knew that I wanted to do something centered around gratitude. However, since we just did a gratitude challenge last November, I thought we'd amp it up a bit and put together a full blown Happy Meal of sorts.

Starting tomorrow, July 11th, and for the next twenty one days, I challenge you to write down five things:

1 thing that made you happy today

1 thing that you learned today

3 things that you are grateful for

It doesn't matter where you write them. Hopefully, you're still keeping a journal. If so, you can write your Happy Meal down in there. A sheet of paper will work. You can even use the notes app in your phone.

As we learned with our gratitude challenge, focusing on the positive things going on in your life can completely transform your mindset and help you stay focused when negative things happen. It is my intention to recreate this challenge but with the additional flare of finding two other instances of joy from each of your days. The three items of gratitude are the main course, while the moment of happiness and the ah-ha moment are side dishes that just wrap your day up nicely.

My hope for you during this challenge is that you won't have any bad days. That even when your day doesn't go as planned, you can find five nuggets of happiness that will, at the very least, even out any negativity.

How to Join the Challenge

The challenge will begin on July 11th and run until July 31st . On the 11th, I will post the challenge's cover photo on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. To join the challenge, send me a DM saying: "I'm In". Then make sure you check in weekly for accountability and the chance to win free giveaways!

So Queens, what do you say? Are you ready to find joy in every day?

-Queen Maree

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JULY 10, 2020