“A goal without a deadline is just a dream….”
I has having a chat to a client of mine the other day and I discovered why she had hit a pleateu with her training. She just wasn’t ‘into’ her goals anymore. My client – let’s call her Tania had previously achieved some great results, when we started training she was working hard to look good for her wedding, CHECK. Tania then wanted to shed a few more kilos for an upcoming holiday CHECK. Then after the holiday things went a bit downhill.
We tried our goal setting again but there was no passion in the goals.
“What do you want Tania?” I would ask her at our weekly weigh in
” I don’t know, lose weight”. I didn’t really believe her. Or rather I didn’t believe that she belived it.
It’s such a general goal, to really achieve it and any other goal we need to get specific and be able to measure when results are achieved. The most important thing though is that you have to have an emotional connection – WHY do you want to lose weight?
Have a think:
What do you want?
Why do you want it?
How are you going to make it happen?
How does one grow and learn if they don’t aim for something and achieve it. Goals. How do you take a goal and achieve it?
Below are some tips that have helped with my clients and achieving their goals.
Be positive
Express your goals in a positive way. How often have you been excited to accomplish a goal that didn’t even sound good when you said it? If you are not comfortable or happy with the goals that you have set, the likelihood of you succeeding is pretty low.
If you want to express your goals in a positive way, you have to think of a goal that puts a smile on your face when you imagine it completed. Talk about your goals to others, put it out there and more often than not you will receive support in return.
Be specific
Set a specific goal that includes details to properly measure your achievement. i.e dates, time, amounts. If you do this, you will know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.
Being specific makes the goal easier as you can follow a step by step format.
Set priorities
When you have more than one goal, give each a specific priority.
This will keep you from feeling overwhelmed by too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones and follow them in order. Setting priorities will force you into the step-by-step format.
Write goals down
In writing your goals down, you are able to keep track of your accomplishments. It also helps you to remember each task that needs to be done and allows you to check them off as they are accomplished. Basically, you can keep track of what you are doing.
Break your goals down
Make sure you have short term, medium term and long term goals. Usually you start with the long term goal which is often the biggest or hardest to accomplish, break that down into what you achieve in medium term and then break that down even further into short term goals. By breaking it down you are making your big goal achievable. For example if my goal was to lose 20kg that is my long term goal. Obviously I can’t lose 20kg in a week so here is how i would break it down
Long term – have lost 20kilos and maintain it within 1 year
Medium term – have lost 10kg and maintaining healthy diet and training regularly 3-4 times per week
Short term – over the next 2 weeks I am going to keep a food diary and increase my vegetable and water intake. I will go for a short walk 5 times a week and research gyms, trainers, exercise ideas to implement. I want to have lost at least 0.5kg
Set realistic goals
It is important to set goals that you can achieve.
All sorts of people (parents, media, and society) can set unrealistic goals for you which is almost a guarantee of failure. They will often do this in spite of your own desires and ambitions or flat out disinterest. Alternatively you may be naïve in setting very high goals. You might not consider either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how many skills you must master to achieve a particular level of performance.
By being realistic you are increasing your chances of success.
Avoid setting goals too low
Just as it is important not to set goals unrealistically high, do not set them too low. People tend to do this where they are afraid of failure or where they simply don’t want to do anything. You should set goals so that they are slightly out of your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of achieving them. No one will put serious effort into achieving a goal that they believe is unattainable.
Get started now…
Have a think about what you would like to achieve. You don’t have to wait for New Year’s resolutions.
Start by writing your goals down and once you have done this share them with others. Make sure you have someone other than yourself keeping you accountable. This will keep you on track.
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