The Only 2 Things That Help Me Achieve A Goal
I think the title of the post tells you everything you need to know about this already. After setting so many different goals and trying so many different things, I’ve found everything boils down to these 2 things for me so, let’s just jump right into it!
1. Finding the why
Oftentimes, I fail in achieving a goal because it had no personal meaning to me. Even if it’s the RIGHT thing to do. Something like “meditate every day” can fail for me even though I’ve felt the benefits of meditation. So, I ask myself questions like WHY I need to meditate every day, what meditation offers me that a day without meditation doesn’t, etc, etc. Usually, I journal these things so I can look back at them when I start to flounder.
The clearer I am on the WHY, the more it becomes an innate need for me to work on the goal. This then becomes the motivation to work on it consistently and achieve a higher success rate (key being consistently and not every day because it’s okay to falter from your “every day” goal sometimes! Life happens!)
2. Scaling it down
When I first started on my “lose weight” goal, setting it at “work out 3 times a week” was not enough for me to stick to it or see the why and commit. I had to scale the goal down to the smallest possible way. So, for example, for this week, I will work out for 10 minutes each on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And that’s ALL I will focus on and think no further than that about it. I’ll work like this for maybe 2 weeks and then increase the time to 20 minutes, 30, 40 etc, until I was doing 60- or 90-minute workouts 4 times a week.
While “work out 3 times a week” and “drop to size 10” was technically enough to define a goal, they felt vague and endless. Meanwhile, looking at goals as “today and today alone” or “this week and this week alone” and then “this month and this month alone” made things A LOT more manageable and triggered a sense of accomplishment. Which your brain THRIVES on! Your brain WANTS to feel rewarded, and that sensation is what makes it easier for you to sustain your everyday habits or small steps to achieve your LARGER goal.
And if you ask me, these two things are intertwined in a way. The more I talk to myself on WHY I need to work on this goal, the more I end up breaking the goal down. Or breaking a goal down to the smallest possible way helps me find my why.
So even if you have a goal that initially has no personal meaning for you like, “drop to size 10” but you feel like you HAVE to achieve it, you can reverse engineer the goal to find your why. Like I’ll work out to drop a size – why do I want to work out? Because I can lose weight and U stay seated all day which is not my heart – why is that important for me? A good cardiovascular health can combat things like blood pressure and cholesterol, which run in my family. Okay, but why? Because I want to stay young and healthy for as long as possible and I don’t want to pop pills for those things just yet. And bam! Suddenly it’s not just about losing weight for me anymore, it’s about health, and an aversion to popping pills. That’s how the goal of “drop to size 10” becomes important to me.
Remember, getting started is ALWAYS the hardest part and for some, it will feel EVEN harder when your steps seem HUGE. So, keep it simple, keep it small and then increase the intensity of things as you go. DON’T let people tell you things like there’s no point doing something unless you take this specific step (e.g., you HAVE to work out for 30 mins at the least for effects to kick in). Yeah, I’m sure that’s true but there’s NO shame in taking small and steady steps. So, sure you commit yourself to a barely 10-minute workout. But guess what? You were doing zero minutes last week! And if you keep at it, before you know it, you WILL be on the 30 minutes!
Find your own pace, your own stride, and that will get you where you need to go FASTER than feeling obliged to follow a path determined by someone else and then spending so much time failing it, repeatedly restarting from square 1 again and again and resisting it simply because you feel overwhelmed.
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