How to Set Healthy Fitness & Diet Goals
How to Set Healthy Fitness & Diet Goals
Goals are powerful things. In fact, when you set a goal with care – make it quantifiable and give it a timeframe – a goal can seem as if it took on a life of its own. What’s the difference between a powerful goal and a discarded New Year’s resolution? The process.
Putting a process with your goal, giving yourself a real way to achieve it, and then trusting that process, is the factor that makes the difference. We see it every day.
Making Your Goals SMART
Experts in fields as wide-ranging as those of Peter Drucker and Deepak Chopra have used the SMART acronym to coach people on how to make their goals effective. Beginning with S, we’re reminded to stretch beyond what we can reach. After all, what’s the use of a goal if we don’t move forward to achieve it? Stretching acknowledges our desire and fuels our curiosity, which are two powerful allies in our progress.
M is to remind us to measure. We like to double-up on that by saying, “Make it Measurable.” Keeping track of work in a measurable way is not to promote self-judgement, and we have to be wary of that. Rather, measurement is a way of encouraging awareness, and awareness is energy you can put on your side.
We like to use A to remind us of Agreement. Looking for harmony between our inner world, the one full of thoughts and hopes, and the outer world, where allies and tools and opportunities live, yields a kind of harmony that adds momentum by reducing friction.
R is to remind us to record our progress. Journals of thoughts and feelings and ideas, charts of our workouts and weight, all these are tools to tune up awareness. And we can’t say it often enough: Awareness is a form of energy, and it doesn’t seem to tire you.
Time is the ingredient we link to T. It takes many forms in pursuit of a goal. The most obvious form is setting a timetable for what you want to achieve. It works like putting a lid on a saucepan – the water comes to a boil faster when the energy is not escaping in all directions. Time limits work the same way by helping us shepherd our efforts and attention.
Trusting the Process
As we see it, a goal without a process for achieving it is just a dream. And dreams are good, but if we want to activate them, then developing a process is the way. Here is where our team can help a lot. What works for one person may not work very well for another.
When you have a program of nutrition and exercise that you know you developed with the best, most experienced counsel, then the confidence that comes from that becomes a constant companion on your way. That’s what we can provide uniquely from Eclipse 1 on 1, because we are as invested in your success as you are. Just give us a call.
