Forget About Your Goals

Last time I wrote about New Year’s resolutions and some of the pitfalls that prevent us from achieving them.  Well we’re now well into 2012 so I thought I’d share some other ideas I have about what we can do to increase our chances of achieving the goals we set ourselves.  In a nutshell what I suggest is:

Forget about the goal…

Have I gone mad? Well, read on and then judge for yourself.

Actually, that’s only half of my suggestion, the rest of it is:

…and focus on the activities that will take you to your goal.

So, what am I driving at? Here’s an example.

One of my goals this year is to lose weight and get fitter. Let’s say that my goal is to lose two stone in weight by July 2012. Not a bad goal and reasonably SMART, but July is a fairly long way off and there’s a good chance that I may lose motivation well before then (as I have in the past when I’ve attempted to slim down).

So what I plan to do is to forget about this distant goal and concentrate on the activities instead – the things that I need to do – repeatedly – that will take me towards my goal.

So for me I will:

1. Reduce (or even eliminate) my consumption of less healthy foods (beer, biscuits, cakes, etc.)
2. Moderate the size of meals I eat (from huge to merely large)
3. Do more exercise (particularly cycling and walking)

Clearly this is no quick fix! The trick is to work out the right activities (deciding to sit down more and increase my consumption of chocolate chip muffins wouldn’t cut the mustard) and then repeat them – to stick at it over a long period of time and not give up. So, if I do these three things consistently for the next 7 months I’ve a good chance of achieving my goal.

So, forget your goal, but work out the activities you need to do and keep doing them.

Good luck and to quote Winston Churchill “Never give in. Never give in.”