Challenge Yourself Gracefully

It's almost that time of year when we start thinking about goals and aspirations for the new year.

When I look back, I'm almost sick at how much time I wasted not setting achievable goals then getting upset with myself when I didn't hit them. I was often too optimistic and I had vague goals like “I want to be healthier”.

Most of us set these unrealistic goals with the thought process that we’ll basically WILL ourselves to success, but that hasn’t happened before, why do we think it’ll happen now?

Here's the thing, I want you to set “stretch goals”. You should have to work a little hard to get to it, but it shouldn't require Mars to be in retrograde to make it possible.

Don't do that to yourself.

Instead, think about or visualize yourself 6 months from now… just 6 months. What's different about your life? You have to stop and ask yourself, realistically, what will it actually take to make this happen?

Chances are, you probably realize you can't change that much in 6 months. It's unrealistic to think you can drop 70 pounds. That’s almost 12 pounds a month… 3 pounds a week. Can you actually eat in a deficit enough to actually lose 3 pounds every single week (assuming you’re not morbidly obese as that’s probably possible).

When you start breaking it down and looking at how you’d actually manage this, you can start asking yourself better questions.

You won’t be able to lose that amount of weight so quickly, but could you walk more? Could you decide to eat out 4 days less a month; that's just one less day each week. We need to put systems into place to help us success, not solely rely on our willpower.

The biggest issue I used to have was thinking because I've finally figured out a problem, it needed to be solved immediately. But that's really hard to do in real life. If I've been procrastinating me whole life, over 3 decades, what makes me think I can change that in just a few months? No, we need a little balance and a LOT of grace.

We can change, people do it every day, but we need to shake the shackles of the expectations of perfection.

There's a reason why slow and steady wins the race.

Social media has this annoying habit of making people's improvements seem like it's happening overnight, but that’s almost never true.

Think about people who have lost a ton of weight. It’s one of the biggest life improvements we often see across social media, but even that takes months or years to truly show itself.

So set your goals, but set two of them, the slow and steady one, and the “I'm highly motivated” stretch goal, and then aim to stay somewhere in the middle.

If you're feeling really good, go for that stretch goal, but when life inevitably gets in the way, when the kids get sick, when you’ve had a long day at work and you find out the dog has eaten something that requires you to now go see the vet, aim for your slow and steady and give yourself some grace.

Lesson: Embrace imperfect achievement

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Stop Sabotaging Yourself