Ideas to achieve your health goals....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 2-21-2012

Of course you need to have health goals -- or health related ways you want your life to go or to go better.

Most people have some of these.

They want to stay healthy or get healthier. They want to live longer and have those extra years be healthy. So they want to avoid diseases that happen in later years if they can. They want to slow aging if they can.

They want to look better, feel better, and have their current quality of life get better.

You find out effective actions you can do to achieve partial goals or help reach your goals.

Those things to achieve have to be doable. And for them to work for you, they have to be doable for you, because you have to do them!

BUT, as you do those actions, things happen. You may find you have trouble doing those actions or do them poorly – or you may find you did those actions just fine but didn’t get your goal result or all of it.

Last Sunday’s Parade Magazine had an article, “Revive Your New Year’s Resolutions” that had several kinds of solutions to just these kinds of obstacles.

I’ll list those but in my own words in a way that I think & hope may make them more doable for you.

1. When you are new to working on a health goal, create some early success to build on!

It’s dramatically easier to improve initial successes than restart after doing horribly.

a) So list things that you for sure can do that are relatively easy and quick. Do those to create some momentum.

If you’ve been drinking soft drinks and eating packaged snacks and desserts and have already stopped having any for a week or so or are just fed up with how fat they’ve made you, just toss them all in the garbage. Stop buying more at the store.

If there is a supplement that you can buy and easily afford that will help, buy it and begin taking it every day.

b) For more challenging things to do, start at a very easy or easy level. Then do it and cheer yourself for doing it!

Then, decide based on how easy that was if and by how much to increase your effort next time. When you do that, again guess on the low side. If you feel you can do three times as much, hold set a goal to do 50% more or try twice as much with a planned fall back to 50%. Set goals in the first few months that ensure your success.

With exercise too, if you only increase by 5 or 10 % a week once you come closer to what you can actually do, you avoid injury. So, go for small but consistent improvements that you keep doing. If you feel you are going too slow, project out your slow bite progress for a year or two.

You’ll see substantial progress towards reaching your goals when you do. Then just keep making those smaller improvements.

At first, doing these actions at all and feeling successful or having an “I can do this” feeling – even if it’s still a bit too easy is the essential thing to accomplish.

This set of things is specially effective with beginning exercise.

2. Other than the things that are so easy that you can just do them and fit them in already, for the more challenging things, set priorities.

Fine, pick two to five things to work on if you like. But know which are most important to you. AND, within each area, set priorities on what actions you’ll take.
What will I do first?

If I only have time to work on one or two things for a week, which ones will those be?

If I have to cut out working on something temporarily on occasion, what will I cut out?

(I just used that one last night. Unless it’s a real emergency, I never cut my first thing in the morning exercises. But I do kettlebell exercises on Monday and Wednesday nights. To avoid losing ground, IU make a special effort to not skip both sessions. But sometimes on Monday evening particularly, I’ll skip Monday night. Last night I did that. I was tired and it was a Holiday and I wanted to add to my time off.)

3. If you mess up or your initial results aren’t good enough yet, focus on doing better next time. Focus on what you did well otherwise. Focus on finding a better or more doable way to get results.

THOSE will help you reach your goals.

BUT, if you find yourself mentally calling yourself names or thinking “What’s the use?”, that’s something to literally tell yourself “STOP!” as soon as you realize you did that.

Then either focus on the first group of things or why you want the result –OR find out the hidden and inaccurate self talk that came just before.

Albert Ellis PhD founded an effective therapy method that focused on what these hidden negative messages were and then challenging them.

Dr Daniel Amen calls them “ANTs”, Automatic Negative Thoughts. I like his name since it makes it easy to think of putting them out of your life just like brushing off real ants from your food at a picnic.

Dr Amen found that helping people get rid of those and focusing instead on things like these really helps people succeed: “Doing better next time. Focus on what you did well otherwise. Focus on finding a better or more doable way to get results.”

Two ideas that I liked in the Parade article were:

4. Set up your environment to support your goals.

We listed one of those already, “If you’ve been drinking soft drinks and eating packaged snacks and desserts and have already stopped having any for a week or so or are just fed up with how fat they’ve made you, just toss them all in the garbage. Stop buying more at the store.“

Another is to set up a seated bicycle exerciser in your TV room to use during commercials and less challenging TV programs.

Another is to set up all or most of your exercise equipment in the room where you exercise so it takes virtually no time to access it when you exercise.

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5. Ask for help when you need it.

Having a friend or family member working on the same thing has helped many people. You can let them know what you did that worked or ask them what they do to overcome a problem you had or think might work.

Reading information on how to do things often provides you with needed help. That’s particularly true if the person you read or ask was successful at what you are trying or reports actual tests of the methods involved.

Getting a person like that who was successful themselves as a mentor or coach can help.

Or, in some cases, pay for professional help if you can find good quality and can afford it, this can be a HUGE help!

Some people get into exercise best and do the right amount of it better if they get a personal trainer for example.

Some people need a professional “ANT” killer to help them get rid of those!

Psychotherapists that use the Rational Emotional talk therapy well that Albert Ellis created or use the work of Martin Seligman well can make a dramatic difference for if you need them, find a good one, and can afford it.

6. Expect some fast results because some are achievable but plan for the long term too.

With some things you can get good progress in 3 months but very good progress in a year and astounding progress in 3 years.

People who realize some things will take longer and persist long enough can do things people who expect everything to be fast cannot.

7. Keep records of your results and your exercise routines. When you are a little down or doing a bit less well, it can really improve your spirits to see that the level that you went down to was better than your all time record just a few months ago!

That just happened to me! So, I kept doing that exercise anyway and am back to a much better level.

Or as in my yesterday’s report on my own fat loss, your records may show you need to do more and show you what you need to improve.

They are more doable if you keep them as you go, make the log entry easy to do, and use key abbreviations to save the time it takes to enter the records.

8. “Begin with the end in mind.” Stephen Covey.

The Parade article suggested focusing on the feeling you’ll have when you get what you want as a way to boost your motivation to make an effort now.

That does often work.

But I like Covey’s idea and phrase better because while it includes that, it also helps in two other ways.

a) If you begin to do things that take time and effort but don’t move you toward the end result you want, having your desired end result in mind can help you get back on track.

b) You can use focusing on the end result you want to find out how to get there!

It’s called “reverse engineering.”

“I’ve no idea what to do to get that result.” Fine, from what set of circumstances could I get that result? What assets or preliminary achievements would make my end result possible?

You may find there are two and realize that you can achieve the first one and could achieve the second one with help.

Now, instead of a desirable but unreachable goal, you have two doable goals you can reach that will deliver the end result you want.

Then ask yourself,

“What can I do now or schedule for the next few days that will begin moving me towards the first thing I can achieve? When will I do it?”

“What can I do now or schedule for the next few days that will begin moving me towards the help I need? When will I do it?

This kind of reverse engineering starts with the end in mind and starts you on your way to having it.

So, use Stephen Covey’s idea!