I enjoy goal setting. Many of us do. My favorite part is creating the steps needed to reach my goal. This may be partly due to my obsession at times with details, but nonetheless, for a while I thought everyone enjoyed this step. As many people start the new year with new goals in tow, I thought this would be an appropriate time to share a few steps you should take to help you get to the finish line.
The first step is to minimize the number of goals to undertake at a time. This list should not resemble the Christmas wish list of an eight-year-old. I want to lose twenty-five pounds, spend more time with my family, go to church more, and start meditating daily. All worthy goals, but a better approach is to concentrate on one at a time. Each goal requires a series of steps, and it’s in mapping out these steps that you’ll achieve success. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, shares how the first step is creating a simple task towards the goal that you perform daily. He recommends that this task take less than 2 minutes. The objective here is simplicity. What you’re doing is building a habit, and habits change behaviors. I like to call these the micro steps. These smaller steps compound over time, like interest with money, and create the more impressive large, macro changes over time.
One of the steps I strive to coach members of our studio (janddfitness.com) is the value of a warm-up. Attracting people north of forty years of age, the risk of injury is more apparent. The only way to improve someone’s fitness level is to keep them in the game, working out, not at home nursing an injury. We have a simple warm-up everyone does consisting of soft tissue work using a foam roller followed by a few mobility drills. If someone has a particular ailment, we will add a drill or two to the fold. Effort wise the drills are easy and don’t take more than eight to ten minutes to complete. The value of a warm-up became evident to me from years of training people privately in their homes before opening the studio. It was common for my early morning people suggesting we jump right into the workout bypassing the warm-up, only to sustain a “pulled” back or shoulder. The culprit was always a specific exercise, not that their body wasn’t properly prepared to load the tissue or joint. Like a parent with their kid, picking when to fight their battles, when I became adamant about warming people up, these issues instantly subsided.
A step I recommend you perform every week, that takes three to five minutes, is to schedule your workouts for the week ahead of time. Don’t leave it for when you have time. Every week you should think about when you plan on exercising for the upcoming week. This is a mind shift that must occur. To make a change, you need concentrated focus, that focus requires making that goal a priority. Disney CEO and Chairman Bob Iger wrote in his personal memoir, Ride of a Lifetime, how he didn’t want to lose time with his kids while taking the reigns of running Disney. He made it a habit to have dinner with his kids on most days of the week. Pulling away from work around 6pm did mean he would have to return to work after dinner on most nights, but he found that hour of time with his kids irreplaceable.
When creating a goal, sit down and break the goal down into the necessary steps. Dropping twenty pounds requires more than just starting to workout. It means losing three to five pounds a month. That requires an increase in energy expenditure or burned calories. This also includes a deficit in calories, which translates to monitoring how many calories you consume. The last step is enhancing your body’s metabolism which is achieved by increasing lean muscle mass. Take the outcome you desire and break it down into the small micro steps it takes, and that’s how you will make the tremendous change you wish to achieve.