Making changes is not easy, it requires effort, dedication and following a plan according to our goals, this applies to any aspect of our lives we want to change.
We all want to improve, we want better health, better economy, better appeareance, work, social status, better education…
Regarding fitness in specific, we often see lots of people starting a diet or training plan with great motivation and intent on making a change: losing weight, increasing their muscularity, improving their health… unfortunately we also see quite often those plans abandoned after a while or how they don’t get the expected results.
Motivation and the decision to make a change are invaluable, but this amounts just for a first step if you want to achieve real and permanent change. That first step can be the start of the journey to success but only if the rest of the steps are also taken and if we know were we want to go and the right path.
Setting goals is vital, otherwise we would just go blindly with no direction. In order to be useful, goals require to have some characteristics.
- They must be realistic. A goal too hard or impossible to achieve will turn into a source of frustration and apathy once we realize it can’t be achieved.
- They must requiere effort to be achieved. If we set goals that are too easy they won’t produce the drive to make an effort and would hinder our progress instead of pushing it.
- They must have a specific timeframe to be achieved. If we don’t set a date for our goals we won’t feel as compelled to work on them, knowing that we will «eventually» get there, no matter if it’s tomorrow, next month or in 10 years.
- They must be specific. If our goals are vague it will be hard to quantify and qualify our advance, the effort they requiere or how long would they actually take.
A realistic, specific goal, requiring effort and dedication, to be met within a set period of time pushes us to work hard on it and make the necessary adjustments to get it done, and to assess our advance and success without being overwhelming or frustrating in the process.
Once we set our goal and get the motivation and decision to start we must accept the following: the path will be hard, it always is, and there will be obstacles, ups and downs, falls and setbacks. Those will always be there and we must be prepared for that.
In front of all that it’s possible that initial motivation and drive might lose momentum, that we consider abandoning or changing our goals, that we feel frustrated; that’s when the elements of our first step, decision and motivation, may result insufficient and we must reach for other key elements: being prepared to face problems and feeding our desire to succeed.
Initial impulse is like rowing to start the motion of a boat, breaking inertia is hard, requires effort and decision to finally take it off the shore, beating the currents and starting to move, but if we stop there we will go nowhere. That initial impulse has to be renewed once and again so we keep moving on and when facing stronger currents or troubled waters we must repeat the greater initial effort and use all our might to keep going on. And we must remind ourselve why we are doing it.
Never think the path will be easy or that once you start the goal is reached, that merely prepares you to quit when things get hard. The main difference between those that reach their goals and those who don’t is in the level of comitment each one is ready to make. Those that succeed never quit.
We all can reach our goals, but we need to know how to set them, the paths that can take us to them and to be ready to face the difficulties we’ll find along the way, but above all we must be sure we fully accept the challenge, that we really want to succeed and why we want to do it.
La Forja 