It’s difficult to resist the urge to set a big goal for yourself when the New Year rolls around. It happens to be a great time to take stock of your fitness, both financial and physical, see where you are and decide where you might prefer to be. It is not a bad thing at all to set a goal to become more financially responsible, or perhaps to become healthier, but something you must keep in mind is that identifying these goals is only the beginning. Realizing them takes patience. If you want to help yourself to succeed, you have to move from thinking about your goals to finding ways to realize them one day at a time. You don’t want to bite off more than you can chew!
Goals Are Realized One Day at a Time
Also read-pathfinder kingmaker jaethal quest
I have a pretty busy life, and I tend to set high goals for myself. I manage to work part time, go to school and have a studio practice as an artist. I spend at least two hours a day commuting, so my time is precious. If I think about what I need to accomplish at work, school and in the studio, I can easily get overwhelmed and can often feel too bogged down to accomplish anything. Instead of thinking about all the big goals at once, I try to approach things one day at a time. I wake up and ask myself what I want to accomplish in one day, what would make me feel good about my time, and then I set out to do that. Any big goal you set for yourself in fitness or in finance is realized day by day; it is what you do with each day that builds your life. You can’t live life weeks at a time!
What Does It Mean to You to Be Healthier?
If one of your goals for 2012 is to be healthier, this is a great goal, but it is not specific enough. You should ask yourself what being healthy means to you, or ask yourself what you need to be doing so that you feel you are healthier. Would you like to work out three times a week, lose a certain amount of weight, prepare more food for yourself at home or see a doctor more regularly for checkups? If you don’t decide in more concrete terms what being healthy means to you, your chances of realizing this goal are pretty slim. It’s kind of like giving an actor the genre of film she is in but no script and expecting her to play a part. It just won’t work out. But as soon as you clarify things and tell yourself, “I want to work out three times a week,” you can write this in your planner, and each time you make it to the gym or go for a run, you are succeeding in small steps towards your bigger goal.
Being More Financially Responsible
The same can be applied to your finances. Perhaps you want to be more financially responsible this year. Step one is to decide exactly what this means to you. Do you hope to get out of debt, start an emergency fund, save more for retirement or begin drafting an investment portfolio? As soon as you know what you hope to accomplish, you can start to break down your bigger goals into smaller digestible steps. I wrote about the debt-snowballing method in a blog about financial planning, and this method employs the idea of starting small and working towards bigger goals as a way of building momentum towards success in finding more financial responsibility.
Anticipate Weaknesses, Expect Setbacks
When you set a big goal, you are planning to change habits that may have been in place for a long time. You have to prepare yourself for setbacks. If you are a perfectionist like myself, it is easy to feel like you have failed when you make one small mistake. Instead of beating yourself up over a small setback and falling off the bandwagon, see if you can anticipate your weaknesses and decide in advance how you want to respond to setbacks. While you may be eager to try to implement the whole goal in one shebang, you will probably have much greater success in making lifestyle changes in small steps. With a little momentum, a few small steps can lead you to lifestyle changes in both financial and physical fitness!
Keep reading-pathfinder kingmaker turncoats