When it comes to reaching our goals, every single day we make a decision to either move towards our goals or move away from our goals. It’s our habits that establish whether or not we will reach our goals. All too often we underestimate the impact of the choices we make today, in favor of looking toward the end result: ‘Someday I’ll lose 50 lbs.’ It’s easy to say, oh I’ll start tomorrow, or eating bad on the weekends isn’t a big deal, but in the long run the result of those small decisions can accumulate in not reaching the goals you have set for yourself. The idea that weight loss should be quick and painful is totally false: you don’t have to completely uproot your life and change everything at once to get results, and if you do and you get results really quickly, the reality is you likely won’t be able to sustain those results because you didn’t address the behavior that caused you to gain weight in the first place.
All too often we get discouraged when our weight loss isn’t going as quickly as we want it to, but when this happens we have to keep in mind the different factors that allow us to reach our goals in the first place: drive, capacity, and capability.
Drive is whether or not you have the drive to move towards your goals right now. Stress and different life events can have a huge impact on our drive; things like injuries, deaths in the family, or work pressure can cause our motivation to fluctuate and prevent us from being as consistent as we want to be with our habits. Drive is directly connected with our motivation, and it’s important to keep in mind the motivation and commitment are two different things. Your motivation WILL fluctuate, but your commitment to your goals should stay the same. Some good things to do when you are struggling with your drive is to revisit your WHY! Why do you have these goals in the first place? Also, spending time with individuals that share similar goals and are ‘in the game’ so to speak is a good way to reignite the spark to drive you towards your goals.
Next is capability. Do you have the skills in place to accomplish your goal? The reality is we don’t always have the skills we need, even though we think we do. This results in the fact that sometimes you will backslide, or flat our fail in reaching your goals. That’s why it’s important to give yourself room to fail. Remember, failure isn’t final quitting is, so don’t get discouraged if it’s taking you longer because you don’t know all the things needed to reach your goals. It’s okay to ask for help too!
Lastly is capacity: Do you have the support and time to hit your goal? Let’s say you’re limited on time. For a lot of our clients they’re training an hour or an hour and a half per week. The reality is that training for an hour or hour and a half is not going to get you your goals as fast as if you were training six hours a week, so a lot of the time it can seem like your goals are never going to happen. If you stay consistent, you WILL reach your goal! Remember: your timeline is not going to be the same as someone else’s and that’s OKAY! The second part of the capacity equation is support: Do you have people to support you? This could be family, friends, or even professionals like CNU Fit. Support and accountability is one of the top reasons people to reach their goals, so it’s important to have someone in your corner!
In the end, it’s the habits you stick to that will ultimately end in success. If you’re focused on the process you will see progress, but if you’re only focused on the end goal you will never reach it. So fall in love with the process, eventually you’ll get to where you want to be!
