Habits & Goals

Habits & Goals

It’s that time again when people start setting themselves goals and resolutions for the upcoming year… Why not take a second, read my blog post and hopefully you’ll be a lot more likely to achieve some of your aspirations this time round.

Typical New Year resolutions:

• Lose weight.
• Eat healthily.
• Train more regularly.
• Quit smoking.
• Reduce alcohol consumption.

These are all perfectly good goals, they’re realistic, they’re achievable so why are the majority not achieved? Firstly, they’re too broad. If there’s no plan of action inevitably after a few weeks you may lose track. One way to increase your chance of success is to begin by implicating good habits prior to working on a goal. These small stepping stones will help with overall progress and make the larger end goal more achievable.

For example: If your goal is “eat healthily” compile a list of all of the ‘smaller’ habitual changes you need to make in order for you to achieve this:

• Eat at least one to two pieces of fruit a day.
• Eat at least one to two vegetables a day.
• Drink more water/cut out juices and fizzy drinks.
• Eat at least two portions of oily fish a week.
• Increase your quality protein intake. (Chicken, Beef, Eggs, Salmon, Brazil Nuts etc.)
• Replace starchy carbohydrates with complex varieties. (White Bread à Brown Rice etc.)

Now these are just a handful of points you can implement every day which will ultimately move you closer towards your end goal. More importantly when you create your list the points should be specific to your lifestyle. Hopefully you’ll start consistently achieving these smaller points and it will become second nature to you.

Finally, don’t give up! Just because you’re not seeing progress on whatever your goal may be it doesn’t mean you’re not working hard for it. Some goals are short term and some are long term. Think of the small habitual changes as laying the foundations to achieve long term success. You need to determine your long term and short term goals then, break them down, plan them out, improve your habits and finally you can begin to put a time frame on the project.

I’m personally planning my goals for the 2015 now, breaking them down and seeing whether they are short term or long term. For any more advice and help on goal setting, why not arrange a free consultation with one of our qualified personal trainers.

Thank you for reading.

Simon Passey - sjp@tonbridge-school.org