You’ve set a goal to lose 20 pounds by that big event in 3 months. You know, the one where you want to turn heads.
Now what?
You sorta know what to do because you’ve heard it all your life: cut out the sugar, eat more veggies, and exercise more.
You think about it often, but you don’t take consistent and long-term action. Why is that?
You, my friend, have left out the one thing that’s more important than setting the goal to begin with. You have left out the “how” or the system to help you get where you want to go.
According to James Clear, author of “Atomic Habits”, the one thing that’s more important than setting a goal is having a system in place to help you attain that goal.
So what, exactly, does it mean to have a system?
A system is simply a process to get you from where you are now to where you want to be within a certain time frame.
Let’s take the weight-loss scenario of losing 20 pounds in 3 months as an example. In the first couple of weeks, you might do really well and lose 5 pounds. Then, not only do you stop losing, but in week 4, you actually gain weight. And at some point, you weigh more than when you started. Then, when the third month rolls around, you’ve only lost 4 pounds and you’ve lost all hope that you’ll ever be able to lose those 20 pounds.
At this point in a weight-loss journey, most people become unmotivated. Then when demotivation sets in, we start to revert back to former habits … those habits we wanted to lose along with all that extra weight. We may think, “If the gym isn’t helping, then why bother?”. Or, “Just this one pint of ice cream isn’t going to hurt and might even make me feel better.”
Then we tend to give up altogether and view ourselves as a complete failure.
Here’s the thing …
We don’t fail because we don’t have what it takes to succeed.
We fail because we don’t have the right system.
Most health coaches would agree that what you really need to do for success is follow this 4-step system:
1. Come up with a goal. Get clear on what you want. I call this your aspiration
2. Attach actions to your aspirations. This is where most of us fail. There is a big difference between an aspiration and an action. An aspiration is what you want. An action is what you’re going to do to get what you want. If we don’t come up with specific actions to take, we won’t see measurable and long-term results.
3. Come up with a process. You’ll want to identify daily habits you want to establish and determine when and how much you’ll do of each. Then you’ll want to commit to doing those actions on a regular basis.
4. Then, forget your goal. Yep, that’s what I said. Once we know our goal, identify actions, and have a process, we need to forget about the goal. When we focus on the goal, we miss the small, motivating results we get. When we focus on taking daily action, the world opens up to us. We’re more likely to celebrate small victories, like 10 minutes of exercise, rather than focusing on the scale moving more slowly than we want.
Once you come up with a system, you can focus on the steps you need to take in order to follow to the process.
We can’t always control the scale, but we can control our behaviors and the habits we work to establish. We’ll also be able to focus on our increased energy, better sleep, and those small successes. And nothing breeds success like … well … success!
If you focus on the system and those daily actions rather than the goal, before you know it, you’ll see changes you never thought possible.
If you’re not sure what action steps and process are right for you, click here to set up a free consultation to come up with a plan!
Here’s to making the impossible possible!
