There’s nothing wrong with an ambitious goal. Many people say that dreaming big can even make you more likely to accomplish your aim because it attracts attention, gravitates people toward you and helps get people on board. If you tell people you want to fly to space, you’ll get a lot more positive attention than if you tell people you want to climb some small unknown mountain.
This is why it often gets thrown around to ‘have visions, not goals’. These are things you visualize and dream about, rather than things you write down and tick off. If you want to get into shape, then your goal can be to train three times a week, but your vision would be to become the best physical athlete you can imagine so everyone will feel and see you full of confidence and energy.... as well as yourself.
While a vision can be as grand and extreme as you like, those smaller steps should still be small and they should be easy. At least at the very start the steps should be simple and this will then allow you to build towards your higher overarching objective.
Think of this like a hierarchy. At the top, you have your grand vision for the future, something so exciting that it helps you to launch yourself out of bed in the morning. Beneath that, you might have your ‘realistic’ version of what you can achieve with your current resources. Beneath that, you might have the steps you are taking every day to achieve it.
The mistake a lot of people make is to clump all these things together and not to consider the necessary progression from one stage to the next. This is the reason that someone who has never been to the gym before, might write themselves a new training program that requires them to train for an hour a day, seven days a week and to do this on a diet of 1,000 calories.
They’ll then do stretching on top of that and start a yoga class. Is it any wonder that we don’t tend to stick to these goals? The problem really tends to boil down to impatience. People want to accomplish their goals now. They don’t want to put in the time or the repetitious work that it actually takes in order to get to that point. And they don’t want the uncertainty that after all that work, it may not pay off.
If you want to start your own business, well then there is a ton you need to learn before you even get going. (Procrastinating on a goal is just as bad and is why it is so important you have a concrete action plan!)
Think of this like a computer game. Computer games begin with a few levels that are incredibly easy and this is necessary to prevent you as the player from rage quitting. Your goals should be the same – if your ‘level one’ is a massive boss battle, then you won’t be successful.
Lots of people get this wrong when they are taking up running for the first time. Here, they aim to start running long distances right away and losing weight. It’s grueling, painful and unrewarding and it leaves them gasping and achy for days after. What they should do is to to first focus on getting good at running and on learning to like running.
So that means they should be running short distances, not running too fast, not running too far and generally not pushing themselves beyond a sensible point. This way, they can gradually start to like running and they can gradually find themselves running further and further without even trying.
And in fact, often it only takes small changes to get to the place you want to be. This is best exemplified by the Japanese notion of ‘Kaizen’. Kaizen essentially means lots of small changes that build up to big results.
If you want to lose weight, then it might be easier to look at small changes you can make to get there, rather than massive ones:
• Take the stairs instead of elevator
• Stop drinking coffee with sugar in the morning
• Swap sugary soda drinks for water as your main source of hydration
• Take your lunch to work or school instead of buying whatever is being sold
• Eat off of smaller plates
These are just a few small changes that should be easy enough for most people to stick to and yet they can be enough to really sway your calorie total in your favor – eventually leading to cumulative weight loss!
Learning to structure your goals correctly can make a big difference when it comes to your likelihood of accomplishing them. The key is to set your sights high, but to have concrete, small steps that you can take along the way in order to get there.
Forget how long it is going to take, deal with it being ‘boring’ and just focus on repeating the same few actions every day until you eventually achieve the thing you want to achieve or become the person you want to become.
And if you assess the situation in a year and you still haven’t made the progress you’d hoped? Then perhaps you need to rethink those goals again. Like anything else, this takes time, practice and effort. No need to rush!
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My recent trip to Mexico
