What is your goal & How dedicated are you to achieve that goal?
Before I continue about how to achieve your goal. Let’s start with discussing how to set up your goal or your vision. This might be the most important step in the whole process. Why? Because every day when you wake up, you will be motivated purely by the fact that you want to achieve your goal! If that is not the case for you, then you have not found your ‘why’, so keep thinking about it.
For me, my goal is to get as close as possible to look like Zac Efron in Baywatch. It is a bit of an extreme goal, but it helps me to stay motivated. I saved a picture of him from the movie on my phone, and I try to look at it once a day, so I never forget why I am dedicating my training, food and sleep patterns to achieve that goal. Having this goal is the reason why I can stay consistent over time without any hesitation. Since this goal is quite challenging, it means that hard work and consistency is required. It also means that I have to make some sacrifices. To get to my goal as quick as possible, it means I cannot drink alcohol or have many cheat days / meals that distract me from achieving my goals. But it is all worth it. The picture, next to it, helps me with visualizing the goal I have in mind. As long as you can visualize your goal, you can get there. The visualization part helps to motivate you and it supports you to actually believe in yourself that you can get there. Also, it helps you through the difficult moments. If there is a day I do not feel like going to the gym, I will think about my goal and I know that the only way to get to that goal is if I go and work out. The same counts for food: sometimes I am on the edge of ordering a pizza, but then I look again on my phone at the picture and I know that ordering a pizza is going to antagonize me getting to that goal. So in the end, I decide not to order the pizza and to cook a healthy meal instead, which I enjoy as well.
To conclude on how to set a goal: start with your ‘why’ and start visualizing yourself achieving that goal. Those are the first steps in the process. Remember, always have a goal. Because as Arnold Schwarzenegger once said: “Always have a goal. Because you can have the best ship in the world, but if the captain does not know where to go, he will just wander around, not getting anywhere. He will most likely end up at the wrong places.” This quote perfectly summarizes why it is so important to first set a goal.
Your goal does not have to be crazy. It can be as small or as big as you want, but the most important thing is that you stick to it! A good reason to do fitness can be just to stay a bit in shape during the week. As long as want to achieve that goal, and are prepared to hit the gym two or three times a week, then it’s a great goal. As long as you stick to your schedule, you will get there. Find your reason why you want to do fitness.
If you have some spare time, I extremely recommend you taking a look at the following speeches. These have helped me setting my goal and keep me motivated to get there. I think that on average I listen to one of these speeches at least three times a week. I hope they will inspire you as much as they inspired me (which they still do to this day!).
About Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mindset:
About your ‘why’:
Success, study and gym motivation:
Speech about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life:
Now that I talked about how to set a goal, the next blog post will be about how to actually plan on achieving your goal. Stay tuned! The next post will be tomorrow already!
