Update:
I really kicked a hornet’s nest with this one, the spam bots are going ape shit. Closing comments.
Well, yes. This is a health and fitness blog, with a particular emphasis on posture and back pain.
So what’s all this bunkum about success? Where is the health, fitness and posture content?
Health, Fitness, Posture
Eh, the posture content came back, I posted on it twice already this week.
Okay, what about the health and fitness?
Hah, young grasshopper, have you not been paying attention? When I was writing about habits, it may have seemed a random collection of thoughts right up until the last one, wherein I showed that I constructed the whole series as a lesson in breaking old habits and developing new ones.
What, exactly, do you think I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks? Just provide you a template for achieving your health/fitness/posture goal. If you take the ideas I’ve presented over the last couple of weeks and apply them, you will achieve whatever goal you choose.
Yes, I’ve written about
- Reframing your view of the Wuhan Flu Pandemic from a crisis to an opportunity
- Defining success
- Choosing a goal and break it into small steps
- Starting
- Maintaining focus and not getting sidetracked
- Making staying on course habitual before taking on anything more
- Adding new tasks as your capacity to take them on opens up
- Stacking tasks to reinforce one another and improve your odds of success.
Yes, I’ve written about all of this in general terms, with my own goal of expanding my reach as an example. Cast your mind all the way back to yesterday when I wrote about accomplishing your goals by treating them like a Lego set.
So what? So let’s take a concrete example
An Example
I have previously used the example of, “I want to lose weight.” The problem with this goal isn’t the goal itself, it’s a heckuva a good goal. The problem is that it’s not specific, not measurable and not actionable. So what do you do?
Define success – “I want to lose 10 lbs before Victoria Day” This is specific and measurable, but not really actionable (don’t you like made up corporate buzzwords?). So, let’s make it actionable.
Break it into its component parts
- Eat more healthy food
- Eat less crap
- Exercise to burn calories/put on muscle
Pick a single one to focus on, create an action and start:
- I will stop snacking after dinner.
- I will do this for 1 week before adding on another task.
After 1 week of no crap after dinner, pick another:
- I will replace my morning bagel/muffin/doughnut/block of refined carbs with a hardboiled egg (pure protein).
- I will do this for 1 week before adding another task.
After 1 week of no crap after dinner and a hardboiled egg for breakfast, pick another. How about some exercise?
- I will walk ten minutes every day at…(scheduled time)
- I will do this for 1 week, adding 5 minutes each day.
- After 1 week I will be walking 45 minutes per day
Continue this process of adding 1 small daily step to your routines each week. In a month you’re;
- Eating better
- Exercising
- Sleeping better
- Replacing bad weight with good.
But Andrew, you didn’t tell us much about the healthy food, exercise and sleeping parts.
No, I didn’t. You’re grown ups, make your own plans and your own decisions. There is no one size fits all diet and exercise plan, and this was an example, for illustration purposes only. If you want me to design you an entire lifestyle enhancing diet and exercise plan, I’ll be happy to do it.
But you’re going to have to pay me.
And, if you take some time and poke around the site, you might just find I’ve spilled fair number of pixels on all the aforementioned topics.
Meantime, follow the script. Pick a goal, break it down, start small, make it routine, and add more as each prior step becomes easier.
Voila, as my boys in French immersion might say, a roadmap for success in health, fitness, or anything else you might want to try.
