Anyone who has set and failed at a New Year's resolution (that would be just about all of us!), knows that some times our goals seem too far off in the distant or too big to achieve, so we give up. We quit. We fail. And our well thought out, well intentioned goal ends up back in the land of pipe dreams rather than as a satisfying outcome to our efforts.
The trick is to take the goal and work backwards into ACTIONABLE steps.
Take for example getting fit. Getting fit or losing weight is one of the most common goals set in the US population. Say you want to lose that 25 pounds of belly fat that has accumulated in the last few years. Obviously, you are not going to lose it all in a month without liposuction. So you start from the end goal and work backwards. You'd like to be looking fit and trim by the holiday season and decide that one pound a week for twenty five weeks is reasonable and will meet your objective.
But wow, 25 weeks seems like so long. So, you chunk in down into smaller steps. That would be about 4 pounds per month. Losing four pounds a month sounds more doable and you can chunk it down further into one pound a week. You know that weight loss, in its simplest form, means exerting more calories than you take in. Now, you can craft your weekly action steps and from your weekly action steps, you create your daily action steps. Reminder here - your action steps should be stated in the positive - that is what you CAN do rather than what you can't or won't.
Once you have your action steps outlined, check to make sure that they are the right size. You may need to start with tiny steps at first to get some momentum but if the steps are too small, you won't feel any sense of progress. At the same time, if the steps are too large, your goal will seem less achievable.
Ask yourself - will this action step move me forward and will I feel some satisfaction toward my progress when I complete it? When the answers are yes to both questions, you have set in place the stepping stones to achieving your goals!
