Fitness is about the only area in my life where I don’t have
a set of super-specific goals, and a list of actions needed to reach them.
In business, I have daily, weekly, quarterly, and even 1- 3-
and 10-year goals (Have 1 million people in my database! Make a system of funnels
and products that will make people want to join that list! Launch 1 funnel a
month! Start funnel #1!).
It’s been my experience, and that of enough other people that
there’s a whole library of books on the topic, that it’s these smaller
objectives that actually WORK to move us along. Simply saying (or even writing down)
at the beginning of the year that I want to make a million dollars by the end
of the year isn’t going to do a thing; it’s less a ‘goal’ than it is an attempt
to manifest something. Absent the meaningful shorter-term objectives that can
be meaningfully worked on, the big goal gets swamped in the tsunami of, well,
day-to-day life
But I’ve never applied the same thinking to my health. In nutrition,
a lot of my ‘goals’ are of the ‘just check the box every day’ variety (eat real
food, not much, mostly plants, every day), which aren’t terribly inspiring,
especially when presented with a slice of delicious chocolate cake.
In fitness, it’s a combination of those same kinds of ‘check
the box’ things (go to the gym every day) and vague or very long-term outcomes
(get strong and flexible, get back to my college weight, live to be 130).
Personally, I find that those sorts of ‘goals’ don’t stay exciting
for more than 6 weeks or so, max. In fact, I’ve sometimes converted them to “30
day challenges” (no carbs for 30 days, gym every day for 30 days) successfully,
but the result is that by day 25, I’m counting down ‘til I can have pasta/take
a day off/whatever, which makes them almost counter-productive in the end; “Ok,
30 days are over, now I can have all the things I denied myself for the last
month!”
The thing is, I’m not a competitive athlete, nor do I have
some strong desire to be able to bench press xx pounds (and don’t even know
what a lot of pounds would be for a girl), so the kinds of goals that folks who
are trying to accomplish something OTHER THAN living their best, healthiest
life ring hollow to me. At the same time, when I am working out, I often have
thoughts around things like, “I really want to be able to do [that thing that I
just failed to do]”. And it occurred to me last week that those are…short term goals
that I can actually measure and celebrate the accomplishment of.
So I started writing them down, and here they are, for the
first time ever on paper.
1.
Be able to—and do—ride my bike from Cincinnati
to Columbus (about 100 miles) over 3 days next summer
a.
Work on leg strength, esp. around knees
b.
Research best kind of bike for this
c.
Ride 20 miles, then 25, then 30, then 35 in one
stretch
d.
Buy said bike as a reward for reaching next weighloss
goal
e.
Find someone who’s willing to do that with me
2.
Be able to do splits by 1/1/19
3.
Be able to do 20 boy pushups by 2/1/19
4.
Be able to do crow pose by 3/1/19
5.
Be able to do a pullup by 6/1/19
6.
Take at least 1 fitness-centered trip in 2019:
yoga camp, extended biking tour, something
7.
Go back to surfing school in late 2019 and
actually have the upper body strength to get up on the board and practice
balance, instead of spending the whole wave just trying to get upright
Now, I actually have things to work on day to day, instead
of just looking for some semi-defined result in some unknown time frame.
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