How to Reach Your Goals in 3 Strategic Steps
Deciding on a goal or making resolutions is one thing, but actually achieving them is another. This is going to be the year you figure out how to reach your goals.
How to Reach Your Goals: 3 Tips
To do so, you need to create a mindset that breaks down any barriers that get in your way. A mindset that says “no” to unhealthy eating. A mindset that gets you to train when it’s the last thing you want to do.
Dr. Haley Perlus, a sports and exercise psychology expert who works with professional athletes, outlines three simple tips that can easily help you create the type of mindset that will help you decide how to reach your goals in fitness and/or nutrition.
First, in order to reach your goals, it is important to understand that you are in competition even if you are not actively competing with other athletes.
If you are trying to reach a goal, you are in competition with a part of yourself you are trying to change. In order to reach your goals, you need to keep a positive mindset so you can fight through the temptations and barriers that come your way.
1. Strategically Post Your Vision
Come up with affirmations for being healthy and fit that resonate with you. These tools are most effective when you strategically post them in places of temptation.
Where do you succumb to temptation?
Dr. Perlus keeps an image of herself that contains her mantra, “I am thriving,” on one of her food cabinets in her kitchen.
She says keeping it there helps her remember how she wants to feel and it also helps her to keep her emotions in check when she’s hungry. It helps her remain accountable to her fitness goals.
Maybe your kitchen isn’t a place of temptation for you. Maybe you struggle with the work-and-home life transition.
Dr. Perlus recommends posting something meaningful on either your center car console or your front door. Posting your goals in your place of temptation will help you break negative patterns and replace them with positive ones.
2. Choose and Use Your Follow-Through Person
Making your goals public is only really helpful when you choose people who can support you! Choose a person who you know will hold you accountable.
Dr. Perlus recommends scheduling a daily, one-minute phone call with that person so you can tell them one of your achievements of the day and one of your intentions for the next day.
While it may seem like you’re pursuing the same achievements day after day, Dr. Perlus says this practice will give you confidence from verbalizing your success and sharing it with someone else.
Likewise, verbalizing your intentions will give you motivation to move forward with your goals.
3. Use Your Past to Create Your Best Future
Keep a journal and look back through it to take note of what worked so you can use those tools to your benefit and keep getting closer to achieving your goals.
You may have heard some of these tips before, but Dr. Perlus gives each a special twist that make them more relevant and applicable to your daily life and the fitness and nutrition goals you’ve set.
They work for the professional athletes she trains and they’ll work for you too. Because while you might not feel like an athlete right now, you’re also in competition: with the part of your brain that gives in to unhealthy temptations.