kaplods |
12-03-2012 07:42 PM |
I also agree that time-based goals are often a bad idea, because it's so easy to focus on the failure rather than the success if you come in close. If you set a 25 lb weight loss goal by a certain date, and you lose "only" 24, you can obsess over every decision or slip you made, berating yourself for not working just a little harder, or making fewer mistakes (and you don't have to make any mistakes or cheats to feel the failure of not making the goal).
Setting up a behavior-based goal AND a reward for it, can be really helpful. Or even an open-ended weight based reward (I buy a bead/charm for a cheap Pandora-knock off style bracelet for every 5 lbs I, lose).
And don't punish yourself if you don't meet your goal, re-evaluate and reset the goal. For example, I few years ago, I set a small reward (so small I don't remember what it was - I think it was a paperback novel I wanted to read) for making it to the gym 4 times in a week. It took me months to meet that goal. I was even tempted several times to revise my goal to three times a week - or even eight times in a month, but I kept thinking "no I can do this."
It wouldn't have been wrong of me to change my goals downward, but I'm glad I kept at it without beating myself up for "failing," because truth-be-told even my "failures" were an improvement over what I'd been doning before I set the goals.
Your goals don't really matter as much as heading and moving in the right direction. Even if you only do one small thing better (even if it's something that won't make much of an impact on it's own) and keep making more positive changes, whether it's one small change per week, or a whole bunch of changes at once - you'll eventually get where you're going if you move in that direction. Even "standing still" is often progress for many of us (for most of my life I was either losing rapidly, or gaining MORE rapidly. Just learning to "not gain" was a considerable acheivement - but one I didn't recognize as success until relatively recently).
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