Think It Thursday: Sticking to Your Goals

With a new year comes new goals. Actually, most call them resolutions, but I find that the word "goals", seems to have a higher success rate. But why is that? Well resolutions make us feel like failures the second we get off track, where as with goals we're more forgiving of ourselves. As long as we make realistic goals of course.

So let's get realistic. One of the major goals of women every year is to lose weight. But instead of saying you want to lose 8lb. a month or 100lb. by the end of the year, why not just make the goal to be more fit & eat right? You could even go out & purposely buy an outfit too small & have that be your goal. 

Of course there's a lot of "exercising every day" goals too. That doesn't mean for hours on end either. Busy day? 10 crunches. There, you exercised. It may not be much, but you did it. I decided I'm going to do yoga every day, but what happens when it's almost time for bed & I haven't done anything yoga related yet? Corpse pose. Yes, I just lay there & concentrate on breathing. I may not be building my balance or core, but it's a legit pose so I call it a day.

Then there's the whole short term & long term of it. Make sure that your short term goals aren't really just rushed long term goals. That is just setting yourself up for failure. For instance a short term goal of mine is doing projects on the house, at least one a month. When you word it that way, the littlest things really seem to count. Because let's face it, we don't always have the time or the money to give one room in our house a complete overhaul (I wish!). A long term goal is to get further in yoga. As a Christmas gift to myself this year, I'd love to be on my way to finding out how to become an instructor. But even if I'm not quite there by then, I would have still gotten further so I can't be hard on myself. 

So remember to be easy on yourself. You had a day that you ate nothing but junk, sat around watching Netflix & refused to even shower. So what?! We all need days like that occasionally. Consider it motivation rather than a failure.