image courtesy of: www.zensorium.com

We are almost two months from the exciting prospects that the new year held for us.  Have we moved into the ideas and goals of the things that we are going to accomplish this year? We create these big, overarching ideas of the changes and the smaller steps we need to do to achieve those steps. This is the point where we commonly get lost. What are those little steps that will create the bigger change? Are the steps that I am laying out actually going to create the change I want, are they too much or too little to achieve my goal? Will I fail in my goal, not because I didn’t plan and stay committed to the change, but that my planning was flawed from the start? What is easy to do, is also easy not to do.  Are you staying on track?

The answer to this plague of questions and doubts is to shift our focus from what we need to Do to achieve our goals, but rather to who we need to Be to achieve our changes. Instead of agonizing over the things that we need to do in order to achieve the goals we set out for ourselves, it is far easier to envision who we want to be and how they would act. What I mean here is that we want to look at our future self and the behaviors that they have after we have achieved our goal. Do we want to lose weight? If so, what exercise habits and eating habit would the slimmer version of us have? Once we have an idea of those habits, all we have to do is take those habits into our selves and live our current lives the way that we see our futures selves living. In this way we have a blueprint to the decisions that we need to make to change our habits into the ones that will create the change that we are looking for.

So a big goal for me this year is to lose at least 10-20lbs. This is a goal that didn’t start at New Years for me, but one that I reaffirmed at that time. So the future, slimmer me make the choice to park farther away and walk. He chooses to drink water instead of soda and refrains from breads and baked goods while limiting sugar intake to a minimum. So now I know exactly the sort of actions that I need to take to achieve my goal. This also helps work into the Non-Negotiable items that we talked about earlier. If the future me doesn’t drink soda, then I guess soda is a non-negotiable and simplifies any decision I have in that regard. It all adds into itself to strengthen and enhance the process to make sure that we achieve our goals.

So what are your goals for the future and how does the future you act while achieving those goals?