Staying on track in health & wellness
You know I believe in keeping a beginner mindset for growth in health & wellness goals. It requires setting aside your pride a bit, but it works. What helps convince me is when I think of how exercise works in the first place—stress and recovery. That physiological experience is how growth happens in the body, and so it makes sense that the same works for our minds, too. Focusing onu
But as you experiment to find wellness tactics that feel good for you, you’ll still need some discipline and self-compassion to stay on track. Here are a few tips for staying clear and focused with health and wellness goals in any stage or season.
Know your why. It’s easy to get caught up on the details quickly (example, “I should work out 3x a week!”). But a meaningful and actionable goal needs a good why. Figure out WHY you want to do that thing so you can make sure you’ll get to the real result that matters. E.g., “Prioritizing my health for longevity,” “protecting my body against back pain,” “so I can be healthy and active with my family after 40”
Visualize the goal. It can also be helpful to paint a picture in our minds of the healthy and balanced person we want to be, so we can start plotting the course to get there. For one friend this meant pictures her parents walking 18 holes of golf without trouble! Find a picture of your future self in your mind to motivate you. How does she feel? How does she look? What does she do? What impact does this have on her life and others’? That’s the woman you are taking steps to become.
Pace yourself. We have to be realistic that we can’t always do everything at once. Find the rights steps in this season to make progress. We came up with a list of specific but realistic habits that we are each trying to implement and connected them to our why.
Decide on new habit strategies. Gretchen Rubin has written extensively about this in her book “Better Than Before,” but we should be sensitive to our personality when setting out to make a new habits. One client noticed that she prefers “all or nothing,” while I like to have a list of flexible options to satisfy a goal. You might also explore how you can tie some of your new habits to an existing habit (what Gretchen calls “habit-stacking”), use apps or reminders to help reinforce it, or try subbing in a high-quality activity for a habit you’d like to drop.
Define success and write it out. What does success look like? This is such a secret to reaching your goals. The way you phrase it, and how you write it down as if it’s happened, can make a huge difference to becoming that person you say what you want to be. It adds specifics to the vision and helps you know exactly where you are going. Since you are keeping a commitment to yourself, your success should feel personal and subjective, not arbitrary and not necessarily a quantitative target.
“I kept a promise to myself not to eat sweets at work.”
“I took advantage of opportunities to move my body.”
“More nights than not, I prioritized sleep and bedtime rituals.”
“I feel more energy and I’m seeing the scale go down.”
“On weekdays I chose to move my body over less important tasks.”
“I protected my body and my back by practicing yoga.”
Practice self-compassion. We don’t have to be perfect. When life happens or we need to change course, be as kind to yourself as you would to a dear friend. Keep the goal in mind and give yourself plenty of credit for every bit of progress. And be willing to reflect, refresh, and reassess if a goal is not working in this season. On the other hand, self-compassion also requires us to see that our health is important—vitally important—and we should prioritize it over external demands in many cases. But this is hard to do when those demands can be very noisy and feel urgent. It’s up to us to show kindness to ourselves and say, wait, this is important, too.
Small daily choices. We know that unlike many other goals, health just won’t wait. I think all of us realize that as we get older our health requires us to be proactive, making daily commitments to improve in order to protect our future wellness. This can feel intimidating, but keep in mind that it’s natural, universal, and essential. By choosing our health over less important tasks in small daily decisions, we are preserving our vitality and laying the groundwork for longevity.
Be well, friends, whatever it takes. I’m cheering for you!