Easily Reach Your Biggest Goal
Recently I've been doing a lot of reading and a common bit of advice keeps appearing. Both The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson and this blog post on personal development by Jim Rohn talk about taking baby steps to reach what may seem impossible.
A while ago I wrote about how to set great goals. Part of setting great goals is making them big enough:
Setting goals that are too easy to reach won't do us any good. We want to create goals that will challenge us, make us better, and improve our lives.
Baby steps are small things you can do daily to help you reach a large, seemingly impossible goal. This time with a little emphasis: Baby steps are the small things you can do daily to help you reach a large goal.
For example
Let's say I weigh 200lbs and my big goal is to get my weight down to 170lbs. That's a 30 pound difference! This number alone is a big problem and it can be extremely discouraging for some people. In keeping with good goal setting we should put a timeline on my weight loss goal. How about 3 months?
At this point a lot of people will say to themselves, "Wait, what?! I need to lose 30lbs. in three months?! That's impossible. I should give up now."
Stop. Instead of panicking let's follow the advice from the article and book I mentioned earlier; baby steps.
First we do some math:
30lbs ÷ 3 months = 10lbs/month
Things are starting to look up. Losing 10lbs in a month isn't so bad but it's still a big number. Can we make it any smaller and easier to manage? Sure:
10lbs ÷ 4 weeks = 2.5lbs/week
Whoa! There's a number we can all get behind. Figuring out what steps to take in order to lose 2.5lbs. a week is easy:
- eat healthy
- monitor calorie intake (more out than in)
- exercise 20 minutes a day
Pretty simple, right? On day one I can make the right food choices and exercise for 20 minutes. Same goes for day two. And day three. Day 15. Day 45. Day 70. All the way to day 90. Doing these simple little things will help me lose 30lbs in three months. Amazing.
How can you apply this principle to your goals? What baby steps can you take each day to reach your biggest goal?
