When it comes to enjoying a healthy, happy life, it all starts with dreams, desires, and goals. They represent your choice to have something more than you currently have. Yet good intentions will get you just so far. You also need a solid foundation on which to grow your new life.
To get your goal started and to keep your positive momentum going strong, here are six easy steps you can take to increase your success:
1. Choose a goal that enlivens you!
Pick something that you know, deep within your heart and soul, will make you more than you were before – more solid within yourself, more self-assured, or more of the man or woman you want to be. The point of any goal is to bring a new expression of yourself into the world.
2. Be Willing to Live Your Goal Each Day
Follow your heart and imagine yourself filled with the freedom to live your dream in a way that feels really, really good inside your spirit and body. Are you willing, no matter what, to give yourself the life you want to be living?
3. Love Your Goal
Reaching any goal is often far more challenging than we anticipate at the beginning of the journey. Let your goal begin and continue as a decision to give yourself something new in life. That way, when you’re asking yourself to step into unknown territory, facing a difficult obstacle, or having to master a new skill, you won’t end up punishing yourself with your goal. Instead, you will realize – every step of the way – that your goal was always about allowing yourself to nurture and bring to life a hidden characteristic of yourself (i.e. determination, trust in self, self-respect, etc.).
4. Apply Action to Decisions
First make a choice about what you want and then apply an action step to that choice. For example, if you decide to lose weight, instead of rewarding yourself for losing five pounds, acknowledge and respect yourself for taking action each day. Weight loss is variable and dependent on many factors. However, choosing an action step such as walking two miles every day for two weeks is finite and tangible. At the end of each day, you know whether you followed through with your word to yourself or not. Take time every day to recognize that you made a choice. Then apply an action to that choice and follow through.
5. Learn From Your Mistakes, Setbacks, and Challenges
Mistakes contain valuable information about what isn’t working. Take a step back and examine what just happened. With your newfound insight, take a breath, fill yourself with new inspiration, and begin again.
6. Be Flexible and Have Fun!
Reward yourself for your efforts. Feel good in the process – not only once the goal is attained. The underlying purpose of your goal is to cultivate more of a specific characteristic. What you are looking for won’t show up on its own at the end of your journey. Rather, each day, each challenge, each failure, and each success is you giving yourself another opportunity to have more faith, trust, self-respect, or other characteristic no matter what circumstance you find yourself facing. Lighten up, learn to laugh through some of the tough times, and truly acknowledge your effort and success.
Discover the secrets to losing weight, staying slim, and falling in love with your life all over again! Body Redesign: Goal Setting Secrets for a Thinner, Happier You will teach you how to make meaningful and thoughtful decisions that feel right—in your heart and in your bones!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Annette,
I’ve been doing some research on Menopause and weight gain. I have developed the “middle age spread” and can’t seem to get rid of it. I eat healthy foods, drink lots of water etc. but having a problem getting rid of my midriff. Any suggestions?
Kathleen
Hi Kathleen,
Thanks for the quesion about your goals to manage menopause and weight gain. I’ll get back to your personally and use your question in a future edition of my Loving Miracles newsletter.
In the meanwhile, it sounds like you are on the right path eating healthy foods and drinking lots of water. Oh, the ongoing joys of being female!
Love,
Annette