A lot of work I do in No Sweat Intros and Goals Review Sessions is to help you gain clarity on what exactly it is that you want. Often times it’s the lack of clarity that stops us from achieving our goals.
We lack clarity in two ways: on the end goal, and the steps necessary to get there.
Gaining clarity requires a good deal of focused effort. This is hard to do, and it generally makes us uncomfortable. We tend not to like being boxed in or limited, and setting a very clear precise goal can feel like that.
We want to lose weight. Great! How much? By when? Is it feasible? What has to change to accomplish this? What’s stopping us right now? What behaviours are we doing that are harming our attempts at the goal?
We can also be forced to the realisation that either we don’t know what we want really, or that our goal seems unrealistic. If our goal seems unrealistic the time hasn’t been wasted. What it has shown us is that we need to adjust the timeline, or the endpoint, or the work required to get there. If we don’t know what we really want it’s a case of you’ve eliminated some options that mightn’t make you happy or you’ve gotten closer to clarity. (We never said it would miraculously happen the first time you sit down!)
Most everyone has heard of SMART goals, and it is a fantastic tool to gain clarity. Another option is the five whys – keep asking yourself why (at least 5 times) until you know the true motivation behind your actions There’s a couple of benefits to this. One is that you find the source of your motivation. Another one is now that you know your “real why” you can change the objective goal to something else that can achieve that.
If you do know what you want, awesome! Halfway there! Next up is to figure out all the steps you’ll need to get there. I’ve fallen down on this and needed my coach to point out that I needed to break my goals down into tasks and then focus on them. I’d missed an important step in the goal setting process. I was committing to daily work but missing out on weekly checkpoints on the way to my quarterly goals. Simple and obvious once it was pointed out to me, but I needed a mentor to help me see the illusive obvious.
Gaining clarity on your what, why, when, and how will make an enormous difference to how likely you are to get where you want to go. And if you need any help, just book a time with me and we’ll work it out together.
Book a No Sweat Intro below!