targets

Believe you can and you’re half way there

~ Fridgesays ~ Leave a comment

Quote Anon

As another week flys by in 2024 and the resolution or challenge you set yourself might be harder to fulfil. At the moment we are watching a series on Amazon prime called ‘Mad Men’ it’s set in the 1950/60s in New York City in an Advertising firm…we are several episodes in but my partner and I can’t get over the amount of alcohol and smoking that occurs. Long alcohol fuelled lunches are the norm and often the house wife is ready to greet her husband with a lighter and cold beverage at the end of the day. The office is a place you can smoke in whilst you work and so are theatres and restaurants …in-fact everywhere, you can smoke everywhere. I can’t imagine going to a doctor now to be examined and him leaning over me with a cigarette on the go? But this was the cultural norm. New Year’s resolutions can often be a culture shift for the individual. You start exercising more, seeing progress but only a few weeks in its easy to be distracted (the weather or a social event) and means your new habit goes out of the window. Your neurone pathways naturally go back to a comfortable older version of you who doesn’t exercise and missing a day can quickly become a lost week, which can easily become a goal that isn’t achieved.

In itself it doesn’t matter, you can pick it back up – but most people don’t. I recently heard a podcast where a man described his friend who ran a marathon with very little training. Whilst I would never advocate for this approach – I’m a firm believer in ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ I was interested in how the man achieved his goal. He completed the marathon in under four hours and he did so by focusing on ‘one more step’

One more step rather than twenty more miles. As humans we often have one more step in us but give up because we look to far into the future and become overwhelmed by twenty more miles…what the man did was stayed positive and focused on the present.

If you are struggling with creating new patterns of behaviour, remember to take one more step. Focus on that you achieved it today, knowing that you will also do it tomorrow…repeat times 365 times and you’ve completed your goal for the year. Small steps, one more step is all you need to begin to achieve your goals. Remember, we can look back at past versions of ourselves and we can be surprised with the progress we have made.

Best of luck with the next step.

Get 1% better everyday

~ Fridgesays ~ Leave a comment

Quote Anon

As a little lady I’ve always known that ‘small steps’ led to reaching your destination, it may sometimes take a little longer but the victory is all the sweeter for it.

This weekend we took our son to a Rugby festival and small steps made all the difference to the team, they left winning all of their matches…the game play wasn’t superior, there wasn’t any new players but they made a few small changes…they spoke to each other during play, they used each others talents to serve the team and they came home winning every match.

Habits are crucial to reaching your goals, to living the life you truly want to. Small incremental moment of progress will always get you to your target and you often find any set backs are smaller too.

Take a moment to think about what you’d like to achieve. If it helps, write it down. From now until the end of time your job is to make that goal a reality, try not to give yourselves a time frame – having it happen is better than not. Many people think they fail because they lack resilience or loose focus. They usually don’t reach the goal because they don’t build habits to support them and when they do regress or decline, they internally berate themselves. If we feed ourselves negativity, we can’t expect the results to be positive.

So this week, speak kindly to yourself. You truly are your best friend. Look at the goal you wrote down for yourself and be that person a little more tomorrow. If you want to be someone that runs regularly, then create some habits that support that goal; leave your running clothes out for ease, set some nonnegotiable time in your calendar but most importantly be kind to yourself. Let’s be more specific: your goal is to run daily. If you are feeling fragile, exhausted or depleted from life you could still go out for a walk with your trainers on, it may be that the fresh air motivates you and you run the last two minutes home – you still ran that day and even if you didn’t, you’re nearer to your goal if you run ‘more’ days than you do now, so missing one here and there isn’t the end of the line. You don’t have to run more the next day, you don’t have to tell yourself you’ve failed. Kindness and daily habits should be your priority.

Some goals are hard to see how you can make small steps, if this is the case then I recommend you spending some time brainstorming all the things you’ll be able to do ‘one day’ then instead of the huge goal, work towards one of the ‘one days’ – any progress is success, even if you’re 1% closer.