With the New Year a quarter complete, we have well surpassed the length of time that most people will reject their new year’s goals in favour of their old habits. This is a good point to take a look and re-assess how things are going for you so far and how you feel about it.
How do you monitor how things are going for you? How many of these things do you do?
- Do you take time out to check your progress regularly and freak out if it’s not going your way?
- Do you take time out to check your progress and course correct a new strategy or mindset?
- Do you take time out to check your progress and celebrate your successes?
Or do you ignore looking at progress through the year/timeframe but just keep your eye on the outcome you expect to have by the end? And when you get to the end and haven’t done what you wanted … how do you respond? Do you call yourself a failure if you didn’t achieve or get what you wanted … or do you dust yourself off and keep going with a different strategy or mindset? And if you get to the end and you’ve succeeded, do you ignore your success or do you celebrate?
The 2 Big Pillars of Getting From A to B: Course Correcting And Success Acknowledgement
Success Acknowledgement
Our brain loves reward. It loves all kinds of reward from gifts, drugs, food, sex, to the birth of a child! Reward tells our brain to keep going and get more of the ‘thing’. It does it by releasing chemicals that tell us something was pleasurable.
Success, achieving or overcoming something is pleasurable yeah?
By focusing on your successes, no matter how big or small we are training our brain to feel reward from healthy areas of our life. Sure, you might not have lost that entire 20kg, but what HAVE you succeeded with; perhaps you’ve lost 15kg and now and spending more time being active with the kids. Perhaps you finally got over not drinking enough water or eating enough fresh produce. Maybe you succeeded in sticking to regular exercise for the past 3 months.
By acknowledging success, we are rewarding our brain and our brain will keep performing the actions to give it MORE reward! And those actions, of course are the things you are doing to be having these successes in the first place.
Here are three ways you can acknowledge success:
- Immortalise the success! Create a diary entry or something written telling yourself how excellent you are with the things you have achieved. You could take a progress photo and compare it to your ‘before’ photo to keep reminding yourself how far you’ve come. Your kids could write you a nice letter about how much healthier and a less grumpy mum or dad you are.
- Write a list of all the things you did that allowed you to have the successes you did. Remind yourself of the ACTIONS that lead you to success, not just the success itself.
- Treat yourself! Buy a new handbag, have a dinner part … anything! Do something special that creates a memory attached to the success.
Course Correcting
Course Correcting is like sailing a ship. Well, actually it is what ships do if they have a hope in arriving at their destination. It’s much easier to correct a short distance than a long one, so let’s use this ship analogy. If you set a course across the Pacific from Australia to the United States, you would find that the tides/current will gently pull your ship off course. If you’re off course by 1degree and then draw a straight line to your destination, you will find that you will be off by hundreds or thousands of kilometres (depending on where you realised you were off course).
Now, imagine that same ship deciding not to course correct at the 1degree mark, the distance gets bigger and the next thing you know, your ship ends up in South America somewhere.
By correcting at the smallest point you are ultimately making the trajectory a whole lot more accurate for the end point. So let’s use an example of someone on a weight loss journey. Let’s say, after 12 weeks of particular nutrition changes and exercise there is no change in either the body shape or size (I’m not talking scales here, I’m talking about a body that has not changed at all) and let’s say you still feel tired and sluggish. At this point you can look at what you’ve done over the past 12 weeks and course-correct various things such as exercise, nutrition, stress, sleep, hydration etc. And within those things you can tweak further. In exercise we use what is called the FITT Principle (Frequency, Intensity, Time, Type). Some people respond better to 3x a week HIIT Training, while others may respond to daily walking, or even yoga and meditation. Keep being open to regular course correcting, this is the antidote to quitting.
The other scenario is someone who has no results, doesn’t course correct, but keeps on pushing through, hating every minute, never feeling successful and getting to the end of the year feeling like a failure.
But remember, success can be small things also (pillar #1), so even if you don’t course correct, make sure you’re still stopping at regular intervals to give yourself a pat on the back. And if you do choose to course correct, reach out for help and guidance.