September has come and gone, and our Simple September challenge is wrapping up!* Did you set your four goals? Did you reach them? Every week?!
(If you didn’t participate, or if you want to join us right this second, we set one easy goal in each of the following spheres: nutrition, strength training, cardio, and FUN that didn’t necessarily have to be fitness-related fun. Then, we track that goal each week to see if we reached it for the week or not.)
Good Goals Don’t Cry
Good goals are goals that you can reach within a timeframe that makes sense AND that you are emotionally invested in reaching – you want to feel the way you’ll feel when you’ve reached it.
Most of my September challengers looked like they set “good” goals! They’ve been listening to their trainer! And yet, nobody so far has gotten a prize this month for having reached their goals all four weeks.
Easy Fixes
Forgetting to do a thing was the biggest enemy of reaching goals this month. Here are some of the easy fixes we came up with to remember goals:
- post-it notes in a calendar/planner, by the bed, in the bathroom, at work, or by the front door (different locations worked for different people)
- bundling the task with something that was already happening (doing push-ups right before brushing teeth, stretching after parking the car, adding on a few extra minutes of a different kind of workout to a workout that was already happening)
- making a version of the activity that could be done at home
“Not wanting to” was the next foe – usually as in “I didn’t want to get off the couch” or “I remembered at the wrong times.” These fixes are mostly still in progress because it’s a harder problem to solve: if you don’t want to take a step toward your goal, you probably don’t have a real connection to the benefit of reaching that goal (kinda like when you were younger and someone told you to eat your peas but you were like why because oreos taste better than peas – you had no idea what the benefits of “healthy” foods were), but here’s what we are working on:
- bundling the task with an enjoyable task that’s already happening (do it right when you get home from walking the dog or the literal minute you get home from work)
- revising the goal for October to be smaller, easier to reach, more flexible, more interesting, or more fun (switch from going running outside to trying a class inside or doing a workout at home, drop down from every day to a certain # of times per week)
- being realistic…which can be tough sometimes!
Takeaways
- Even if you think your goal is too small, if you’re not reaching it, it’s too big.
- Consistency, while key to success in any change, requires thought and reminders at the beginning.
- “Enough”is enough – going overboard just burns you out.
Are you participating in the challenge? Are you reaching your goals (I am! And it’s fun.)
*Don’t worry, we’re continuing it for the rest of the year. We’re just in “OK-tober” now, during which we are going to do “okay” instead of stressing over perfection.
**There was a 20-minute delay while I watched clips from Adventures in Babysitting, because I (incorrectly) remembered that song being in that movie, which was my FAVORITE movie in second grade but…why??
