The Simple Secret to Reaching your Goals When Life Gets Busy
Know WHERE you’re going and WHY.
Ok so maybe that’s two secrets, but remember in Alice in Wonderland when the Cheshire Cat said something along the lines of: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."
In some ways that can be a helpful approach, to be open minded and flexible about the paths we follow in life.
But in other ways it’s helpful to know where we actually want to go. My friend Jay likened it to traveling from California to New York. If you head out without a map, there’s a whole lot of different places you could end up long the way.
And some of those places may be important along your journey, but there’s probably a more clear path to get you where you want to go.
As humans we are motivated by progress!
And in order to see progress we have to keep moving forward.
The secret lies in resisting the urge to go big and staying focused on taking small but consistent action. We’ve been SO conditioned to think that you have to go big or it doesn’t count, but that mentality is often what keeps us stuck in these endless cycles of stopping and starting. And then feeling guilty about all of it!
Congruency and Why it Matters for Your Health!
In psychological terms, congruency means that the person you’re showing up as in your life is CONGRUENT with the person you WANT to be. So you’re idea of yourself and the things you’re doing daily match. You know who you are and where you’re headed.
If there’s a mismatch, whether it’s out of fear of change, lack of clarity or absolute necessity . . . if how you’re living is not in alignment with how you want to be living, there’s going to be some incongruence.
For example, when you show up at work in the morning. Do you feel fulfilled? Are you doing the work you're meant to do? Or do you secretly hate your job, but stay anyway?
If you want to wake up in the morning feeling energized and picture yourself as the kind of person that gets up early to practice yoga. . . but instead you're staying up late binging Netflix and sleeping through your alarm, you’re going to feel frustrated.
Whether you want to:
Stress less
Eat healthier
Exercise more
Play more
Or create a better morning routine (add link)
It doesn’t really matter what it is, it all starts with knowing WHAT you value and WHY. And making sure that your beliefs and behaviors actually match.
The research shows that this congruency is actually one of the most important predictors of our overall health and happiness!
BEHAVIOR CHANGE that lasts
Motivation is good to trigger change initially, but it rarely lasts long.
You already KNOW what you “should” be doing. But there’s more to creating healthy changes than just gathering “more information.” You have to take the time to figure out WHY it matters to you.
No matter how busy life gets, when you know where you’re going and WHY and commit to consistent action to get you there, you greatly increase your chances of sticking to your goals! And as a bonus, the entire process becomes a lot more enjoyable!
Relying on motivation alone is not a great long term strategy. You’ll get bored, and have days where you feel tired. Eventually we all run out of motivation. But the ability to keep going when things get hard, or no longer feel as exciting is the thing that will make all the difference in your health and in your life.
How to make it happen
Start with embarrassingly small changes! Commit to just 5 minutes.
Five minutes a day may not be enough to move mountains, but it’s enough to get you closer to the mountain and closer to where you want to be. Whether it’s in your health, your career, or your . . . Commit to doing something EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
We all want to know how long it takes for a specific behavior to stick and we hear things like “it takes 21 days to break a habit” or “you need to spend 100 hours to become an expert.” But the reality is, the amount of TIME is not nearly as important as the repeated effort.
Behaviors start to become habits when they are repeated enough times that it becomes almost automatic! Twenty one days can come and go but if you haven’t put the work in, you’re not going to be any further along in your journey. BRB off to do my 5 minute meditation!