Jumpstarting and Sustaining Healthy Habits
Get traction
It’s easy to look down the road to health and see nothing but an empty highway, stretching into infinity. The destination seems so far away you can’t even picture it.
And yet, a simple change in mindset can make all the difference in sustaining healthy habits and improving your odds of success.
Try this: shift your focus to just that next streetlight. That one little step? That’s your objective.
In fact, it may be a little contrarian, but we say don’t look ahead at the road at all. Once you’ve started your journey, take a moment to gaze back at the ground you’ve covered, at the distance from the “old you”, and congratulate yourself on how far you’ve come – no matter how far that is – because it’s progress.
Map your path forward
A lot of coaches and trainers focus on “creating your personal plan for fitness.” Fine, if that works for you. Some people like specific goals. For others, it’s one more thing they don’t have time to do. For yet others, talking about goals just reminds them that they doubt their ability to achieve them.
Everyone is different, and thus no single plan will work for everyone.
Where your mind goes, your body will follow. When you talk to one of our health and wellness coaches, one of the first things we talk about is mindset: how you define success and failure, not in raw pounds or inches, but as part of your objective to live a healthier life. Tired of feeling like you’ve turned into your dad when climbing the stairs? Can’t bounce your grandkids on your knee? OK, let’s define goals in those terms.
Reframe success and failure
Once we’ve defined goals together, we’ll help you define progress markers you can actually achieve, reframe successes as progress milestones toward your goal, and cut “failure” down to size. After all, “failure” is actually valuable data on what not to do going forward. Nobody is keeping score!
It’s OK if your path to healthy living takes the scenic route, as long as you feel good about the journey you’re on.
Light on commitment, heavy on reward
Track your successes – and make sure you recognize what you’ve accomplished. The day you throw out your big plates or walk a mile for the first time is a Really Big Deal!
Mark it on your calendar and draw lots of big red circles around it. Start making plans to celebrate the anniversary of that day.
Making progress towards your goal is amazingly self-rewarding, You’ll probably find that you’re way more capable of healthy living than you thought, and it wasn’t nearly as hard as you feared.