Wellness practitioner Craig Cox writes;
We have already touched on the dreaded concept of goal-setting, but to make this process easier, we should ask ourselves why we have those specific goals.
There must be a reason why one person wants X and another person wants Y.
Both X and Y are perfectly acceptable under the right circumstances, but why differentiate between X and Y in the first place?
The only reasonable answer seems to be that either X or Y matters to the individual at that moment in time, and under the circumstances in that moment.
The choice is dictated by the importance of the outcome.
Have you ever experienced the frustration of not achieving what you set out to achieve?
Look specifically at personal wellness goals – losing or gaining weight, giving up smoking, addiction issues, improving exercise patters, better stress management, and all the other usual suspects.
Look back over the past few years and see where you started to implement changes, at when the whole process fell apart and old behaviour dominated you again.
Now ask yourself what was your motivation for the change?
What was it about the expected outcome, the goal, that mattered to you?
Was this motivation actually important to you or not? Did you try to give up smoking because your parents or spouse told you to, or because you saw a grisly picture on a pack of cigarettes?
How much more powerful would the motivation have been if the goal was actually important to you?
If you were planning to hike in the Himalayas or surf in Polynesia, for example, the behaviour pattern change would have been linked to you passion, to what matters to you.
This week’s challenge:
Take a moment to decide what matters to you.
How are you current goals linked to this?
How can you use what matters to you, to change and improve what you choose?
Remember these words from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
“Would you tell me, please, which way to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to go,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where…,” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
