What Does Success Look Like To You?
When we set goals with our clients, we push people to think about what is important to them, and WHY. As they progress toward their goals, knowing their why and what they value helps them understand what to fall back on when things get tough. With these goals and Why's we work with them to create habits to guide them. We do this, while honoring and empowering their values to help utilize their superpowers.
While success looks very different for each person, the necessary systems, habits and steps to achieve it usually don’t. Want to lose weight? We create basic habits to help you eat more nutrient dense foods, increasing vegetables & lean proteins while decreasing stress & increasing sleep quality and duration.
Want to gain weight? Guess what, we are going to use those same steps & then help you use those new habits and system to increase your calories. This is why goal setting and knowing where you want to go is so important. The devil will be in the details, and having measurables on the path is important. If we have an end goal, or specific success point, in mind and we properly reverse engineer from it, we can create a great path to reach it.
So, is goal setting and talking about our client and athlete’s goals a one time thing?
Nope. The longer we coach them and the further into our program they get the more we talk about their goals. Constant reflection on how things went, specifically figuring out what did NOT go well, allows us to reattack using another method or strategy. This feedback also gives our coaches and program valuable data to improve, and as the program grows so will what we can and will offer people.
Some of the tools we use to help people better understand what success looks like to them include the following questions below and this drill:
The reason we love this question is that it allows us to go through and ask HOW to make things easier for YOU. Seems silly right? The beauty about this drill is that it forces our clients and athletes to reflect on what is truly holding them back and allows us to help them remove roadblocks quickly and consistently by making things easier.
Here’s a great example from the article that is linked above:
If it were easy you’d be able to call up your nutrition coach for tips and encouragement on how to practice being more mindful during the day and especially while eating. You would have coaches, friends, and family who would act as accountability partners and provide you with awesome support as you work your way through mindful eating.
- Lack of habits OR “Lack of Willpower” – Unfortunately, we’re not robots… yet. We often make the mistake of assuming emotions should drive action. This emotion-based decision making often leads to us choosing a less than optimal meal over the more appropriate one. Emotions are great, and I’m not here to say otherwise. They are what makes us amazingly human, but they also make terrible bosses and leaders if they were used to make every decision. Many think that when it comes to changing your lifestyle and trying to become a healthier individual you need steel-like will power… not the case. We use science to support our habit changes, which is why we stress only working on or changing 1-2 habits at a time. You can get a better understanding of this method by checking out our article on habit forming.
- Next Steps – working with our staff here at PP will allow you to take this support and we will provide you with education, personalized goals and plans and help meet you at your current level, and then grow and expand as an athlete or person. As your habits grow we will help you to pick each next step to make sure that it is appropriate and the correct difficulty to be successful!
This article is extremely helpful for a lot of our athletes and really helps them hone in on what is important to them. It’s also great because it is an easy to follow and track system where if on the correct path it will show progress and if something is missing you can quickly adjust. We also recommend as you go through to do this drill. This will help you to work through each acronym of the SMART process.
Specific – Have you gone through and truly figured out EXACTLY what you want to accomplish?
Measurable – Now that you know the specifics, what will you measure to know you achieved this?
Attainable – This is where self-reflection and awareness is important, have you done the appropriate deep dive into what it will take in order to make it and is that an attainable goal for you?
Realistic - Specifically, at this step the important questions to ask yourself are: Do I have the resources available to achieve this? If I don’t have them, how can I get them?
Time Bound – When are you going to accomplish this goal? How long will it take? The more specific you are with this the more likely you are to accomplish it.
Are your actions Value Based & are you taking ownership over them?
When your actions are always emotion based, they rarely lead to where a person wants to go. Decisions based solely on emotions are ones that align with your momentary desires and wants, not the long term goals you want to achieve.
This is where VBA’s come in and allow us to truly understand what matters to us, then we use those values as a guide to pick the best actions. The more actions we take based on our values the more likely we are to end up at our goal of becoming the person we want to be. “Every action we take to better ourselves is a vote towards the person we want to become” – James Clear. We want you to vote for the best version of yourself every day and work towards it with small actionable steps. Get started by figuring out what your values are with this worksheet.
What does your support system look like?
Who is in your corner? This is an important thing to know. Things are not always going to be easy and the better your support structure the more likely you are to achieved your goals. These are the people who will help you to stay on track and be values based when you want to stop or quit.
When you have a bad day or problems come up, you should know who you can rely on and talk to in order to help you to get out of your funk or to fix the issues. We here at PP believe this is one of the most important roles we provide for our clients and we are always here to trouble shoot, listen and help for whatever life throws at you. We want to provide you skills to be as self-reliant as possible, but we are also here to help you through the bad times. This is another big reason why we have staff members who are counselors, along with our dietitians and coaches.
How much self-reflection and analyzing have you done?
Success is an easy idea and something we all think about daily, but how much have you really analyzed your actions and how they either move you towards or away from success? Knowing where you are starting, where you want to go and how your current actions affect your chances is extremely important. Knowing what success looks like and what you’ll need in order to reach it is the only way you’ll ever truly reach your biggest or BAG goals.
This isn’t a one-time drill, but something you should do constantly in order to help you direct your efforts in the best way possible and redirect when necessary to make sure you are on the correct path. There may also be times in your life when major things happen and you need to either turn up or turn down the dial for some goals and activities and other times you need to change the goal all together. If you are setting off to achieve a goal without doing any self-reflection or analyzing the chances of succeeding is MUCH lower.
Want a guiding hand and some more assistance in defining success, setting SMART Goals, choosing VBA's and figuring out what matters to you? Click Here for a free consultation and to speak with our PP staff!