NB These notes accompany the goal setting questionnaire.
The most important thing to do if you are to change any aspect of your life is to know what it is you want! That's pretty obvious, isn't it? You would think so.
But people tend to just have this vague notion about what they want and leave it at that. There is so much more to goal setting than that for you to be successful.
There are three golden rules to goal setting.
The first is to have clear and positive expectations. When I ask people who come to see me what it is they want, they invariably say "I want to lose weight."
That sounds reasonable enough, after all that's what I'm here for, you may think. But let's look at this statement. How positive is it? How clear? Let's face it, it's neither clear nor positive.
Firstly it is focusing on the fat and not on the result you want to have. Thinking in this way is not going to get you what you want. What you really want is to be slim or fit or healthy. Wanting to become slim, fit or healthy is focusing on the positive, what you want the result to be and not on what you are trying to get rid of, i.e. the fat.
Can you imagine Linford Christie standing on the starting line of his 100 metre Olympic race saying I must not come last!
Work out what the benefits you personally will get out of being slimmer, fitter and healthier. For example, the benefit of being slimmer may be that you feel confident and attractive. Or the benefit for you to be healthier could be that you will have more energy or you that your joints don't ache so much.
Maybe the benefit for you to being fitter is that you can fool around more with your kids or that you don't get puffed out climbing the stairs.
Write down your goals. This is probably the most effective thing I will tell you to do and that is why it is your first task. I'll tell you another story to emphasise the point.
Back in 1979, Harvard University did a study. They asked their graduates at the Harvard Business School the following question: "How many of you have clear, written goals and have made plans to accomplish them when you leave this school?"
3% had written goals, 13% had unwritten goals and 84% had no goals at all.
Ten years later they went back to find out how they were doing. The 3% who'd written out their goals were earning or were worth, ten times as much as the other 97%.