You Set A Goal -You Failed- Now What?

You’ve seen the success stories on every late-night infomercial promising instant weight loss, but if you’re serious about living a healthy lifestyle you know the real truth—most diet- and exercise-related goals don’t end with someone proudly displaying a set of giant jeans that no longer fit them.
Most end in failure.
As the year marches on, all those New Year’s resolution people taking up the treadmills at the gym will start dropping like flies. Will you be one of them?
You may have made a New Year’s resolution, you may not have. Regardless, odds are that you do have at least one long-term goal that you have either

1. already met,
2. are still working toward,
3. or are on your way to failing.

Those are the only three possible statuses any goal can have.
If you’re making good, measurable progress toward your goal, forge ahead! But if you have failed, are on your way toward failure (and you know in your heart if you are), or think you might fail at some point in the future (you will) this post is for you.

The Real Problem with Goal-Setting

                                                           
The problem with most goals lies in an odd feature of human behavior—we have an amazing ability to overestimate what we can do in the next year…while dramatically underestimating what we can do in the next 15 minutes.
We set huge goals, overextend ourselves, get burned out, and slowly fade away.
This isn’t a rant about setting “realistic” goals. You don’t need to settle for easy goals. All it takes to succeed in goal setting is the right mindset in terms of how you measure your progress along the way.
What trips people up is that they develop tunnel vision on the end result while forgetting about the process it takes to get there. When you put all your focus on the end result of losing 100 pounds, it gets easy to overlook the tons of little things you have to do along the way to get there.
For example, when you focus too much on the end result you look at something unhealthy and say, “Oh, I can’t eat that…I’m trying to lose 100 pounds.”
How depressing is a thought like that? It’s certainly not a morale booster. It makes you think, How am I going to avoid poor diet choices long enough to lose 100 pounds?

How to Change Your Perspective on Goal Setting

                                                           
The key is to keep your mind laser focused on the one little action you can be doing immediately to make at least a little bit of progress toward your ultimate outcome.
If your goal is to lose 100 pounds, do not start every morning with that goal in mind. Instead, build your goal around the actions you can do in the next 15 minutes.
To do this, start by deciding what you can actually do in the next 15 minutes. Skip that snack in the next 15 minutes. Seek out and read three Diet Blog posts in the next 15 minutes. Do five minutes worth of continuous cardio in the next 15 minutes. Chunk this down into easy “to do’s”.
Stop making this hard on yourself. Live in the NOW and know that these little things will always add up to HUGE accomplishments.
When you can check the little things off the list at the end of each day, not only will you boost your confidence, you will begin to take massive steps toward reaching your ultimate outcome every time. You will become a believer in yourself. And you will certainly no longer need New Year’s resolutions.

Robert D. Smith is the author of 20,000 Days and Counting, a crash course in maximizing intensity and purpose in life. He blogs on entrepreneurship, personal growth, and more at TheRobertD.com.