John Dryden famously said, “We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.” Confucius said, “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.” And Aristotle noticed that, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” It’s pretty clear that the habits you adopt will shape who you are.

When it comes to your body, the two habits that define your physique are your eating and exercise habits. In fact, everyone that you know who is in great shape has dialed in these two important habits. If you aren’t happy with your body, then simply adjust your eating and exercise habits. Here’s how to adopt a habit:

Use these seven steps to create a life-improving habit.

1) Decide on the ONE habit that you would like to develop. It’s tempting to pick up 3 or 4 healthy habits, but choosing just one new habit is realistic and doable. Here are some healthy habit ideas:

Do not eat after 9pm each night.

Bring your lunch to work instead of eating fast food.

Exercise 4 times a week after work for 45 minutes each time.

Only eat lean protein, fruits, and veggies as your afternoon snack.

Get up early and exercise for an hour each morning.

Work with a personal trainer 3 times a week.

2) Write your new habit down on paper. Also include your 3 main motivators for developing this new habit, the obstacles you’ll face, and your strategies for overcoming these obstacles. Here’s an example:

My new habit is to work with a personal trainer 3 times each week.

My 3 main motivators are:

1) to feel confident in my bathing suit this summer,

2) to have more energy, and

3) to fit into my skinny jeans.

The obstacles I will face are

1) not having the energy to go to my session after work, 2) not having enough money to pay for sessions, and 3) not having my spouse’s support.

I will overcome these obstacles by 1) doing my workouts before work instead of after work, so I have more energy, 2) cutting down on frivolous spending to ensure that I can afford it, and 3) asking my spouse to join me so we can get in shape together.

3)Commit fully to your new habit, in a public way. This could mean posting it on facebook, or simply announcing it at the dinner table. Put yourself in a position where you’ll be embarrassed to give up on your new habit.

4)Keep track of your progress. You could keep a detailed journal or simply make a check mark on each calendar day that you successfully exercise your new habit.

5) Keep yourself publicly accountable. This means either status updates on facebook or verbal status updates at the dinner table. Your friends and family are in a position to offer you support, so don’t shy away from those close to you.

6) When you fail, figure out what went wrong so that you can plan around it in the future.

7) Reward yourself for your success. Once your new habit becomes second nature, usually in about 30 days, feel free to add a second habit by going through the same 7 steps. I’d love for my fitness program to become your new healthy habit!

Exercise of the day: Band Curls - The Band Curls are perfect for developing your bicep muscles with the use of fitness bands.
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Setting goals is easy but the hardest part is executing them. I look at it as a two step process, setting the goals then getting the goals. If you have big goals, it takes a lot of work. A dear mentor of mine who recently passed, Jim Rohn, said affirmation without discipline is delusion. Stated another way, vision without execution is hallucination. There are many self-help “gurus” who will lead you to believe you could just sit home, think successful thoughts, and your dreams will magically come true. But I have to disagree with that premise. Now don’t get me wrong, I have read many of those works and see the point they’re trying to make, however they’re not giving you the whole story. As far as I’m aware, no amount of mental activity alone will help you accomplish your goals. An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. I will use this article as an example. As I’m typing this, 95% of what I am doing is mental but the 5% physical activity is what is turning my thoughts into reality. If I didn’t take action to type this, it would still be sitting in my head and my goal of helping others succeed in life would not be accomplished.

The goal setting process is simple to do but you have to make sure you do it. What is simple to do is also simple not to do. Have you ever wondered why some people work hard and achieve very little and others don’t seem to work hard and they accomplish great things? It’s because they have their goals clearly mapped out. They know exactly where they are going. It doesn’t take much to plan your life- the next day, week, month, year, etc. You don’t need a degree for that but it’s something they don’t spend much time on in school. An example would be an airplane leaving the airport with the pilot and flight crew having the whole trip mapped out and planned. They know exactly where they are going and have a definite goal. And ninety nine point nine percent of the time they’ll get there. Now compare that to another plane with no destination or aiming point. Where is it going to go? If it even gets off the ground, it will fly away aimlessly until it runs out of gas and crashes. Unfortunately, too many people are like that second plane. They wander around aimlessly until they run out of gas and crash. Have you ever known somebody who has just given up on life? They tend to complain about things but never really do anything about it.

There is a story I heard from Zig Ziglar that involves Yale’s graduating class in 1953. They did a study of the graduating seniors and found that only three percent of those seniors had definite clear goals for the future written down. That three percent knew exactly what they wanted and a plan with a time frame for completion. Twenty years later, the same students from that graduating class were surveyed again. They found that the three percent with goals had accomplished more than the ninety seven percent without them combined. That’s a prime example of not only setting the goals but also getting the goals!

I’ll share with you one of my personal experiences. About six years ago now, I had started a sales position. It was a very competitive environment and three out of the top ten salespeople on the east coast worked there. I started part time because I was still going to school at Towson University. The sales record for personal production in one month was 87, 000 in personal gross. I told the team that I would break it in January during the winter break as soon as I got out of school. For the most part, I was brushed off like who does this new guy think he is? He’s good but I don’t think he’s that good. My part-time numbers were slightly under most of the people working full time and I actually made the top ten in the region during that December. My final exam was around the 14th so I started working full time that day because I wanted to build momentum for January and get used to working every day.

At the end of December, I let them know I was going to write 90k in business. I wrote it down in my planner and started figuring out how I was going to accomplish this goal. First I broke the 90 thousand down to 3 thousand a day in business over 30 days. I made a commitment to work every day until my target was hit. I was going to work from 9am-9pm. Now it’s show time. The first day of the month came and I blanked. When you blank in sales that means you didn’t do any business. It is the worst feeling in a sales environment when you’re on full commission especially when you put in a 12 hour shift. It wasn’t a good start, but I didn’t let that stop me. The next day I did about $6100 dollars in business, the next day I did about $2000, then I blanked again. So it was very sporadic but after the first 10 days I was leading the area with $25,000 in business. I was slightly off target; I needed to be at 30k to stay on projection. I re-calibrated and needed about $3200 a day.

For the next 6 or 7 days I went into a slump. I blanked a few more times and averaged about $2300 a day. It wasn’t bad but I needed to pick it up to break the record. I started to get my momentum back and had some big days so by the 22nd I needed about $4k a day to hit my goal. I knew it wouldn’t be easy because school started on the 27th and I would have to take 2 days off to register and one of those days I had to be at class. I overlooked those details when I first designed my plan. The days were winding down and I was back in school with 2 days left in the month. I was at $83,000. The next day I got out of class, jetted to work, and did $3900 in business. I was about 100 short of the record. That next day I did $5500 and broke the record. I finished the month close to $94,000 in business. I won an award, got a promotion, and a really nice paycheck.

I share this story because everything you need to know about the process of goal getting is included. First, I wrote my goal down. When you write something down you have a lot higher chance of success than if you keep it in your mind. It’s like a business owner before he opens his business. He writes his business plan out. There are many studies out there that show a direct correlation between business plans and successful businesses. Businesses that are thriving typically have a business plan and many of the businesses that fail don’t have a business plan. By writing your goal down, you can clarify exactly where you want to go so when life’s obstacles get in your way you still know what you’re reaching for. Never lose sight of your goal.

The second part of the goal getting process is that it has to be specific. I knew I wanted to write $90k in business. I didn’t say I will do as much as I can, I was focused on one number. There are many people without specific goals who wonder why they haven’t accomplished much. If you don’t know where you going you are headed nowhere. How can you hit a target that you don’t have? Bill Copeland said the trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never scoring.

When it comes to the goal, make sure it is a meaningful and challenging goal. The problem with some people isn’t that they aim to high and miss, it’s that they aim to low and hit. You want to stretch your limitations. Why settle for average. Don’t let your minimums become your maximum. Unless you attempt to do something beyond that which you have mastered you will never grow. A great example of this principle is exercising. I love lifting weights and working out. I’ve been going to the same gym year after year and I see the same people. Some of them have been working out just as long as I have yet they still look the same. Then I take a look at the bar and see the same exact weights on there week after week. If you do what you always do, you’ll be what you’ve always been. Conversely, the people who challenge themselves tend to have the biggest muscles. So keep that in mind when you’re setting your goals; small goals = small results and big goals = big results. Life is rough sometimes and it is survival of the fittest, so start conditioning yourself now. Who has a better chance of lifting the heavy weights in the gym, the person with the small muscles who only lifts the same light weights or the person with the big muscles who continuously attempts heavier weights? You may not have weights to lift in your everyday life, but there will be many burdens to carry. The great news is that you have a chance to start building up your mental muscles now so when the time comes, most of life’s challenges will be light work. If you are willing to do only what’s easy life will be hard, but if you are willing to do what’s hard life will be easy.

The next step of my goal getting process is putting a time frame on your goals. I knew I had thirty days to accomplish my objective. If I didn’t do it in the time frame provided, doing $90k in business would have been meaningless because it wouldn’t have been done in a month. As humans, we use time to put our lives in perspective. When people don’t have a time-frame for completion they are just wishing. “Oh, I want to be rich or I want a nice car.” Don’t say that. Say I want to have a million dollars banked by the time I’m 30 or I want to have a Mercedes CLS 600 by June 2009. Goals are dreams with deadlines.

So you have your goal, its written down, specific, and you have a time frame for completion. Now you have to create an action plan and take action. This is where you figure out how you are going to reach your goal and start reaching for you goal. You want to set your goals high enough to inspire you and low enough to encourage you. I had a big goal of writing $90k in business but I broke it down to a relatively low number of three thousand dollars each day. It’s like that old saying, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Also remember that the plan you start with probably won’t be the plan you finish with. That’s perfectly fine. I originally planned to do $3k a day in personal business but after the first few days I had to adjust and do $3200 a day and later that month I had to do $4k a day to hit my goal. There will be set-backs and obstacles in the way and you will have to work around them. Brian Tracy noted that if there are no obstacles between you and your goal, you don’t have a goal you have an activity. Where great goals can be attained great obstacles exist.

The key is to start tackling those obstacles as soon as possible. You do that with activity. Take action today to live your dreams tomorrow. Winners are beginners. We’ve all heard this ancient Chinese proverb “a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step”. Another oldie but goodie from China says “be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still”. In order for us to reach our goals we have to work towards them. It may sound good on paper but it does us no good if we don’t act. In ancient Greece, a traveler on a road once asked an old man “How do I get to Mount Olympus”? The old man replied, “Just make sure every step you take is in that direction and you will eventually reach Mount Olympus”. Make sure every step you take on a daily basis is getting you closer to your goal. By the way, that old man happened to be Socrates.

Confucius once said, “knowledge without practice is useless”. Practice without knowledge is dangerous. He also said “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand”. That pretty much sums up the importance of action. You cannot understand something just by reading about it. You have to get that real life experience, the street smart aspect of life. Often, that is the best way to learn for some people. I know I can relate to that. When I was a kid my grandmother said don’t touch that pot it’s hot. In my curiosity I touched and burned the skin of my hand. I will never do that again. See it didn’t matter that she told me about it, I had to learn for myself. But you can’t make it to the top purely through knowledge that you gain by doing things nor can you get there based purely on knowledge learned in study. The two have to work together. You study and then you do the activity. The activity changes your frame of reference and now you are in a place where you can learn more. Once you learn more, it gives you a better insight into what you experienced in your activity. Then you re-approach the activity with more insight and the cycle continues.

Ask yourself, what goals do you have in your mind that you have yet to act on? I can guarantee that if you’re not acting on your goal you’re not moving closer towards your goal. That statement may seem like common sense but it’s not common practice. You can’t build your dream by what you’re going to do or planning to do or intend to do. You build your dream by building it. Do the thing and you shall have the power.

The last part of my goal getting process is review. This is where you sit back and analyze the results of your activity. The strength of the effort can be seen in the measure of the result. You want to be able to make measurable progress in reasonable amount of time. Being able to measure your results is key. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Make sure you have someway to know if you are on the right track. Using my example from earlier, I was able to see each day how much business I had wrote so far for the month. I would then subtract that from my targeted amount and adjust accordingly.

I know this was one of my lengthier posts but goals is an important topic. Here are the 5 steps for my goal getting process so you can write them down: 1. Written 2. Specific 3. Time Bound 4. Action Plan 5. Reviewable/ Measurable. Try it out for a month, implement it for life, and let me know how it works for you!

Recommended Resources:

Goals! How to Get Everything You Want–Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible

Goals : Setting And Achieving Them On Schedule

The Strangest Secret – Single CD, Digitally Re-mastered, 2000

Flight Plan: The Real Secret of Success; How to Achieve More Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible (Your Coach in a Box)

If this post has helped you in anyway, please feel free to make a donation to our “Lose Weight, Save A Child” fitness challenge. We are raising money to help those who need it the most. Thank you.