The Power of Goal Setting

Believe it or not, I wasn’t born a “positive thinker” or “goal setter”. Trust me I know, because I’m married to one. But it’s something I try to really work on in myself.

I’ll take you through a step by step thought process of something that happened a few summers ago when I first started running.

It was my “run” day. I skipped it for 2 reasons:

1. It was raining cats and dogs

2. I was so sore from a workout I did the day prior I knew my body needed rest. 




This was my mindset the following day:

 I’m still sore… but I know I’m not TOO sore to workout. Also movement often make the stiffness go away.

 I don’t know if I can run… but I’ll start with walking.

 Walking feels ok…I think I’ll start jogging.

 My goal is at least 15 minutes… surely I can do that.

I wish the story had a superhero ending where I set out to run 15 minutes and ended up running a marathon… but no. I turned around as soon as I hit 7.5 minutes to get 15 minutes by the time I got home. And this part is important.

Why is that important? Sounds pretty measly right? Incorrect! Goals help guide us, and if we make realistic goals, we often have an easier time sticking with them.

Notice that my mindset wasn’t heroic… I wasn’t telling myself to set new PR’s, to run farther then I set out to etc. And because I knew that I only had to run 15 minutes… I still did it on a day that felt hard!

Of course there will be days where we do the impressive, heroic things… but that day, I celebrated in the discipline of just DOING it.

No new shiny award on my smartwatch telling me I busted out my fasted mile yet.

But when you can pat yourself on the back for doing the boring, mundane yet consistent goals that you set for yourself, even when you DON’T WANT TO… that counts way more in my books than shiny new records. 



TL;DR? The more consistently we can do the small hard thing we didn’t want to do, the easier it gets to tackle the bigger, shinier things.