Your values will guide your goals
Do you struggle to stick to your goals? Do you lose momentum along the way and just throw your hands up when things get hard? If your goals and your values aren’t in alignment it’s going to be very difficult to see success.
I’ve watched this happen time and again with clients searching for fat loss. They just can’t find a way to stay consistent when everything isn’t lined up perfectly. They couldn’t find a reason to continue when giving into their hedonic desires seemed so much easier. So we developed a simple system based on techniques used in behavioral health to help people to identify their values and/or priorities. I simply call it our Value Based Action Plan. The first portion is simple: What is it that’s most important to you?
So the simple task to begin with is just to ask yourself, what’s my priority or core value? What is it that guides my life’s course? Just identify that one overarching value. This might take some soul searching, some digging, and just time. Don’t rush it. This is important. But you should be able to look back on your life and see that invisible guiding force in your choices. Some examples may be honesty, integrity, health, or creativity.
Once we have established that overarching core value we can begin to work on what to do with it. We will start building a framework to spark action. The next step of this framework is to establish 3 goals that can help you to truly live that value. These goals can be health or fitness related but need to be congruent with your core value. Without that congruence we can never expect to drive for that goal when it becomes difficult.
These goals will be very important in further developing your value. And in turn your value will help to stick to your goals. But without taking action we aren’t moving forward. So next we work on the action portion of our value based action plan.
Pick one of the goals you have chosen to support your value. Under that goal we want to start to list action steps to take that goal from a thought to reality. In order to keep things simple, I like to keep these action steps to 3 however you can list out a bunch and just choose your top 3 for this exercise. Once you have identified your top 3 action steps choose one to work on right now. Not tomorrow or next week, now. This is how we spark action.
As you start to see success with your first action step and it moves from a new practice into habit, we can go back and incorporate another action step and in turn the third. This might take a few weeks or a few months but each action step is a process piece on the road to your goal. The plan really becomes cyclical as we work closer and closer to our goals.
As our goal starts to be visible on the horizon, we can start the same process with these other goals. And rinse and repeat. As we grow we will adopt new goals and possibly even work on developing other core values.
At its heart this is just a simple way to work on self development but the simplicity is also why it works. Congruence between our values and goals brings not only greater success but greater happiness as well. And at the end of the day happiness is the real goal.
