How to use Habits to Set Yourself up for Success

Being successful doesn’t usually just happen, it usually takes time deciding, planning and follow through. We need to decide on what success means to us. Is it achieving a particular goal, run 10km in 50minutes, exercising regularly, losing weight or something different? Then we need to plan how we are going to do this. What steps need to be taken? How can I break this down to keep on track? Then we need to do the work. Below are some useful habits to help set yourself up for success.

Set goals

Goals can be short term and long term. It could be short terms of something that we want to achieve that will not take too long, long term as in far away or a bigger goal that will be easier to achieve if we have multiple short-term goals along the way. An example of short term and long term goals could look like, reduce back pain (short term) to be able to travel overseas next year and walk a trek – long term).

If we have a goal to achieve this gives us our reason as to why we are doing the hard work to achieve our success, especially when times get hard, we get busy or momentarily loose motivation. It usually needs to be something meaningful to ourselves, we need to be invested in wanting to reach this goal and therefore in our own eyes being successful at that goal.

Useful habits

Be on time, get the full 30minutes of exercise in. If you attend a fitness class, personal training session or more clinical exercise prescription classes be on time. Many classes are 30minutes and that can definitely be enough time but make sure you get that whole time. If you are constantly 5 or 10 minutes late that’s one, two or three exercises less you are doing every session. That adds up over the month or longer.

Learn consistency

this one is a huge one and probably has the biggest effect on achieving your goals therefore being successful (for that goal). Don’t worry if you miss a training session here or there or have a week or two off to go away. Getting back into training and returning to being consistent will have a much bigger impact in the long term.

One thing at a time

If you have a bigger or longer-term goal, break it up into smaller goals along the way. If you have the goal of running a marathon but don’t run or exercise at all or regularly the first goal could be to start exercise regularly regardless of type, duration, distance, intensity or it could be even to find someone who can help you get started. Try not to get overwhelmed by how big or far away the goal feels look at one thing at a time.

Work/life balance

A work life balance can be hard for anyone to achieve and that can even be before trying to fit regular exercise in, and we become overwhelmed at think what we have to do. If we set up unrealistic goals or amounts of exercise we want to do we could be setting ourselves up for failure before we even start. Look at what you can actually fit in with time and resources available to you.

These are just some useful hints to assist with setting yourself up for success. Plan ahead, make it meaningful and be consistent, set yourself with good habits and see where you get to.

If you have questions and concerns about exercises and being healthy, please don’t hesitate to contact our clinic on (03) 9857 0644 for more helpful tips and advice.

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