Know your why

I just went for a walk this morning wearing a 20 pound weighted vest, shorts, t-shirts, and hat and gloves. Both the added difficulty of the vest and my body trying to stay warm boosted my metabolism and increased my fat burn. Double-whammy! Additionally it was invigorating, cleared my mind, and got me excited to write about knowing your ‘why’. Ready to jump in?

Another year is ending. It is a natural time to reflect on what happened over the past almost 365 days as well as think ahead to the next 525,600 minutes (minutes in a non-leap year). Often that entails setting goals for the year. If you read my “Why wait?” newsletter you may already be underway with your goals. Let’s wade into goal setting and get to the goods.

Many of us are familiar with SMART goals; specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely.

What is this missing?

The why.

Why is a specific goal important to you? Why do you write it down? Why are you trying to attain it? Why is knowing this important?

What happens in our daily lives? Do you have a demanding job? A family? Involved in your community? Social events? Errands? Are there still 24 hours in a day? That’s right, we get involved with our daily lives and our good intentions get interrupted. So writing down or saying that we want to loose ten pounds by May 1st for example, gets pushed to the back-burner. We are so busy we just go to a convenient fast-food restaurant. Just this once gets turned into weekly, every other day, or even daily. Looks like that ten pounds won’t be lost any time soon. The temporary gets turned into the permanent.

How do we avoid that?

Instead what if we answered that question. Why? Answering that question involves honesty, awareness, and mindfulness. It makes us think more deeply and articulate why accomplishing a goal(s) is important to us. We can set an intention so that when life happens (and it always will) we have full knowledge of what’s important to us. Full knowledge of what we need to do to stay focused and on track. It helps us set our priorities. Perhaps we need to remove a few things from our day-to-day lives to accomplish what we’ve set out to do. Instead of drifting we are designing our lives.

Try it. Take some time out of your day to visualize what you want your life to look like. What areas do you want to improve? What is important to you? What goals would help you to realize the life that you want?

Why?

Lisa Schaffer

GreenNote Fitness

P.S. Checkout my Facebook page where you can see what my weighted vest looks like.

https://www.facebook.com/GreenNoteFitness