Mindset Goals: Mindset & Body

How many times have you started a new fitness program only to be disappointed? How many times have you promised yourself you would eat less and be more disciplined in the kitchen only to completely abandon those plans?
Are you someone who has been a little out of shape for the last ten years despite your best efforts? And who just really wishes they could get the body they’ve already wanted?

The one they see on the covers of magazines? There are a few things you may have blamed for your failure in the past: perhaps you thought it came down to the advice. Maybe you were following the wrong training program? Maybe your PT doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Or perhaps you have unfortunate genetics? Well, if you have read any of the other guides, then you will know that this is mistake number one: blaming outside factors is a surefire way to ensure that nothing ever changes.

In order to make a difference in your life, you need to start taking responsibility. That means developing an internal locus of control. And it is your fault. Here’s the harsh truth: even the worst training program in the world is going to make a difference if you stick with it. If you have the most unfortunate genetics and the only thing you change is to go for one run a week, or to eat one less snack a day; then you are still going to see some difference.

Sure, it is much better to have a good training program and to do your research. But in lieu of that anything will work. So, stop blaming other factors! The problem lies with you. But more specifically than that, the problem lies with your mindset. You possibly already guessed that from the title of this guide. So now let’s dive into the issue and see how you can change your thinking and change your results for the better.

Where the Mind Goes, the Body Follows

So, the biggest problem a lot of people have is this lack of responsibility. That, and a lack of conviction. Many people who claim to want to lose weight or build a toned, muscular body, will only really be interested if they can do so without actually putting in a huge amount of work. The irony is that they don’t even realize that this is how they feel!
The first sign that this is the case, is if you find yourself procrastinating.

How do you procrastinate when it comes to working out and getting into shape? Simple: you read. You spend ages reading about all the best workout programs, you read about all the different diets, you develop a fantastic plan, you join a gym and then you wait until the perfect opportunity when work is quiet and when you don’t have any other commitments and that is when you deign to begin your training.

But here’s the thing: there is never a perfect opportunity. Life doesn’t do perfect. Life much prefers to be awkward and difficult and if you try to wait until everything is calm and nothing is in the way, well then you’re going to be waiting a very long time indeed! The whole reason that we do this, is so that we can feel like we’re making progress. Simply by determining that we are going to workout, we feel as though we’ve done something worthwhile.

And in fact, this even removes some of the pressure so that we no longer feel we have to make the effort! There are actually studies that demonstrate this. These studies specifically looked at whether or not we should tell people our goals when we set out do something worthwhile. Often, the advice you receive is that you should tell people goals: that doing so will make them concrete and real and will force you to stick with them.

How has that been working out for you so far? The reality according to the research is that telling people your goals actually releases some psychic tension. Telling people your goals makes you feel that ‘fitness’ is already a part of your personality. And as such, you actually don’t have to put in the real work! Ironically, telling people goals makes you less likely to accomplish them. If you want to tell someone your goals so that you will have a little bit of morale support and encouragement, then tell just one person your goal.

But otherwise, keep it to yourself. Think about that day when you take off your shirt at the beach and everyone sees your incredible six pack for the first time. Let that motivate you! And to prevent the possibility of you looking for outside excuses as to why you aren’t in shape, it pays to hunt down the most effective and simple strategies to get into shape. That’s what we’re going to look at in the next section.

KISS — Keep It Simple Stupid

How do you lose weight through your diet? The problem is that the answer varies just so much depending on who you ask. Some people will tell you that the best way to lose weight is to start eating less. Count your calories and then make sure that you consume fewer calories than you burn. This way, you can maintain a deficit and be forced to burn fat stores.

Makes sense. But another blog will tell you something different. It might point out that counting calories is actually difficult to the point of being nearly impossible. And not only that, but it’s also boring and sure to put you off after a while. Worse, it says nothing of nutrition or appetite. If you just eat fewer calories, then technically you can lose weight by eating only donuts.

Which would also destroy your health and leave you hungry and malnourished. So, what do you do instead? According to this crowd, it’s more useful to focus on keeping your carbohydrate intake down. This will help you to prevent blood sugar spikes and will avoid ‘empty calories’ (if you avoid the processed, simple carbs). That way, you are getting only filling, nutritious and whole foods.

Great! Then there are the intermittent fasters and the low fat crowd. No wonder you never managed to lose weight! The other issue is that almost all of these diets are complex, they are hard to follow and they are unsociable. They often involve spending large amounts of time in the kitchen cooking and they can get expensive. What is the most important part of any diet?

Simple: that you stick with it. There is actually no point in starting a diet unless you can sustain it indefinitely. If you start a diet and give up in two months, then you will put the weight back on! Okay, so let’s simplify.None of these diets is wrong. They all have good points. The problem is they go too extreme in one direction. As is so often the case, the ‘middle way’ is best.

In this case, the middle way means:

• Trying to eat fewer processed, simple carbs. Avoid the obviously bad foods such as crisps, chocolate bars, ice cream and swap them for healthier things.
• Eat less. Don’t be obsessive about counting calories and trying to work out what you need to eat every day, but just eat a little less than you normally would.
• Don’t be afraid to go a little hungry. Sometimes the easiest way to eat significantly less is to drastically reduce one or two meals.
• Find ways to fit your new diet into your routine.

One strategy that I highly recommend for losing weight, is to eat less at breakfast and less at lunch. These two meals make it much easier to cut down because they don’t tend to be social. While your dinner might be something you have with family in front of the TV, with your partner, or out with friends; lunch and breakfast tend to be eaten quickly around work and commuting.

Thus, you can eat more boring meals and you’ll be less likely to get tempted by the more indulgent options. Okay, so what about your training? This is a little more complex, seeing as the best kind of training will depend very much on your current physique and the type of body that you are interested in developing. You will likely train differently depending on whether you want to build muscle or tone down for instance.

That said, weightlifting is something that can benefit a huge number of people including women who want to get lean and toned. Muscle is metabolically active, meaning that when you become more toned, you actually burn more fat even when you are resting! The other useful thing to recognize is that when you tone your muscle, you can hide fat by pulling it in and you can even make your skin appear more taut.

Got stretch marks? Dieting isn’t actually what you need and neither is cardio it’s muscle tone that will hide this!
Doing a little cardio is important too though, for weight loss and for your general health. Now, you might be tempted by HIIT workouts. These are ‘High Intensity Interval Training’ regimes that involve sprinting for short amounts of time and then alternating that with brief periods of rest.

The allure here is that it is reportedly very time saving and very efficient. You can use this training to burn fat and increase your health in a fraction of the time. But at the same time, what many people miss is that this type of training is far harder than it is often made out to be. This takes a huge amount of will power, dedication and a basic level of fitness to begin with.

It is not the best option for most people starting out. Not only that, but running or swimming etc. can actually yield benefits that other types of exercise simply can’t. So instead, I recommend starting jogging short distances, swimming or running. You can do this once or twice a week and combine it with a generally increased amount of physical exercise during your day.

Walking more is one of the easiest ways to start improving your health and fitness and burning more calories in a day.
The workout I specifically recommend is this:

• PPL — Push, Pull, Legs (train pushing movements one day, pulling movements the next and legs the next all in the gym)
• 30 Minutes of Cardio
• 3 x Long Walks

Add this into your routine in the way that suits you. That’s three gym sessions, one cardio session and a few long walks which can be tied in with your commute, trips to the shops to get milk etc. The most important aspect of your mindset here though? Making sure that you don’t overdo it.Whether dieting or working out, one of the biggest mistakes we tend to make is to try and get the change immediately.

This impatience is another aspect of our mindset that can prevent us from reaching our goals. People want to see their abs tomorrow, or this summer. They want to have massive biceps in a few weeks. Thus, they take up intense training programs because they want to feel like they are ‘doing something’. So many people will begin running and try and go 10 miles or more in their first session. Or they’ll ‘only’ do five miles but they’ll run fast the whole time.

It’s painful, tiring and exhausting. They come to the conclusion therefore that they ‘don’t like running’. The reality is not that they have a problem with running but rather that they have started with too much too soon. The same thing happens in the gym. So instead what you should aim to do is to begin your training in a light and gentle way. Start out by just running 1 mile at a slow pace. In the gym, maybe just try a few different exercises on low weights. Do this for a while.

The aim is not to lose weight or build muscle in the first week. Not even in the first month. Your first aim should be to learn to enjoy the activity. Do it for you. Do it for fun. Over time, you’ll build up your health and fitness naturally as you do. It’s impossible not to do that. And as you do, you’ll find yourself running further and faster and lifting heavier as a result. But don’t rush it. Just enjoy it. Your MAIN goal is to make this a part of your life.

Goal Setting and Energy

And with that in mind, consider carefully the way that you are going to set goals. What too many people will do with their goal setting is to focus purely on a distant end result. Maybe they want abs by the time summer comes around. Maybe their goal is to lose 2lbs and fit into their dress. This is the wrong way to think about it though, because it gives you much too much flexibility and means you can make excuses.

You might decide to take it easy tonight and to try harder to tomorrow. It’s also too much out of your control, leaving plenty of excuses for you to make. So instead, I want you to make your goal simply to train every week. This is a goal that is immediate, in your control and immediately rewarding. Every week, if you manage to train at least once (or twice, you set the parameters) then you have succeeded.

The abs, the dress, the biceps these are not goals. This is the vision and this is what will motivate you to accomplish your goals. Finally, I want you to keep energy in mind. Energy is finite and you only have so much of it. If work is leaving you exhausted and if your commute is stressful, then you aren’t going to have much energy at the end of the day to work out. So, conserve that energy and carefully consider the ways you can maintain it or increase it.

This is why nutrition is very important. It’s also why you need to make sure you are getting adequate sleep, giving yourself opportunities to rest and generally making sure your life outside the gym is healthy and nourishing. If you are coming home every single day with absolutely no energy and you feel achy and stressed, then no manner of training program is going to help you.

Meditate, take holidays, use supplements and sleep more. And if none of that works then consider leaving your job for something less stressful. Ultimately, one of the biggest and most important aspects of having the right mindset is knowing how to prioritize. Your health and happiness should take priority. If you are never going to be in shape because of your work, learn to accept that and then leave your job. It might be the only way to get what you really want from life.

So now you have the goal, you need the plan. To do this, look at where you are now and then look at all the things you would need to build the life you are picturing. For instance, you might find that you need a certain amount of money to make your dream of travelling happen.

In that case, you need to look at the options available to you to make that money. Or maybe you want to achieve a certain thing in your career and you realize that in order to get there, there is a certain amount of experience you need to acquire first. How can you acquire said experience?

There are many similar examples of how you might go after a particular goal but the thing to remember in every case is that you need to focus on small steps that are just ahead of you. That might mean the next small promotion. It might mean a small upgrade to your home. It might mean developing any form of small income.

With that in mind, you’re then going to break these smaller goals down even further. Now the objective is to look at the smallest possible steps that you need to take on a daily or weekly basis to get there. So if your goal is to have a body like Brad Pitt, then that smallest daily step is simple: diet and exercise.

Look around, find a training plan and a diet that works for you, and then commit to sticking to that every single day without one flaw. Likewise, if your goal is to be a top novelist, then your daily goal is going to be to write X number of words per day. Make the goals easy to accomplish but ensure that they take positive — if small — steps in the right direction.

This is the key target. This is the primary directive. You’re going to imagine that vision and let it motivate you when the times get rough. But you are going to forget anything other than the daily target. Right now, that is all that matters.

To help you visualize this, here is what it basically boils down to:

Dream/Vision (Overarching Goal) > Plan (Stepping Stone Goals) > Daily Target (Daily/Weekly Goal)

Changing Your Thinking

So why is this change in thinking so important? The answer is that focusing too much on a distant goal will make you too detached from what it is you’re trying to accomplish. For instance, if your only ‘goal’ is to become a novelist, then you lack any real structure or any plan.

This is going to make it very hard for you to stick too. It’s all too easy for you to get lazy, to take shortcuts or even forget all about it. Even if your goal is more specific and time-sensitive — such as losing 15kg in 6 months — you are still too detached from it. Why? Because a) you might still think it’s okay to skip a workout or to cheat on your diet one day and then ‘put off’ the goal.

By the time you have 1 month left and you’re still no lighter, you might give up. Or what if you stick to the plan as much as possible but you still don’t see the results you want? How disheartening is that? So instead, the goal is the target. You focus just on the one day.

You either succeed or fail. It is entirely down to you. It’s entirely your responsibility and no excuses cut it. But if you keep focusing on the daily targets, you will find that the overarching vision takes care of itself. It’s like building a house brick by brick, or taking a journey step-by-step.

Some Final Tips

Just to help you stick to your path, consider a few pointers.

One: keep your daily targets easy to accomplish. Introduce them slowly. Don’t be in a rush to get anywhere. It is better that you just start to enjoy exercise than letting yourself get burned out or put off.

Two: keep track of the days you succeed and lose. Jerry Seinfeld uses this technique and calls it ‘the chain’.

Every day he does what he sets out to do, he puts a big cross on his calendar. This is rewarding and addictive in and of itself and his desire to ‘not break the chain’ is reportedly enough to keep him from giving up.

Three: use the most practical and proven methods to get where you want to be. You must believe in your plan.

Why are we willing to go into work every day but not work on a plan we enjoy and that could make us richer? Simple: because when we go to work we definitely get paid. You need a similar plan. Something that will help you to definitely get where you need to be at least in your mind.

And finally: don’t get disheartened if you miss one day. The aim is not to of course. But if you slip up, go easy on yourself and just jump straight back on that horse!

Having a goal is a little like having a destination. It gives you something to aim for, it gives you something to target and it generally gives you a structure and a direction that might be lacking otherwise. So, if you think of a goal as a destination and life as a journey, it becomes apparent that without a goal of some sort, you are likely to be directionless.

How can get to where you want to be, if you don’t know where that is? Thus, one of the most important aspects of creating a winning mindset is to identify the goals that you hope to achieve. But in order to do that, you also need to understand how to go about writing a useful goal. Because not all goals are made equal and actually, a ‘bad goal’ can be a very destructive thing.

In this guide, we’re going to take an in-depth look at precisely what makes a goal good or bad and precisely what you can do to increase your chances of reaching those goals in the minimal time and with the minimal challenge.

Wait A Goal Can be Bad?

Yes, a goal can be a bad thing. And there are a number of reasons why. Firstly, a goal can be bad if it is kept vague and if it is used as a tool to help placate yourself. Let’s be honest, many of our ‘goals’ are not really goals at all but rather dreams. These are ‘pie in the sky’ ideas that we like but which we make no real moves toward accomplishing.

We are so often told that having goals and constantly visualizing them will help us to achieve whatever we want and to be enormously successful. But have you ever actually checked the science? Unfortunately, the research paints quite a different picture. Rather than helping us to get to where we want to be, it appears that goals that take such a vague form actually hinder our chances of success.

The problem is that we end up dreaming about what we want and visualizing it but don’t actually go after it!
In fact, it might be that having a goal to visualize is what prevents us from feeling the need to take action. In one surprising study, it was found that talking about a goal could actually make you less likely to accomplish it. Want to lose weight?

Keep it to yourself. Want to stop smoking? Don’t tell anyone.

The reason for this is simple: once you’ve told someone, you already feel ‘ownership’ of that goal. You already feel as though it is a part of who you are. This is a problem because if you now think of yourself as someone who is fit or someone who doesn’t smoke, then you’re likely to feel as though you don’t have to make any major change to your lifestyle. You’re already that thing, so why bother?

It may well be that visualizing a goal or a dream does the very same thing. When we picture ourselves rich, when we tell ourselves the narrative that one day this is going to be the case, suddenly we remove the incentive to take action. As far as our brains are concerned we’re already there! While it’s not a nice comparison to draw, this always makes me think of Auschwitz.

There, the Nazis had a large sign that read ‘arbeit macht frei’. This translates to ‘work makes free’. In other words, the objective was to provide the prisoners in the camp with just enough hope to keep them working it was enough to prevent them from trying to take that freedom.

In your life, work doesn’t make free. Just like it didn’t back then. If you want to be free, you need to change your approach and you need to take action.

How to Take Action

Okay then, so how exactly does one go about taking action? The answer is to come up with a plan. This is very different from a goal because it tells you exactly what you need to do. Yes, that means that you do need a goal. You simply have to learn the difference between a goal and a plan. You have to recognize that a goal on its own isn’t enough. And in fact, ‘goal’ is really something of a misnomer here.

What you need more than a goal is a vision. A vision is something that inspires you, it is something that gives you the motivation and the drive. A vision is what makes you wake up in the morning. But it is also abstract. It is hard to quantify. And it is hard to know precisely how you should go about getting to the point you want to get to.
That’s where the plan comes in.

The plan is what bridges the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be. And the very best plans are small, they are measurable and they are directly within your control. The best plans are usually made up of lots of much smaller goals, each of which will represent a stepping stone toward where you eventually want to be.

Don’t worry if all this talk of goals, plans and visions is a little complicated right now. Over the rest of this guide, we’re going to demystify what all this means and we’re going to figure out precisely what you need to do to get to where you need to be.

Creating Your Vision

So, the first thing you need is the vision. This is what many of us once referred to as a goal. It is the ‘dream’ if you will. You might already have one. In that case great, you can skip straight to the next section! But there’s also a chance that you don’t know precisely what you think your vision should be.

This is something that often gets overlooked in self-help texts and other advice. So often we are told to ‘go after our dreams’ but what if we don’t know what that dream is? Many of us would say that we don’t want to tie our dream to our job. We don’t want to work toward a career because we aren’t career focused. Other people might feel that they don’t want to limit themselves to just one dream.

What if you want to be a rock star and an actor? A programmer or an author? If you can’t decide quite what you want to do and if you don’t know what speaks to you on that important level, then you’ll struggle to come up with a plan to get there. We’re back to that directionless journey. Okay, so what you need to do in this case is to simply close your eyes for a moment and imagine yourself in your perfect life.

It’s five, ten or twenty years from now and everything has gone just the way you always wanted it too. So where are you? What is the picture in your mind? Are you with your family in the living room, laughing with not a care in the world? Are you standing on top of a mountain somewhere, having just travelled from somewhere exotic? Or maybe you’re in a high-rise office, looking out over the city below wearing an incredibly well-tailored suit.

This isn’t a specific goal in the conventional sense, but it suggests the ‘emotional’ content that is driving you forward. Maybe it’s success in the conventional sense of the word. Maybe it’s money. Maybe it’s family and free time. Perhaps it’s travel. Whatever the case, you can now look at how to accomplish those things and therefore work a bit closer to your perfect future.

If you’re still struggling, then there are a few more different psychological exercises you can use to get there. For instance, ask yourself what the best day you had recently was. When were you last overjoyed? Maybe it was when you bought a new computer, maybe it was when you had a whole day to just relax. Maybe it was when you were on holiday. Or maybe it was just a nice day out with friends.

Think about the things you always wanted to be and the things you always dreamed of when you were younger. And likewise, think about your role models and heroes. What do they have in common with one another? What could you potentially learn from them? Answer all these questions and hopefully a picture wills tart to form. And a picture is all you need.

Just make sure to assess that picture thoroughly. Too often, we can end up chasing after fool’s gold: thinking that one thing will bring us happiness when in reality, it actually just makes us less happy. For instance, you might think that the key to happiness is to get a job as a high-flying executive, only to discover that the life is too high-paced and too stressful.

This is why one last thing worth doing is to speak to some people who are already where you’d like to be. What is life like for them? How do they feel about it? Oh and one last thing: you might of course have more than one goal. Maybe you want to lose weight, quit smoking and also become America’s next top model.

In this case all the goals are related. Or maybe you want to find love and also become the top CEO of your organization. Either way, you can of course have more than one goal and this is probably normal. But what you should do in this case is to place your main focus on at least one of those goals at a time. Sure, you can have multiple goals but try to make one of them the ‘primary’ goal at any given time.