Recalibrating is fine...

Did you make it or did you give up?

Blogs and self-help gurus abound with talk of defining your own success and what that means, and most of it is good advice. We should be looking inward, not outward, to determine what success is and what it means to us, individually, to consider ourselves a success.

Sometimes I worry though, that defining your own success can easily just become a way of moving the goal posts to make it easier for you to stop pushing. Consider the person who wants to lose 50 pounds. They map out their plan, the do the work and they stay honest about all of it, but when the last two or three pounds don’t come off, suddenly the fervor to lose 50 pounds turns into the complacency of losing 47.

The rationalization begins with, “well, close enough, right?” Then you start to dismantle why you wanted to lose 50 to begin with. This monolithic number, suddenly becomes just a silly little round number that doesn’t mean anything because you lost a lot of weight already. The #Fightfor50 hashtag on your social media conspicuously goes away and well, maybe you give yourself a day or two off from dieting since you, “lost so much already.”

The beauty and strength of being human comes from our ability to adapt and overcome and when we truly commit to overhauling our physique we can have incredible results just by making some targeted changes. If you goal is to lose 50 pounds, then see it through, especially if you’re close. Maybe you set a goal of 50, and eclipse it easily, great! You completed your goal, move on to something else now. However, maybe you get down 20 and its taking you considerably more than you thought, or perhaps you have some medical or physical complications and need to reevaluate that goal.

Reevaluating your goal is fine.

Getting down the stretch and realizing that the race is different than you thought is common, but be honest about whether your goal is now unattainable or if it just got difficult. There is no shame in taking your goal and reestablishing it once you’ve made progress-you’re not moving the goal posts then, you’re just recalibrating from a new starting position. One of the biggest hurdles to honest-to-goodness goal setting is that we tend to make arbitrary goals and once we realize they aren’t practical, we give up. Allow yourself a window to change the game up. Don’t be afraid to give yourself a redo if things aren’t moving like you anticipated. Just because things aren’t going your way doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong, sometimes you just need to go back to drawing board with some new information and plan things out again.

Your goals are just that-YOUR goals. They don’t belong to me or anyone else, but when you are making a deal with yourself, be honest about where you are and where you want to be, because you’re the only one running that race in-between.

Stay strong and believe in yourself!