Goals and Routines
“The problem with not having a goal is you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”
Bill Copeland
The point of having healthy goals is to give your life structure and a sense of accomplishment when you have structure it is easier to develop routines. I'll get to this later. One of the greatest falsehoods of life is that we think we have forever to live, until you turn 65 and think, what did i do with my life? You don’t want this to happen, i’ve seen it and it’s not pretty. You cannot buy back time, your body will not get younger, and you need to be have an opportunist mentality. People who squander their time wandering aimlessly through life never seem very happy to me. Don't get me wrong there is a balance to being present and peaceful during goals these are not to be confused, but being lost in the mind and still nothing to shoot for is a terrible existence. It puts you at the bottom of the hierarchy for mating and life gets stressful and tough.
Plan of attack
Imagine your life as a canvas, you can paint anything you want on it, and now you just sit there and grow old with the paint brushes sitting in the tray, do something!
What it your ideal life? Or make this question even easier, what is your ideal day? An excellent program i’ve used in this regard is Jordan Peterson’s Self Authoring suite. This is an in depth analysis of what your goals are, who this will affect and what will happen if you don’t do anything about it. You can develop one week goals, 3 month goals, 6 month goals and 5 year goals if you like. Experimenting with this will prove to reveal interesting ideas about your life. You can model your goals around people you admire and what they've painted with their life canvas or you can go out there make totally new things the world has never seen through your vision. The imagination is endless as the greats have shown us before. Ideas that at one time were found in hollywood studios now happen in our everyday lives. There was a time when star trek in 1960s had handheld devices where you could see the other person and communicate long distances in real time, that was considered sci fi. Now your 8 year old son knows how to do this better than keeping food on the plate and off their chest.
Values
At 37 years old, i’ve spent far too much of my life not living aligned with my values. I partied hard for too many years just to hide the pain of not being able to see my son enough, this has just furthered my suffering causing me to empty and void. Then I finally got my shit together and started finding out how to live a good life of meaning and purpose. Knowing what you value most in your life will prove to be very important as well as it reveals if your actions and routines are aligning with what you value. Take out a piece of paper and spend a week researching values, then start picking the ones that you value each day, get a list of ten going, then take that list and start comparing it to what you are doing now in your daily life. For example, if you value health and you eat pancakes and syrup for breakfast, you aren't living up to your values. If you value travel but do nothing to leave the house, then you aren’t living to your values, if you value helping people but do nothing to help yourself, you aren't living to your values, because you can only give what's in your cup, and if it's empty then good luck. I value helping people hence why i'm writing this right now.
Smart goals
many times we make goals that sound great but have no idea how to accomplish them. As with anything that is overwhelming you must break it down into small pieces that you can conquer easily. The acronym smart is often used when you actually get serious about tackling these goals
S specific- you need to narrow in on what exactly you are trying to accomplish, are you trying to
Lose weight, or are you trying to lose 10 pounds?
M- measurable- how are you going to measure the progress? Weight scale? Calipers, measuring tape?
A- attainable- are you able to attain this goal or are you shooting too big for your skill level? It should be noted here that an increase of about 4% increase in difficulty in a consistent manner has shown to give good results
R- realistic- are you trying to build a space shuttle but can’t operate your vacuum? Keep the goals to something you have a chance at or you will get discouraged and start over.
T- time sensitive- This one is one of the most important on the list, how many times have you made a goal just to not have timeline, and never see it completed. An important note here is that i think people avoid this one because they don’t want to feel the fear of failure when they didn’t achieve the goal in the time frame. To this i say, don’t worry about it, once you get in the habit of checking in with your goals often you will get better at timelining them and you can always reset the clock on the goal. Try to be honest with yourself however because resetting deadlines over and over will make you inefficient and end up getting nothing done and getting down on yourself.
Routines
“Early to bed ,early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise”
Benjamin franklin
Now that you have identified your goals based around your values you can start playing around with routines.