It is the time of year when people begin anew.
Whether or not you make goals or resolutions for the New Year, most of us cannot help but take this moment to reflect on the past year and think ahead to the coming one. And, inevitably, we have thoughts and ideas on what we want to be different.
If you are listening to this episode, you’ve likely gone beyond just thinking about this and dismissing it, but perhaps - like most of us - you’ve never really been ‘good’ at achieving the broad-sweeping goals that are often made this year - to finally quit sugar, to start going to the gym four times a week, to train for a half marathon or to add more fruit and veg to your diet. Maybe the first two weeks go well, or even better, you find a 6 week fitness challenge or use a Whole 30 to ‘jump start’ the effort, half-expecting but mostly hoping that the momentum in the first 10% of this year is somehow enough to carry you through the next 90%.
But life doesn’t work like that, does it?
There are interruptions and obstacles and unforeseen chaos that inevitably makes it near impossible to meet a long term goal unless you either have an adaptable, evolving plan in place or a hell of a lot of support from others around you.
So today I want to talk about how to increase your motivation to stick with it when going gets tough and how to create that adaptable, flexible plan to navigate the unexpected as best you can without throwing in the towel.
Knowing and Integrating WHY It Matters
Perhaps the most important step in all of this is to have a clear, strong purpose in achieving the goal. If you want to run a half marathon this year, determine why that is important. What is that gong to give you, aside from feeling like a bad-ass? What does feeling like a bad-ass give you? A sense of refusing to age like you parents did? A long term goal to establish the consistency in exercise you had in college? Once you achieve the goal - THEN WHAT? If the goal is not tied to a deeper value or sense of personal integrity - for example: I value fitness as a part of my lifestyle because it keeps me strong, improves my mood and allows me to do all the things I want to in my life - it will likely not withstand the storms and obstacles ahead of you - then you have nowhere to go after it is achieved and you are more likely to not achieve it in the first place. You must tie the goal to a value inherent in either who you are today, or who you are growing into; who you are becoming. This integration of oneself into an aspiration or goal makes abandoning it far more painful than keeping at it.
if the goal is tied to who you are becoming and wish to be in the world, rather than how you see yourself today, you may need more support and reinforcement of integrating that value. reminding yourself in numerous ways what becoming this person means and staying connected to how much that intention means to you is essential. Here, I find that inspirational autobiographies and movies about people who overcome odds and achieve great changes such as rags to riches stories, overcoming a debilitating injury to resume a sport, those who have come back from disease to regain health, the personal stories of special olympians, to be very helpful. They are human and so are we - our shared humanity reminds us that it is possible to achieve things which may feel impossible in the moment. Find sources of inspiration to be your north star and keep you from falling prey to your own fears and doubts. Find people around you who are ahead of you on the path, but have a similar backstory. This is where fitness communities and support groups can be a lifeline.
Even if you aren’t aiming to be a first-place finisher or believe that your diabetes can be put into remission, using the examples of those who have achieved more than you expect for yourself or your body can still carry you forward. The question you ask yourself may not be, ‘can i win first place’ but it may be ‘can i finish at all?’ ‘Can I get my blood levels to pre-diabetes range from diabetes ranges?’ or ‘Can I reduce the dose of my medication through lifestyle changes and maintain that?’
Which reminds me of something else - shifting the goal from an expectation of something you have to do to an experiment to see if you can do it, or how far long you can make an improvement - can reduce the pressure to perform and also opens up your mind to creative problem solving when the going gets tough - which it will.
Planning Around Known Obstacles
This leads me to my second point - known obstacles: Maintaining a mindset of curiosity is essential to maintaining resiliency in the face of adversity. Begin first by listing out the known obstacles you expect to face - when work gets crazy, how will you navigate your dietary needs instead of relying on take-out? If you only have 20 minutes to get dinner on the table, how can you best meet your nutrition goals doing this? When you get sick, how will you prevent it from permanently derailing your workout plan? What do you need to plan for when vacations or summer comes and your daily routine changes?
Before you begin (or today, if you’ve already begun) outline how you plan to navigate the obstacles and set up contingency plans for when things go haywire. Who can watch the kids, what can take a backseat while you hold onto this goal as a life priority?
If you find yourself saying there is no way out and you have no choice, reframe the question: “If there was a way out, what would it look like?” What’s the closest you can get to THAT?
Write these ideas and contingency plans out. I assure you, in the moment you will forget them. So having them written down will not only help you remember them when the time comes, but it will give you a resource to refer to when your brain is in panic mode and the creativity juices have temporarily dried up.
Outlining the Smallest Pieces Needed to Achieve the Goal
We often don’t realize what it takes to maintain consistency and gain momentum in new goals. If you have a goal to eat more produce this year, what needs to happen? Well, you need to have the produce in the house. Most of the time there will probably be some prep involved, and you’ll need to make the time to actually eat it as well. What does it take to get all these pieces in place?
Here are some ideas:
Create a master list of produce that you always have on hand - every time we go to the grocery store, we pick up the staples, and some produce is included in that. Bananas, oranges, broccoli, lettuce. If even getting to the grocery store is a struggle, see if you can have regularly scheduled deliveries of groceries to save yourself the time needed to shop for them.
Save prep time with pre-cut veggies, single serve produce options (like a single orange or a bag of snap peas). Keep some of these on your master list of grocery items for moments when you dont have time to prep
Let’s say all hell breaks loose and it’s just going to be a meal out. That’s okay - but where is the place you can find produce? Order from there. Maybe it is the Thai place on the corner that has a wicked vegetable curry, or you know the deli across from your workplace has a salad that will get the job done. Make note of the places that offer options aligned with your goals and lean on them during the times you need to. Once you start looking for the places which offer what you need, you start to find them!
Determine what is Optimal, Good, and Good Enough to Make Progress
This is a great segue into step 4 - determine optimal, good, and good enough. Usually when we make goals we are operating from a place of what is optimal. I want to eat 5 servings of veggies daily! Awesome! But is that realistic for 365 days this year? If your current baseline is 1-2 servings a day, which is what most Americans, Brits, Kiwis and Aussies get daily, probably not. Only 10-14% of these populations get 5 servings of fruit and veg daily, so if this is the baseline for optimal, than shooting for 3 is good, and shooting for 2 is good enough. Let ‘good enough’ be just a little more than what your baseline is, and good be about halfway between good and optimal. This way, even if you have a hellish year, your ‘good enough’ still puts you ahead of where you were last year and keeps the goal at the forefront without the demands of optimal.
Life is not a binary pass/fail exam, nor should our goals be so. Gradients of success allow for unexpected diversions without giving up entirely and allow progress to continue to be made, even if at a pace that is less ideal that we long for it to be.
Aim for Good Enough or Better 80% of the Time
Life is going to happen, and the reality is that a perfect score is not needed to be successful. A study of Precision Nutrition participants show that even those who adhered to their nutrition and fitness program 50% of the time still lost 5-6% of their total body weight after a year! Even modest improvements such as this have real life benefits for joint health, blood sugar levels, and reduced chronic disease risk. Those who were consistent 50-80% of the time made even greater progress, losing more weight and inches, and the difference between those who were rocking it 55% of the time to 80% of the time wasn’t wildly dramatic. Those with the greatest transformation were adherent 80-90% of the time. So aim for 80% instead of 100% as your gold star A+ metric, knowing that 90% and over is basically extra credit. And if you are consistent even 50% of the time this year, you will be much better off for that effort.
This perspective is often hard to keep when you have a big goal. But let’s say you want to lose 30 pounds this year. And for whatever reason, 2025 ends up being a whopper of derailments and obstacles. You only manage to lose 6 pounds by December 1. That is still a success! Don’t think so? Let me ask you this - do you want those 6 pounds back?
No?
Okay, then take the win!
Not only did you lose 6 pounds, but you’ve also learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work in the face of massive obstacles. you take this into your 2026 and keep at it. If, by November, you are pissed off and frustrated and refuse to take that win, you are likely going to say the hell with it for the holidays and then regain that 6 pounds. Then, come January, you’ll be even more pissed off at yourself. So don’t let imperfect progress be the enemy of good enough. If you are focused on all or nothing, you will end up with nothing.
It’s Crucial to Keep the Long Game in Mind
My father once told me that he was always a decade behind schedule. A decade! Can you imagine? But he never gave up, and he achieved more in his lifetime than he could have conceived of when he immigrated to the USA. So plan for a year but expect 2 or more for any big hairy audacious goal, be it a half marathon, disease management or significant weight loss. You’re planning on living and aging anyway, so keep at it and you’ll get closer and closer and better and better at it. If you lose 20 pounds instead of 30, you are still so much better off if you can maintain that rather than get frustrated at those last stubborn 10 pounds and give up, only to gain the weight back. If your body keeps getting injured at the 10 mile mark of your long run, maybe you don’t end up running that half marathon in 2025 or 2026, but you refocus and start racing 10Ks and stay in shape this way. It still puts you in far more alignment with your values and who you want to be in this world than getting frustrated and giving up altogether. That is NOT who you are. That is NOT who you want to be. If that was you, you would not be reading this Substack, or any of the other health and fitness Substacks in your feed.
Consciously, Acutely Acknowledge What is Working and Where You Are Rocking It.
This is key to keeping motivation and momentum. If you delay the dopamine hit you can derive from your progress, you are at high risk for giving up when it gets hard. If you don’t acknowledge what is working, then you don’t have any weapons to combat the itty-bitty-shitty committee when they get all up in your head and tell you that nothing ever works. You already have skills and tools and strengths that you’ve cultivated in your past attempts and these will continue to serve you. What you learn this year will add to your skillset even if your fall short of your overall goal. These insights and skills make you better skilled, more resilient, and better equipped for your future endeavors, and that is a straight-up win, my friend.
If you tend to get myopically focused on the end result and skip the reward of acknowledging the progress along the way, set up reminders in your calendar at least once a month to assess your wins. This can also be a good time to check in and pivot if some things aren’t working or plan ahead for obstacles you see coming. But take these moments. Congratulate yourself for the effort you have put in, the progress you have made - especially over the habits you are building which you have control over - because sometimes the increased speed run, the heavier weights lifted, or the weight lost is not within our control. Give yourself proper kudos for what you have worked for and do it often. You’ll realize how capable you actually are of making progress, living in alignment with your values, and improving your health.
So, to recap, to make this year’s goals ones that can withstand whatever 2025 has in store for us, be mindful of these 7 things:
Know why the goal is an essential part of who you are and are becoming
be mindful and plan for the pbstacles and pitfalls
Break your goals down into the smallest of tasks to make them more achievable
Determine your best effort, what’s good effort, and what is good enough
Aim for 80% at good enough or better, but know that even 50% adherence is progress.
Keep the long game in mind nad expect it to take longer than any goal date you ahve in mind.
Fully, acutely acknowledge your success and what is working once a month or more.
I hope this (episode) has helped you become better prepared and resilient for your aspirations this year! If you find yourself stuck with navigating some of the obstacles that come your way, having a master strategist in your corner to help you navigate through the terrain can save you some mental bandwidth and spare you some of the decision fatigue that comes with navigating life’s challenges when they are at odds with your health goals. Know that I am here to support you and have a good 30 years of tools at my disposal to help you navigate the path! You can reach out to me by clicking the link below to schedule a complimentary call or get on my newsletter list to be invited to upcoming group programs that will be offered this spring!
Until next time, my healthy heathens!
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