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The number one New Years Resolution is always to loose weight. It never fails that thousands of people across the world make the decision that this year is going to be the year that they finally get into the shape they’ve always wanted to be in. By March, they’ve given it up for a lost cause. Why? Why is it that so many people make the same resolution for change, but can’t seem to see it through? Is it because these people are essentially weaker than those who can see it to completion? Is it that they don’t have the self discipline that it takes to succeed? I doubt it. I think the real culprit here is a lack of true motivation. People say their goal is to get back into their old clothes, but that’s not enough of a reason. Once you’ve made certain that your reason for loosing weight holds more pleasure than the pain of daily effort, you’ll know you’re on your way to lasting changes and you know how much I like those.

I’ve talked before about creating determination and how real determination is the key to personal development, but the determination that it takes to exercise everyday is cultivated differently than any other form. There are many ways that you can do this, but I’m going to offer you a few of the more “radical” ideas. These strategies might not work for everybody but, if you’re willing to give it a shot, you might just find that the success you’re looking for is right around the corner.

The Negative Self Image Approach

This strategy is a very sticky wicket; it can be used to great success, or incredible disaster, so use it wisely. The idea behind this approach is that you make it impossible for your mind to stay in the body you have created for it. What we want to do is create a mindset that refuses to spend one more day cooped up in the body you’ve made. To do this you have to think (gasp!) negative thoughts!

Now before I get all of the personal development community in an uproar over that advice, let me clarify. I don’t want you to start standing in front of your mirror and telling yourself what a pig you are, that won’t help anything. What I want you to do is to stand in front of your mirror and tell yourself that this body you see before you is not good enough for you. Tell yourself that your thighs are too big or you have too large a gut. This cannot and will not be tolerated! I want you to point out every feature you want to change about yourself and call each feature out in turn to be chastised. Tell each individual feature that its days are numbered and that you will not stand for this body anymore!

Once you’re done telling yourself how unworthy your body is of you, immediately switch to thinking about the changes that are coming to you. The danger of this approach comes when you do not take the time to change your thoughts back into a positive direction. Start thinking about all of the changes that are going to take place. Imagine the results and tell yourself about all of the physical changes you are going to see occurring in the next few weeks.

Think of yourself as the boss and your body as the employee falling down on the job. Tell those employees that what they have done just won’t fly any longer and tell them what kind of changes you want made and that you will not accept anything less. The beauty of this method is that it can create such a burning desire to change. Once you get to the point of absolute disgust, you’ll be begging for the chance to turn it all around. The danger is letting yourself wallow in despair over your self image. If you think you’re strong enough to turn that negative energy into a positive force, go for it. If on the other hand, you’re afraid you’ll just make yourself feel hopeless, I suggest you stay away from this method.

The Exercise Deprivation Approach

This is the approach I used when I started my weight loss journey and I can tell you that it worked like a charm. The trick to this approach is to do nothing that will help you get to where you want to be. You are not allowed to do anything that will help you achieve your goals. I know, first I tell you to think negative thoughts, then I tell you not to work toward you’re goals, but bear with me a minute longer. The reason this approach works is because it gets you really wanting to workout, it creates that “burning desire” everyone always talks about.

To make this work you have to use a combination of deprivation and visualization. You start off by cutting out all forms of exercise and any attempt you have made at healthy eating. If you’ve started a diet, stop. If you’ve started exercising, quit. Let it all go for two to three weeks. Live your life in whatever form you have been living in, don’t make any attempt at healthiness. For the next two weeks I want you to visualize your workouts every time you look at exercise equipment, or gaze into a mirror. I want you to visualize it before you go to bed. Imagine it in the most vivid details, feel yourself doing it and then imagine the result you want to see. Every time you walk past the refrigerator, think about eating healthily. Imagine that salad, or that lean chicken you’re going to have. Imagine all of the wonderfully delicious and healthy foods you’re not allowed to eat. Just savor them in your mind. Do all of this everyday for two to three weeks.

Now you may be wondering if you have to ban yourself from healthy foods and exercise and the answer is yes! This is a crucial step because it is withholding the desires that you are visualizing. You’re thinking about how desperately you want to workout, but you’re not allowed to. You’re thinking about how wonderful that salad would taste, but dream on, you can’t have it. This deprivation means that at the end of the three week period, you’ll be barking at the end of your chain to get at these things. You won’t have to make yourself workout, you’ll be lucky if you can stop!

I have personally used this and I highly recommend it. It sounds far fetched, I know, but believe me when I say that I now love my workouts in a way I never thought possible before.

The Hip-Deep in Pie Method

Ah, this is my version of the good old “sink or swim” technique. This is the method by which you throw yourself into the deep end of the pool with no way out but to learn to swim and fast. The trick here is peer pressure, or financial pressure. Whatever kind of pressure you can put on yourself is generally good in this case as this is the best option for people who need a good swift kick up the shorts to get moving.

Some people do this by investing a lot of money in exercise equipment, that way they cannot deny the workouts any longer, now they have to make their investment pay off. Others decide to enter into a marathon that is months down the road. They know the marathon is coming, they’ve told all their friends, now their going to have to go for it, or explain why they didn’t. Most of time, we’d rather just do it than admit that we were too lazy to.

The key here is to tell everyone you know about your goals and about what you’re doing. Invite them to come and watch you at an event like a marathon or a competition. However you do it, make sure you get that positive pressure behind you. Make sure that you tell everyone you know, make sure you make your attempt public. Why? Because once it’s public, you’ll do everything in your power to make sure that you don’t fail publicly. You’ll do everything to make your friends proud of you and that is a great motivator.

Go Use Them

Go give all three of these a try. Like I said, they’re the more radical side of motivation techniques, but sometimes radical is exactly what is called for. Sometimes, unorthodox is just what you need to get you out of a slump and into high gear. Try all of these out and find out which one works for you. When you do find it, let me know, I always like hearing from others who have used these techniques to success.

How many times have you set a goal for yourself, only to fail once and get too discouraged to continue? Let’s say you wanted to start waking up early. You set your alarm clock for 5:00am and promptly rise at 8:00am wondering if you’re really cut out for this whole “morning thing.” Or perhaps you want to start exercising, but always find reasons why you don’t have the time. After a weeks worth of attempts to make the time, you finally decide that exercise just isn’t for you. You make these goals, you don’t see them through and you either decide that it just wasn’t meant to be, or you just don’t have the self discipline that it takes. But let’s stop a second, before you condemn yourself to a life of “not enough self discipline,” and take a look at what’s really going on here. Is it really a lack of discipline that holds you back, or is it that you aren’t using the discipline you have correctly? Is it really a problem with you, or does the problem actually lie in the way you’ve created your goals?

The Nature of Creating Goals

We all have goals, whether or not we write them down and plan them, we all have things that we want to do in our lives. The problem seems to be that we don’t know how to implement most of them. Many success coaches will tell you that all you need to do is set your goals and go for them without any worry for how you’re going to accomplish them. They tell you that it doesn’t matter how you’re going to get there, just so long as you try, the path will open up for you at some point down the road. That may work sometimes, but I personally want a little more of a guarantee.

When we plan out our goals we tend to make goals like:

“I want to start a work out program. Starting tomorrow I’m going to get up at 5am and run a mile everyday!”

This is great goal, except for the fact that it won’t work. This is an admirable goal, not an effective one. The problem is that you didn’t take into account the fact that you normally wake up at 8:00am and that you haven’t run a mile since high school gym class, if then. The reason this goal will fail is because you started out at the end. You started at top speed with no warm up. You told yourself that your exercise program was going to consist of waking up at 5:00am and running a mile. That was the end result and yet, for some reason, that’s exactly where you started. This is how most of us plan our goals. We think of what the end result is and immediately go for that.

How many people have told themselves they were going to quit smoking by just not smoking anymore? And how often does that work? The problem is that our behavior is habitual. It doesn’t matter what kind of behavior it is, if you’ve done it more than twice, it’s a habit and the more you perform the habit the stronger the habit becomes and the harder it is to break. The problem is that you decided to break a habit by simply breaking the habit, which is akin to saying you’re going to learn to fly by not falling. The funny thing is that if planning out how to achieve our goals was like planning how to pack for a vacation, we’d be a lot better at this. We would make a list, start by packing the basics, then move on to what we need to bring and then what we want to bring, if there is room. If you took this approach, you’d achieve every goal you every set for yourself.

Your Body is Progressive, Deal With It.

So many people try to deny the ways in which their bodies work. They try to tell themselves that they are strong enough to stop smoking all at once, or begin running a mile everyday. The truth of the matter is that our bodies and mind work progressively, they have to build up to new things. Think of your body like a car with a manual transmission. You start out in neutral, move up to first and then throw it into fifth, causing the car to screech, grind and do all sorts of bad things. If you’d moved up through the gears slowly, waited for the engine revs to catch up with you, you’d be doing 110mph with no problem. You decided to go for broke right out of the gate and now you’re on the side of the road going no where fast.

This is the same way your body and your mind works. If you slowly start changing the way you think, slowly your mind will adapt; but if you suddenly try to throw out everything you ever thought was true, your mind will rebel and it will never work. Your muscles are capable of lifting enormous amounts of weight. You could curl 120lbs dumbbells with no problem—once you work up to it. Try that trick on your first day of weight training and you’ll hurt yourself. We hate to think that we have to wait for results and think that we should just be able to force ourselves to do whatever is set before us. The idea of having to wait until we’re ready goes over just as well with adults as it does when we tell children they aren’t old enough yet. We may hate it, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

Start out slowly and build yourself up and you succeed. Jump in the pool before you know how to swim, you’ll die. Any questions so far?

Use Build Block Goals

Building Block Goals is a name I made up for all of the smaller steps you can take to get to your larger goals. It’s like the check list you use when you pack for vacation. As we’ve already seen, most of the time, the biggest problem facing you when trying to achieve your goals isn’t a lack of self discipline, it’s a lack of understanding of how go about achieving those goals. By breaking up your larger goals into these smaller building blocks, you can easily step from one to another.

Let’s look at this in an example:

Let’s say you want to implement the workout program I mentioned earlier. You want to wake up at 5:00am every morning and run one mile. The only problem is that right now you wake up at 8:00am and haven’t run for years. We already know that waking up at 5:00am for a run isn’t going to happen, so how can you achieve this goal?

Let’s start off by breaking this up into two smaller goals.

Goal number one is to wake up at 5am.
Goal number two is to go running every morning.

Now that we’ve broken this up, let’s tackle the first goal before we move on. Rather than simply setting your alarm for three hours earlier than normal, let’s start off slowly. Start by consistently waking up thirty minutes earlier, and once that becomes a habit, increase the time until you’re waking up at 5:00am everyday. All you have to do is make sure to let your body get used to the new habits, before you try to force something new on it. Think of this like progressive weight training, don’t add more weights until you’re used to lifting what you have.

So let’s try this schedule:

Week 1: Wake up at 7:30am
Week 2: Wake up at 7:00am
Week 3: Wake up at 6:30am
Week 4: Wake up at 6:00am
Week 5: Wake up at 5:30am
Week 6: Wake up at 5:00am

Only took six weeks and you’re the proud owner of a brand new habit. Now that you’re up at 5:00am every morning, let’s go for a run. Now if you’re really out of shape, maybe you’d be better off to start with a walk instead. Walk a mile if you can. If you can’t, start lower. Walk a quarter of a mile and work your way up. Once you can walk a mile pretty easily, try jogging for a quarter of a mile, then half a mile, then three quarters, until you’ve met your ultimate goal. The scheduling principle is the same; work up to your next building block, until you’re comfortable enough to move on from there.

The great thing about building block goals is that not only do they act like little mile markers to track your progress, but they also serve as mini-victories. Rather than getting to celebrate one goal achieved, you can say you’ve a achieved ten goals, and the more small goals you achieve, the better you’ll get at it. The point of these goals is to plot out a course of least resistance for yourself. Humans, for some reason, have somehow gotten it into our heads that nothing that is easy can be worth doing. That’s ridiculous, why wouldn’t you give yourself the easiest method for achievement? If the goal is what you want, why wouldn’t you do try to do away with as much struggle as possible? Why make life harder on yourself than it has to be?

Start using the building block goals to create the life you want to live by asking yourself what foundations need to be laid for you to achieve your goals. Ask yourself what needs to be achieved, what kinds of steps need to be put into place to give yourself the best possible chance for success. You can keep struggling and telling yourself that you just don’t have the discipline it takes, or you can stop making excuses and start creating more effective goals. If you’re one of those people who thought you had no self discipline, think again. Create the correct building block goals and you’ll have no choice but to succeed.