Easy Steps to Your Success: Using Building Block Goals

September 26, 2007

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.

Posted in Determination, Fitness, Goal Setting, Motivation, Self Improvement, The Mind