32 Tips to Improve Your Health and Fitness
Tip #6. Set Goals Based on How You Want to Feel
A great way to do goal setting successfully, is to start with how you want to feel 1 year from now, and set some goals that will get you to that feeling.
Confidence is a great feeling; confidence in your own skin, confidence during intimacy with your significant other, confidence when presenting in front of your team at work. If you want to be more confident in any part of your life imagine what you want, and work backwards to set goals that will help you get there.
Being full of energy, full of life is a great feeling. Do you want energy for your kids, energy to do the best you can at your job, to feel full of life so you can thrive in your relationships? Imagine what your life will be like with more energy, and work backwards to set goals that will help you get there.
Do you want the pride of doing something today that you could not do yesterday? When we hit a new PR, accomplish an obstacle race that challenges our physical and emotional capabilities, even attempt a new challenge that scares us, we earn a sense of pride that can only be earned by living boldly and daring greatly. Imagine what your life will be like when you decide to live boldly and dare mighty things, and work backwards to set goals that will help you get there.
How do you want to feel? What is a goal that will challenge you to be happier, healthier, and live into your best self?
The book The Happiness Hypotheses uses the analogy of the elephant and the elephant rider to explain to the idea that every decision we make is a combination of our logical brain and our emotional brain. Our logical brain (the rider) can try to steer the way, but our emotional brain (the elephant) can overpower our logical brain (often to our detriment). The magic happens when we get the elephant and the rider to move together.
When we set goals based on how we want to feel, we get buy in from our emotional brain. Then, the goals we set are the logical steps we need to take to accomplish the goal. Bam: emotional and logical brain working together so we can be successful!