By Victor Acquista, MD
Author, “Pathways to Health: An Integral Guidebook”
Special to PRIME
You have had enough. Maybe you are sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Perhaps you don’t like what you see when you look in the mirror, or step on the scale. When you ask yourself the question, “When was the last time I felt healthy?” you can’t recall when that actually was.
Finally, at this moment, you have reached the point where you are ready to do something about it.
Where do you begin?
You need a plan
Would you build a house without a set of blueprints? Would you try and get to an unfamiliar destination without directions? Believe it or not, step one on your journey to better health doesn’t start with a plan.
Let me repeat that so you know it isn’t a misprint. Step one is not to develop a plan. The first step is establishing goals.
Here is a useful analogy – if you want to build a ship, you first need to decide what you want the ship to do: travel long distances, carry a large amount of cargo, transport passengers, go fast, etc. Thus, step one is deciding the ultimate goal or goals you want to achieve in building the ship. The same is true about achieving your goals to be healthier.
The remaining steps are pretty straightforward and constitute your actual plan. These include the design phase, the building phase, the implementation phase, and the monitoring phase. Breaking this down into components, you first need to establish goals, then plan your tactics and strategies to accomplish these goals. Planning requires design, build, implementation and monitoring steps.
Returning to the ship analogy, once you have decided what you want the ship to do, you need to design it, build it, sail it, and monitor its performance to see if it actually does what you intended. The process is not much different when approaching your health. Let’s look at these different elements.
Establishing goals
You may have concrete ideas and goals about what you want to achieve such as, “I want to lose 10 pounds.” Often, our health goals are a bit more amorphous such as, “I want to feel better,” or “feel happier,” or “have more energy.” The first example has a measurable outcome and is entirely objective –10 pounds is just that. The other goals are subjective and more difficult to measure.
When you list your goals, separate the objective and the subjective. Next to each goal, identify how you will know you have made progress towards meeting or fully achieving that goal. Include a timeline for accomplishing this. In establishing this timeline, be realistic. A way to measure progress – and time elements – are crucial for this step as these elements are used later in the plan for monitoring success.
For each goal, it is important to ask yourself why you want to achieve this particular health outcome. If you are not clear about why something is important to you, it’s difficult to sustain the motivation and discipline required to achieve the goal.
The clearer you can be in developing goals and reasons why achieving them are important to you, as well as a realistic time frame to accomplish these health outcomes, the better you can then write the rest of the plan.
Design
Take each goal and spend time formulating the design for it separately. If you want to exercise an hour daily, look at your weekly schedule and determine where those hours are going to fit in. If you don’t plan, chances are good it will not happen. Have contingencies in your plan. If something comes up and you have to rearrange your schedule, have you allowed for this change? You may have the best intentions for working on a health goal, but in the design phase think of reasons why your intentions might not be met and design ways around potential failure. A crucial way to help guarantee your success is to design a plan with failsafe elements to make sure you succeed.
Where it makes sense, design your plan to include key support people. Who can you get to help you achieve your desired health goals? Trustworthy friends and family who are willing to support, encourage, and motivate you should be carefully thought out in your design. Again, having backups and contingencies will help to maximize your chance of success.
You should also include in your design how you plan to monitor your progress. The specifics of how you plan to measure progress is an often overlooked design element. Do not make the mistake of failing to include this important step.
Build
Think back to the ship; you have thoughtfully considered what you want it to do and developed a solid design. Now comes the time to build. The energy of building is different than the energy of design. It is a matter of looking at the design plan for each health goal and devoting the time and other resources into how you will put it into practice. It is not much different from looking at the blueprints for a structure and then building. You need the lumber, hammers, nails, manpower and other resources to do the actual building.
Implement
Time to set sail. Get started on this part of your journey towards better health. There is not much more to be said for this part of the plan. After all your hard work in establishing goals, designing, and building, now comes the time to put your plan into action. Get going!
Monitor
I have tried to emphasize this important part of your plan in my recommendations about goal setting and design. However you have decided to monitoring your progress towards achieving your objective and subjective health goals, measure how you are doing. Are you on target, ahead of schedule, behind schedule? If you are not meeting your targeted goals, you need to seriously ask yourself why or why not. You then have a couple of options. You can modify the goal or you can tweak the design and build the modifications into a revised plan. Always be honest in evaluating yourself against your outcomes. Were you unrealistic in setting a goal, encountered unexpected obstacles, unplanned circumstances get in the way, suffered a motivation lapse, etc.? The better you can honestly look at your performance and understand why you are or are not accomplishing what you want to accomplish, the further you will get in actually arriving at your destination.
Smooth sailing!
Victor Acquista MD is an international speaker, author, teacher. For information on his writings, presentations, and workshops: http://victoracquista.com/
