Commit Yourself–to a Grand Health Goal

So, are you ready to put together your Grand Health Goal? Is there any reason why you wouldn’t want to get yourself into the best possible health and do it for the rest of your life?

We should back up here a bit because, of course, that Grand goal is way too general by itself. You absolutely need to break it down into specific small goals and steps in order to be able to monitor and measure your progress along the way. I talk about what I call “Bite Sized Miracles” in Chapter 6 of my book “How to Ignite Your Passion for Living”. It’s one of the most essential elements to guarantee you are successful in this very important goal.

What small bite-sized miracles can you aim for that will make your Grand Health Goal a reality? That’s not something I can tell you. You need to decide what you want and then figure out the steps to get there. Just don’t let the idea of a Grand goal make it feel impossible. You can just add a short exercise routine this week and then a new sport next week to get yourself back into shape. Try cutting out soda followed by eliminating all the empty calories of white bread and white rice soon thereafter to keep your weight down. With these small, managable steps and changes in your life, you will soon find you are healthier and feel better and that high energy feeling alone will motivate you to do even more. Then you just keep it up and there you are, living your Grand goal!

But back up one more step. Are you ready to do this? Is it important enough to you? (And if you say, no, you really have to ask yourself what is more important than the very aspect of your life that allows you to do all the things you want to do and enjoy it because you feel good?) Because the first and most important step is for you to realize just how enormously important your health is and commit yourself to preserving and improving it.

So, are you ready to live a healthy and full life for the rest of your life?

The Most Important Steps are the Small Ones

Here’s a thought that’s been coming to the top of my mind a lot recently–it’s about taking seriously all the little things we have to do to reach our goals. I’ve put off some small things I need to do as I have been rather occupied lately traveling. I’ve had all these wonderful conversations with intriguing people and my mind and spirit are overflowing! I do love talking about BIG ideas and courageous goals but those grand visions aren’t realizable without all the individual steps you take in between.

In Chapter 6 of my book, How To Ignite Your Passion for Living, I talk about how to make a big dream do-able by breaking it down into all the smaller steps. But also consider that it’s the small steps and the individual decisions you make, not the big ideas you have, that determine if you are successful. If just a few of your small steps take you off the path, or you fail to take those small steps, your big, grand, genius ideas just aren’t going to happen.

So next time you put off the small things which you may not like to do, or for which you find other activities more pleasant, remember those are the building blocks of your dreams and every time you decide to do something else other than take a small necessary step, you are stepping away from your dream, not just an unpleasant task.

The Bite-Size Miracle

As long as I live, I’ll never forget how a series of 20-minute goals literally kept a man alive. Joe Simpson’s story is told in his book,Touching the Void (and in a movie documentary of the same title), and it is a very gripping, real-life example of the power of goals.

High in the frozen mountains of Peru, with a compound fractured leg (his shin bone shoved up into his kneecap), a determined Joe Simpson crawled, hopped, and dragged himself off a 3,000 foot glacier and over 8 miles of ice, snow, and jagged rocks.

His climbing partner, Simon Yates, thinking Joe had died in a fall off the mountain, was forced to cut the rope to keep from being pulled into a deep crevasse by the weight of Joe’s body. Simon then made his way back to base camp and prepared to break camp and go home, sickened by the thought that he had to leave his friend’s body in the frozen mountains of Peru.

The challenge for Joe was that he did not die in the fall or from the plunge into the crevasse after the rope was cut. Although seriously injured, he began the ordeal of his life!

Without food or water, and delirious with pain and fatigue, he set one 20-minute goal after another in order to achieve his ultimate goal: to get off the mountain alive!

His brutally painful journey off the mountain took days, during which time Joe lost one-third of his body weight and came perilously close to death from pain and dehydration.

Without those 20-minute goals to keep his mind occupied and keep him motivated, driving him to the next objective, Joe would have died high up there in those frozen mountains.
Joe Simpson would pick a spot maybe a hundred meters ahead, look at his watch and say, “I’m going to reach that spot in 20 minutes.”

He would then set off with determination, one excruciatingly painful step at a time, as he kept an eye on his watch. No, he didn’t always make it. Sometimes he would pass out and wake up 40 minutes later and be only halfway or less. But often, he did hit the spot within the time limit,which would motivate him to keep going. Without all of those short-term (measurable) goals, Joe Simpson would, no doubt be dead now.