A List for Hard Days

In the last couple of posts, I talked about some of the essential components needed to reach your goals including taking action and writing out your goal. Without doing that, you can’t even get started. But what will keep you going once you do get started? All the best intentions in the world are not going to help you when things get really challenging. The things I’ve mentioned do help but I have one more thing to make it even more likely that you’ll reach your goal.

Let’s start with an example such as dieting. You go out to eat with all the best intentions to stick to a healthy, low-calorie diet. Then you find yourself there with a salad in front of you while your companions are enjoying prime rib and pizza and suddenly, your mouth is salivating nonstop. You begin to wonder, Why in the world am I dieting when I could just be enjoying myself? Somehow, maybe because your friends know you are on a diet, you stay strong and dig into your salad.

The next day, you see yourself in the mirror and can smile at yourself, knowing you stuck to your goal. In the afternoon, you are out playing ball with the kids for an hour instead of just ten minutes which had been your limit in previous times. It’s times like those that make it easy to remember why you’re changing the way you eat. In those moments, you can honestly say you don’t miss those grande mochas with whipped cream or the bowl of ice cream after dinner.

Unfortunately, your day isn’t filled with those reminders and maybe the next day you’re at work, a co-worker walks in with donuts for everyone and you hear your inner voice asking you why you are torturing yourself, making all the reasons you wanted to diet a little fuzzy all of a sudden. That’s when the idea of just one donut doesn’t seem like a truly bad thing and there’s no one at work that knows about your diet goal to help keep you on track. It’s then that you need a true will power tool.

The tool I think that works the best for this is something I call B-RAM. You can read about it in Chapter 7 of my book, How to Ignite Your Passion for Living. B-RAM stands for Benefits, Reasons, and Motivations. This B-RAM is a list of the real end goals you’re after. Losing weight isn’t just about looking good, it’s about feeling better, getting off medication, reducing your risk of disease, and increasing your energy so you can do more for yourself and your family. You know this is why you do it but in those really trying moments, they are just hard to remember clearly.

With a B-RAM list though, all you do is write down the list of the reason you are chasing this goal, then you can pull the list out and read it over to remind yourself. You’ll want to keep that list as handy as possible. Maybe put it on your phone, on an index card in your wallet, or on sticky notes posted on your glove compartment and bathroom mirror.

To make this B-RAM list really effective, you must list every single benefit, reason, and motivation that will make this goal worth working so hard for. The longer the list, the easier it will be to keep on track because you can see, just by looking at your big, long list, that those trying moments are really worth getting through. Then when you read it, you’re reminded of all the good things you can look forward to when you reach that goal.

If you can just read your lists and keep yourself going, soon you won’t spend any time wondering why you work so hard or why you don’t just give up. How come? Because soon enough, you’ll be living with those benefits, not just reading about them!

100 Ways to 100 Years

On my July 2nd post, I said I would continue with an additional list on the theme of aging and what you can do to live a longer heather life but I wasn’t able to do that the following week, so I still owe you, my good readers, that list.

In that previous blog, I wrote about some basic things a person can do to reset the whole body, which included eating extra protein and colorful fruits as well as getting in some strength training. That’s a good place to start and pretty easy to do, but now I’d like to share with you more ideas from the article “100 Wonderful Ways to LIVE TO 100”.

Living to 100 is a great goal and it can be done. No, it’s not easy, but don’t you agree that it’s probably worth the effort? Your kids and grandkids and great grand kids would certainly like you to do it.

Here’s a few more suggestions from that article:

1. Find a reason to laugh and smile a lot.

2. Try a little responsible “retail therapy”.

3. Don’t forget about yourself. Fitness guru, Jack LaLanne, who passed away at the age of 95 in 2011, knew the importance of looking after yourself. “This is where I take care of the most important person in my life, me”.

4. Try to have a friction free marriage.

5. Put the pedal to the metal – be a super cyclist.

6. Stop smoking.

7. Get fishy. Consume lots of omega-3 fatty acids.

8. Get busy and stay busy.

9. Get enough sleep.

10. Run, but not too much.

11. Wash your hands.

12. Buddy up at the office.

13. Grow from trauma.

14. Smile a lot.

15. Hit the gym.

16. Turn off the TV.

17. Cut the sugar.

The bottom line is, never forget how very important you are and take care of yourself, especially when it comes to self-talk—keep that positive for a long, happy life.