If you can look back at your life over the past few years and honestly say that you have achieved what you set out to achieve in at least one area of your life, congratulations. Otherwise for most people it’s the same old story every single year, isn’t it? You’re all pumped up for the New Year, armed with a health and fitness plan which you’re adamant you’ll see through this time around as part of your list of New Year’s resolutions, yet a few weeks into the year things take the same old disappointing turn.
It perhaps applies more so with regards to our health and fitness goals because this consideration affects the quality of our lives quite directly, but it also applies to pretty much all areas of our lives, how we just perennially conspire to fall well short of our goals. What is it that so effectively manages to fuel this disappointment though — disappointment which is so constant that we end up becoming numb to it and subsequently dropping our standards to accommodate mediocrity?
Unrealistic Expectations
Unrealistic expectations are the biggest dream killers you can ever come across. I’m not suggesting that you should lower your expectations of yourself or lower the bar in terms of the quality of your goals and dreams. I mean if anything, the very reason that you have a certain goal or dream popping into your head is because somewhere, somehow your mind and body know that you have it in you to achieve and realise that goal or dream. At the same time however, you also know where reality and your ambitions meet, so by no means should you be living in a state of complete ignorance.
We’re Just Not Working Hard Enough
Building on from the expectations we need to set of ourselves having to be realistic, sometimes that gap between them being realistic and unrealistic resides in some elements of our lives we can change. If you want to work your way up to a fitness level which hands you the ability to be able to compete in a competitive favourite sport for instance, you could be falling short as a result of not working hard enough or not working effectively enough. You may be putting in hours in the gym everyday yet you fail to incorporate something like the lean protein required to aid your muscles in their development and recovery, for instance.
Basically there are some elements in your life you can adjust to aid the process of realising your goals in addition to working harder on realising them.
Effecting the Re-Evaluation
Re-evaluation allows you to reflect on how far you’ve come and where you need to improve in order to get back on track to realise your health and fitness goals (if you’ve fallen off). You might perhaps even need to change tact completely, which is okay really as that is the whole point of re-evaluation. Whatever isn’t working needs to be addressed accordingly because holding on to something which isn’t good for the cause could be the only thing that’s holding you back.