No Substitute for Success

There is no substitute for your goals. The biggest problems I’ve seen come from a difference between goals and actions. If your actions match your goals, you are successful and everything is great. When your actions do not match your goals, you have a problem. Actually, you’ll likely have many problems.

Problems occur when you don’t do what supports what you want. It’s not complicated, yet it is difficult to stick with. For many, a goal is something that they may never reach. For others, a goal is almost a promise that something will get done.

For those that refuse to find substitutes for their goals, success is the result.
Why do some people have problems reaching goals while others are continually reaching goals? They seem to do it effortlessly. Why don’t we all do it that way? We don’t all reach goals because we don’t all set goals properly. Setting goals properly is a skill that I talk about a lot. As a skill or habit, goal setting can be improved over time and become much easier.

Easy is the key word. It is the word easy that gets us in trouble when we are trying to reach goals. As we move toward the goal, many opportunities present themselves. We have the option to keep going, try an alternative action or two (or ten) and we have to decide which one to go with. Often we take the easiest one. When we do that, we feel better because things are easy, but there is one major flaw here.

The flaw is not that it is easy. Success is not easy, but it doesn’t have to be as difficult as we make it out to be. The real flaw with taking the easy option is the fact that we don’t weigh the options for what results they will bring. We simply look at the difficulty and choose based on that alone. We accept a substitute for our goals. This works if your goal is to be the one that makes the smallest effort.

I don’t know too many people that have put in the least and gotten the most out of anything. The truth is, the more you put in, the more you get out. That doesn’t mean that everything has to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. It means that you have to think about what you put in and make a deliberate effort to do so.

One of the aspects of our actions that gets overlooked the most happens to be the most important. That aspect is how it aligns with your goal. Before taking a step in any direction, the most important question to ask is “Is this leading me toward my goal?” The question of “Is this the easiest route” may have a place, but if it is the first question asked, you are likely to head off in the wrong direction. If it is the only question you ask, well, I hope your goal wasn’t that important to you.

If an action matches your goal, it is the right thing to do. For you, the best step you can take is the step that takes you toward your goal. If a step takes you away from your goal, you are spending time and effort working against yourself. This is ironic considering the steps were taken because they are easy. It’s a good thing they are easy, because you will be taking many of them just to get back to where you started.

That being said, I guess it is easier to stay true to yourself and your goals. It is easier to walk a straight line toward your goal without veering off the path. It is more difficult to wander away from your goal or try short cuts that take you the wrong way and cause you to start over again and again.

Since it is easier to take action toward your goals, it must be easier to be successful than it is to fail. It must be easier to only do things that are in line with your goals and therefore only lead you to move in the right direction.

Too often, I hear the same people that complain about how challenging it is to stay on track are the ones that are continually taking short cuts and trying new routes. They are looking for the easiest route and they are ending up back where they started…again and again.

So is it more difficult to be successful? I don’t think so. I still think it is easier to do what will lead you to your goals. I think it is easier to look back and know that you did what you said you would do. I think it is easier to look ahead and know that you plan to do what you say you will do.

It all comes back to your own credibility. I’m not just talking about how you can commit to appointments or tasks. It is even simpler than that. It is more about committing to your goals. That’s all it takes. When you set a goal, take actions that will help you reach them. Does that sound more difficult than trying all sorts of things that lead you in the wrong direction and cause you to start over and over again? No! To me it sounds much easier to just set a goal and do things that help you reach it.

The key is to commit to yourself. Don’t even think about it as your goals. Just think about what you want. Until you can commit to you, there is a substitution going on. You are substituting ease for success. You are substituting your comfort for your goal. In other words, you are substituting something that may be easier for something you know you want.

When you commit to yourself you will be successful. When you commit to doing what is easy, you will not be. That’s not completely true, as you will be successful at taking the easy route. That may lead you somewhere, but it is not likely to be the destination you had in mind when you set your goal.

By committing to yourself and your goals you are saying that there is no substitute for your goals. When you refuse to find a substitute for your goals, you are also saying that there is no substitute for your success.

Preparation is easier than being unprepared

As a Health Coach, I hear a lot about what makes it difficult to reach goals. I work with my clients to overcome these difficulties, but they always seem to come up. If there is a challenge, I’ve likely heard about it.

Sometimes there are challenges that are more challenging…for me to hear. One of the most challenging things for me to hear about is how difficult it is to prepare for things. I obviously hear it with health goals, but it has been something that we’ve all dealt with.

Preparation is important in many areas. You need to be ready for school, work, family events and even social gatherings. Clearly, the more serious the occasion the more preparation is required. Also the more responsibility you have for the occasion, the more preparation is required.

If responsibility and preparation are directly related, than preparation should be easy. Why should it be easy to prepare? It should be easy because the success of whatever you are doing depends on it. When you look at your list of priorities, what puts things at the top? Is it things that are easy? Do we place things that are simple and have no meaning at the top of your priorities list? No, we don’t.

Our priorities are decided by importance and impact on our lives. You get up and go to work every morning, not because it’s fun. Even if you have a great career or run your own business, you take care of the important details because it is making a difference in the lives of your clients, yourself and your family. Whether you took the job or started the business, your company depends on you to make an impact. Now your preparation and action plan make that impact.

The greater the impact, the greater the importance of preparation becomes. It doesn’t take much preparation to watch television. It doesn’t take much preparation to hit the drive thru.

This is where the concept of preparation meets health. I hear how difficult it is to prepare. I hear how much easier it is to watch television or go to the drive thru. The reason I don’t understand the difficulty is the amount of impact these areas have on our lives.

What we eat and how much activity we get has a very significant impact on our lives. The impact can be seen in many areas including the very basic area of how we feel. The better we eat and the more we move, the better we feel. I ask everyone what they want from a coaching perspective. The answer that I hear the most is: “I want to feel good.”

We all want to feel good. But by not preparing in the area of health, we are not acting as if we want to feel good. We know what we need to do in order to feel good and yet, we are not doing it.

In fact, by not preparing, we are actually making things more difficult. When we enter a meeting unprepared, is a nerve-racking experience. When we throw a party without preparing for it, it is a frustrating experience. Showing up for a test in school without preparing is nothing short of a nightmare that many of us have had. When we suffer the consequences of not preparing with our health it is much more serious.

Our health is our life. We’ve talked about it over and over and I will continue to stress how important health really is. I don’t understand the idea of looking at something that is as terrible as having heart issues, gaining weight, feeling tired all day (the list goes on) and deciding that those are all easier than setting a few goals.

Even if your only goal is to feel good, you can make it easier than all the health issues you face by letting your health go. Feeling good may be the most commonly desired result, but it’s not the only one. There are countless benefits to living healthy. Avoiding many problems is one of them.

Just as the meeting or party or test is more difficult without preparation, health is too. I have seen over and over again that without preparing we simply cannot live the lives we want to live. The key is to realize that while it may be easier to put it off, it is not easier to deal with the consequences.

Being unprepared is much more difficult than preparing. Preparation is a habit, so the more you do it the easier it gets. Remember, easy isn’t bad. In fact, that is what preparation does for you in your routine. You get better at it and it becomes automatic. Eventually, preparation is easier than being unprepared.