Tips for Setting and Achieving Healthy Goals

Setting healthy goals is pivotal to your ability to achieve the results you desire. So many people talk about wanting to achieve things, but they never take the extra steps necessary to make it happen. To succeed in reaching your health goals, follow these tips.

• Be Realistic – When you set any goal for anything you want to achieve, the first thing to ask yourself is, is it even possible? Don’t fool yourself into trying to do something that you simply cannot do. For example, if you’re a type I diabetic, working toward getting off your meds is impossible. You have a disease that needs meds. However, you can perfect your diet so that you may need less insulin, and that’s good enough.

• Know Why – When you want to accomplish something, you must understand why you want to do it. Doing things just because others say you will never work. Instead, your reason needs to be something from yourself backed up by facts so that you know what you’re doing will be fruitful if carried out.

• Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses – Get to know yourself better to see what you’re good at doing and what you need to work on. Then, lead with your strengths so that you make it easy. Of course, you can always work on your weaknesses, but focusing on your strengths will always get you much further.

• Set SMART Goals – Learn how to set goals in a way that truly helps you achieve them, complete with a plan that you can follow. The SMART goal-setting process enables you to develop a well-thought-out plan that you can easily follow.

• Get Support – While getting formal support from health care professionals and counselors is a great idea, you also want to surround yourself with relationships that really and truly want the best for you and you for them.

• Persist – Once you have your plans in place created from study and research, you can be assured that the results will be close to what you want if you stick to them. Of course, you may not always get everything you want with each plan you create and implement, but you will get better and better at it as you do it more and more.

• Develop Habits – Anything you know you need to do because it’s good for you will be more likely to occur if you turn it into a habit. Getting to bed on time, drinking enough water, eating right, and exercising all need a time and place to ensure it happens. Developing the habit or ritual for it will make it easy.

• Reward Success – When you set any goal, always set shorter smaller benchmarks that enable you to track your progress to get motivated from the success achieved. When you reach one of those benchmarks, reward yourself in a healthy way.

Reaching your healthy goals, no matter what they are, is totally within your power as long as you have figured out where you currently stand, where you want to go, and mapped out a plan to see it through. Likewise, being healthy is within your grasp. You just need to take the steps and persist until you succeed.