Leaning into your “why” and building a system to enable you to stay disciplined and consistently maximize your time, no matter the season.
Joshua Parris, PhD, NSCA-CPT
Victoria Parris, Pre & Postnatal Fitness Specialist
Is it just us or does life tend to get fuller and busier as the days and years go on? With seemingly never ending “to-do” lists, compounded by increasing responsibilities and personal commitments, some days can just feel so…overwhelming. If you’ve ever set personal goals and found yourself in the tension between the “right now” and “not yet,” we are right there with you. As parents to three young children, it can be an “easy excuse” to feel as though we “don’t have time” for the things that we know are good for us. Just like you, we aren’t ALWAYS motivated to maintain a healthy standard of life, especially with the constant lure of ease and comfort. It can be difficult to find time each day for movement. It takes effort to prepare healthy meals for the family. It is so easy to “doom scroll” on social media at the cost of using our time more productively. For these reasons (and so many more!), how we approach our goals – and frankly life, in general – matters.
So how does one approach goals? There are numerous frameworks out there for goal-setting – you may have heard of acronyms like SMART or OKRs; or you may have heard of less widespread frameworks like 4 A’s, 7 C’s, 4 D’s, 4 P’s, to name a few. While there is nothing inherently wrong with these various frameworks (outside of sounding like alphabet soup), we wanted to significantly streamline and simplify the answer for you… achieving your goals boils down to DISCIPLINE.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we want to review six tangible actions that keep us disciplined when motivation fails. These actions have helped us take ownership for our lives, and while they are given in the context of fitness, these six actions will benefit you if applied to other areas of your life as well:
- CONNECTING WITH YOUR “WHY”
- CLAIMING YOUR CLOCK
- FINDING YOUR LOCATION
- ESTABLISHING YOUR STRUCTURE
- LEVELING UP YOUR FOLLOW THROUGH
- DRIVING THE WORK FORWARD
To start out this series we will first elaborate further on the first action – connecting with your “why”. After we take you through each action, we provide you with a “challenge” to apply the action we discuss in a more practical manner.
