Congratulations to all the participants completing Hooray for Hollywood. Hearing your accomplishments firsthand last week at the Tips for Maintenance seminar was inspiring. In case you missed the presentation, here’s a brief re-cap of five points to keep in mind moving forward to maintain or improve on your desired goals.
- Re-visit your goals. Have you set a good goal? Is it:
Intrinsic
Specific (goals without feedback and feedback without goals are both meaningless)
Positive (seek to attain not avoid)
Outside comfort zone (no low hanging fruit)
Leveraged (does it have a domino effect on accomplishing your next goal?)
Written down
- Set your environment up to support your goals with positive primes. Primes are environmental cues in your environment that prompt you to think or behave in a specific way. Often subtle and sometimes subconscious, they can help or hinder such things as mood, self-confidence and commitment to various goals. Research supports the depth and breadth of how primes impact our lives.
- Understand that willpower is like a muscle, it fatigues when used. You can conserve willpower by planning, limiting choices, and playing offense when you know you are going to need willpower. You can replenish willpower through sleep, meditation, laughter and glucose. Finally, you can train willpower, by focusing on a small consistent act of willpower. Over time, your willpower muscle will learn the new skill.
- Support – surround yourself with people who have similar goals. Research shows that our negative and positive energies changes depending on the people we spend time with.
- Finally, savor your success. Celebrating your victories will enrich the positive accomplishments, which in turn will help get you through and overcome the next challenging moment or obstacle.