Make Wellness Your Priority This Year

It’s the new year and many of you promised yourselves this is the year that you will _________(enter your goal here).  However, the job often takes its toll, especially now that your head needs to be on a swivel at all times.  Fitness, wellness and your wellbeing have most likely already taken a back seat.  It constantly surprises me that so many put their training on the back burner when it will save your life.  Since, statistically speaking, over 95% of you will not achieve your goal, yet alone make it 45 days into the goal, we need to examine why.

Persistence: The first mistake is that people rely purely on persistence to attempt to meet their goals.  While persistence is great only a scant few have the ability to change habits with pure mental fortitude.  It’s estimated that only 8% will meet any goal based purely on mental fortitude.  So here is how you can succeed.

The Gleicher Change Formula

Gleicher’s formula was actually created in the context of organizational change management, but it works magic for personal behavior change, too. The Gleicher Change Formula states:

D x V x F > R

D = Dissatisfaction with the current situation

V = Vision of the future state

F = First steps towards the future state

And those three variables when multiplied together must be greater than:

R = Resistance (or the cost of change)

In other words, the combination of your current dissatisfaction, goal clarity and specific action plan must be greater than the resistance (i.e., pain) associated with making the change:

Dissatisfaction x Vision x First Steps > Resistance

The power of this equation in meeting goals or enacting change is that there are two ways to win. You can increase the left side of the equation—the size of your motivation, goals and plan—or you can decrease the resistance on the right side of the equation. WOW!

As an avid fitness person my entire life I never realized that most of my time was spent managing the two sides of the equation so that I have always been part of the 8%. 

And there is even more you can do!  With this awesome equation in mind now you can add some more psychology to the mix and actually meet your goals.

1. Fuel Your Ego by making your goals and progress Public

The power of social media is that everyone knows that you have determined your resistance point and identified the vision and first steps, how do they know this?  You embrace the power of social media and tell the world!

2. Make Your Progress Tangible

Write down your goals, take before and after pictures and track them every day!

Track what you eat and when, keep a food and exercise journal.  Track how you feel after every meal and after every workout.  It will take some time but when you realize how much better you feel after eating clean and getting some exercise the resistance to progress drops even further.

3. Put your Money Where Your Mouth Is!

Give a friend $200.00, if you stick with it for 6 months you get the money back....drop off and the $200.00 gets donated to a charity.  Or subscribe to a service that sends you workouts or tracks your movement.  One of the awesome things about technology is that it can help you stay focused and motivated if you use it properly.

A few of the products that you can use are:

Fitresponderfitness.com which has a mobile app and is geared specifically to public safety fitness.

Fitbit, garmin, jawbone and mio to name just a few.  This article will help as a resource to get you started. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404445,00.asp

4. Determine your resistance point

Arguably the biggest key to meeting your goals and establishing a new habit is to figure out your resistance point.  Where will you most likely fail?  Once you know this it's easy to establish a routine and start meeting those goals. Keep in mind that your resistance point can and will change as you progress so keep going back to our equation and rework the figures!  I also want you to write the equation down and post it in a very obvious place.  

To help get you started on a weight loss goal let’s examine the common resistance points that most of you will and have already met. 

If diets worked we all would be thin and healthy already.  So ask yourself are you an intuitive eater or a mindful eater?  Intuitive eating is a nutrition philosophy based on the premise that becoming more attuned to the body's natural hunger signals is a more effective way to attain a healthy weight, rather than keeping track of the amounts of energy and fats in foods.  Controlled eating is exactly the opposite, you eat at specific times and only eat specific amounts; sound familiar?

So moving forward I want you to make good food choices all the time and eat only when you are hungry.  After eating look in the mirror and ask yourself if you feel good?  Eating healthy and eating clean will make you feel good.  Instead of wanting to take a nap you will want to move and be proactive as clean foods promote healing and give you energy.  That little voice in your head usually has all the answers, as humans we need to simply listen to it and listen to our bodies.

As a parting story I want to share with you the path that Steve took.  Steve was overweight, lazy, unmotivated and hurt all the time.  Steve was always tired and not just from his crazy shift schedule.  Steve had constantly failed at diet after diet and fitness programs too numerous to count.  So we examined Steve’s equation.  He was Dissatisfied with how he felt and how he looked.  He had a Vision of getting back to his weight when in the military almost 20 years ago.  We identified his First Steps as adopting intuitive eating and a couch to 5k program.  His Resistance was time, money and pain.

We are happy to report that after 6 months Steve has met his weight goal, he is happy with how he looks (although still a work in progress) and his pain is almost gone.  Sure he had to learn about foods and fell of the wagon a few times but that equation stared him in the face all day long and he did run that 5k with no trouble at all, in fact his son joined him and has also gotten a lot healthier.

So go on face book, start a shift challenge and tell the world YOUR equation, then get moving!