This week I thought it would be helpful to share some tips and give advice on finding your mindset to achieve your goals. As you know when you first visited Infinite Pilates, we strive to create a positive environment to create the correct mindset in order for you to be in the best mental state possible – it’s important to remember that physical change is extremely hard without the correct mindset to create change first!
Here are 3 helpful pointers to lead you onto the right track for creating and maintaining a healthy and positive mindset:
1. Understand how your brain works
Everyone is unique, and peoples various upbringings and personal experiences have shaped them to become who they are today. But what’s really important is to understand how that has impacted your way of thinking as an adult. For example, are you naturally a pessimistic person? Instead of trying to completely change and become extremely positive overnight, try and simply recognise when you feel negative. This is an important step into creating change as you can focus on specific areas which may need to be worked on.
2. Goal Setting
How we look at our goals and the goals we set for ourselves play a big part on our outlook towards them and ultimately, our overall mindset. as a guide for goal setting, we like to use SMART goals.
S – Specific. Having a specific goal that directly applies to the change you want to see is important, as opposed to having a very broad goal. for example, wanting to travel may be a goal, but you are more likely to actually travel if your goal was to travel to a specific place.
M – Measured. Measuring progress is key to staying on track and helps identify times in a week or month when you are not as focused on your goals.
A – Achievable. It may seem obvious, but goals that you have must be realistic and achievable; many people have goals that seem very aspirational, which is a good thing, but there also needs to be an element of realism there for you to reach your goals.
R – Relevant. Another seemingly obvious factor, but you’d be surprised at how many people set goals that aren’t actually relevant to what they want in life. For example, you may be wanting to lose wieght, yet you have the goal to try every takeaway in Newcastle, it doesn’t add up right? Setting a goal that is relevant to what you really want to achieve helps with motivation and success.
T– Timebound. Give yourself an amount of time to achieve your goals, and remember, be realistic. It’s not uncommon for people to want to hit a huge life goal in a matter of weeks, when in reality, it takes a lot more time and effort to attain that goal. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or advice, if you know someone how has hit a goal that you also want to achieve, ask them how long it took, and use that as a guideline for your own success.
3. Starting is the hardest part – Don’t be scared!
It may be cliché but it’s true, starting anything important in life is difficult. People are very comfortable when it comes to routine and what they know, while the fear of failure allows us to be hesitant in beginning the process to make change happen. On the other hand, the body is also very efficient and is extremely adaptable. If your goal is to wake up earlier every day, the first couple of days will be very hard, but after a couple of weeks, you’ll notice that you wake up at an early time much easier than when you started. So don’t be scared, and make change happen today!
Ryan