The #1 Factor That Will Keep You Going Toward Your Personal Goals

 How often do you celebrate?  Official holidays and family events only?  Or do you also celebrate your small victories and achievements on the mountain that you are personally climbing?

Some of us aren’t aspiring to anything.  I know lots of people like this.  They have achieved what they have always wanted – a certain income, grandparent status, a comfortable job – and they are satisfied.  They will read and learn and grow intellectually, or not, but they don’t have any aspirations burning a hole in their souls.  They have no mountains that they are attempting to summit.

Now please note: a mountain that you feel compelled to summit need not be something tangible.  It doesn’t need be healthy weight, a strong, muscled body, graduating from college or the Displaced Homemaker program or completing a marathon.  It could be getting through an entire week without snarling at anyone, feeling completely free and happy in one’s sexual expression, meditating for 10 minutes a day for a month or graduating from the eternal Yes Woman at your church (and being OK with everyone being mad at you, up to and including needing to find another church).  I particularly love the clients who come to me for that 2^nd type of mountain!

Some of these mountains are public – you tell everyone that you are changing your eating pattern forever, or becoming tobacco-free, so they will help and encourage you if you are tempted to return to your life-killing choices – and some are completely or primarily private.  My personal fitness goals have been in the latter category.

I have had a couple of injuries, which have kept flaring up, and other complications that have kept me from completing the six hours/week that the Surgeon General says we all need for optimal health.  I couldn’t even complete the three hours needed for minimal conditioning.  Most weeks I could complete 1.5 hours. Some days, I did 10 minutes of yoga or hand weights at home and it was all I could do.

The end result: poor physical condition.

But I’m celebrating today!  For the third day in a row, I was able to complete a 30 minute interval program on the treadmill, speeding up my walk to nearly running for at least half of those minutes.  I warmed up for 10, and then started a “5 minutes fast, 2 minutes moderate” progression.   I felt great every day, no relapses.  I can see muscles starting to form all over my torso, arms and legs.  They have been silently building for months, clearly, even as I’ve struggled and thought I was failing.

This is not the mountain summited, no.  It’s not the beginning of the end of my conditioning mountain.  But it is clearly the end of the beginning*.  

Along every mountain trek, there are interim resting spots at the ends of the switchbacks.  If you are a project manager, or have ever painted your house, these are the checkpoints along the project road, the places where you stop and assess your progress.  If you are literally climbing a mountain, you look out and down and realize, in awe and appreciation, how beautiful the view is and how much you have accomplished.

It’s so important to take these progress assessments!  Not in the way we do assessments in the corporate world, where their exact translation is “let’s see what you HAVEN’T accomplished so I have a stick to beat you up with the next time you want a concession on time, flexibility, whatever,” but in a Wow, I’ve Taken Some Steps, Haven’t I spirit. 

This is also what I talk about in my programs when I say that all behavior change goals have to have rewards for every effort toward a goal, as well as rewards for interim steps.

This is my day to celebrate with a non-food reward, and I intend to – extravagantly!  An entire hour of crochet tonight, finishing up a meter-tall stuffed animal, a fuzzy, funny wolf for a wolf-obsessed colleague.  It is not great art or great technical execution but it is fun, and another milestone in its way.  After all, how many people do you know who have ever created a 3 foot tall plush toy wolf that sorta-kinda looks like one? 

When you reward yourself, when you don’t allow your inner damage to slough it off and push you to spend your Reward time/energy/money on some other chore or goal, you are sending a powerful message to your subconscious mind that these actions DO matter, that small actions taken every day, consistently, rain or shine, tired and busy as you are, WILL get results.  It sends the message that these mountains that you are climbing are formidable, but you are more formidable.  It sends the message that you believe in your mountain-summiting ability, your ability to get to the very top and survey the entire world from the highest height.  It sends the message that you matter – to you, which is all that really matters.

Tomorrow, I go back to the gym and return to the climb.  For now, I am celebrating!

*[Extra points if you know who I plagiarized.]

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Avoid the Short Cuts that Don't Work. Sometimes Truth is just Truth.

We've all heard the joke about the efficiency expert who thinks waiting 9 months for a woman to produce a child is a process that can be improved; just get 9 women to work at it for a month!

Doesn't work that way.

Neither does the new craze for shorter, more intense gym (especially weights) workouts.  The reasoning goes that we are all stressed for time, why waste time?  So far, so good.  But you have to understand that some truths are Truths; they are not a matter of personal opinion, and you cannot use willpower, vision boards or any other mechanism to overcome them.  

Good:  Warm up with a treadmill or other slow, rhythmic, aerobic moves for at least 10 minutes.  Then do your shorter, more intense workout, realizing that intense HAS to use perfect form and correct placement of limbs and weights, because if you are too heavy or too intense and you make even a small mistake in placement, you are going to get injured.  Injured removes you from workouts anywhere from two days to the rest of your life. 

Bad: Jump right in and start pushing and pulling at high intensity.  Muscles and fascia that have been over-stretched or over-tense during hours of work and worry, usually in the same position, are really ripe for a major injury.

So - impatience can kill you, just like your parents told you oh so long ago.

Take your impatience and treat it like the problem that it is.  Breathe deeply for a full minute.  Allow your muscles and connective tissue to relax a bit.  Pray.  Reiki.  Meditate.  State into the abyss until the urge to think that you can overrule the physical rules of nature, what your physical self needs, dissipates and you are returned to sane, rational humanity.  

If you only have 10 minutes, don't go to a gym.  Walk up and down the stairs at your job or home, at a walking pace.  Don't run.  You only have 10 minutes and you're not loosened up yet.  Or do yoga.  Cats and cows, boys and girls.  You can do it in a dress, in a cubicle, so you can surely do it at home. 

If you only have 20 minutes, walk on a treadmill to warm up for ten, then do intervals of rapid or hard work, with a slower pace. for another 10.  Cool down by walking for a few minutes.  

Any strategy is better than going from overstretched and over-tense straight into an intense, especially weights, workout. 

ANY time you feel "I have to" preceding something that violates the laws of physics or biology, know that as a signal to change your faulty thinking, not those natural laws.  

Two plus two will always, always equal four, not twenty four, no matter how busy or important you are, or think you are.  I permanently crippled my hands by exactly this kind of crazy decision-making, and it took me five years of rehab and you don't want to know how much pain and suffering to regain most of my function (and life), but the life lesson has left me with a permanent twerk toward a sane approach to facts.  Truth exists, apart from opinion.  Much of what we think of as fact, is truly opinion - but not everything.  

Slow down.  Breathe.  Make a sane assessment of what is truly possible (Truth) and commit to that.  Let go of everything else

Feeling Stressed and Down?

Many people get “down” at this time of year.  An ex-boss of mine said that she hated autumn because all she saw all around her was the living world dying.  But that dying was only in her mind.  Nature never dies.

What it does is sleep.  The upper layers of grass fall away, and the roots remain, waiting for the return of the light in spring.  Trees lose their leaves so they can effectively hunker down and take their own hibernation time.  Roses drop their last blooms in December, just before the Solstice.  The Great Sleep overtakes nature, a time when the summer’s focus on growing, growing, growing can turn into the winter’s focus on restoration.

If you have the blues because you think you see Death all around you, be of good cheer.  The world is only sleeping.  And tonight, at 8PM PST, the nadir will be reached and the Light will begin to return to the Northern Hemisphere again.  We will all receive the promise that life is eternal and the Great Sleep will end in another cycle of furious growth and resplendent colors.

When nature goes inward, it is an invitation for the human animal to rest as well.  If you’ve been on frantic overdrive, realize that you are creating the definitions of Success and Failure that are driving you crazy.  Perhaps this year you can realize it and next year you can stop it?  At least consider that option.  If you don’t rest enough– thinking rest = laziness because that’s what corporate culture tells you, for their own greedy reasons – consider resetting your beliefs.  You do need 7+ hours of actual sleep and at least another half-hour of meditation, yoga or Reiki each and every day, if you want to live a long and healthy life.  The laws of biology apply to everyone, regardless of their income and Great Importance in The World.  The reason I get so much done in my working time is because I regenerate my energy through exercise and through rest.   You can’t keep dipping into your reserve tank forever.  Eventually, the well runs dry.  Consider this for the next 24 hours.

Most of our “downs” are, like the belief that we are observing Death all around us, or the belief that we’re not allowed to rest, thus self-created, which means that they will fall away in the moment when we stop believing lies.  [Not all “downs” are products of our thoughts.  If you get down every winter, you may have a biochemical form of temporary depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Get my book Journey Out of SAD and take your life back.]

The biggest source of self-inflicted pain at this time of year is the self-diagnosed Failure.  If you are down to your last dime, you are absolutely kin-less and friendless, and the food bank is out of food, then, yes, you have a real problem.  For most of us, it seems like Armageddon but if we get a solid 9 hours of sleep, and take a couple of naps, we’ll awake to the realization that what we are really facing is a mismatch between what we wanted and what we got.  This is a situation where the believers in a benevolent spiritual presence or benevolent spiritual laws have a real leg up.  They take a deep breath and sink into the comfort of knowing that whatever is in front of them is an opportunity to gain wisdom, and get on with living a kind and benevolent life themselves.  Maybe there’s a food bank in another town.  Maybe the local church has a warm place to spend the night.  Those of us who don’t have that philosophy need a world-view that encompasses the truth that we’re not supposed to go from pleasure to pleasure with nary a discomfort to be had.  That ain’t – and never has been – the human equation.  Into every life, some rain must fall, especially if you live in the Seattle metro area.

It seems obvious, but millions of people make themselves literally sick from fighting against this reality.  

If my first book hadn’t been botched by Prentice-Hall, I’d have been a millionaire in the 1980s.  I wouldn’t be working so hard for my daily tofu in 2015.  So what?  The road that “failure” sent me on lead me to the love of my life, a new career in comprehensive mental and physical healing and a completely different vision of why I was born.  

Why couldn’t I have a million AND the world’s best husband?  Why did my mother have to die in the grips of awful Alzheimer's?  Only children ask that question, grasshopper.   Adults let all the emotions generated by expectations of everlasting happiness fall by the wayside or slough off their backs like rain off an anorak.  Adults look around them and find the beauty in what IS, without comparing it with any imagined reality. 

It is Solstice Night.  In a matter of hours, the cosmic hourglass is turned over and the light begins to return to my half of the world.  Light is good.  It banishes SAD, and it makes it easier to step over, not into, the furball your cat coughed up overnight.  But the deeper Light – the Light of wisdom –is even better.  May we all awake tomorrow morning to welcome not only more light, but more Light. 



Visit my website www.soaringdragon.biz and explore all my programs for transformation - blasting you through barriers that are keeping you from the life you were born for!  The Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies also gets my announcements of new Webinars series.  Friday mornings Pacific and on YouTube humanbio4everyone after that.  Another webinar series on Wed mornings in 2016 on Creativity and it's link to health, wealth, and blasting through barriers