Dumbbells in a row

What kind of goals do you have?

Today we’re going to talk about the two main types of goals we can have, and how to use them to get results.

Pain vs Pleasure

The first type of goal – and often the strongest one – is a negative goal – that’s when we’re changing something because we’re not happy where we are.

This is a really common reason for people to start training.

Often, new clients get in touch because they’re in a situation that they’re not happy with – either they feel discomfort with something in their life right now, or they feel it’s coming down the tracks.

The most common ones are weight gain, injury or illness, or the fear of any of these happening in the future.

The biggest reason that most people start, especially with training and fitness, is to get out of pain.

New Year Blues

A lot people will experience this in the New Year, for several reasons. The end of the year often prompts us to look back and review, and of course to make the old New Years’ resolutions. Combined with this, January arrives on the back of what is for most people a period of indulgence over the holidays. This is compounded this year, as we’re starting a new decade. The upshot of all this is that a lot of people are gonna be unhappy with how they look, how they feel, and the way they’ve treated their body, over the last month, year, or decade, and will want to make a change.

That’s where gym memberships spike.

 

Positive Goals

The second type of goal is being pulled towards happiness, rather than pushed away from pain.

That’s where we’re happy where we currently are and we want to get even better.

We’re not in a bad place, we’re not in danger of something terrible happening any time soon, but we do want to improve.

This could be building muscle in specific areas, it could be generating more energy at certain times of the day, it could be working towards an event that’s coming down the line, whether that’s a race or a social event.

 

Out of the flying pan vs. lighting a fire

 

An analogy of all this is a burning building.

If you’re inside a burning building all you want to do is get out. Simple.

Fear or desperation will drive you out. You’ll take action. You’ll do something radical to get out of danger.

Once you’re out, and not in pain anymore, this is actually the danger point…

What often happens here is that once the immediate fear subsides, you’ll start to backslide. Being driven from fear will only get you so far. Little by little, the weight will creep back. The energy will flag. The couple of drinks will increase. The takeaways will reappear.

This may sound familiar to you. Being spurred into action out of fear or self-loathing will only get you so far. It might get you through a bootcamp or a crash diet. It won’t keep you going.

What we do here, and what works again and again, is setting positive goals, and then building that habits that get you there, step by step.

This may be a slower path, but I can promise you from experience that it yields immeasurably better results.

Time after time I’ve seen clients achieve results they never would have dreamed of. If you put in the time, effort, and energy in a sustainable way, and then see the positive transformation happen in front of your eyes, do you think you’re turning back?

No way.

It’s a powerful turning point, when you can go from saying “I want to lose belly fat” to “Yeah I’m pretty happy with my figure – I’d love to be able to do more chin ups”. When you’re feeling confident and secure in your habits, you get sustained, predictable results, and you feel in control of eating, drinking and training, it’s pretty easy to set and reach more ambitious goals.

This could be you. I have never had a client that this didn’t work for, if they commit.

 

A word of warning…

 

This what will happen around your social circle if you do get out of that burning building.

You’ll start improving yourself physically, mentally, working on your health, your nutrition, your training.

People will start seeing changes and are going to congratulate you and say “You’re doing great, keep going!”.

However… at a certain point, your success will become threatening, and people are gonna start saying “You’ve taken it a bit too far. You’re getting obsessed. You’re grand as you are”. If you don’t realise what’s happening at that point, which is they’re trying to support their own reality – that they’re not making that much effort to work on themselves – they’re gonna try to tear you down.

This is so that you don’t get too far ahead and make them feel even worse about themselves.

You got to watch when that’s happening, acknowledge why they’re doing what they’re doing and it’s more about them, than it is about you.

There’s a saying that there are two ways to have the tallest building in town: build it yourself, or tear all the other ones down.

 

Take a moment and ask yourself: where you are in this scale? Are you at the point where you’re in pain and you want to get out of it? Or are you comfortable with where you’re at, you know you’re healthy, you know you’re protected against the future, and you just want to improve yourself that bit more?

If you want our help in getting out of pain, and into positivity, get in touch.

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