Stay Motivated

Stay Motivated!

How do you do that? Simple -- you set up goals that are preposterously, stupendously easy, things at which you cannot possibly fail. Maybe it's walking for one minute. Maybe it's doing three minutes on a treadmill. Maybe it's watching the first four minutes of a Tae-Bo tape from your living room couch.

Think that's silly? Think again. Remember that your subconscious doesn't evaluate big or little, it only knows success or failure. If you tell yourself you're going to do 30 minutes of aerobics and you only do 27, that's logged as a failure. Couple of those and you lose motivation and are out of the game. But if you tell yourself you're going to do three minutes, and you actually do them, it's recorded as a success. You leave the game a winner.

Now the trick is to do that every day. Why? So you can build up the habit of believing your own word. It does not matter what you do, it matters only that you do it. And that you do "it" successfully. That your subconscious scores it as a 'win.'

So set it up so that it's impossible to fail. Don't worry about it if the goal you set seems ridiculously easy. That's OK -- you'll be upping the bar soon enough. Remember that the prime goal here is not the amount of exercise you do or how "good" you are on your "diet"; the prime goal here is to develop a new habit -- doing what you say you're going to do.

So bypass the "no motivation" blockade by forgetting about the enormity of the goal. As you rack up your successes, your motivation will grow, the pounds will come off, and your body will change.