Setting Healthy Goals

Still stuck on creating health goals for the year? Perhaps today is the perfect today is the perfect day to think about it. Read my blog for Irish Executives Network below:

Lets start here with you, because that is where you are. Setting healthy goals

Another year, another reason to set ourselves a range of goals that we feel will motivate us to perform better and achieve great things. We come into January so filled with hope and expectation and aspiring to be much better and healthier people for the year to come. But before you start sitting down and mind mapping how to take over the world, let’s start where we are.

We are all coming into the New Year with a set of feelings, and irrespective of where you are coming from, it’s a time to acknowledge those feelings and from here create plans to change or consolidate these. You may think it’s the new diet that will change your figure or it’s your new work ethic that will improve your productivity. And to a certain extent, they will. But the key factor we often miss in all this, the bit that we tend to forget in all these plans, is ‘you’.

Remembering back to when I studied nutrition, I recall the slow realisation that food and nutrients could provide the answer to almost every ill. I felt that if I could just get the largest megaphone, my work would be easy. I’d go out there and tell everyone all about the miraculous qualities of food and that illness, as we know it, would cease to exist.

Yet, what I learnt as I set up my business and started practising, is that fact that the world of nutrition is filled with people, with their individual habits, traits and behaviours. To simply place the same plaster over every individual’s wound would see me failing with many of my clients.

I learnt that I had to come and meet people where they are at, and then take the journey with them. I’d encourage you do the same to yourself at this time of year. So as you sit down and think about the year ahead, meet yourself where you are.

What do I really need this year to perform at my best, and be the person I’d like to be? And from here, then think about what support, ingredients, relationships and feelings you need to get yourself there?

If you create a massive detailed plan for the year (with weight loss goals and pain reduction deadlines and energy boosting projects) and as you go through that process you feel energised and alive, then go with that.

If you carry out this process and feel exhausted and worn out at the thought of it, then put it to one side and create something that feels better.

And from this place, where you are, you can start to create something that suits just you. So as the year goes on, as deadlines come and go and life throws us highs and throws us lows, we will always be able to go back to the one constant support for ourselves, ‘you’.