Achieve Your Goals in 10 Steps

The most important step you can make when deciding to change your lifestyle and enter a life-long program of leanness, fitness, good eating practices and wellness is to first spend a few minutes clearly defining your goals. Start by making a list of all the reasons you want to (and need to) change your present lifestyle. Next, list all of your new goals. If your goals are vague or poorly defined you will waste time and energy wandering off in different directions. First, establish your ultimate goal and then break it down into smaller, short-term, easily doable goals. Here are a few points I have found to be very helpful in establishing and achieving goals:

• Make your goals realistic. It's not important who else believes in your goals. What is crucial is that you believe in your goals and that they are realistic. If down deep in your subconscious you don't believe you can do it, it will never happen.
• Redefine your comfort zone. In order to be successful at implementing significant changes in your lifestyle, you must be ready and willing to get out of your present comfort zone and redefine a new comfort zone for yourself. Everybody experiences some difficulty in getting used to new behaviors. I have found that it usually takes six to 12 weeks for most people to move from the uncomfortable to the comfortable zone with exercise and diet programs. By 12 weeks just about everybody wonders how he or she ever got through a day without exercising and eating right. Exercise and eating healthy have now become key parts of their comfort zones. Without them, they feel uncomfortable.
• Make your goals an integral part of your subconscious. There are several techniques to permanently and forever lock your goals into your subconscious-the master control center of your brain. First, every morning write down what you want to accomplish that day. When you write your goals down this reinforces your subconscious and makes it a partner in your quest. Next, you should verbally repeat to yourself several times throughout the day what your goals are for the day. Sometimes it is helpful to record this and play it back to yourself as you move through your day. And lastly, put the final touches to implanting your goals into your subconscious by finishing off your day with visual imaging. As you lie in bed that night, imagine what you want to look and feel like when you have attained your goals. When you use these three techniques every day, your subconscious mind will become your best ally-guaranteeing your success.
• Update your goals constantly. As you reach your goals, pick new goals so that you can continue to be challenged and energized in your quest for life-long leanness, fitness and health. Avoid complacency! 
• Develop self-discipline. I am appalled at the lack of self-discipline that exists in epidemic proportion in our country today. Most people do not want to be disciplined. It is this lack of self-discipline that has played a major role in our ever-increasing problem with obesity, diabetes and other degenerative diseases. The best-laid plans for developing a lean, fit healthy body are worthless without self-discipline. Self-discipline is all about taking control of your mind so that you can control your emotions and desires. It takes time and practice to develop self-discipline but it is well worth the effort because it assures a life of good health and happiness.
• Focus on success. Never think in terms of failure. Focus only on your successes. Make sure all of your self-talk is positive-positive self-image, positive attitudes, positive behaviors and positive expectations. Negative self-talk feeds into your subconscious and results in negative actions. Speak and act like a winner. Winning is internal because winning is a state of mind!
• Avoid negativity. Negative people convey messages that can slowly and insidiously influence the subconscious mind of even the most positive thinking individual and eventually sabotage all their fitness efforts. 
• Learn to think. As Arnold Schwarzenegger has so aptly pointed out, "What you think is what you get." This applies not only to the sport of bodybuilding but all other sports and most of life's activities as well. We must work hard at developing our mental skills and practice them diligently and consistently. We must understand exactly what and why we are doing what we do in the gym, the kitchen and in our daily lives. We must learn all of the exercise techniques and eating strategies we can. We must discover what works for us and what doesn't. This takes time, experience and commitment. Too often, we just move aimlessly through life without ever taking time out to think what we are all about. We must never forget that mental power is essential when we want to succeed at developing muscle power and good health.
• Get the right training partner. A training partner can make all the difference between your success and failure. He or she must be on time, positive, energized, enthusiastic and help encourage you to make maximum progress and stay focused. I have found that there's nothing that will motivate me more to get out of bed and to the gym on time than having a dedicated "psyched" training partner waiting for me to show up no matter what the weather is like or how much sleep I got or how much time I spent at the hospital the night before. A great training partner is absolutely essential for your successful training program.
• Make change a part of every workout. Building muscle and strength is all about change. Your muscles are either growing and getting stronger or doing just the opposite-there is no such thing as maintenance. You must continually use different exercises, different numbers of sets, different rest intervals, different rep speeds and different intensity levels. Change eliminates training plateaus and replaces boredom with enthusiasm. Change energizes workouts, stimulates your muscles to grow and get stronger, and increases your ability to burn body fat for fuel. Change is what resistance training is all about. Change is what will make you lean, fit and healthy.