client chat with tony
A client of mine (let’s call him Tony) has come to me talking about his health and how we would like my support to make an impact.
My immediate statement was “Awesome”! My next was a question “ What do you specifically want to do about your health?”
This was followed by the response “Good question, I just want to improve my health, get fitter.”
OK, so we can all agree that this is a great goal to have! Improving one's health can have a massive impact. Energy, mindset and general feeling of accomplishment can have you charged up to take on more!
That said can you guess what the challenge is with the goal as it stands right now?
That’s right it is not SPECIFIC enough, meaning it is hard to create habits to get there because we don’t really know where we are going.
We don't have anything to aim at.
So what did we do? We spent time digging in further to understand why this was important to him. Below are a few of the questions I used during the awareness session, you can try them yourself.
Why do you want to have improved health?
Why is this important to you now?
Why are you looking to make these changes relating to your health?
Why have you not reached this goal already?
What does life look like in 12 months if you don't make these changes?
What specifically in tiny detail does success look like to you?
What is the most challenging part for you?
How does the rest of your life look with these amazing changes achieved?
How do you feel knowing you can achieve these goals?
How can you start making change tomorrow?
We then spent time understanding his limiting beliefs to his health and the goals that he had tried to achieve in the past but couldn't get there. We also explored who else might be impacted by him achieving this in his life and how that made him feel.
Here is the kicker, remember his original thought was “I just want to improve my health, get fitter”. Needless to say his kids were a massive part of his vision and him being able to spend time and educate them was really important. He was determined that his beliefs from a young boy about health not being important were not passed on any further. Talk about a powerful reason for change!
In fact the further we got into it, the more we started to uncover other goals for the future relating to spending quality time with the kids and being an awesome dad.
We ended up creating a plan around how he could educate his kids in relation to health, diet and benefits of a positive mind!
But first he wanted to commit his energy not just time to achieving this one!
I won’t go into too much detail about the conversation and what unfolded over the session but I will provide the framework we used for him to progress forward and it looked a little like this.
But remember you need awareness of your beliefs and what matters most to you before starting to head in a direction.
Onto the process. We used SMART goals.
The reason this is so good and why it is perfect for health as it gives you something to aim at, something very clear and puts timeframes in place. The mind loves a deadline to work towards...introduce them as often as you can to stop the procrastination monkey arriving.
Specific: He wanted the ability to run with his kids while they rode their bikes on the weekend once the warmer weather arrived and educate them on the importance of health.
Measurable: He needed to be able to run for 5 kms which takes about 35 mins, so he would dedicate 3 mornings a week to run at 6am before the kids got up to get some base fitness. Starting 1st week of August.
Attainable: Sure is! It’s a reasonable pace and something to work towards, the time works because it’s before his day starts. There were hardly any roadblocks for him once the plan was set other than implementing them.
Relevant: All fits to his vision on health and the other goals which weren't clear at the start which was enjoying time with kids on weekends teaching them the importance of health.
Timebound: 3 mornings a week from August in prep for summer months to ride weekly.
Lastly we looked at some bad habits that had formed in his life and how we would break that to ensure he achieved his goals
He asked for my suggestion to break bad habits, which was this!
Create a bunch of good habits
Design to stop unwanted behaviour. Make them harder to do. Remove prompt or motivation
Replace/swap the habit
In summary we achieved great awareness of what was really important to Tony along with creating fantastic SMART goals with a process to break his current bad habits! The path forward is now set! Thanks again to Tony for being open to share.
I hope he has inspired you to make some change!