How do you Eat an Elephant?

Today I would like to talk more about resolutions and how we can be more successful at keeping them and not end up in the 88% who never see their resolutions though, or the 48% that don’t even feel they can make it one day!

I am calling this day “How to eat an Elephant”. You’ve all heard this phrase, so you all know the next line right? You eat an elephant, I bite at a time! Here in lies the answer to keeping resolutions. By breaking down the elephant into smaller chunks, maybe I can eat the whole elephant—so much for the diet!

To start this process I want to talk about SMART goal setting. Many of you have heard and used SMART goal setting, but for anyone who needs a refresher SMART stands for: Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Sensitive. SMART!

Now the first step to the elephant process is to actually describe what the elephant is, if you have a herd of elephants you will need to describe each member of that herd. For me I have two elephants I want to eat one bite at a time this year. The first elephant is called “Becoming Healthy” and the second elephant is “living a positive and purposeful life”. Big elephants I know, but I know I can do both and be very successful if I use SMART to get there.

Elephant/Goal 1: Becoming Healthy

SMART Goal Statement: I will lose 30 pounds by October 2010 by dedicating myself to working out with my personal trainer three times a week and go to the gym at least five times every week.

Elephant/Goal 2: Living a positive and purposeful life

SMART Goal Statement: I will write a blog at least 300 days in 2010 and each day find at least one example of how I or those around me are examples of positive and purposeful living.

Specific, Yes – 30 pounds by October and blog at least 300 days

Measureable, Yes – The scale will not lie, and I can count how many posts I make this year

Attainable, Yes – 30 pounds in 10 months means 3 pounds a month, I have a personal trainer that is paid through next October and I belong to a gym 1 mile away. I have started the blog and so far have more things to say and write about then days.

Relevant, Yes – I need and want to feel better and be able to live a long and healthy life and relevant examples of positive and purposeful living will lead to continuous blog postings.

Time – Sensitive, Yes – I have a timeline of October 2010 for the weight and December 31, 2010 for the end of this blog.

I’m done right? Au contraire my PPL followers this is just the beginning. Just because I have cut the elephant down to smaller sizes, I still have not done enough. Challenge yourself folks, how do we cut this up into bite size pieces? Use my example or come up with your own, how do we get these goals down to a size that we can see results NOT in October or December, but maybe Feb, June, August, and November as well?

We do this by taking our SMART statements and going one step deeper. I will give one example, and then I hope you all do the same with your New Year’s Elephants!

First and foremost I need to answer the question “do my goals match my values”? I say yes by tying directly to the values of Achieving and Believing. I Value achieving what I think is impossible and losing weight and dedicating to writing a blog are both achievable. I also value believing in others and myself, so this is a perfect opportunity to live my values by believing that I can do this, all of this. I have the ability, time, energy, thoughts, and gym membership so I truly believe I can do this.

Second, I need to make these elephants a little smaller so I will make my monthly SMART goal to read: I will lose at least 3 pounds every month by increasing the frequency of working out and using my personal trainer at least twice a week. I will measure my results at the end of each month. Now that is one bit at a time.

How about you? What are your elephants? What are your SMART Goals? How do your goals align with your values? What smaller SMART goals can you work on?

More tomorrow!