Jan 17, 2019
Have you heard of the phrase progress, not perfection? That is the focus of today’s episode of The Transformation Show. Many of you may have gotten the impression that we feel that setting goals for the New Year are a bad thing. This isn’t true! We think that goal setting is a great idea any time. The difference between resolutions and goal setting is that resolutions are a fix and goal setting is about self-improvement. Think about what you are trying to do, are you trying to fix a problem or improve yourself? If you are trying to improve yourself, we are going to show you why you should strive for progress, not perfection.
Is eating healthy food, working out 3-4 times a week, practicing gratitude, drinking half your weight in water your norm? Or maybe your normal is eating junk food, sitting most of the day, drinking sugary sodas, and feeling low on energy? Both of these are normal for some people. Your normal is the current condition you are in. Goal setting is attempting to create a new normal for yourself. If you aren’t working out 2-3 times per week that is your normal. What are your behaviors and routines and how are you trying to change them? Are you trying to create a new normal for yourself?
Progress is not always a linear progression. You may not get better every week. Some weeks you will lose weight and some weeks you’ll gain. Some weeks you’ll hit the gym every day and some you won’t. Listen to episode 10 about the gap and the gain to help you understand how to measure your progress and have compassion for yourself. If you are interested in making progress toward your goal you can follow these 4 steps:
What are you doing to make progress toward your goal?
Stop using perfection as an excuse for not doing the job. You have to release yourself from the perfection mindset to achieve your goals. Once you see that perfection is actually a negative thing you’ll see that perfection is holding you back from achieving your goals. You have to work at something a long time before it will become perfect. If you are worried about perfection then you’ll never get going in the first place. This is why seeing progress, not perfection is so important. Perfection doesn’t happen overnight, and sometimes it never happens!
So if perfection is not the goal then how do you measure progress? You need to measure the progress of your goals on many different levels, not in just one specific area. You may be making progress but the way that you are measuring isn’t showing how far you have come. If you are trying to make a physical change in your body don’t just look at the scale or how your clothes are fitting. Ask yourself instead, how do you feel? How is your energy level? How is your mood? These deeper questions show the real progress.
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