Today, I just want to briefly expand on something related to my posts on goal setting and my post on activity trackers and goal setting. That is, some day you're not going to reach your goal, for whatever reason. On these days, based on how you view it, it can actually be a hindrance to your motivation, or help to feed it; it's all about how you look at it. I'm here to teach you how to use it to your advantage.

Last week, we talked about confidence, why it's important, and sources of confidence. Today, I tell you  an easy trick to increase your confidence. The easiest way to become more confident is to pretend that you are confident. While I use the term "fake it" in reality it's not fake. It may seem that way starting out, but soon the changes to our confidence are real, and easily achieved.

Do you ever have those days where you just don't feel like exercising? Those days where getting off the couch, or out of bed early, just seems like too much work? You just feel "blah", and even if you did exercise, it probably wouldn't be productive? In this post I'm going to show you how we can utilize a specific cue (i.e. our activity tracker) to elicit positive emotions and confidence, and help you perform to your peak ability and overcome difficulties you may encounter when maintaining exercise.

I spend a lot of time working out with friends, trying to instill in them the passion I have for physical activity and self-improvement. In our training, I will often issue challenges. If they think they can do 10 reps of an exercise, I will tell them to do 15. Not because I want to see them fail; just the opposite, in fact. I want to see them succeed beyond what they believed they could do. Simply by having the belief that they can do more, I am able to help them knock out those last couple of reps. If you tell yourself you can only do 10, you will only do 10. But if you tell yourself you can do more, you can. It’s all about believing in yourself.

To me, belief is the most fundamental building block of action. We can want to do something, we can plan to do something, but if we don’t believe we are capable of doing it, we never will. Who is going to exert time, money, and effort on something they don’t believe they can do? Who is going to continue going when their body is telling them to stop, when their legs and feet hurt, and their lungs are screaming? Those people who, with all of their being, are confident that they are capable of overcoming the obstacle in front of them, and any hindrance they will encounter.

By now, hopefully you’ve read my posts on setting effective goals.

Now, I want to take a moment and discuss how goal-setting relates to activity trackers. Do you have a Fitbit, Jawbone UP, Misfit Shine, or anything similar? Does it tell you that you have to walk 10,000 steps to reach your goal today? Based on everything we learned about setting effective goals, does that seem like a quality goal you should be setting? For the sake of this post, keep in mind the example we came up with the other day.


We have our outcome goal, which is the destination:

     Outcome: I will run the local 5k on January 1st in under 30 minutes.

And we have process goals, which provide us the road map of how to get there.

     Process: I will limit my junk food consumption to once a week on Saturday evenings.

                      I will eat more calories than my daily expenditure to aid recovery and training.

So, last time, we came up with our outcome goal, the ultimate goal we want to achieve. How do we achieve that goal? An effective goal won’t just tell us where we want to go, but how we get there. Just like you wouldn’t set off on a cross-country road trip without a map (or GPS, for the younger generation), you shouldn’t try to make a change to yourself without understanding how, and what it takes, to get there. Process goals act as that road map to tell us how we achieve our ultimate Outcome goal.

So you want to make a change. How do you know where you want to go?

Goals are the fundamental building block of change and self-improvement. As everyone knows, goals tell us where we want to go. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether it’s running a mile or a marathon, setting a goal provides us with a clearly defined thing that we want to achieve. Everyone has some goal they would like to achieve. Let me help you realize your goal.