It’s Not Will Power You Need In Order to Succeed … It’s a Plan!

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You’ve been told all your life that you need a huge amount of high octane will power to succeed with your goals. If you want to lose weight successfully, or take up a fitness regime and make it work, then you have to buckle down and work hard, ‘cos it’s gonna be tough. Actually, that’s not the case. I mean, sure, you do need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve … and yes, you do need to work at it … but the whole idea of having to drive yourself into the ground to achieve anything isn’t quite right.

Success plan

The reason most people fail when it comes to trying to achieve their goals is that they don’t have a plan. Part of that plan needs to be the clear vision of what you want to achieve. Part of the plan is making the decision to work steadily towards your goal. And part of the plan (the part that’s usually missing) is that you need to structure your life in such a way that it’s fairly easy to do the right thing.

Change your environment

Let’s say you have a drug habit. It got so bad that you had to go into rehab. Then you came out and went back home. Now … and this is critical … if you slide right back into the same environment that made it easy to be an addict, chances are you’ll end up right back where you were before you had to go into rehab. If you’re right back mixing with addicts and dealers again, of course the chances of you becoming readdicted are high. But … and this is the critical difference … if you steer well clear of that world, you have every chance of staying clean.

The same thing applies if you want to lose weight (okay, fat). If you’re careful to not have the offending foods right in front of you (which you can do by the simple expedient of not buying them anymore), then there’s a damn good chance you won’t eat them. If you make sure you habitually have fresh fruit available, then your attempts to eat healthy snacks goes up markedly. Same applies to exercise – have a few simple pieces of exercise equipment around the house, in plain view, and your chances of sticking to an exercise routine go up immediately.dream, believe, achievedumbbellsSuddenly, you’ll find you don’t need such a huge amount of will power to succeed … you just need to be focused. Make the decision what it is you want to achieve (be very specific about it) … decide how you’re going to go about achieving it … and make it easy to stick to your plan. By that I mean, have the things around you that you will need, and make sure any obstacles to success are missing, gone for ever.

Now it becomes almost easy to stick to the plan. And once you start, and find that you can do this, and you see evidence of that (your sticking to the plan is the evidence) … then you’ll go from strength to strength. Instead of failing, as you might have done again and again in the past, this time you’ll be on course to succeed.

Celebrate your successes!

You want to make success even more of a safe bet? Then every time you do the right thing (do some exercise, go to the gym, eat the right food, whatever), make a big deal of it. Celebrate your success in some way (and it doesn’t matter how little of a success it was). It might be rewarding yourself with something almost meaningless, on the face of it. You might just make a note of in your diary, or stick a little gold star on a calendar, the way you would do for a child, if he or she had done something worthwhile. You don’t have to tell anyone else you’re doing this, by the way, just in case you’re thinking you’d look a fool … it’s nobody’s business anyway, but the main thing is that it is a big deal to you … or it should be.