Life Lessons From Memaw
Last week I talked about Memaw’s favorite movies during the holiday season and using one of the movies–specifically “A Christmas Carol”–can help you achieve your goals. Memaw was very smart–way before her time–and used movies as her inspiration in life. She loved an actor called John Wayne. I grew up loving him too because we saw so many of his movies. He was an actor but he practiced his real life as the characters he played in his movies. One of Memaw’s and I favorite movies of his was “True Grit”. This original movie was made in 1969. Since then, it was remade 2010 with Jeff Bridges. “True Grit” was a movie about a young woman and her passion for finding her father’s killer. There were many obstacles but because of her perseverance and grit, she was able to overcome the issues and bring the killer to justice.
Since the new year, I have talked about how to make resolutions into SMART goals, how you need more than motivation to achieve those goals, and two of the four ways to avoid “Quitter’s Day”, which will be this Friday. Today we are going to talk about the other two ways to achieve your goals–grit and routine. Grit means that there will be many, many obstacles on the journey to achieve your goal and you have to somehow overcome those obstacles. I will give you a few ways of doing that. Finally, routine is wonderful and exactly how our brain operates. If you make a routine to obtain your goal, your brain will like that routine, and you will set up for success.
Even if you make your resolutions into SMART goals, you go through the exercise of making sure your ultimate why to achieve this goal is specific, good and selfish reasons, and you broke down your goal into small steps, the journey to reach this goal is not linear. What I mean is that it is not smooth and straight. It is curvy, hilly, bumpy, muddy, and just overall crappy! If you want to lose weight or eat healthy, you set good intentions. Then it is your birthday or holiday, co-workers bring in your favorite cookies, that endless meeting has donuts that are calling your name, or maybe you are just too damn tired at night to make a healthy dinner. You want to exercise 3 times every week but it is raining in the morning and you can’t find your workout shoes, or the gym closes for remodeling, or that meeting lasted so long, you just want to go home and put your feet up. There is always something that becomes an obstacle.
Nothing in our lives is smooth–why should obtaining a goal be any different? So, the road sucks! Ok, what do we do? We tap into our grit, our perseverance, our disciple, our resilience. Powerful words, but what does that mean? The American Psychological Association Psychology Dictionary says this about grit: (it is) a personality trait characterized by perseverance and passion for achieving long-term goals. Grit entails working strenuously to overcome challenges and maintaining effort and interest over time despite failures, adversities, and plateaus in progress. Recent studies suggest this trait may be more relevant than intelligence in determining a person’s high achievement. For example, grit may be particularly important to accomplishing an especially complex task when there is a strong temptation to give up altogether (https://dictionary.apa.org/grit 2018). It means that we plan ahead, anticipate as many obstacles as we can, and let go of perfection.
For example, let's take “I’m too damn tired to make a healthy dinner.” We all have been there and if your goal is to lose weight or eat healthier, then not making a healthy dinner can derail your goal. So, let’s plan ahead. Let’s anticipate this bump or pothole in this road. People handle this in different ways and you need to find the way that works for you. For example, some people prepare 5 dinner meals on Sunday (it is their day off and have time to prepare dinners for the days they work). Then they put that prepared meal in the microwave or oven when they come home from work and eat their healthy dinner in minutes. Too tired? You just literally put it in the oven. Auto pilot–without thinking. Another example may be to subscribe to meal plans. There are many companies out there that will deliver a week’s worth of meals–no prep on your part. Just put their meals into the oven. For something a little cheaper, you can buy healthy frozen dinners. Buy a variety and put them in your freezer. When you come home, pop it into the oven–again, no thinking and no excess energy. Finally, another idea may be to plan ahead with your partner. Maybe you know that on Wednesday you are going to work late. Could you ask your partner to have dinner ready for that night? Plan ahead as much as you can–it is your dodge of that pothole.
Also, let go of perfection. You’re driving for 13 hours to a work conference. Your long term goal is to drink 1 liter of water every day. You have done the small steps each week and you are finally doing that big goal–drinking all that water. But you realize you can’t drink that much water on the road–you will either have to stop every half hour to go to the bathroom or just not drink any of your water. Does it need to be either or? What if you only drink half a liter of water during your trip? Your body can absorb that so there isn’t that much stopping for bathroom breaks. No, it’s not your full liter that is your real goal but it is better than not drinking any water. Sometimes, you just need to adjust your goal short term and give yourself the win. It’s not cheating, it’s adapting.
In order to plan ahead and adapt, you need your grit. You may not want to plan ahead on your day off or just throw your hands up and not exercise at all. But you need to dig deep, be creative, and remember why this goal was important to you.
Finally, the fourth skill you need to obtain your goals is routine. Routine or auto pilot will help you avoid quitting. We don’t like change. It causes us stress. Our goals mean we want to change but it still causes a lot of stress. Try taking out as much stress in your goals as possible. If my goal is to go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, then my workout clothes, gym shoes, car keys, phone, and wallet are all literally in a pile by my bed. When my alarm goes off, I get up, put on my workout clothes, take my things and drive to the gym. I literally don’t have to think–I just do it.
Or I want to drink a liter of water everyday. I prepared my swell bottle of water and put it in the fridge the night before. In the morning, I just grab it and go. The more you are prepared and make it into a routine, the less stress you encounter. The less “thinking” you do and the more “action” you do, the further you keep going down that road of success.
Knowing why you want your goal, making your goal into small steps, digging into your grit for those bumps in the road, and taking out the stress of your goal by creating a routine will all help you reach your goal.
But there are no guarantees. What if you don’t reach your goal? What if you didn’t start your goal on New Year’s? Is it too late? What if you started your goal but have already given up? What happens now?
We will discuss all of that next week. After all, this journey is not easy. It is not comfortable. It is not stress free. It is hard. Chances are you will quit your goal. But, atlas, all is not lost. I have more tricks to talk about next week. Stay tuned:)
