Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Recognizing your progress

As we enter the new year, we are excited to start fresh! Setting lots of fantastic goals and planning for a bright and empowering year. But before we keep pushing forward, thinking of all the things we want to change, take a moment to reflect on how far you have already come. This exercise is important to set the tone for creating new goals. Instead of thinking about all the things you failed at last year and want to change this year, reflect on all your successes, no matter how small! This will help set a more positive tone for your new goal setting.

Looking Back

First there are different types of progress. When talking about fitness, one can progress physiologically through body composition changes, strength, endurance and so on. This is typically what comes to mind when thinking about progress in fitness. But you can also progress psychologically. Being self-aware about triggers for binge eating, positive self-talk, increased confidence and competence around exercising or developing a new healthy habit like eating breakfast every day.

So, let’s evaluate all types of progress in a positive and proactive way. First you need to look back. See where you started and notice all the strides you have taken.

Ask yourself questions:

• What have you put the most effort into? If you’ve been showing up to the gym, even just a little, it means you have been working on something.
• What are you most proud of from the last few months? Think daily wins, like having breakfast on your busiest morning, making a smart eating decision in a tricky situation, showing up to your workout class even though you had a rough day and really did not want to go. You’ve done something to be proud of, now call it out!

Looking Ahead

Now it is time to plan for what is to come. Think about where you are going. You have already made great strides and to keep moving along it is helpful to plot out your nest moves to ensure continued success.

Again, we can ask ourselves some simple questions to get the creative juices flowing:

• What more would you have liked to accomplish? This is your coulda, woulda, shoulda. Things you wanted to get done but didn’t.
• Now, what next thing can you do to move past what you think you ‘should’ have done, and keep you moving forward? What next step can you take right now to stay on track. Don’t go overboard with this, think of small daily actions that can be performed in a realistic setting.

The next few questions will help you get excited about the future, find your superpower and spot challenges likely to stand in your way and how to overcome them:

• What are you most looking forward to? What are you excited about? What are you ready to tackle?
• Knowing what you are about to work on, what advantages do you think you have that will make progress more likely? Tune into your unique abilities or superpowers that can help you in your efforts. Think strong mindset, lots of support from family and friends, access to a fitness facility, organized and so on.
• Now what things are likely to stand in your way? Consider anything that might prevent your progress. Think illness for yourself or a family member, busy schedule with kids sports or hobbies, snow days/bad weather so kids home and gym closed and so on.
• How can you prepare, right now, to make sure those things don’t get in your way? Take the time to go through each barrier you listed and come up with a game plan for how you plan to prevent them from sabotaging your efforts. How can you avoid obstacles before they happen? Take snow day for example, maybe the kids are in a day care program, and you can opt-in for snow days. Then you have the house to yourself to do a bodyweight online workout or ask your coach for an at home option. Or for kids sports in the evening, maybe you can create a carpool with other parents and take turns driving to free up a few nights to hit the gym or do some meal prep.

Start this year’s journey by reliving last year’s successes. Riding on the high of pride, start planning for another amazing year!