Goal Setting for Health

Goal Setting can be a very powerful tool for your health. Goal Setting is not something that acts alone to bring you great health but instead is a willing partner for your overall health program.

My next statement is provocative, unfair and may not be totally true, however, it is an important statement to consider if you are embarking on a health program.

Someone is unwell because they have decided to be so.

This decision may not be a conscious one, but on some level the decision has been made and now it needs to be let go of and a new more positive decision made.

Decision

How and why would someone make a decision not to be perfectly healthy. A number of factors could contribute to such a decision. There could be some secondary gain in not being totally healthy or you may have succumbed to a suggestion not to be totally healthy.

Secondary Gain

Some people are unwell because there is some advantage to them for being unhealthy. It may provide them with an excuse for not achieving a result they should have achieved or for not doing something they need to do. It may also provide them with some reward for being sick. This reward may be a reward in terms of attention or it could even be a financial reward.

Suggestion

Suggestion is a very powerful force for shaping our lives and modifying our behaviour, especially when someone is in a vulnerable state. A person may pick up a suggestion regarding their health even if that suggestion is not in their best interests.

The Path Forward - Goal Setting

Goal Setting can help improve your health. The goal or goals you set will vary according to your need. Common goals related to health deal with weight loss and exercise. These can lead on to far more ambitious goals.

Goal Setting for Health Steps

Health is a very wide area and people are at different stages of health and can have health practitioners with different approaches. For this reason the health goal setting steps can vary but the list below is a good starting point:

Discuss your plan to use goal setting to help your health with your health practitioner
Gain the support of those around you
If you can, find others that have used goal setting for health and learn from their experience and motivation
Set your goal. Define the outcome you desire as specifically as possible
Document your goal
Identify any secondary gain you have from not being totally healthy. Determine whether or not you are prepared to give up this secondary gain
Understand how your life will change when you reach your goal
Understand how your life will change as you strive towards your goal
Visualize the perfectly healthy you
Determine the action you need to take to achieve your goal
Develop a program for undertaking and monitoring this action
Constantly remind yourself of the goal
Constantly remind yourself of the benefits of achieving the goal.
Focus on the positives

Develop a Supportive Environment

Sometimes an important step in health is to break the stress cycle . This can be facilitated by using some basic visualization tools and understanding the role of stress in disease. It is also likely to require the support of those around you and a true understanding of the things that could have lead you away from perfect health.

It can also be valuable to learn from others that have used mental techniques or goal setting to support their health goals. A starting point may be to review some goal setting case studies to understand approaches that others have taken to use goal setting to help improve their health.

Tools that can help you:

Download the Goal Achievement Program Checklist

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