Create a scaffold for your goals

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If reaching your goal is more than a month away, a really useful strategy to keep you on track is to create a scaffold for your goal, like a builder does when they are building a house. Let’s say that I’m working with you to help you lose 15 kilograms over the next three or four months. I’d say, ‘That’s great. Now, write that goal down and forget about it for now. I want you to focus on what you are going to do in the next month – what does that weight loss look like?’ Then we’d take that monthly goal and break it down further into weekly mini-goals.

I call these ‘weekly waypoints’. When I was a helicopter navigator in the military, if we wanted to get from point A to point B, we’d create a map for how to get there. On this route, we’d program a number of waypoints so that we could check to see if we were on track or not. If we were, great; if we had been blown off track by the wind, we’d adjust the next leg.