Achievable Goals

This week I got to thinking about achievable goals. As many of you know my husband Sam and I have been trying to conceive for a few years now and finally our fertility journey has brought us to IVF. Speaking with our IVF doctor for the first time revealed the importance of achieving a certain weight in order to move forward. (For out patient procedures, a recipient's bmi must be below a certain number for anaesthesia, and mine wasn't!)

Well if that wasn't enough motivation for me to finally make some changes! I got to work and managed to shed 22 lbs in time for our anticipated start date, or so I thought.

We learned that actually the doctor had miscalculated and in fact I needed to lose 5 more lbs to begin. That would mean 5 lbs in 3 weeks. Though I'd been steadily losing 1 lb a week, this was asking for more.

So, after I cried, I seemingly accepted my new goal. Suddenly though I found myself choosing larger portions again and saying yes to the extra drink or snack. Fast forward 2 weeks and the scale wasn't budging. Shocker. I realized that in response to the pressure to achieve this new accelerated goal, I had unconsciously unlocked a voice in the back of my mind telling me "why bother, it wasn't going to happen anyway".

Whether or not that was true, perhaps I could have simply made some adjustments, but the way I saw it, I had taken an achievable goal and turned it into something that felt beyond me. I had gone from motivated and thriving on my success to feeling discouraged and beat. That pressure to speed things up turned my very achievable goal into something less accessible, triggering the "f**k it" response. You know, the one that can sabotage even our deepest desires from actualizing.

So I took the pressure off. I decided it would be okay to wait another cycle to start. To lose 5 lbs in 6 weeks. Way more achievable!

And so I wanted to share this with you, because I wondered, how many of us push things off, or sabotage ourselves because we're creating goals that are a bigger stretch than we can wrap our motivation around? What if we took those desires and the pressure off by giving ourselves smaller, more spacious and achievable goals along the way? I wonder if it would work for you like it worked for me.

Let me know if this speaks to you. How might you set yourself up better for success? What exciting things might you start, or finish, if you made your goals more achievable?