Achieving My Goals By Starting Small and Building Bright Habits

When it comes to facing a goal that we’ve always wanted to achieve, it can be overwhelming. Let’s say you’ve always had a New Year’s resolution that always somehow makes its way into being a part of next year’s New Year’s resolution and the following years’ resolutions as well. You might wonder why you cannot seem to cross this resolution of your list despite all your efforts. The thing is, you might have been going about it the wrong way.

Fueled by your passion to finally achieve your resolution at the start of a fresh new year filled with the brim of new possibilities, you might go about it in a way that requires a huge step. Let’s say you want to lose weight, you might start with a session of going to the gym, only to end up getting tired of going to the gym after three or four sessions and holding off this resolution until next year.

The thing is, you’ve started a step that might have been too big for you to handle. A better way to have gone about it is to start small. As I’ve learned from Sun Life’s Build Bright Habits Workshop with Dr. Carter, it’s best to start with a small habit. For losing weight, it’s better to start with 30 seconds a day of maybe stretching. After all, you can’t use the same excuse as not having time to go to the gym since it only takes 30 seconds. For financial goals, you can start saving a small amount of money every day.

Once you’ve gone into the habit of stretching every day for 30 seconds, you’ll probably be driven to do more. You could then go for 5 minutes of light exercise every day. As Dr. Carter emphasizes, it’s all about creating a neural connection in your brain.

I’ve also learned from the workshop that it’s important to know the “why” of your goals. For me, I want to lose weight and why I want to lose weight is because I want to be healthier and more confident as well as because I want to be as physically active as I was in the past when I was still doing sports.

I’ve actually started working towards my goal two months or three months ago and I’ve started with the same mindset, to start small first. At first, I started with some light exercise at night followed by using dumbbells for a few minutes. Eventually, I’ve started using our stationary bike at home.

Recently, I’ve also started to cut down on more sugar. I love milk tea but it contains a lot of sugar so now I blend my own milk tea at home and it’s sugar-free, I drink the tea mixed with fresh milk. Yesterday, I tried a new way to enjoy my favorite tea. I mixed the tea with lemon and orange juice. It’s like my favorite iced tea but without the sugar.

What about you? Do you have a goal you want to achieve? Have you started taking small steps into working towards your goal?