No sugarcoating it: the road to athletic and personal transformation is long and steep. But you can make the journey sweeter by celebrating your achievements along the way.
Goals and greatness – the themes go hand in hand. Becoming the best version of yourself takes persistence, continuity and a No-Excuses mindset. Goals give you focus and grit as you push through the hard work of building a stronger body and brain. Yet amid the sweating, there’s one thing we sometimes forget to do: celebrate the milestones along the way. Why is it important to respect these occasions?
What do you do when you have finished a training journey and crushed your PB? Do you do a fist pump, a few clap claps and immediately start focusing on your next goal? Or do you take a moment to reflect on your achievement – where you were and where you are now? While it’s true the only way to keep growing is to keep setting new goals, it’s also super critical to applaud what you accomplished as you reach each one. Because, in the end, that is what really keeps you motivated to stay on the long road to transformation.
Respect Your Hard-Working Body
As an athlete, you have set a goal to get in better shape. You are pushing your body hard, maybe harder than you have ever done before. It may be tempting to focus on what you cannot do rather to acknowledge what you can do, but even if you just hit your very first training target, you need to celebrate your body’s achievement. Serve up some respect for the mind and muscle that made it possible. How? First, measure your progress, no matter how small. Start to track your workouts and PBs, and take some photos of yourself along the way to keep a visual journal. Second, stop comparing your body to somebody else’s. Everyone’s journey is unique, and everyone reaches their goals at a different pace. Respect your body’s own progression. Finally, with each milestone, reinforce your promise to take care of your body – to train and feed it well. It deserves no less.
Celebrate Your Commitment
With each workout, you demonstrate a personal commitment to making yourself stronger and better. You are more of a bad-ass than you realize. Every time you push yourself out of bed at the crack of dawn to train, every time you put in a sweat session after a long day at work, every time you force yourself to exercise when you would rather do anything else, you win the fight against procrastination and laziness. That deserves to be celebrated! Most people never achieve this level of dedication, and it is why so many fail to reach their goals. That does not mean there are not weeks when you fall off the workout wagon – we are all guilty of that. Rather, it means you understand that it’s your commitment driving you from one goal to the next. You may pause, but you don’t stop, no matter how long it takes.
Thank the Setbacks, Too
Goal set but not achieved on time? Disappointment is part of life and happens to everyone. Yet we tend to obsess over the 20 percent of times we fail and ignore the 80 percent of times we succeed. We bash ourselves for minor setbacks when actually, they can play an important role in achieving goals if we react to them in a positive way. For starters, you can use moments of failure to think about why you set off on this athletic journey to begin with, what motivated you to say “no” to limits and mediocracy, and to aim for something much better. That should refresh your motivation. You can also choose to learn from failure by examining why you did not hit your target, and what you can change next time in order to make it the time around. Look at it this way: there are a lot of steps along the path to success. Some are wins, some are losses, but they all matter.
If you want to go from strength to strength, you need to keep raising the bar with your goals. All good. Just don’t forget to celebrate each and every victory along the way.
