I'm the only difference between impossible and possible.

I learned a long time ago the importance of setting goals.  Small, large, short term and long term goals.  They all are crucial to success.  Goals give you something to focus on, they pinpoint your destination.  Without a goal we are just aiming ourselves towards an objective with the hopes of coming close to hitting it.  A goal makes the route much more direct.  If our goal is getting from point A to point B, the closest distance between these two points is a straight line.  A goal is what keeps this line straight.  Without the goal we end up making a lot of unnecessary turns to get where we are going.  Yes we can still get there but it may take longer and on a longer journey it's easier to loose hope and turnaround and go home.  

I started this journey with two main long term goals, all round improvement in fitness and weight loss.  Throughout this journey I have made many short terms goals as well, focus on food, run more often, stick to my daily point allowance, add additional time to my daily workout, show up to class everyday, just to name a few.  It is because of each of these two different types of goals that I have found and continue to find success.  What I have tried to focus on is keeping my eye on the prize of my long term goal, overall fitness.  But it is these short terms goals that keep me in check.  Yes I want to get in better shape, but how do I get there?  Without the short term goals the end is too far away, it's overwhelmingly far away.  Starting this journey several months ago, I could not even see the finish line, in fact it was so far away I was not sure it existed.  I wanted it to exist but fear of the unknown and fear of hard work made it seem very far away.  As I thought of the finish line, I tried to think about what ways would help me get there.  Baby steps, one baby step at a time.  Daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, all of these baby steps compounded equal large steps closer to the ultimate goal.  It's a process and take time, a lot of time.  Sometimes it's hard to stay focused on the long term goals because we are so slowly coming up on the finish line.  The key is to start with smaller goals first.  When I was in boot camp for the Marines I so clearly remember them telling us to not think any farther in the future then your next meal, or the next Sunday.  "Chow to chow, Sunday to Sunday".  13 weeks of boot camp is painfully long and tedious.  The first week there thinking about how hard the remaining weeks were going to be was too much to deal with.  There were too many open possibilities ahead where life was just going to be awful.  After breakfast, don't think about anything else except lunch.  That is only 4-5 hours to try and process not 13 weeks.  I can deal with 4-5 hours of something, it's the much larger picture that is overwhelming.  The exact same applies to goals.  If little Johnny makes a goal of losing 20 pounds, and after six weeks he has only lost three pounds there is a chance that he might get discouraged and lose hope, possibly give up.  Yes, its great that Johnny make a goal to lose weight, but equally important to this long term goal are his short term goals.  With the 20 pound weight loss in mind, also make a goal to lose 1/2 pound in a week, or two pounds in a month.  These are much more achievable goals with immediate results, and it is because of the minor successes that you may feel even more focused as the weeks go by.  

We are a people who thrive off immediate satisfaction.  Because of this we stop caring or get bored very easily if we do not find this kind of satisfaction as quickly as we feel we should.  I find that because of short term goals, we still get this satisfaction that we are craving, and because of this short term satisfaction we are able to find ways to keep focus on our long term goals.  Make a goal, write it down, make it happen, repeat over and over and over again.