How Reframing Your Definition of Results Can Help You Achieve Your Goals
When I ask a new client about their goals, they usually tell me they want to lose weight or look better in some way. Often they'll follow up by talking about their physical health, wanting to live longer or decrease their risk of health problems.
Unfortunately - and this probably won’t surprise you - most people who start an exercise program drop out after just a few weeks (with some studies finding that up to 87% of people will abandon their exercise program) and never see those results.
If you want to build lasting, consistent exercise habits that will allow you to achieve your goals (and get many other benefits, as you’ll see later in this article), there is something you can do.
It involves an important mindset shift: change how you think about the “results” of exercise.
The Mindset Shift That Will Make All The Difference
Exercise benefits you in so many ways, but the most important (at least in terms of motivation) is that it provides you with energy and resources to help you live well every day.
To learn more about the many benefits of exercise (some of which might surprise you), check out my article HERE.
Each time you're active, you’re giving yourself a gift: the opportunity to feel good, to have more energy, to be self-confident, to let go of stress, to be a better version of yourself.
Those are incredibly valuable resources, and you can use them to accomplish the most important things in your life, whether that means taking care of your family, achieving success at work or at home, or connecting with others.
More than that, those are emotional benefits that you can feel very quickly.
You should feel good after even just a session or two, and you can notice those positive emotions and feelings every time you move, if you’re paying attention. Those quick, emotional benefits are the most effective for long-term motivation.
Think about it – we do a lot of things because they make us feel good. That’s why we want to eat delicious but maybe not-so-healthy foods, settle into a nice comfortable couch and watch tv, socialize with people we love, and do the other things we enjoy.
Those enjoyable activities light up our brain’s positive emotion and pleasure centers every time we do them. It doesn’t take much motivation to do those things.
If you’re chasing long-term exercise goals that you can’t really feel right away or that you can’t easily see the positive emotional value of, you need a lot of motivation to get off that couch and do your workout.
But if you reframe exercise as a way to make yourself feel good and improve your daily life, instead of as a tool to accomplish an external goal, you’ll want to do it and you’ll be much more likely to stick to it consistently.
And, if you exercise consistently for a long time - guess what? You’ll also get some of those physical results.
The trick is not to focus on them, but instead to acknowledge all the immediate doors that exercise opens for you.
The less you focus on the long-term physical benefits of exercise, like muscle definition and health benefits, especially at the beginning, the more likely you are to achieve them.
How To Realize The Less-Obvious Results Of Exercise
These immediate benefits of exercise can be subtle and easy to overlook, especially with so many other things competing for your attention each day.
You might be in a better mood or feel more self-confident, but you may not notice it or make the connection between that good mood and the physical activity you’ve been doing. A great way to recognize and reinforce the incredible benefits of exercise is to keep a journal.
Each day, record what you do and how you feel. You can include as many or as few aspects of your daily activities as you want, depending on your goals. Here’s an example of the things you could record:
Structured exercise (strength training, walking, etc.)
How active you were throughout the day (how many steps you took)
Eating habits (as much detail as you want)
Sleep (number of hours and quality)
Mood (use a simple 1-10 scale)
Energy level (1-10)
Stress level (1-10)
Productivity (or some other measure of your brain function, you can use a 1-10 scale for this)
Notes
Review your journal or log every few days and try to pick up on patterns. Maybe you see that you sleep better on days when you’re more active, or your mood is better and you’re more productive right after your lunchtime workout.
Use these insights as motivation to keep going and, before you know it, you will have built some solid exercise habits and be well on your way to achieving your long-term goals.
If You Want The Mental Health Results Of Exercise
Here's an article with lots of information on how strength training can improve your mental health and combat depression and anxiety.
If you want a specially designed program you can start right now, check out my Strength Training For Anxiety Program! It has 12 weeks of workouts, each guided by an app so you can do them anytime, anywhere. It also has unique video lessons, worksheets, and more information to help you manage your anxiety while you get strong!