There are sweet rewards for reach­ing your goal.  Bet­ter health, more time and money to spend doing the things you like.  There is even more than the reward at the end of the road, there is the road itself.  As oth­ers have said, it’s not only the des­ti­na­tion, but the jour­ney.  The jour­ney, as it turns out, is some­thing you can mea­sure.

For exam­ple, if you have set a tar­get weight for your­self of 110 pounds, and you presently weigh 150 pounds, then the “jour­ney” is to lose forty pounds.  All of this is mea­sur­able:  your present weight, your tar­get weight, and the pounds to lose on the jour­ney there.  Mea­sures can be recorded, com­pared, ana­lyzed, and oth­er­wise used to deter­mine how well (or how poorly) you are mov­ing toward your goal.  Mea­sures can make reach­ing your goals eas­ier and help moti­vate achiev­ing them by break­ing the jour­ney down into smaller seg­ments or sub-goals.

An anal­ogy from Amer­i­can foot­ball illus­trates this.  Each time the offense steps on the field, their main goal is to score a touch­down.  But unless they go for the “hail Mary” to get the touch­down in one long pass play, the team will try to get a series of first-downs.  Each first-down is a seg­ment or sub-goal that moves them at least another ten yards toward their goal of a touchdown.

Sim­i­larly, if you want to lose forty pounds, you will not do so overnight.  Nor likely in a month (nor would it be healthy to do so).  But (with your doctor’s approval) you might be able to lose eight to ten pounds in a month.  Or a smaller seg­ment might be a pound or two in a week.  The point is, a mea­sur­able goal is eas­ier to achieve because it can be bro­ken into seg­ments, one step at a time.

Mea­sures also serve as mile­stone mark­ers.  You know where the halfway point is.  Set it as a mile­stone.  When you achieve the mile­stone, reward your­self.  Good job!  Go out to din­ner and take in a movie, or enjoy a spe­cial week­end.  Maybe buy a new hat or purse or elec­tronic gad­get.  Mile­stones can be any­where along the jour­ney.  Divide the course into quar­ters or thirds or what­ever, and when you suc­cess­fully reach each mile­stone, celebrate!

The Dia­betes Book That Could Save Your Life!