Set­ting goals is absolutely vital to man­age and opti­mize your dia­betes care and treat­ment.  This sim­ply can­not be over­stated.  Set­ting your goals is not only a mat­ter of decid­ing you’d like a par­tic­u­lar result.  It is a mind-set: what it takes to get there, what you will aim your ener­gies and work toward, with full inten­tion and commitment.

Set­ting goals can improve and ener­gize any area of your life. Set­ting goals works for your edu­ca­tion and career, your finances, per­sonal rela­tion­ships and other long-term life achieve­ments. Every achieve­ment will bring the by-products of sat­is­fac­tion and self-confidence.  The greater the chal­lenge, and the more obsta­cles and set­backs you over­come, the greater the sat­is­fac­tion and your self-confidence will be.

Fail­ure to set goals, on the other hand, will result in the same or likely worse sit­u­a­tion as time goes on. You can­not just hope in luck, or sup­pose that con­tin­u­ing with the same old thing that got you nowhere in the first place will some­how improve all by itself. It won’t.
Think about where your present course will take you in the next year.  Will your dia­betes con­trol be bet­ter or worse?  What about your weight?  What about the effects of dia­betes, the heart dis­ease, the nerve dam­age over the next five years?  Or the next ten years?  Those years will still come, whether you improve your dia­betes con­trol or not.  And then where will you be?

If, how­ever, you set goals to man­age and con­trol your dia­betes, the future need not be so bleak or dark.  It may well be pos­si­ble for you to be health­ier and stronger than you are today.  It depends on your indi­vid­ual sit­u­a­tion of course, but five and ten years from now you very lik­lely could have min­i­mal to no com­pli­ca­tions from dia­betes, and have more time and money to enjoy life with your fam­ily and friends.

I know we all hope and wish for that.  But wishes are not goals, and goals are not wishes.  Goals are not wisps of dreams or of feel­ings or good inten­tions.  Goals are real.  Unlike wishes and dreams, well-constructed goals can change your life.  Think about the dif­fer­ence it will make in your life between con­tin­u­ing as you are, or set­ting and achiev­ing life-changing goals over the next year, five years from now, and ten years from now.

When you have a goal like this, it lends hope and excite­ment to your efforts man­ag­ing your dia­betes. I’ll get into specifics about goal-setting in the next cou­ple of posts.

The Dia­betes Book That Could Save Your Life!