Within this last week I have started a workout program, but before this program began they asked us three questions; what are your values? Goals? and your why? Over the last week I’ve been spending a lot of time going over all of this both in my head and out loud with a few people. Overtime these things are discussed I manage to go a little bit further with everything.

What are your values?

This program references the Demartini Hierarchy of Values. These include spiritual, mental, work, family, finance, social, and physical. We were asked to pick our top 3 values. Mine were my family, I bundled physical and mental health because I believe they function as one and school.

Your Goals.

After we had established our values we were then asked to establish our goals. In this case it was our fitness goals over the next 12 months. My goals are to feel more energized and be able to do more after these first 6 weeks. Then by the end of 12 months I want to be able to share clothes with my friends and my mom. As silly as that sounds, something like that would mean the most to me because never in my life have I ever been able to share things with anybody. It has always been “thanks for the offer but it will never fit. It will be too small.” Eventually, I want to get to the point where it’ll be “thanks for letting me borrow it right now even though I’m swimming in it.”

What comes after the goals is the key thing that really got me thinking. How do your goals impact your life? When you came up with a reason you were then asked to come up with a secondary reason, a tertiary, and so forth. So here we go: If I meet my goal and lose 20 pounds in 6 weeks I will be more energized. If I am more energized it will allow me to do more with other people. By being able to do more I will be more confident and not want to sit on the sidelines because I am afraid that I won’t be able to do it. I am going to be committed to things because I won’t be afraid of the failure anymore or the embarrassment of not being able to do something. I am going to want more and strive for more. By being more confident in the things that I can do, I will be improving my mental health because I won’t be inside beating myself up. Instead, I will be telling myself you can do this and you got this, you’ve done it before you can do it again. Right there in no more than 2 minutes I was able to hammer out 7 reasons as to how my goal will impact my life and I promise the more I keep thinking on this the more I will come up with.

Your why.

What is your motivation? Why do you do this? My motivation is my daughter. I want to be better for her and to be able to run around with her without losing my breathe in a matter of minutes. I want show her that living a healthy lifestyle is easy and can be done. And my motivation easily brought everything full circle for me because it linked right back to my values, right back to the beginning. I truly believe that if your why doesn’t touch your values in some way then you’re doing something wrong.

Take a moment to stop and think. What are your values? Your goals and how do they impact your life? Your why?