Dr. Peter J. Weiss

Make A Good Plan,  Make Sure It’s Real – and Go For It

Today I’d like you to take a real­ity check.

Now a real­ity check is sim­ply answer­ing the ques­tion, “Is your walk match­ing your talk.” You say you want this, that or the other thing in terms of your fit­ness and well­ness goals, and are you tak­ing actions to achieve this, that and the other thing, or not? Is it real?

To under­stand a real­ity check you’ve got to see the prob­lem it’s designed to solve.  Let’s look at some exam­ples, because prob­lems are eas­ier to spot in other peo­ple. An exam­ple might be (say) your daugh­ter.

Your daugh­ter is talk­ing about get­ting into a top­notch col­lege but she’s not mak­ing very good grades in high school. It doesn’t match. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to sit her down and say, “You’re talk­ing about going to this very exclu­sive school but your grades aren’t going to get you in. What are you going to do about that?”

There is a dis­con­nect between her words and her actions.

Another com­mon exam­ple you might see is at work, where an employee, or maybe many employ­ees, who believes he deserves the next pro­mo­tion.

He “deserves a pro­mo­tion;” he “should get the pro­mo­tion;” he’s “going to get pro­moted” — but his work doesn’t jus­tify a pro­mo­tion.

It only jus­ti­fies him to stay right where he is. So there’s a dis­con­nect between his expec­ta­tions and his goals and his actual per­for­mance.

You’ve prob­a­bly thought of a num­ber of exam­ples of this your­self.

Now my ques­tion is, “How about you?”  How about doing a real­ity check on your­self?  Do your words match your actions?

You’ve artic­u­lated some well­ness goals, some fit­ness goals, and some health goals. Are you actu­ally tak­ing the steps that are going to help you achieve your goals, or not?

Are you just talk­ing about it while doing the same old thing? That’s what you have to decide. You have to decide, is this for real?

And if the answer is “No, it hasn’t been real­ity,” then you need to make it real. You need to decide, “What exactly is it going to take for me to achieve my goals?

And then decide that, “What­ever it is, I’m going to do it!” That’s a real­ity check. If you need some help, per­haps a well­ness pro­fes­sional or a friend can talk with you about the actual steps needed to achieve your goal.

Unless you’ve done this real­ity check, it’s very easy to talk your­self into the idea that your goal is not obtain­able — that you’ve done “all the right stuff” but you haven’t achieved your goal. Well, that’s not real­ity.

If you’ve done all of the right stuff and you haven’t achieved your goal — it wasn’t the right stuff!  You need to do some­thing else. That’s real­ity.

So make a good plan.  Make sure it’s real, and go for it.

You can do it!