Setting physical goals for oneself is a precarious task. There is a reason that New Year’s resolutions are often the butte of many a joke. It’s because we all know that the majority will be abandoned by February 1st; and for those who haven’t failed at their resolution by February 1st, it’s because they didn’t make a resolution in the first place!

Nevertheless, it is crucial to have physical goals when it comes to wellness. Have you ever known someone who improved his or her health by accident? I have not. People do not just magically become healthy; they do not just start eating healthier, exercising, better, or getting better rest by mere coincidence. They need goals, otherwise, much like Isaac Newton’s physical law that an object at rest tends to stay at rest, we stay in the status quo.

Tip 1: How to Set Physical Goals

So, if we need goals, how do we go about setting them? The answer lies in the avoidance of the common roadblocks that prevent people from setting physical goals. The first roadblock is simply not knowing what a reasonable goal is for yourself. You don’t want to make a bad goal, and you don’t know what a good goal would be, so you just maintain the status quo.

What a good goal looks like is going to vary, depending on where a person is starting in their physical well-being and what they’d like to be able to do, but we can say at least this much: if you don’t exercise, simply starting with a ten or fifteen minute walk a couple times a week is a great goal to start with. In terms of exercise that makes the biggest difference in longevity and physical health, there is probably nothing that makes a bigger difference than changing from a non-walker to regular walker.

Tip 2: Overcoming Fear of Failure When Setting Physical Goals

The second significant roadblock is fear of failure. Setting a goal and failing often feels worse than just not setting a goal at all. However, when we give in to this way of thinking, we aren’t seeing the big picture. If you set a goal and fall short, you’ve actually made some progress. You may not be where you want to be. You may not even be where you think you should be. But, you’ve made progress.

Tip 3: Get Started

So, take a few minutes over lunch, or before bed, and set a physical goal for the week, whether it’s a walk, or replacing one soda with a water, or going to bed fifteen minutes earlier, you are flipping from being an object at rest to an object at motion, and Newton said that once an object is in motion, it tends to stay in motion!