Renal Diet Headquarters Podcast 44– SMART Goals & Willpower

Renal Diet Headquarters Podcast 044 – Smart Goals And Willpower Podcast #44 Released on January 7, 2015

Welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast with your host, Mathea Ford, CEO of Renal Diet Headquarters. This is our weekly talk about how you can succeed with a kidney diet. Brought to you by renaldiethq.com, a website whose mission is to be the most valued resource on kidney disease that people can use to improve their health.

Hello, welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters. Podcast. This is Mathea Ford, and this week we're recording episode number 44 of the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast. You can find the links to this show at www.renaldiethq.com. Okay, this week we're going to talk about making goals and things that are smart and good goals for your resolutions for the new year and talking a little bit about willpower and how it works. So, I want to play a little clip for you from someone who's talking about setting smart goals and how they work and what you need to do to create smart goals. And then I'm going to talk about it.

Smart goal setting for everyone. Setting goals is an important part of running a successful business today. Many businesses like to use the smart goal setting process. By using this process, it's possible to come up with an easy to execute plan. Smart stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. As you can see, this process can help you set realistic and attainable goals. Let's go through these processes in more detail. Specific goals are the best kind of goal to set and much better than just setting a very general goal. When you focus on just one specific goal, it helps everyone involved attain it. This is extremely important for employees. Giving them just one goal to reach at a time helps you to eliminate confusion and obstacles that would otherwise get in the way. Measurable means putting things in place that will help you measure the progress of the goal. This could be adding a completion date to the goal, or it could mean having everyone involved track their progress on a spreadsheet. Being measurable helps both employers and employees stay on track. Attainable means setting a goal which can be reached. While it's perfectly acceptable to set lofty or big goals, it doesn't help anyone if the goal is so big that it doesn't motivate the players.

A business can lose time, money and resources by setting unreachable goals. Plus, it doesn't help with employee morale. Relevancy helps to keep everyone on track by giving them the same core values. When employees care about their place of employment, they're more motivated to help make things happen. One reason why it's important to ensure that your employees are happy. Timely goals keep everyone on track. This is where having a finish date for the goal is important. It's also part of human nature to want to know when this task will end. It makes it easier for someone to work overtime if they know it's only for a month. During the busy season, setting timely goals provides people with a sense of urgency and helps them keep things in perspective. The above steps are those that are put into place by using the Smart system. While many businesses swear by this system, some say that more is needed and that this process is actually missing a step. The missing step involves evaluating your goals at regular intervals. Evaluating is different to measuring your goals. When a goal is evaluated, it's looked at to see if the actions that are being taken are actually working or not.

During the evaluation process, if things are found to not be working, then action steps can be put into place to change the direction of the goal. The evaluation step is not just a one time thing. Good business owners will realize that goals need to be continually evaluated until they've been accomplished. Business goals change for a variety of reasons, including due to the current economy and due to expansions in the business. There may be a huge change in management, and this can be reflected in the goals of the company. A company that has constantly evaluated their goals will have no problem with resetting goals as necessary. Goal setting is part of the growth of any company, and having motivated employees will help these goals become a reality. Use the processes outlined in this article to set goals and to get everyone onto a common ground. Remember not to forget about adding the evaluation step into your new goal setting plan.

So, now I want to remind you that we talked about goals that are specific, that are measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. And those things, I think, are very important to put into a goal because it makes sure that you have something that you can achieve. You're not just setting a general goal of I want to lose weight by the end of the year. You're saying very specifically, I want to lose X pounds, or I want to eat this, or I want to not eat meat this year, or something. You need to evaluate and look at your actions that you're taking, but they're not the same as measuring, like he said. But you need to understand that you can evaluate and change your goal as you need to. So, the things that are working and the things that are not working, you need to change. So, if allowing your family to have chips and snacks and everything in the house when you're trying to lose weight and you seem to find ways to go eat those things, then that's something that you need to evaluate, okay? Is that affecting your ability to do better and to reach your goal and realize, okay, it probably is, and what do I need to do about it?

So, I would encourage you to look at evaluating your goals as well as determining if you're meeting your goals. Goals change as you need them to. So, if your goal was to lose a certain number of pounds, I want to encourage you to think about that and to look at it as also signing up for the actions that you have to take to reach that goal. So, when you think about to do, I want to lose £50, but there's a whole bunch of small steps between you weighing now and what you want to weigh £50 from now. So, if you weigh 200 now, you want to weigh 150. There is a lot of difference between that. It's not like you wake up overnight and you've lost weight. So, even though some pills promise to do that for us, right, but it's the same thing with your diet. It's small changes. It's small actions that lead to the bigger goal, but you don't necessarily think of yourself as having signed up for those smaller actions. A very wise person talked to me about this this week because it really made sense how they were talking about it.

As far as there's little actions involved in changing your diet, there is making a meal plan. There is making decisions on a day to day basis. There's having those snacks available and saying you're going to eat those snacks and not the other snacks. There's having your grocery shopping, going grocery shopping once a week and choosing what you buy. There's maybe even a small step of throwing some things out of your cabinet. So, doing all that involves strength and willpower, but it also involves small steps, and you may not have realized, okay, I want to change my diet, and you want to snap your fingers, and it's done. And really, it is a huge process that you have to go through as a person, as a family, as a group, to get your change done. And setting a smart goal is good. To have an overall smart goal, we're going to have a healthy diet, or we're going to eat this many calories a day or something like that. I want to lower my cholesterol. But realizing that even within that big goal, there are smaller measurable attainable goals, like, I'm going to create a meal plan every week, and I'm going to walk 10,000 steps a day, or I'm going to not have salt at the table.

I'm going to not eat out five times a week. I'm going to only eat out one day a week. I'm going to cook three meals at home. All those things contribute to a bigger goal that you can have that can make even that. It's kind of like puzzle pieces. It all adds up together and makes it a smart decision at the end of the year that you're like, wow, I achieved that goal. Well, I achieved a bunch of small steps that got me there. Okay, so now I want to talk, have the same person who just spoke about the smart goals going to talk about willpower and resolutions. And these are important because I think willpower is something we take for granted, or we think we don't have it, or we think we have a lot of it or whatever. But this talks really good about some of the things that you can do to improve your willpower and how you can change how you think about willpower.

Willpower and Resolutions. Are you the type of person who has a lot of willpower to see a project through to its completion? Or do you feel your willpower is lacking? While many people think that some people have more willpower than others, this is not true. Everyone has the same amount of willpower. What is different is the way you choose to use your willpower. It's easy to blame your lack of willpower for the choices you make and for giving up. How many times have you heard someone say, I just don't have the willpower to follow through? The real question is, are you willing to apply that way of thinking to your own New Year's resolutions this year? Or are you willing to take more decisive action and make your resolutions become a reality? To make your New Year's resolution successful, you must have the right mindset and know that you can actually achieve your resolution. This is one reason why it's so important to set resolutions that are attainable. Wanting to run a marathon in a year may not be possible if the last time you exercised was five years or more ago. Instead, you want to set a resolution that you can envision in your mind and actually see yourself doing by the end of the year. Mind you, no one says your New Year's resolution has to take you the entire year. Your resolution may be to lose £10, and this could be done in two or three months. Try sitting down, closing your eyes, and seeing yourself and your resolution together. If you want to fit into those skinny jeans, picture how you'll look wearing them. Use this tactic each time you feel your motivation lacking, as it can help you refocus and stay on track.

You may also want to create a physical picture board as well. This is great for resolutions involving lifestyle changes. A picture or storyboard allows you to see how far you've come instead of focusing on how far you still have to go. Learning how to increase your willpower is going to be a huge step in helping you successfully reach your resolution this year. To do this, you want to start learning to think in a more positive way. Try to look at the bright side of things instead of the downside. Another good way to improve your mindset is by using positive affirmations. Find ones that hold some kind of meaning for you and pin them up where you can read them on a daily basis.

Also, surround yourself with positive thinking people. This is a great tip, as the positive mindset will eventually rub off on you. I'm sure you've heard about how good things always seem to happen to successful people. You can easily become one of these people by rubbing shoulders with the right people. Shifting your mindset is not going to happen overnight. It'll take a little time and effort on your part to achieve. Just remember that nothing is impossible. If you truly want something to happen work at it and you'll see the success and reap the rewards. Remember that goals may change over the course of time and you can adapt as necessary. Nothing is written in stone, and as long as you get to where you want to be, then that's great. At the end of the year, you want to be able to feel proud that you stuck to your New Year's resolution and got something accomplished.

Okay, so thinking about things in a different way, realizing that you have to start viewing your resolutions and the things that you do in a different way and even picturing them, because that can excite you. He talked about a picture board and that can be an exciting thing. And maybe a picture board of you with your grandchildren or you on a vacation, cruise. Even if you're on dialysis, you can go on a cruise. You can take your dialysis equipment with you. If you're on home dialysis, there's lots of options. So, things are not out of the realm. You just have to ask. That's something that I've been really learning and working on even just in the last couple of weeks. I decided, okay, I'm going to ask for some help with my accounting because I don't like doing it. And when I finally made the decision to change that, it changed my picture board. Because my picture board is that I want to be able to do some things with my family, we want to go on a little vacation or whatever and that is affected by whether or not I can find someone that can really help me with my accounting.

I have help with other things, but all the help that I get doing the things that don't help me create the things that are beneficial to you. That make a good podcast or make good reading on the blog. Or even my recipes that I'm working on. Those things that take me away from that don't help contribute towards the overall goal that I have. But they certainly are necessary to do. And you know that too. You know that you have to do certain things and you have to get them done. Just like you always have to wash your clothes, you always have to do your laundry. Those things, if you don't do them, you don't take out the trash, it piles up and being tax time. I'm really thinking about accounting. So, I wanted to review with you that we're talking about these smart goals and these resolutions. And I have a free guide available and it's going to be in the show notes, but if you go to www. renaldiethq.com/start-best-year-now. So, you can find that at renaldiethq.com/044 will be much easier and then you can just click on it.

If you didn't notice, we changed our theme on our website, it looks a lot smoother and nicer and we're going to change a few other little things just to make it prettier for you. And I did a black eyed peas recipe last week and it went over really well. I got some excited comments back. Don't forget to sign up for the newsletter if you want to get that recipe every week. If you're interested in getting recipes instead of having to come to the blog, you can just get the recipe. And this week we are going to have a jello recipe that's pretty interesting and I found it on a forum. I thought it kind of sounded strange, so I decided to make it and it actually is delicious. And then the following week, I have a smoothie and some almond cookies planned for the next couple of weeks and then I need to do some more cooking. So, I want to invite you to join the mailing list and to send me your feedback at [email protected]. Let me know how you're doing, how you like these, what else you want to hear about, and I want to thank you for your time today and tell you to have a good rest of your week.

Thank you.

You've been listening to the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast. Head on over to the website at www.renaldiethq.com/go/email to sign up for our email list and get exciting updates every week on what is happening. Thanks and we will talk to you again next week. Bye.

Send in your questions about all things related to chronic kidney disease to [email protected].