I’m sure everyone has their own ideal about what qualities a perfect person in their profession looks like. By my own standards, my ideal financial advisor looks lean and fit among other qualities. Over the years I find the clothes in my wardrobe shifting from size S to M. In fact, the M size feels a little tight now…
Have I tried losing weight over the years? Yes. Successful? Clearly not. It boils down to a fundamental problem – lack of urgency. There’s always tomorrow and back then I am a far cry from the other qualities that my ideal advisor should possess so my self talk was that I'll fix it when the rest of the qualities fall in place!
1. We tend to find excuses when the desire is not strong enough
Throughout the attempts to lose weight, I’ll tell myself that I’m going on a no carb diet and then eat carbs again after a short 3-4 days of abstinence. I’d justify my first carb meal after the cleansing period as a cheat day. Somehow, the cheat days became more frequent. There’ll always be new justifications till I faced up that the feeble attempts at dieting had failed and cave in totally.
2. When you are accountable only to yourself, it’s easy to shift the goalpost
In case you haven’t figured out by now, I really dislike the entire process of weight loss. I find it harder than finding clients and doing business. This year, I set a resolution to attain my desired weight. You could have guessed it! My slightly more resolute attempts lasted slightly better than 3-4 days. Thereafter, I still caved in and ended up letting me convince me that ‘a little bit’ of junk food was fine to reward myself for a hard day of work. A little bit grew to eating anything I like because I worked hard. For the matter, I always felt like I can lose weight tomorrow.
3. When you really want something, you will commit resources
Fast forward, it’s October. I’m panicking because there’s 3 months left. As frivolous as I’ve treated weight loss for so many years, I’m serious about it this year. Maybe, I feel I’ve more qualities that my ideal self should have and it’s time to settle the weight issue now. Maybe, it’s because it’s more expensive to change my wardrobe to L than hiring a coach to help me slim down. Yes, I hired a coach. I was given a string of requirements which I’ve all along been trying to do but never succeeded. Eat clean food, stick to low or no sodium food, exercise sessions had to be a minimum of 3 times a week and I had to drink lots of water. It’s surprising but I’ve managed to stick to the regime for 2 weeks and it is still on-going.
4. When the desire is strong, you will persist
During the two weeks, I endured. I fell ill with a bad cough and my body felt like it is down with virus. I even visited the doctor twice. There were countless days I wanted to postpone my gym sessions. Somehow, I stuck to it and did the workouts despite feeling under the weather. I really dread going to the gym. Pushing the body to burn calories felt like pain. Yet, I found myself trudging to the gym and out-doing my past performances even when the sky looked like it was about to downpour and my mind was telling me to use rain as an excuse to slack. I’ve been eating salad bowls and healthy wraps for 2 weeks now. I’m not sure if dieting causes hallucinations but the cravings for my favourite maggie noodles and ice cream seems to grow stronger. My taste buds seem to conjure imaginary flavours in my mouth to tempt me to cheat. Walking along Orchard Road after an awesome presentation, my mind kept telling me I deserve reward food. Yet I found myself inside Toss & Turn digging into expensive salad. It’s unbelievable really that I’m still persisting. No matter how much I really want to relief myself of this torturous exercise, my inner strength kept reminding me that I’m very close to completing the first version of my ideal self.
5. When you have a strong enough ‘WHY’, pain becomes easier to bear
I honestly will not believe I can do this few years ago. Even though the process sounds simple enough. For someone who keeps a hobby food blog, abstaining from all the nice sugary, fried, instagrammable food for the next 3 months is traumatic. Till now, there’s countless self-talk encouraging me that one cheat meal won’t hurt. In a way, I feel like a recovering drug addict in cold turkey. I guard my goal by telling everyone I meet about this diet. I find that publicly declaring your goals help too. Posting my salads on Instagram and making the process fun keeps me going.
Summary
Achieving goals is similar to my struggles with attaining my ideal appearance. A lot of times people will freely declare their wants without regard of whether they really are committed to achieving it. Very often, people easily give up once the going gets tough because the goal doesn’t mean enough to them. The truth about achieving goals is this, it will always be tough because change is always uncomfortable. Habits take 100 days to form.
If you genuinely want to work on a goal, it’s better to get a running partner to hold you accountable and remind you when self-talk convinces you to lower your standards. Temptation to give up will happen and it will test your resolve every other day. It’s effective when you make it expensive to give up on a goal half way. The more vested a person is to a goal, the more he will convince himself he wants it, the more he will persist. For goals to be meaningful, it must have a compelling reason why you want it. I personally think you shouldn’t waste your time on goals you do not really believe in. A lukewarm desire won’t be attained anyway. Ask yourself before you set a goal, why is this important to you?
Have you managed to attain your goal after a hard struggle too? You can also drop me a message to share your story with me.
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Disclaimer: The content created are based on my personal opinions and may not be representative to everyone or any organisation. If you have any doubts or queries pertaining to insurance or investment, please seek professional advice from a trusted adviser in an official setting. You may also reach out to me if you do not have a present adviser using the message box under 'Let's Talk'.
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