Do You Measure Up?

I mean that in the literal sense – when you set a goal, do you measure to see if you are reaching it?

There’s a saying “What get measured gets done”.

When a client comes to me expressing frustration about lack of progress, asking advice about what to change in their nutrition plan, I will usually ask a question –

“What does your nutrition look like now?”

And then ask for their food log.

You see it is impossible to make suggestions without seeing what’s going on currently.

Let’s think about it from an athletic perspective. You like to run 5k races (you’re crazy, but that’s beside the point). You have a goal to run your next 5k in under twenty minutes, and your current best time is 22 minutes. So you want to shave a couple minutes off your time. What would you do? How would you know your training is effective and you are getting faster? You would time yourself periodically to see! If you were getting faster, you more than likely would continue your present training. However if your time was stagnant, or worse yet you were getting slower, you know you need to change something up. Logical, yes?

Or maybe you are business person, and you want to know if your latest direct ad campaign is bringing in customers. You would track the number of responses to the ad to see if it was effective and profitable. If not, changes will be made next time around.

In either situation, you are not going to just leave it to chance and let the chips fall where they may. You are going to measure.

If you have been following my July Mental Toughness Extra Effort Challenge, you may have noticed that I changed things up a little this month. I have been on my present plan for a few weeks, my compliance has been high (this is critical – you can’t accurately measure by 'feeling' you are doing a good job). I've told everyone my goal and asked them to check in with me. I am either to say yes or no. There isn't an inbetween. My goal is no chocolate in July. Each day I can either check it off or not. I can measure how I am doing. Measuring your compliance on a specific task is critical.

If you are training at Cr8 Fitness, I encourage the same approach: Pick a goal that has a measurement you can check off as done. . Detect the trend over a 2-4 week period, and adjust the goal as necessary.