When The Problem Is Me...Setting Goals Wisely

As the New Year approaches, we often think of resolutions and goals.  I learned some very important lessons about setting goals in 2014…and I hope you can learn from my mistakes.

Three months ago, I ran my first half-marathon.  When one realizes that I waited until I turned 40 to start my “running life”, it is fair to say that a half-marathon is indeed an accomplishment.  However, the bigger accomplishment (and dirty little secret) was getting past my bad attitude

Why would one take on a half-marathon with a bad attitude?  All I can say is that sometimes a destination isn’t planned, the journey just happened to take us there.  Looking back, I tried pretty hard to fail.  That is an embarrassing problem, considering I specialize in cholesterol management and heart disease prevention.  I am dedicated to helping my patients set and achieve goals for better health on a daily basis.  So why and how did I set myself up for such misery? 

It started with an “impulse buy” (the race registration) – bad decision #1.  In June I was “high on running” after completing my second 5K (and more importantly, my first alongside one of my children).  I was so caught up in the excitement of achieving another goal that I forgot how I got there – with slow, methodical hard work. I forgot that each new distance takes time and training. 

Over the years, I had secretly admired all these happy people on Facebook who finished marathons and half-marathons.  There they were, clutching really cool-looking medals with big, colorful ribbons at the end of their races.  Who wouldn’t want that?  And so I had subconsciously put “half-marathon” on my bucket list.  That late night in June, my euphoric-little-self went online and signed up for that half marathon.  I told myself that I was in the best shape (endurance-wise, anyway) of my life and that I still had months to prepare.  Physicians are arguably pretty good at setting long term goals (surviving medical school and residency, to start) so I falsely believed I had done harder things…I would simply pace my training and run my way to success.  I researched training schedules for beginning half-marathoners, found one that seemed reasonable, and printed it out.  With the pretty pink schedule on my bulletin board, the path to success was before my eyes.

Bad decision #2 went hand-in-hand with #1 - setting a goal too big.  A 10k would have been a natural next step for me, not a half-marathon.  Plus I had a very busy summer planned professionally, setting up a new office.  I also actually enjoy spending time with my family and they had no plans to run a half-marathon.  The training involved in preparing for a half-marathon is much more time-consuming than preparing for a 5K, and I didn’t realistically set aside the time to make that training happen.  It turns out that to prepare to run 13.1 miles, you need to practice, well…running. 

As the weeks slipped by and there were very few successful training days marked off on my pink schedule, I began to feel blue, not pink at all.  I started to beat myself up as I missed training day after training day.  It became a dark cloud over me.  The cloud grew and grew. 

As I started to feel that I might actually fail, I couldn’t own up to the real reason for failing…which was me.  That’s when the excuses started to swirl in my head:

·       I didn’t get enough sleep last night – I’ll be better tomorrow and get a really good run in. 

·       It’s too hot to run without hydration.  I’ll get a water/running belt and try this weekend.

·       I might miss my meeting if I go now.  Maybe I can squeeze a run in later today.

·       I’ve just had too long of a day already.  I’ll get up early tomorrow.

·       I haven’t seen my kids enough today; it’s not fair to do something selfish like running right now. 

·       My feet are too sore from my new insoles – I’ll need to take it easy this week and then try again. 

·       There aren’t good trails and I don’t know my way around at this conference’s resort.  I’ll make it up when I get home in a couple days. 

By making it about the situations happening “to me”, I was rationalizing that it wasn’t ME that was the problem.  They weren’t really excuses.  Excuses are tools to justify your behavior to others.  When I say these things to myself, that’s actually self-doubt that I’m not ready to face.  And that self-doubt was pushing me, step-by-step, down my path to failure.  I actually didn’t believe I could reach my big goal, so every small step was too terrifying to take.  If I had believed I could reach my final goal, then these small steps would have been exciting and invigorating.  As race day got closer, the self-doubt cloud was big, depressing and scary.

That’s when the only good decision I made on the journey came back to save me.  I had signed up to run the race with a friend.  My Best Friend, to be exact.  And that Best Friend took this race seriously and didn’t want to do it alone.  So, I was stuck.  And in this particular story, stuck is good.  A month from race day, I realized not only that I was indeed stuck, but that I couldn’t fail because this wasn’t just about me.  Failure wasn’t an option and TRYING was all the success I needed.  So, I “sucked it up”, as they say.  I stopped procrastinating and decided even if it near-killed me, I needed to finish.  I realized that there was a fair compromise:  I realized I probably could run-walk it and survive.  I set a reasonable pace goal (running slow as molasses but faster than walking).  Then came the hardest part, admitting to my friend that I had goofed up in training.  I explained that I couldn’t keep up with her the entire route, but I was proud to stand by her at the start and couldn’t wait to reunite with her at the finish.  And along the way, I remembered that shiny medal and those happy people that I wanted to be like.  I was back on track.

When I stopped being the problem and started sharing my struggle, the self-doubt cloud got smaller and less gray.  It was still there on race day (literally and figuratively), but the sun kept peeking through during the race and, roughly 2 ½ hours later, I made it across the finish line with a smile on my face!  It was fitting that the sunniest part of the morning was the moment my Best Friend and I posed for our ‘happy people on Facebook holding cool medals with big ribbons picture’.

There are so many reasons I am thankful for my half-marathon journey.  Sharing the day with my BFF is a biggie, of course.  But nearly as precious is the knowledge that I learned the hard way how to better support my patients in goal-setting, and am better at cloud-spotting along the way – before those self-doubt clouds get too big and daunting.  And, maybe I can now better help keep others from being their own biggest problem.

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