Make Starting SMART, And You'll See Yourself Starting Your Quest As Frequently As You Want To.

In my piece about the power of starting, I promised to share a personal story about how I engaged the power of starting.

After writing that post in May, I didn't quite continue to engage the power of starting here as I thought I would. My quest for the illusion called perfect got in my way of writing the follow-up piece because I hope to have some desirable elements and conditions aligned to ensure I continue to write frequently here.

A little over five weeks after reading the Power of Starting article, I realized I had forgotten the formula that had made starting as frequent as I needed to be.

In 2021, after receiving doctor's orders to make lifestyle changes to get my diagnosis of stage 1 hypertension in check, I needed to find a way to make exercising a more consistent part of my life.

Like most people trying to, I'd gone through the figure-it-out-on-my-own phase, get-a-gym-membership phase, and try-new-exercise-routine phase and none of the things I tried in these different phases stuck. I still struggled to get into the habit of consistently exercising as frequently as I needed to.

By happenstance, I stumbled on James Clear 's Atomic Habit, which was a game-changer for me.

Earlier that year, in March 2021, I started a regular exercise routine. However, I saw very little change when I checked my weight in April (one of the critical things I needed to work on to get my blood pressure within normal range). I was discouraged, and I stopped keeping up with my new routines.

As I read Atomic Habits, I saw that stopping was a wrong move. Every day I didn't take action for my health, I was going to get worse off. With every tiny move I made, I increased my chance of aggregating remarkable results.

After seeing this graph, I decided to start each day with just one objective: to invest in improving my health by 1% every day and evaluate the result of my commitment at the end of the year.

But I needed a system to make my commitment stick; James Clear advised falling in love with systems over goals.

I had set goals in the past and failed to reach them, so I needed a process to encourage me to work towards achieving them. So, I was all for creating a system, and I needed it to be very simple to implement, as it would encourage me to take action for my health more frequently than I was doing.

As I considered my system, the SMART framework came to mind, but mine would differ slightly from the popular SMART mnemonic.

My system would have these five components using the SMART mnemonic. The system would be:

• Simple: Every action I took for my fitness had to be so simple that my 70-year-old self would still be excited to take these actions.
• Measurable: The actions lend themselves to tracking, especially digital monitoring, so I can evaluate the data from the actions.
• Actionable: Each action had to be easy to execute, with nothing that required overthinking. Any action that needed too much work to execute wasn't for me.
• Repeatable: My actions had to be the kind that I could repeat every day until I completed my mission on this side of eternity.
• Time-bound: I must be able to time-box my actions; they must be activities I could block time for on my calendar.

With the components of my system defined, I needed to define three more things that would help my mind understand the purpose of my healthy lifestyle quest.

I need my:

• WHY: why was getting healthy important? I wanted to be present and able to serve the people and things I loved with the best version of myself.
• WHAT: what did I need to do to achieve my why? At the beginning of my journey, I committed to walking 5 miles five times every week.
• HOW: how would I ensure I executed my what? I would keep my what simple, measurable, actionable, repeatable, and time-bound and find ways to keep the process exciting.

The combination of my SMART system and my why-what-how helped me start a fitness lifestyle quest in June 2021 that would completely change my life.

When I started, I didn't know how far I could go, but I was willing to trust the process and give myself to executing the actions I committed to as frequently as I had committed to implementing them.

Three years on:

I've covered over 4,000 miles, which I couldn't have imagined when I started. If I had a vision board, it wouldn't have made it on there.

I got weaned off beta blockers by Q4 2021 and haven't needed them since then.

I lost 20+ kg by Q1 2022, and I've maintained my new weight since then.

The system delivered outsized results beyond what I could imagine or set as a goal.

I started one day and continued to begin again and again every other day after that.

I'm doing that all over again, with writing more frequently on LinkedIn. Join my journey here, start your own, and share the details with me. I promise to support and spur you on.

Find your system, define your why, what, and how, and start keeping faith with your system and motivation. You'll engage your quest as frequently as you need to so you can aggregate the results that move you from where you are today to where you need to be tomorrow.