Goal Setting

If you find yourself overwhelmed by the details, then try to scale back your expectations. Even small steps toward a goal are better than no steps at all.

A personal master plan is much more than investment counseling or life insurance. It anticipates success rather than loss and plans for continued growth -- growth in skills necessary for prosperity and growth in realizing your own full potential.

No one walks a straight line on the journey to wellness. Most studies of lapses in fitness, nutrition and recovery programs show that you can get back on track more easily if you have scripted the way you will recover.

A basic outline for prevention has existed for more than 30 years, but wellness has had a hard time making real headway. Old habits are hard to break. Our society has a magic bullet fixation, waiting for the next miracle drug to cure us of every ill.

Real change can be hard to come by, and it's tempting to want to start lowering expectations, or throw in the towel on your goal completely. But don't despair, because it's not too late to push the reset button and try tackling those goals again.

Every year you get a brand new year to play with, a clean slate and a great big opportunity to make change. But too often the resolutions don't make it past the first month -- or the first donut!

If you don't believe that your thoughts are creating the life you're living and that you're the principal author of your own destiny, writing your own story every day, you will remain a helpless audience member watching your life go by.

I am not one who normally embraces personal challenges like running a marathon. Marathon running is a cliché goal, right up there with climbing a big mountain or sailing around something. But I am buying into the cliché.

Telling the world (or telling anyone) about your goal too soon delivers an instant ego boost that can actually derail the process before it even gets started.

Your capacity for self-control is not unlike the muscles in your body. Just as well-developed biceps sometimes get tired and jelly-like after a strenuous workout, so, too, does your willpower "muscle."

The message is simple: Don't be afraid to reach out. Be fearless. Sometimes it does take a village to get where you want to go.

Decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

Is it possible that having a supportive partner might have the opposite and paradoxical effect, actually undermining effort and commitment to health and fitness goals over the long haul?

Having someone say to my face that there is no way I can do something has a highly motivational effect on me, and it is the root of some of my greatest accomplishments.

You're a month into your New Year's Resolution, everything is going great and you're putting your friends to shame. Good for you. Your "no excuses" ...

If you made resolutions that were supposed to begin on January 1st and you still haven't successfully started a plan, then start over today.

We know the importance of setting goals, and we know how good it feels when we reach those goals. But at the same time, we need to remember that each step is an important part of the process.

I believe in the small idea, the small thought and the small bite. The only way I've succeeded at anything is to take small steps.

Too many of us lead deferred lives. We don't feel worthy of our dreams until our "work" is done, and since obligations seem omnipresent, our dreams take a back seat and ultimately fade away.