Your Baseline Always Changes.
A client and I met yesterday. She felt discouraged as her health and fitness goals “reset”.
My goal-setting process requires consistency over time.
For example, goals must be met over consecutive weeks or months. We play the long game of fitness. Let’s see four consecutive weeks of a minimum of 150 minutes exercise minutes before moving on to the next goal.
When she missed her goal in week 3 of a 4-week goal, the goal starts over. Back to week 1. This happened yesterday.
Learning Two Things
She thought was now starting from scratch — as if the past 4 months didn’t happen. This is not the case. Why?
Up to this point, her physical activity, exercise intensity and weight loss goals trended in the right direction. Average step counts steadily increased week-to-week over the past 10 weeks and her weight stabilized and began to decrease.
The graphs looked beautiful but lost those lovely patterns.
Although discouraged, I reminded her of two things:
Your baseline always changes
True baselines involve no intervention. Current baseline includes all work to date.
Her true baseline produced very low weekly step count averages
Her current baseline included higher weekly step counts and success meeting various goals.
See the difference? The current baseline includes weeks of success, regular meetings with her coach (me) and a clear strategy for meeting her goals.
Her true baseline did not include those pieces.
You learn something new
Sure, not meeting her goals and living her ideal lifestyle disappointed her. An increase in her work demands conflicted with her time to exercise and meet her goals.
What did we learn? In the face of these environmental challenges, the current health and wellness goals could not be meet. Going off course teaches us that we need to recalibrate and get back on track.
It’s ok to not meet goals, but it not ok to NOT meet goals over consecutive weeks or months. A two week distraction is ok, but no more.
After our meeting, I am confident that she will adjust and get back on track.
