simplerich

The Chinese New Year isn’t for a while yet, but I’m going to stick with the Tiger imagery anyway.

I’m reading The Spark right now, a book that I will review in much more detail later. It will be a weekend post since I agreed to do book reviews on weekend posts. One of the primary themes of the book is that lifestyle changes, whether they be fitness changes, dietary changes, business changes, motivational changes, any kind of personal, internal change, is best made incrementally with a string of small victories building to a larger change. The pyramids aren’t climbed in one step. They’re made up of many steps that are, by themselves doable goals that lead to something magnificent.

So, towards that end 2010’s goals are going to be many, short and medium length goals, that will set up a chain of successes leading to a bigger over all destination of larger success. The advantage is if there is a set-back it’s not a set-back on the huge, overall goal. It’s a set-back on one tiny portion of the goal. That’s not as soul-crushing as blowing a giant goal. As someone who quit smoking 5 times before having one stick I know what it’s like to slip once and blow the whole kit and kaboodle!

When I quit smoking (6/15/2005) I didn’t quit forever. I quit cold-turkey and quit for the rest of the drive home. Then I quit until the following morning. That next morning I quit until lunch. (I didn’t smoke in between those quits, those were just my goals… like getting a first down rather than going for touch down every play.) You can see the pattern. Mentally staring down the barrel of a forever quit was too daunting. I’ve said before I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner and that is still true today, even when I run (Not that I’m a sprinter either as it turns out. I raced a 16 year old a while back at the campgrounds and he beat me like an old rug. I should have tripped him. He’s young. He’d heal!) So I’m going to follow The Spark’s advice and make a chain of small achievable goals.

Just because a goal is small and achievable doesn’t mean it’s a gimme goal. We recently had an Ownership Thinking workshop at my work and someone set forth as our first goal to do something that was not only 70% complete all ready it wasn’t something we could fail on. It was an assignment. There was no challenge to it. It was a gimme goal and it didn’t mean anything when we accomplished it. It was like having every team member get a trophy after a game where nobody kept score. We didn’t care about it as a first step in the Ownership Thinking program because it was as much an accomplishment or challenge as putting on our socks. That’s not what I’m talking about by small goals. (Things improved after that by the way.)

My Goals for 2010 follow, in no particular order:

• Minimum 10 Minutes of cardio every day with no days off. (Yes it’s low, but it’s doable and constant and I will do more most days. Do YOU do this much a day outside of basal movement?)
• Finish SparkPeople’s 28-day bootcamp that starts January 3, 2010.
• Run a 5k road race in spring in under 30 minutes.
• Run a 10k road race in the fall. (Time to be determined when I know what’s reasonable)
• Make at least two positive blog posts a week in any of the three blogs I’m currently maintaining. (simplerich.com, simplerunner, and my fitness blog over on SparkPeople.)
• Hit and maintain a healthy BMI by February and keep it through the year. (BMI = Body Mass Index)

You’ll notice an absence or work related goals on there. That’s no entirely an accident. I’ve asked my managers, I have 11 of them now rather than 8. I got three more stores to manage last week. I’ve asked them to get me a list of their goals for the month and year. I’ve also asked them to let me know what areas we as a company most need improvement, what areas I can help them the most, and what they would do if a) They owned their store and what they would change on the first day it was theirs, and b) what they would change tomorrow if there were no rule or policy against it. I’m going to use these to formulate my goals this year. It’s going to be a somewhat bottom up approach to managing this year, but I’m going to try it and see what happens. I’ll still be their manager obviously, but I’m definitely not going to be the only one driving this ship this year. I’ve got to do my job differently than the way I have been. I’ve got too many stores for me to continue doing it the way I was doing it. I finally realized the reason I was so burning out was that I was trying to manage the 8 stores I had the same way I was doing things when I had 5 stores and it was just too overwhelming. Then add to it the insane policy changes and I’m not alone in thinking they’re insane but there you have it… Anyway. Things had to change.

So, my goals that you see here are mostly about me and my fitness. My assumption is, if I take care of those things that work will take care of itself. That’s not as sloughing off work as it sounds. I just believe that I need these things to get me out of the death spiral I was in most of last year with work when I focused on work more than anything else and it wasn’t a healthy balance at all. By the end of the year I would have said “Thank you” if I’d lost my job. I’d have handed my boss the keys and hugged him in appreciation. I would have changed my phone number and never missed those calls again. That is NOT a healthy place for someone to be who is as high up as I am in the company. Attitudes are contagious and it was exhausting to try and be upbeat and positive when all I wanted to do was go home and lay under the covers and hope it all would just go away. I don’t feel like that now. But I did.

So, by focusing outside the spiral, by taking my eyes off the thing that was making me crazy I’m going to work on non-work goals as a primary focus and let work be my job again for a while and not my life. Because you know… as lives go… it wasn’t terribly rewarding there for a while. I think it will be better now that I’m remembering it’s a job, not a wife or husband. It’s a career, not the way I define who I am. I’m not my job. That’s I guess my only work related goal in 2010. Remember that my job is not me.

You’re wondering what this has to do with Tigers.  Tiger’s symbolically are representative of Power, Generosity, Illumination, and Energy and my goal in 2010 is to exemplify as many of those as I can in my personal and work life. To me personally the tiger is all about movement, and the energy of a coiled spring or the pent energy of a crouching tiger about to unfold into a long, lithe orange and black missile aimed at something. Their muscles ripple under their coat as they run and their eyes are fixed on their prize as they tear across the landscape. 2010 I want to have that kind of energy, that kind of feel to it. I envision 2010 as the year I reaffirm myself as interested in myself and developing myself and not just trying to go through the motions.

I started the Couch to 5k running training program a while back (September 12th) with a goal of finishing the program and running my first 5k race in the spring. (Hey Rich! This isn’t your running blog, wrong place! Bear with me. I’m getting to it OK?) This week I’m on the last week of the program. I had to redo a week and might have done two weeks twice. I’m not sure now. I just know that I’m a run away from completing the plan. I should add that I’m in North Dakota and today instead of eating lunch I ran, my thinking being that one pm it was as warm as it was going to get all day. It was 4° Fahrenheit (–15 C) when I went on my run today and there was a slight wind out of the north. When I finished my run, 40 minutes with the five minute cool down, it was 2°F (-16 C). It was cooling off already.

Why would ANYBODY run in those conditions? Two reasons really. 1) They’re a runner. I saw two other runners out on my run today and B) They have a goal set and they want to make it and will do whatever it takes to make that goal. I’m not always like this, but there are times when I set a goal and for some reason that particular goal sets hooks in my skin and drags me along.

I was manager of a store that made $800/day when I got the store. I was offered a promotion to Area Supervisor but I said I wasn’t ready yet. I had a goal of getting that store to $1000/day, a pretty ambitious increase of 25% (This was a monthly average obviously, a day to day thing was easy to do, weekends were always over $1k/day) A year or so later I was again offered a promotion and again I turned it down, saying, “I haven’t met my goal yet. When I have then I will promote up.” I was told at that point by the person making the offer that I would only be offered one more time. Nobody was offered a promotion 4 times. If you say “no” three times they’re done. You’ve dead-ended yourself. Agree with the policy or not I hadn’t met my goal. The third time I was offered a promotion I said I appreciated it and didn’t think that this should count as my third offer, not because they didn’t need me three times, but because they KNEW why I had said “no” the previous times and they had access to my numbers. They KNEW I wasn’t going to say “yes” yet, and if I did… then I’d have failed at my goal and they would know that and I couldn’t do that. I was offered a 4th time and I accepted. I’d gotten my sales where I wanted them and held them there while I waited for a position to open up.  I had a really good crew at the time that made all of it possible.

Today, running in the arctic air I realized I was in pursuit of another of those goals of mine. I was so close to being done with the Couch to 5k program when I came up here to North Dakota and winter hit hard but there was no way I could quit. The hotel has no treadmill, and I hate those anyway. I didn’t want to join a gym when I’m only out here a week or so. That left only two options. Don’t run and quitting now would NOT be good. It’d be too hard to start up again. Or option 2, put on a hat and get out there and put one foot in front of the other.

The importance of goals, even goals that look hard but doable, I take that back, ESPECIALLY goals that look really hard but doable are what make things interesting out there. Those victories are the great ones. Setting a goal that you can’t help but meet, that’s not a victory. That doesn’t make a difference at all. It’s a “gimme” and that’s just a waste of time. But setting those goals that you’re pretty sure you’ll be able to do but it won’t be easy. I think those are the most fun to make and meet.

Oh, and lest you think I meet all my goals. Nope. I haven’t. I don’t brag about the others much. Who would? But just because I don’t meet a goal doesn’t mean I stop. The weeks that I had to do over again on the running program weren’t weeks I was proud of. For some reason I had off weeks. I wasn’t running as good as I should have and I knew if I’d progressed it would have gotten worse and I’d have quit. So, I redid the week. I held myself back… I didn’t socially promote myself so I’d feel good about myself. I knew I didn’t have the base that I needed so I worked until I got it, even though it turned what was supposed to be a 9 week program into a 12.5 Week program doesn’t make it a real victory does it? Yes. It does because my goal was to finish. Not to finish in 9 weeks. So. Day after tomorrow, barring a blizzard I will be tying on my running shoes and pulling on my balaclava for the last run of the Couch to 5k program.

PS: Today’s run was 6.78k (4.2 Miles) I like metric for distance since it makes it look like I’ve run further lol.

PPS: To those of you who run already and laugh at my paltry accomplishment. Pththththt