Feb 3

Feb 3 Baseball, Wellness Coaching and Goal Setting

Hello beautiful wellness seekers, I'm Liz Moser, and I'm a Mayo Clinic and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach.

Imagine sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game, eating peanuts and sipping sparkling water with lime (well, that’s what I’d be having, anyway!), and you notice that the players are hitting first base runs after base runs. It’s single after single. Over and over again.

What?!

Where are the doubles, triples, and holy cow, you want to see a home run now and again? Hey, these tickets weren’t cheap! 😉

Baseball or any sport is exciting because you don’t know what each play will bring. It's that aspect of spontaneity, variety, and chance that makes a sporting event fun and thrilling.

Sure, but how does this apply to wellness coaching? I'm glad you asked!

Invariably new clients look at my vlogs and (now particularly my vlog on my nightly checklist review of 2021 and my goal review for 2022) and they want to create a nightly checklist similar to mine. They're motivated and enthusiastic. So let the wellness coaching games begin! Woohoo!

However, when we explore their specific goals and the actions they want to load up their checklists with, I usually hear something like, ‘Well, this is kind of a stretch, but I’ll see how it goes.’ Meaning they'll see day by day if they can fit it in or not.

Now I don't espouse perfection; life happens, and sometimes the best choice at the moment is to let your commitment go and pick it up the next day. Sometimes, that's what self-care looks like.

That said, long-term habits and lifestyles are built with repetition, not with spontaneity, variety, and chance, like a baseball game. Furthermore, I like to gently repeat to my clients that every long-term break in their daily habits started with skipping just one day. So, don’t take that decision to miss a day lightly but if you must do it, then do it with self-love and acceptance, and then move forward.

So, back to my baseball analogy. As a wellness coach, I counsel my clients to put 1st base level goals on their checklist instead of home run goals. My definition of a single base run goal is one that feels relatively easy, achievable, and doable every day. These are the goals that build long-term lifestyle changes.

On the other hand, homerun goals are the ones my well-intentioned new clients want on their lists even though they know it’s a stretch, and they don’t expect to achieve it daily. Or maybe they’ll achieve them for a week or a month. These tend to be the goals that create short term unsustainable gains. Think crash diet or cleanses, or intense workouts to ‘get ready’ for a vacation or special event.

In the game of creating new habits and lifestyles, repetition is vital. As a result, it’s in the showing up and achieving the goal even if it's relatively easy, even if you're wondering how such a small effort will do any good in the long run. When you cross it off your nightly checklist, you build your confidence and self-efficacy. Also, as you achieve your small daily goals, your concept of what a small goal is, expands.

Now, in next week’s vlog, I promise, I’m going to review all four-plus years of my nightly checklists so that you can see what used to be my first base goals, and then I'll compare them to my current first base goals.

Because, for instance, 10 min of meditation four years ago took me, more or less, as much effort to accomplish as two twenty-minute sessions today. No matter how counterintuitive that sounds.

Furthermore, keep in mind, I maintained my daily 10-minute practice for over two years. More isn't always better. We don‘t always have to increase the time or intensity of every habit on our lists. Maintenance is just fine.

Health and wellness are about the long game (even longer than baseball!) with cumulative effects. You may see a benefit from your daily first base goals in 1 month, six months, one year, or even two years. It's about slowly building up habit upon habit, action upon action. Results take time. My clients learn how to set reasonable goals and develop long-term habits.

A reasonable goal hits that sweet spot of just a bit of difficulty, however doable every day. And let me reiterate I don't expect perfection from my clients, and you shouldn’t expect it from yourself. Life happens, and we must skip a habit or action upon occasion, but that's different than knowingly putting a huge goal on your list to complete every day when you realize in advance that it may or may not happen.

All that said, unlike baseball, the successful wellness game of single base runs after single base runs, day after day, might be boring as a spectator sport; nevertheless, in the long run, when you’re feeling fit, centered, and energized, basically running circle around every else, are you going to care about boring? I don’t think so?!

I’m Liz Moser, a Mayo Clinic and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and thank you for reading this blog about baseball, wellness, and goal setting. If you have any questions about this blog, health, wellness, or wellness coaching with me, please reach out via my website at lizmosercoaching.com.