The blog posts will introduce my experience and learning for past 7 months about course changing of my life. What I have done? Lose 16kg and have a healthier life, find my passion, start a business to pursue my passion, and starting to solve problems instead of ignoring them in workplace.
If you haven't read my first blog about "Build Habits and Enjoy Life Part 1", you can read at: http://agile2lean.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/build-habits-enjoy-life-1.html
This blog post is about how I start a journey about my missions and do something which are "impossible" 7 months ago.
When I was a child, I had a big dream to have my books with my choices. With limited incomes from parents, it has no money left for me buying books after buying essential supplies like food, clothes and stationary. I still remembered my mum bought me a book and parents didn't buy anything for themselves for months. I decided to find a way to earn myself money and buy books for myself. There was a manufacturer who put rubbishes which contained some steel parts at back of factory. I did a hard work to find those and sold that to a recycle center. I earned 2 dollars for first month. But the money was not enough for a book and I felt a very disappointed and try to give it up. But dad told me that, "A book is around 3 dollars. If you continue doing for one more month, you can buy a book." I were happily after that and continued for another month. I bought a book after that. After several months, I had around 20 books with my own choices and rent them to kids around me.
One biggest learning from the childhood experience is that having a specific and measurable goal can help you going to achieve something hard to be done or even sometimes they are impossible.
I have applied same theory into my missions. I will talk about setup measurable goal for healthier:
1. Lose weight so that my BMI (Body Mass Index) back to health one. As my height won't change with my age, I am targeting 70kg util Jan 2015; Now I am at 71kg. At start of of this year, I weighted around 87.5kg.
2. Keep most of blood testing results as now which is healthy and change one of metrics from risk to normal by Jan 2015; Low that metrics to low-risk around July; I just got my blood testing done last week. It is on the track.
3. Back to monthly 10km bush walking between Nov 2014 and Jan 2015. Now I am doing that every quarter. And shorten it gradually.
The specific and measurable goals have helped me overcoming plateau period and keep focusing on what I need to do.
There is a popular SMART goal criteria. Except specific and measurable, a goal needs to be attainable, relevant and Time-bound. Every part of SMART is important.You can read more about SMART from wikipedia. To quantify mission, you definitely need to bound your goals as annual goals or more than one year. If it is not your case, it is not big enough for you to treat it as a mission.
And I want to highlight the "relevant" part for being healthier, it is very important that people should understand longer benefits come from healthier not from fitter or thinner. Healthier is some degree measurable from medical point of view. Routine check and use that as one of goal settings are essential and important. Bush walking is not only physical exercise, but also mind training to me. You may find other activities will help our mind training and please include that in one of your plan. Your mental health will impact everyone around you a lot esp your family.
About attainable part of "SMART", feel free to change your annual goal around first and second months from start and but try to stick to that afterwards. You can't create attainable goal if you never try them before, but you need to stick to them to achieve something outstanding. So allowing yourself to modify it at start is as important as sticking to it after 2 months.
