ok ok its late January but IMO this is still acceptable any time up until Waitangi weekend.
Every year since about 2021 I have thought at New Year's, maybe this year won't be quite the dumpster fire that last year was...not a great start so far, between the tragic landslide at Mount Maunganui and the flooding up North. Our hearts and minds go out to everyone who has been affected.
This is a time of goals and goal setting; I am going to use this as a kicking off point to look at goal setting from some different perspectives. The goals of a bariatric journey are the direction in which you are travelling, and the habits you form are what gets you there. (well technically the surgery gets you there, but the habits keep you there...the metaphor is getting wrecked now).
This is usually the period where the New Year's resolutions are falling apart a bit. Here is the first "habit" - abandon black and white thinking. A well constructed goal will help with this but think about success in shades of grey. My goal was to post here every week this year. Not a well designed goal, so I haven't achieved that. Posting today does give me a bit of a measure of success.
I'm going to post more about what makes for good goals but in general they should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
So my goal of posting every week is specific and measurable, maybe not achievable though as it turns out...definitely relevant and the time bound will be by the end of the year. So to be kind to myself, how many weeks of the year can I achieve this? A better goal might be, post every week, for at least 40 weeks of the year. Then there is a little bit of wiggle room.
Next week: some common goals my patients have and how to re-frame them to be better.
Hei te wā. Ben