5 TIPS TO ACHIEVING GOALS WITH BALANCE IN YOUR LIFE:
Let’s face it, most of us in the OCR community do these events as a hobby, and it can sometimes feel like there is a constant struggle to find a balance that works with your life. Obviously, everyone is different and will have different goals and dreams, but we’re sharing a few tips to achieve your yin and yang, while still training for and racing in as many OCR races as you want each year.
1. IDENTIFY & SET GOALS
It’s basic and applies to every facet of life, but start with identifying and setting your personal goals! What works for us is to set our annual goals first and then work backward to our weekly goals. For example, we’ve identified and characterized our goals as follows: Professional, Spiritual, Financial, Health, Social, Family, and Service. Within the seven different categories, we create goals for each and a plan of attack on how we are going to get there.
2. ORGANIZE, PRIORITIZE, & ORGANIZE!
Make a list – like the above – and understand what is important to each in the household so you can incorporate everything which brings happiness into the fold. What are the non-negotiable items that each person has to go each week? Incorporate it into your weekly calendar.
3. MAKE A SCHEDULE
After you have made your goals, created a list, prioritized what is weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.. make a realistic schedule that you feel comfortable following. Notice I don’t say that you can “stick to.” The reason is simple: people don’t like being boxed into something mandatory. By making a schedule you can follow, you allow for flexibility in your schedule while still hitting all of your goals and it will prevent you from ever feeling like you “have” to do something.
Personally, we first schedule what is set in stone: work schedules, church service/mass, volunteer shifts, kids’ practice, school. Next are the things that need to get done but can be more fluid: gym, training, food prepping. Last to go on our schedule is the most fluid items: errands and chores (who doesn’t want these items at the bottom of the priority list, anyway?)
Ask yourself: when and where do these items fit into each week? Is this schedule realistic? Is it too much? Too little? Does it allow me the freedom to achieve all of my responsibilities each week while still listening to my body and working towards my yearly, monthly, and weekly goals?
We plan for what we think we can realistically achieve each day/week based on the real-life responsibilities and other life events/races that are planned. A weekly accountability chart all adds up to meet your monthly and yearly goals. (And, bonus: it’s motivating to be able to mark several things off each day).
We don’t feel bad about having to move a strength workout to Thursday morning and making Wednesday morning a restful one if that’s what our body is craving and telling us to do. Listen to your body. Race week is going to look different as well. We plan out about five weeks at a time using a calendar in Word that we can print. If you’ve got a race, swap it out with whatever workout you had planned. It’s not going to be the end of the world so long as you’re consistent with your training otherwise.
This way of planning allows freedom to accomplish what we want, but not get overly stressed.
4. PRINT IT, POST IT, USE IT
Print the schedule out and put it somewhere you will see it every single day. Ours is on our fridge right next to our junk drawer (shh, don’t tell anyone we have a junk drawer). In this “non-existent” junk drawer is a pen. Every day we do something for the week, it gets marked off. If you need to move things around as life happens, it’s okay. Even if it’s Wednesday and I just did a gym class because my body was too sore/tired/whatever to go as planned on Monday, the gym class gets marked off regardless of the day I completed the task that week. It still counts because I still accomplished the goal of going that week.
5. BE PATIENT
Most importantly, this process doesn’t always happen overnight. This literally took us about six months to get down and figure out. When we both started to get into OCR racing, it always felt like one of us was coming and one of us was going with all the other things we have going on. The only time we were having together was first thing in the morning and last thing at night. This did not help us in our yin and yang. So…. we made a change.
Remember you are the CEO of your own life. Create your life, live it, and love it. Whether you are doing 30 races in a year or three; be positive, adjust your life to create your happiness, and go after it.
If you have any stories, advice or anything you deem OCR-related, please let us know!! This is an OCR Community for the OCR Racer, by OCR Racers and we want you to help cultivate it!