Neuro Journey Challenges
Ever get overwhelmed by all the things you want to get done? I do. All the time. And I’m not talking about things like cleaning the house and changing the oil in my car. I’m talking about the big things. Like passing my next Neurology Boards exam or building up my NeuroCurious audience. Those are very important to me! And honestly, I can get pretty bogged down thinking of how to accomplish my goals.
What’s the solution? Well, it’s different for everyone, but I am happy to share what works for me. In graduate school I studied program monitoring and evaluation. What is that? It is the science of figuring out whether a program or organization is fulfilling its stated mission. As a consultant, I had the opportunity to work on some really big programs and some smaller programs. I found that large or small, the same principles applied: state the mission, delineate the goals to achieve the mission, prioritize the goals, determine measurable benchmarks and set a schedule to reach them. Sounds straightforward, right? LOL, not so much.
To start, allow me to tell you why this is relevant to you on your Neuro Journey. There are different factors at play in good health. Perhaps you are new to wanting to achieve health goals. Perhaps you have good health and now want to push further. Where do you start? What do you take into consideration? How do you go about even figuring out what to do?
Well, I’ll use myself as an example. A few years ago, I was working a ton, commuting hours a day and generally not at my personal best in terms of health. I had no energy even though all I did was sit in my clinic and sit in my car. I wasn’t in a good mental space for my family. I wasn’t sleeping well. The last straw was that my clothes had become uncomfortably tight. That really hurt my vanity!
I did a deep dive into all the things that I wanted to change. I felt totally overwhelmed was paralyzed by how many things needed to happen! Weeks of me doing one thing here, one thing there went by with no improvement in anything. I was even more discouraged.
Then I remembered how much I had enjoyed working as a program evaluator because of the logical, step by step nature of the work. I decided, why not treat myself as an organization and my goals as programs? That’s when the fog began to clear and fun started…
Here’s what I found in my journal from that time:
GOALS:
Find job with shorter commute
Exercise regularly
Improve my nutrition
Sleep better
Lose the extra 10 pounds I have gained
Feel better mentally
Next, I looked at my goals and thought about how they relate to one another. For example, exercising regularly is an important factor when it comes to good sleep. Exercise and improved nutrition are factors in weight management, good sleep and mental health. And having a shorter commute would open up time for me to exercise, spend time with family, rest, etc. which are critical for my mental health. Taking all of this into consideration I prioritized the goals to the top 3 I would start on immediately:
TOP 3 TO START NOW:
Find job with shorter commute
Exercise regularly
Improve my nutrition
The next step was to break each goal into small, measurable objectives. Let’s look at “Improve my nutrition”. I found I was eating junk at lunch so I concentrated on that meal.
Objectives to improve my nutrition:
Research 3 easy, healthy recipes per week
Plan out my lunches for the week
Make a shopping list of ingredients each week
Prepare meals in advance and package for easy grab and go in the morning
The next step was to break each objective into small tasks. Let’s look at “Research 3 easy, healthy recipes per week.”
Tasks for Research easy, healthy recipes:
1. Go online and search for “easy healthy lunch recipes”
2. Pick 3 recipes
3. Print recipes out and put into my Recipe binder
Estimated amount of time I’ll need: 20 minutes
Finally, I set the schedule and wrote it into my calendar.
Saturdays: Spend 20 minutes on recipe research
I repeated the process for each of the objectives that fell under “Improve my nutrition.” The entire exercise took about an hour. This is the end result:
Saturdays: Recipe research for the week (or pick from recipes I already have). Make list of ingredients I need for my recipes. Time: 25 minutes
Sundays: Do grocery shopping. Prep what I can. Time: 1-2 hours
Sunday-Thursday evenings: get together my lunch for the next day. Time: 5-10 minutes
I know it seems like a lot of work. The first time around it does take time and effort. But the process gets easier and easier. The time investment is worth it.
Any particular goals you want to achieve? Tell me about them!
