A goal properly set is halfway reached.” —Zig Ziglar

It is the start of the new year, and at the gym we will be asking you to complete a Goal Setting Sheet. (If you haven’t gotten a chance to do that, please let me know and I will send you an email to complete one.)

In any process, there is a halfway point. Whether it’s travel or knocking out a marathon, there’s always a halfway point. Simply setting that goal and creating a good action plan puts you at the halfway point to reaching it!

Goal Setting is something that requires a great deal of specificity. Writing down goals, clearly and concisely, with a step-by-step breakdown – it’s the next best thing to having Tony Robbins cheer you on every day! It focuses your attention, increases your motivation to actually start working on your goals, and keeps a living record of how far you’ve come.

This isn’t just an opinion though. Thankfully, science comes to the rescue in the form of Encoding!

Encoding is the vehicle we use to transport our perceptions to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed. Here, we decide what makes the grade for our long term memory storage (a little like the images you choose to back up to the cloud), and also what gets trashed. Writing supercharges that encoding process.

Put simply, when you write something down it has a much greater chance of being remembered.

Second up is the “generation effect” which tells us that we demonstrate better memory for material we’ve generated ourselves than for material we’ve skimmed over.

To add some extra boost to this (you’ve got to love how the brain lets us better ourselves) when you write down your goal, you get two tickets to the “generation effect.” One for when you generate the goal (create a picture in your mind), and the second for when you write it down, as you’re essentially reprocessing or regenerating that image.

In essence, you get a double whammy that really sears the goal into your brain!

So, your task now is to pick goals and choose simple and concise steps to get there. We know that isn’t always easy, so we are here to help you with that process. All you have to do is schedule a complimentary Goal Setting Session (it’s one of your membership perks at Recursive), and we will sit down together to take a look at your goals and how best to reach them!

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