Action Plan for Health Success
Outlining the steps you need to take to achieve your health and weight loss goals is critical to your success. This includes recognizing your big vision, setting a goal, outlining your action plan, identifying your motivators, and seeing the expected outcome.
Your action plan is basically your map for moving from where you are to where you want to be. The steps you’ll be taking. After you’ve outlined your action plan you then need to pick 1-2 steps to focus on. Trying to change too much at once can set you up for failure. So, identify your first two goals or steps to tackle. Now, this is where you need to go deeper and develop what I’ll call “sub-steps”.
It is very important that you are specific about how you are going to make your action plan a reality and I want to give you an example of what I mean.
Here is the example on the Action Plan for Health Success template:
I commit to walking 45 minutes 3 times per week starting tomorrow.
That is a great action plan step and I’m going to use it here as an example of how you need to go further.
- What days of the week are you going to walk?
- What time of day?
- Are you going to have to get up earlier, go to the gym on your way home, or alter your lunch schedule?
- If you have children – are they going with you or do you need to line up a sitter?
- Do you have walking shoes?
Try to think of everything that could impact your decision to walk when the day and time you’ve set rolls around.
Next, grab your schedule. This could be your wall calendar, appointment book, online calendar – whatever you use to manage your time. Add your appointment to walk just like you would anything else.
After you complete the activity check it off your schedule. This is a great visual tool you can use to monitor your progress. If you don’t accomplish a goal, you can look back and see when you accomplished your action step and when you did not. This can help you identify why you weren’t successful and what you need to change to meet your goal. If you intended to walk Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and met that goal Mondays and Wednesdays, but always seemed to miss Friday it’s time to revise your action plan – change the day, change the time, etc.
So, how do you implement what I’ve shared above without getting bogged down in details? When you fill out the Action Plan for Health Success you do not need to create the “sub-steps”. Outline any “sub-steps” after you identify the one or two steps/goals you are going to focus on.
All the best,
Lisa Nelson
