I was a stop-start, intermittent runner for 15 years. I’d start a training programme and stop a few weeks later having missed most of my sessions. Or I’d sign up for a run and overtrain. Or not train at all. The pattern was consistent in its inconsistency. Building a running habit felt impossible. I was exhausted with never completing what I set out to do. Each time I promised myself it would be different. It wasn’t. It was exactly the same.

Missed goals aren’t character flaws. There’s zero benefit in blaming your personality. Goals get abandoned, moments feel like they’ve passed, and whatever happened gets stored as a personal failing. It isn’t. There can be many reasons, none of them are personality based.

Review your last goal

Take the last goal that didn’t go as you’d hoped. Did you create a plan? Did you stick to it? What got in the way? Were you realistic or over ambitious? Maybe it was too easy. Or you realised you hadn’t thought it through. Whatever your answer, don’t spiral into blaming yourself. You are simply becoming aware of where you got derailed. The more honest and matter of fact you can be, the better.

Reassess and Reset

Even if you have managed to stick to the plan, there’s no harm in reassessing your goals and possibly resetting them based on how you found them. Although I now run every day and have run multiple events from 5K to marathon, I still get it wrong. Usually, I’m overambitious and increase my training too much all at once and get injured.

When I considered why this was, I realised it was how I was approaching my training. I cancelled my CrossFit membership until I could go consistently 2-3 times per week. My job meant that I couldn’t be reliably consistent. The problem wasn’t CrossFit. It was fitting it around my life.

What patterns can you spot in how you approach your goals and what could you change to increase your likelihood of success?

How long does a habit take to create?

No-one really knows. There are lots of opinions and studies, with scientific research suggesting it takes between 18 and 254 days. 66 days has been found to be a good average for a behaviour to become automatic.

In my experience, it mostly comes down to what the habit is and how you approach building it. I find the more intentional I am the quicker it happens. So, I use visual prompts and reminders to create a habit system that works for me.

Another good approach is the 66-day, three-phase approach that Robin Sharma shares in The 5am Club. Each phase lasts 22 days. For the first 22 days you focus on dismantling your old ways. The second 22 is often the most difficult, it is about forming new neural pathways. This tends to be where the stopping and starting happens, the point where it feels like nothing is working and you are most likely to abandon the plan. The third 22 days are when it starts to come together.

The Compound Effect

One of my favourite habit books is Atomic Habits by James Clear. One of the core concepts is that change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of small things. Small changes that add up to a bigger goal over time. I have found this to be true. But I need a tracker. I need a visual record so I can see how far I’ve come. I like the process of recording and the visual of my progress.

How I changed

After 15 years of stop-start frustration, I found my solution in a year-long challenge. Run the Year requires you to run the number of miles in the year. So, this year you would run 2026 miles. I tried in 2018 and came up short. 2019 was worse. 2020 Covid removed my commute and gave me the time I needed, but I still almost came up short. In August I still had over 1000 miles to run.

My problem? I had no sense of what I needed to do each day. I would miss a day and think it didn’t matter. It didn’t. But consistently missing days was building a cumulative problem.

So, I created a ‘backwards’ tracker. Instead of recording miles completed, I recorded how many miles I still needed to run. Subtracting instead of adding. I kept an eye on the number of days and broke the miles down into a daily target.

When the daily mileage got too high, I split it into two runs and slowed my pace. I hit my goal. And I learned a lot about running and mindset in the process.

Are you chasing the right goal?

My goal was to lose weight. I’d tried various things over several years but never achieved my target. Then someone shared a nutritional programme that was about more than just weight loss, it offered a solution to feeling more energetic. At the time I was feeling lethargic, struggling to concentrate, exhausted. So, I embarked on the programme to feel better, not to lose weight.

The result? I felt amazing, lost over 20 kilograms and reached a weight I’d never thought possible. And I’ve stayed around that weight ever since. Nine years. By focusing on how I was feeling rather than the number on the scale, I achieved something that had previously felt impossible.

What can you do?

Reflect, review and reset. Look at a goal that keeps going wrong. What do you keep trying that isn’t working? Are you chasing the right goal? What could you change? Rip up every previous plan. Start with your outcome and work backwards.

Want help building your system without taking the leap? Book a call and let’s work through what’s holding you back.