Goal Achievement – The Fruit And Veg Lessons!

goal achievement - the fruit and veg lessons!What goal achievement lessons are there to be had from fruit and veg? Well, good ones actually, and in this article I’m going to give you two…

When I talk about fruit and veg, you may well be thinking about 5 fruit and veg. That’s because 5 is the amount of pieces of fruit and we are told we should eat every day as part of a healthy diet.

That’s the first goal achievement lesson right there…

Eat 5 pieces of fruit and veg a day as part of a healthy diet. It’s a great example of goal setting. It’s simple and clear. You can visualise it easily. It’s an easy goal to measure. It has a purpose, and it’s sustainable.

I’ve written many times about the pitfalls of setting goals, that if you do it incorrectly it can set you off on the wrong path even before you’ve started. That means you need to get certain things in place when you set the goal in the first place.

As well as the things I’ve just mentioned, you can add that the next step on the path to the goal is fairly easy to work out, I.e. what will your next piece be. Also, the goal even allows flexibility in how you accomplish it.

There’s a problem though.

It’s a problem that brings in the second goal achievement lesson – so do you know what the problem is..?

The problem with the goal of 5 fruit and veg a day, is that it’s just an arbitrary number! The number 5 was settled on as a number that the British public would accept as reasonable!

In Denmark it’s 6, in France it’s 10, and in Japan it’s a whopping 13!

You may well have been under the impression that 5 a day was a cast iron fact, and it maybe a shock to find that in fact it’s effectively a random number.

It seems the low fruit consumption in Britain led policy makers to believe that setting a lower number would make it seem within reach, and that getting 5 a day would be a good step towards a higher figure further down the road.

That’s all well and good, but it means that 5 a day is not your end goal, it’s a smaller goal along the way, and that makes a difference in your planning. What’s not all well and good, is something we can all be guilty of – forming plans around theories and ideas that we simply assume are fact, without actually finding out by doing some research.

You can spin this idea around to use it as a positive though – for example, how many times have other people told you that your goal is silly, or not possible for you?
How many times have you told *yourself* that your goal was out of reach? You may have simply taken it as a fact just because so many people told you, and this turned into something you started to tell yourself.

Just like the idea of 5 fruit and veg, the people putting you down, or you putting yourself down, may be based on no actual evidence at all! It might be that by simply trying to get towards your goal, the truth is that you *can* achieve it!

Don’t get me wrong, eating fruit and veg is a good thing, but the next time you doubt the possibility of achieving your goals, break open a banana and ask yourself whether that doubt has any justification!

By the way,if you want to read more of my ideas about goal achievement, self improvement and personal development, with examples of how I used them in my own life, then check out my book ‘Transform Your Life in 21 Days!’

‘Til Next Time,
Health & Happiness,
Gordon
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