Goals: people love ‘em and people hate ‘em. We love achieving goals. However, most of us don’t like to spend the time required to establish meaningful, practical, specific goals. And when we fall short of the goals we set, we wish we hadn’t bothered in the first place.
Let’s keep this simple. What do you want from your yoga practice? To look better? To feel better? To be healthier? To be more fit? To improve athletic performance? To be proud that you are doing something good for yourself? To enjoy the social aspects of a yoga class? To be impressive in yoga class? Something else?
Then be as specific as you can. Do you have a weight goal? An idea of how you want to look in the mirror? Breathing less hard from stair climbing? Fewer muscle aches from hiking? Fitness: Flexibility, Strength, Coordination, Balance, Agility, Endurance. Appearance of body parts, e.g. muscular arms, firm legs, tight butt? Ability to perform certain yoga poses: style, reps, speed, duration? Plain old medical fitness measurements: lower blood pressure and pulse rate; success on cardiac tests?
Whatever. Just be practical and realistic. And please integrate the goals with your lifestyle, i.e. sports, work, whatever else you have going on. These goals don’t exist in a vacuum.
Then add a timeline and figure out how you are going to measure tangible progress. If you don’t have a method for measuring results, you won’t know if you have achieved your goals.
The above approach works best if you are an obsessive compulsive person like me. If you are more sane than me, then simply establish some general targets in your mind and maintain a general awareness of whether you are getting closer to them over time.
