Keeping on Track

Oprah has been all over the news lately, confessing how she has gotten off track with her health and fitness routine and how she has let herself fall back into old bad habits. She says she is embarrassed. After all, she is a role model to millions of women. She has tons of money to hire personal trainers, chefs, etc. Her everyday message is about our personal power to change. So she really has no excuse, right?

Well, I think this example of personal weakness is very inspiring. This is what I get from Oprah’s experience: Maintaining your weight, living a healthy lifestyle, asserting your control over personal weakness is an everyday process. It doesn’t matter how wealthy you are or how together your life seems. We all have to keep working to reach our highest potential in life. There are no short cuts and the work doesn’t stop.

Most of the time we set goals for ourselves and we are so focused on the end result that we lose sight of the everyday process. We think that our life will somehow be different once we reach that goal…that life will suddenly be perfect and we won’t have to do anymore work. I can’t tell you how wrong I think that world view is. You reach goals and then you make new ones. This is what life is about. If you have put on extra weight, your goal is to take that weight off. But once you reach your goal, do you think that if you stop exercising and go back to eating the way you did before that you will not gain that weight back? It is this perception of reaching some ideal place that keeps us from reaching and maintaining realistic goals and enjoying the process.

In How to Stay Motivated: The Goals Program, motivational speaker and master storyteller Zig Ziglar examines this very issue. At one point he says “so you didn’t reach your goals the first time you tried. So what? Failure is an event – it is not a person!... Failure is the result of the least persistence.” Without clearly defined goals and persistence, you simply can't achieve the success you want!

Also check out Denis Waitley’s Healthy, Wealthy and Wise. This 16 hour program is divided into 3 parts:

Part 1: Healthy: The Ultimate Fitness & Wellness System, How to build a Fat-Burning, Disease-Fighting, Age-Defying Body and Mind (based upon Denis' Olympic mental training experience.)

Part 2: Wealthy: The 12 Secrets of Self-Made Multi-Millionaires; The Richest Man in Babylon and Acres of Diamonds. A banquet of priceless knowledge on capital accumulation and financial independence, both philosophical and practical.

Part 3: Wise: The Psychology of Winning for the 21st Century (recorded live at Caesar's Palace) and a separate recording, The Psychology of Winning for Women, where Denis Waitley is joined by his two Ph.D. daughters, Deborah and Dayna Waitley.

How do you stay on track? We want to know! Share by commenting below.