My Quest to Be Better - Part 1

For those of you who follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram, you have likely read bits about My Quest to Be Better. Over the summer, I started My Quest to Be Better. Although I have flatlined, and even regressed, in my efforts over the last few months, I am still committed to My Quest to Be Better.

What does it mean for me to be on My Quest to Be Better though? And why the need for a Quest to Be Better? After all, isn't life busy and complicated enough without also adding in a Quest for anything?

According to all viable data, my life is half over, if not more. I'm happy with my life and what I've accomplished but looking back, I can see clearly where I could have done better with regard to my family, work, health, and overall outlook. This reflection led me to the questions - What is important to me? And how can I BE BETTER and do better for the remainder of my life?

How can I be happier?

How can I make those around me happier?

How can I take better care of others and myself?

How can I ensure that my wife and kids are as happy, safe, and secure as they can be?

How can I be a better friend and relative and show up for others consistently?

How can I live healthier and more sustainably?

How can I be a better version of ME?

I've learned through the process of being human that aiming for BIG GOALS right from the start of a process is a good way to hit a wall really quickly. So I conducted an assessment of my daily habits and idenfied a few things that I knew I could immediately start working on to improve my quality of life and BE BETTER.

The first habit I targeted to improve was moving my body more. Body movement directly impacts all of the mechanics and emotions in life, including energy, longevity, and mental health. Notice that I didn't even make the leap to say "exercise." Yes, as a human, I should be doing some kind of moderate exercise every day. However, life can get busy and you find yourself either sitting in a car running around or sitting at a desk looking at a screen for a majority of the day. So to launch my Quest to Be Better, I decided that moving my body more consistently on a daily basis was a good reasonable start. It should be a given, but according to various sources, Americans get an average of only 4000 to 6000 steps per day - and I knew that I was one of those Americans. My energy was consistently lower than it should be and I would hit a slump in the middle of the afternoon. I initially set my daily steps goal to an average of 9000 steps. After I was able to consistently accomplish that on most days, I increased my goal to 10,000 steps and then 12,000 steps.

Starting with a good, but reasonable, goal gave me the best chance for success. Incrementally increasing my daily steps goals allowed me to build momentum and increase my stamina without becoming disinterested or feeling that achieving my daily steps goal on most days had become too hard to maintain. I admit that this not seem very ambitious. However, since the goal is not to win a race or contest, but instead create healthy daily habits and increase my longevity, I focused on reasonable but increasing daily steps goals.

You may have noticed that I also referred to reaching my daily steps goals on MOST days. Since humans are big advocates of things like perfect attendance awards, we have the inclination to think that progress is all or nothing and that we need to score 100% in order to be successful. However, since life is busy and chaotic, we need to account for variation in schedules, responsibilities, and other things that impact our day. It seemed common sense that life may make reaching my daily steps goal difficult on some days, but allow flexibility to make up for those steps on other days. One day doesn't matter, but the average of many days does. This allows us to create new daily habits through gradual progress. And it was just the amount of grace I needed to give myself to be able to ramp up to an average daily steps goal of 12,000 steps. At no point did getting steps in every day seem insurmountable once I started the process. But for context, if I had set a 12,000 step per day goal from the start, I would have likely burned out quickly. I can't stress how important it is to make gradual and incremental progress when striving to create new daily habits.

A second habit that I wanted to create was to drink more water every day. Like getting in daily steps, I was not drinking nearly enough water. Like daily steps, healthy levels of water consumption can greatly impact your daily quality of life. According to the Mayo Clinic, men should consume an average of 124 ounces or 15.5 cups of water per day and women should consume an average of 92 ounces or 11.5 cups of water daily.

Similar to my approach with daily steps, I gave myself the grace to do the best that I could to reach my water consumption goal each day. I was low on the daily water consumption scale when I started My Quest to Be Better. Even though the daily habit that I wanted to build was to average more than 92 ounces of water each day, I knew it would be a more sustainable and manageable habit if I built up to that level over time. This is exactly what I did.

I've only scratched the surface. Humans are complicated and creating new habits is a process, not an overnight change. Stay tuned for Part 2 on Friday, December 19th for the continuation of My Quest to Be Better.