Set Limits to Achieve Goals

Lim­its Schmimits

I’ll admit it. I’m a rebel at heart. When peo­ple zig, my instant reac­tion is to zag. As a kid I even rewrote Robert Frosts’ famous poem, The Road Not Taken, to match my own ten­dency: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I bushwhacked.”

My rebel­lious nature trans­lated into hat­ing lim­its. Well, I hated being lim­ited by anybody’s arbitary expec­ta­tions and inter­pre­ta­tions of my abil­i­ties. I actu­ally liked “lim­its” in that they gave me some­thing to strive to break through. I remem­ber as a kid, when told that it wasn’t safe to ride my bike down a steep trail, being obsessed with doing just that until I finally did (never mind that it was the scari­est two min­utes of my life and I lost con­trol of the bike).

I fought all kinds of lim­its with teeth and nails. Bed time, amount of TV I was allowed to watch, and whether or not I was able to go off-campus dur­ing recess. I wasn’t going to let some­one else impose lim­its on me and say what I could or couldn’t do. This atti­tude got me far in some cases. By chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo I gained a rep­u­ta­tion for being cre­ative and a “go-getta”.

The Prob­lem With “No Limits”

There was a rather seri­ous prob­lem fes­ter­ing in my not accept­ing or even set­ting lim­its, though. In not set­ting bound­aries, I unknow­ingly lim­ited my abil­ity to achieve my goals. I wore myself out chas­ing after too much. “No lim­its” can be tir­ing as hell!

I recently fin­ished read­ing the book, The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Lim­it­ing Your­self to the Essential…In Busi­ness and in Life by Leo Labauta. In it Leo explains how set­ting lim­its goes hand in hand with achiev­ing goals. Lim­its allow us to focus our energy on what’s most impor­tant. With­out set­ting lim­its we aren’t able to focus. And with­out focus, we can’t achieve our full potential.

I clearly need to set more lim­its in my life if I really want to suc­ceed in a few key areas.

Lim­its are Impor­tant in a Good Run­ning Program

Set­ting lim­its and hav­ing focus is crit­i­cal in all areas of our lives, espe­cially when it comes to run­ning. If we’ve only run 2 miles at a time, for exam­ple, and want to run a 10-mile race, we can’t expect to set a per­sonal record in a 100 meter dash and run 20 miles dur­ing the same period. We need to focus all of our energy and time on train­ing for the 10-mile run. If we spread our time and energy out over many dif­fer­ent goals, we’ll likely end up achiev­ing none of them.

Para­dox­i­cally, lim­its help us achieve our goals. They help us focus and keep us from spread­ing our­selves too thin. Instead of chas­ing numer­ous dreams, decide exactly what it is you want to achieve and then set lim­its where nec­es­sary to enable you to focus on your goals.

“But there’s so much to do!”

Set­ting lim­its can be dif­fi­cult. We have many impor­tant areas of our life that we can’t ignore. Fam­ily, work, par­ents, fit­ness, nutri­tion, per­sonal growth, chores, bills, and more. How do we decide where to place lim­its with­out suf­fer­ing severe con­se­quences? Well, I can’t answer that for you, but here are some lim­its that I am going to set for myself so I can find the time to con­tinue to run, spend time with fam­ily, and gen­er­ally take care of myself:

• No unsched­uled TV, and only TV when I’ve been very productive.
• No stay­ing up past mid­night, and hope­fully more like 10 or 11 – I’m just not pro­duc­tive enough to war­rant the seri­ous phys­i­cal and emo­tional investment.
• No more than a 15% increase in the dis­tance of my weekly long run or total mileage from week to week.
• Do not accept any new requests for work with­out tak­ing some­thing off of my plate.
• No work email between 7 and 9 PM, and only emer­gen­cies after that.
• No check­ing work voice­mail after I leave work.
• I will cut my run­ning back if it inter­feres with fam­ily time (that’s hard to say, but it’s very impor­tant that run­ning remains a means to an end – a bet­ter me – not the focal point).
• When not trav­el­ing, be at home for at least 3 fam­ily dinners.

Obvi­ously, these are just some of the lim­its I will need to set. There will no doubt need to be new lim­its estab­lished and adjust­ments made to exist­ing ones as I return to work and my sched­ule gets incred­i­bly busy. But if I don’t set lim­its now, I face cer­tain drown­ing upon return­ing to work.

Instead of see­ing lim­its as, well, lim­i­ta­tions, I now real­ize the free­dom they pro­vide me to achieve my goals.

What lim­its have you set, or plan to?

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