Get Your Life Back On Track With These Powerful Strategies

Have you ever made a commitment to do something or investment to start something and then, after you got into it, you realize you have made a big mistake? Or have you had the difficult experience of knowing you are doing something all wrong, but you feel powerless to change it so you just keep going?

This is for you!

Knowing what to do when you have made a wrong turn and need to correct course to get yourself back on track can be very challenging.

I love hiking and one of my favorite, but most formidable things to do is to take off on a trail into the wilderness on my own. Sometimes the trails are not well marked, or there are many trails that branch off from each other. One trail might be a nice 7-8 mile hike while another is 20 miles, so it’s important to be careful about not getting onto the wrong trail. It might be miles later that the mistake is realized…and that’s not easy to fix.

When I first started hiking I spent a lot of time standing at a fork in the trail trying to decipher which way to go, and sometimes I was very wrong, and my legs paid a hefty price for the mistake.

Over time, I learned to download maps to my phone that I could use even without service, which allowed me to consult an overhead view of the hiking area and easily see where I needed to be.

If only we had solutions in life as easy as using a map…

When I decided to write this, I wasn’t sure I was the right person to talk about course correction because I have messed things up in my own life so many times.

But then I thought…well doesn’t that make me the perfect person to talk about it?!?

So, here I am, hopelessly flawed, sharing what I have learned from making many wrong turns and needing to correct course in my own life.

Figure Out Why You Went Off Course

Whether you have made major financial missteps, slipped on your diet for the tenth time, or are just suffering from a general sense that your life is not headed in the right direction, the first step to getting back on track is to figure out where you have gone wrong.

Step back, take some time and figure out where and why you have gone wrong.

These answers may not come easily…and they may not be answers that are easy to hear.

But in order to make real change in your life, you need to understand where the problem is stemming from.

Your mistakes may be rooted in:

• Your mindset
• Limiting beliefs
• Destructive habits
• Environmental influences
• Relationships
• Lack of understanding or education about certain things
• Stress & other challenges

Whatever it is, getting to the bottom of why you have gotten off track is the key to correcting course.

Re-Establish Focus

Once you understand what is causing you to go off course, it’s time to get refocused and start moving forward in the right direction.

This starts with defining your goal and writing it down. This goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Sometimes the reason you got off course to begin with is because your goals have changed, but you never took the time to define that change.

The practice of defining your goals and writing them down gives you direction…a destination at the end of your hike. This is essential to making progress! If you aren’t headed anywhere, why would you work so hard to get there?

Some other strategies for regaining focus include:

Set Yourself Up For Success

So you know what went wrong, and you are taking steps to get re-focused.

Now you need to put some time into setting yourself up to succeed! You need some strategies to keep you on track.

This will help you make progress long-term and keep you from continually needing to go back and start over. These strategies provide you with reminders and accountability, they will also help make it easier to stay on track.

Some ways to set yourself up for success may include:

• Signing up for a course. This can be joining a weightloss program, a learning course, or a class. If there are things you need to learn, do some research and then get signed up!

• Finding an accountability partner. This is someone you will check in with at specific intervals to help keep you moving forward. Sometimes just knowing you will have to own your failure with an accountability partner is enough to keep you on track. Other times, they can help drag you out of your own head and give you perspective.

• Putting reminders or setting alarms on your phone. This is a very simple way to be reminded of when you need to do specific things.

• Post it notes. These little notes posted in key places will give you reminders and inspiration where you need it most…like in the pantry or on the fridge. Maybe you need a post-it note on your bathroom mirror with a reminder that you are enough just the way you are! In your car, on your desk or computer, on the front door…they will be wherever you need them most!

• Removing temptations from your environment. If you are trying to eat healthier, you may need to remove the snack foods from the pantry. If you are cutting out alcohol, you may need to remove all the alcohol from your house. If you are working on cleaning up your finances, you may need to cut up your credit cards and remove the saved cards from Google. You may need to create distance from relationships that are holding you back or dragging you down and work on replacing them with positive relationships. This could mean looking for a viable replacement for of the cash flow generated by your dead-end job.

These strategies may take time and need to happen incrementally…but they need to happen in order to avoid the pitfalls that veer you off course.

Habits

Now you have identified the root causes, refocused, and set yourself up for success. Whew!! That’s no easy task.

To maintain momentum, you need to establish habits that will keep you on course.

Some strategies to create new habits include:

• Setting up routines. Grab your pen and paper and write down five or six things you need to do at certain times or before certain activities. You can also put it in the notes on your phone so you have access to it no matter where you are. Even better is to put your routine in a recurring calendar event that pops up to remind you at a specific time! Seeing all the steps of your routine written down helps you stay on track until it becomes an ingrained habit.

• Setting calendar reminders. This is especiallly important when you are changing the time that you do something, like going to the gym.

• Using an accountability buddy. Another great use of your accountability buddy is to help you establish habits. When I had to prepare for a 5k but I was struggling with getting out the door to run, my accountability buddy would call me at a set time each day. I knew the phone call was coming and that I was supposed to be outside starting my warmup when the call came in. This gave me the motivation I needed to do the same thing at the same time each day, and over the course of a few weeks, a new habit was formed and I stopped relying so heavily on my buddy, and leaned into my routine.

• Starting your day by writing things down and setting your intentions for the day. This is especially important if you are strugging with your mindset or the emotions behind the changes you are making. You can write down things you are grateful for as well. Getting yourself in the right headspace at the start of every day can create exponential change in your life!

Establishing healthy habits will keep you focused on the path you want to take, and prevents you from needing to make major course corrections, even as you refine your course and make adjustments. You can just plug in small changes here and there, rather than needing to start from the beginning.

Don’t Give Up and Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself

No one is perfect and no one lives life perfectly…that’s a fact. You are going to have to course correct more than once in life!

Sometimes you will have major course corrections, like cleaning up years of bad financial choices that will take time…maybe years…to get things right.

But using the steps I have outlined here

• Identifying what went wrong

• Re-establishing focus

• Setting yourself up for success

• Creating good habits

Will help prevent most major missteps and keep you from getting too far off course.

These strategies can be used in any situation, like my hiking misadventures. I figured out where I was going wrong and how I was getting lost. There were poor markings on the trails and I was relying on my memory of how the trail looked, rather than bringing a map. Then I re-focused and came up with a plan to correct the problem. I set myself up for success by downloading pictures of the map onto my phone that weren’t reliant on cell service so I had a visual reference during my hike. And I repeated this process over and over until now it has become a habit and a routine that I go through everytime I am heading out on the trails.

Not all situations are as cut and dry, and you will need to readjust and make corrections, and that’s ok!

Remember, it doesn’t matter if you fall down seven times, as long as you stand up eight times.