We are now halfway through the year but there’s still a long way to go before we’re clinking champagne glasses and toasting the new year. The good news for all of us is that there's still time to do the work and make progress on whatever we hoped to gain this year. If you need to take another shot at achieving your goals - whatever they may be - then today is the day to get going.   Almost everyone sets goals for the year, whether its as a new year’s resolution or something more formal, but very few people actually accomplish those goals. Goals should be something that we set, accomplish, and then leave in our dust as we pick new ones that will take us even further. If we have the same annual goal each year it just becomes perennial wishful thinking.  So, what’s holding so many people back from actually achieving the goals they set for themselves? The fact that they don’t actually create a plan to achieve that goal.   A month ago we discussed commitment and what that does towards helping us actually achieve the goals we set. We can set all the goals we want but if we don’t make a personal commitment to the goal, and the process of achieving that goal, then the odds of us getting to that finish line are almost zero.   But it is actually pretty hard to commit ourselves to a goal that’s far out in the future. It can be difficult for us to hold on to that vision for the entire time it takes us to achieve that goal. When we lose sight of that finish line we often also lose our motivation to keep moving forward. We often don’t see the progress we have made in ourselves: just think of losing weight but not seeing the change in the mirror. But we are very aware of the daily struggle as we keep doing the hard work.   When the work seems to outweigh the results we become discouraged. Being discouraged allows the nagging little fears and doubts to get in our heads and weaken our resolve to keep going. Then we are at serious risk of quitting.    We can instead commit ourselves to the process of achieving the goal rather than the goal itself. The process is something we can hold in our minds day in and day out. The daily progress may be imperceptible but intellectually we know we are moving forward as we complete the small tasks that will add up over time.   Success isn’t found in the goal but rather in the process. And the process is laid out in the plan.   For the purposes of this series we are going to just focus on developing an exercise training plan. But you can use these tools to create a plan to accomplish any kind of goal, whether its related to health, wealth, relationships, or whatever. If there is sufficient interest I would like to cover those topics as well.   For novices though, both young and old, creating a new training plan can seem really complicated. Yes, training plans can get super complicated - for Olympic athletes. But yours doesn’t need to be. After all, you just want to get from Point A to Point B, not each and every step to Point Z.   Do you remember those “Choose Your Own Story” books? The end of each chapter gave you a few options for where the story could go next. You can mix and match the choices to get different overall stories; sometimes you might get the same endings but the story paths there were different. These are fun for kids but most adults enjoy books that clearly walk them from the front cover to the back cover. Well, same goes for exercise with many people, except most people go with the self-guiding story option and find they don’t get the happy ending they hoped for. If you don’t know what you really want for the end of the story you don’t know how to order the chapters.