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Short term focus, long term goal

In 2007 I joined the gym. I joined with a clear goal of losing 6 kilos in six weeks before I set off to a holiday in Europe. Bearing in mind this trip included Oktoberfest and the Rugby World Cup I was under no illusions as to how long I would keep the 6 kilos off!

The first step was meeting with my personal trainer, known as EB. Her first question; why have I left joining the gym so late? She argued that if I had joined 6 weeks earlier a proper balanced program could have been set in place with the same weight loss over twice the time.

And that’s where the focus came in. I know myself well enough to understand that I would not commit to going to the gym regularly over 12 weeks. I would get bored, lazy and make any old excuse not to go. I know this based on 40 years of previous experience.

But I could commit to 6 weeks.

Her next question; how many times do I want to come to the gym each week? After I tell her 4 times, she says that she thought I was serious and that it will be 5 times.

So 5 times a week it is. That’s only 30 sessions in total; I could do that!

Day one saw me doing a warm up (which almost killed me) and a lower body workout that involved an ancient torture method called lunges. I now officially hate lunges and couldn’t walk properly for the next 2 days as a result of them. But I had to go back the next day for a cardio session that saw me rowing, stepping and biking flat out for almost 45 minutes. The gym staff needed a mop to clean up after me. Only 28 sessions to go.

The parallels between my short term gym goal and my work goals are very similar.

Recently Tradestaff introduced a new range of Physiological tests in order to measure our staff and candidates. To determine it’s effectiveness I completed the test myself.

It seems I am an innovator with a slight trend towards dictatorship. This was not too much of a surprise to anyone who knows me. While it all sounds pretty good for a managing director, that combination has some serious flaws. The biggest of which is that I don’t like detail; I’m a big picture kind of guy!

So while I’m thinking about what I want Tradestaff to do, behind me is a team of people doing the detailed stuff that makes it happen. I enjoy the freedom that comes with being the innovator; the team enjoys the opportunity to put it all together without me micro managing them.

The challenge of course is to determine who works best in which environment and how big a picture they need to work in that manner.

Often it simply comes down to a need to know basis. The amount of information needed to buy someone a cup of coffee is obviously different to that needed to buy them a coffee maker. The trick of course is to identify just how much someone needs to know to complete the best job they can.

At work I want the big picture and most often not the detail. At the gym I want the detail on a day to day basis, not the worry (terror) of what will be happening for the next week.

So my relationship with EB was clear.

She manages me at the gym and I do what I’m told. She understands that I have a clear goal in place for 6 weeks time. Her job was to provide targets for me to achieve in each of those 30 sessions without me worrying why I am doing what she tells me to do. Then in 6 weeks when I have reached my goal, she will have succeeded in planning my 30 hours of hell and in her own evil way she’ll be happy too.

Like many managers I make a lot of decisions and much of what the people who work for me do is dictated by me. So sometimes it’s actually really nice to have someone make decisions for you. Often when we go out for dinner my wife orders my meal for me without any input from me at all; often the first I know of what I’m eating is when it arrives in front of me at the table.

I was happy for EB to boss me about all she liked as long she was working to my long term plan.

That way all I had to do is huff and puff away without having to think about it. So while she in her role as sadist was happy, I (the new skinny version of me) was thinking about all I was going to eat and drink in Europe.
Sounds like a perfect team to me.

Post script; I lost 5 kilos and had an awesome 3 months discovering Europe where I found the lost weight and even gained a few more kilos, all by the old well-proven technique of overindulging.

To my great surprise I have stayed at the gym, EB turned out not to be so evil after all and my weight is now lower than my Europe target.

This entry was posted on February, 2009 and is filed under Articles.