Small Changes Big Results part IV

CONNECT TO YOUR INTERNAL GPSMissteps and false starts are part of any process. The key to staying on track lies in viewing each one as a minor glitch instead of a total system failure. One solution? Take a cue from your car's global positioning system, says de Bonvoisin. To get you from point A to point B, the GPS doesn't need to know where you were yesterday or if you got lost three turns ago. It needs to knows only where you want to go now. Apply this practice to your own goals. It doesn't matter if you didn't eat a single green vegetable last week, or if you spent (instead of saved) $20. "There's zero focus on the past," de Bonvoisin says. "You get to ask only, 'Where am I today with the meditating thing? Where am I with looking for my dream job? And where do I really want to go right at this moment?' "

Janis Rothermel of Longport, New Jersey, kept this idea i mind when she quit smoking. She'd always thought of herself as a smoker. Unfortunately, that's the way other people saw her, too, as she found out one year when three people gave her a cigarette case for Christmas. She realized it didn't matter if she smoked yesterday or earlier that day; she wasn't going to smoke from this point on. "I told myself, 'I've gone five minutes. I can go another five.' Then it was, 'I've gone three days, two hours and five minutes.' I haven't gone back in 25 years." Rothermel learned, as many of us do, that you can get exactly where you want to go , one moment at a time.