-       Are you obsessed with your goals?

Thinking about your goal is like a habit. It takes a while to get into the routine. But that’s the only way you can achieve anything worth wide in life. It’s the only way you can train to get bigger. Obsession has such a negative connotation. But as long as you don’t harm yourself or someone else with your obsession, then rest assure it has not reached that dangerous level yet.

-       Do you feel bad at the end of the day if you have not made any progress toward reaching your goals?

If you’ve just skipped 2 meals and a few hours of sleep because of a wild night of partying, do you feel horrible about it? If you missed even just one single rep of your squats, does it upset until you have found out the reason why you missed that rep? If you only gained 1 pound instead of 1.5 pound this week, do you feel good about gaining 1 pound or do you feel bad about not gaining 1.5 pounds? Your goal set the benchmarks for your performance. You cannot be happy if you are not making these benchmarks.

-       How unhappy do you feel if you have not made any progress?

Again, if you gain 1 pound instead of 1.5 pounds, do you feel bad for a few hours and then totally forget about it? Or does it keep bothering you all the way until you have figured out the reason why and also the solution to that problem? It is not enough to be upset for just one or two hours. You have to take positive actions once something like that happens.

-       Do you constantly think about where you are on your journey toward reaching your goal? Do you constantly think about where your journey is taking you?

Let’s say your goal is to gain 15 pounds in 10 weeks. That means 1.5 pounds for a week. It also means that if after 5 weeks you have only gained 5 pounds, you are not on the right track. Or maybe you have gained 7.5 pounds after 5 weeks, but can you rest assure that you can gain another 7.5 pounds just by doing exactly what you are doing now? Constantly checking where you are standing  and where you are heading is vital to the attainment of your goals.

-       Do you constantly look for ways to improve your performance, to help you reach your goals faster?

Let’s say you are gaining 1 pound of muscle per week. For an ectomorph, that’s wonderful. But you can gain not just 1 but maybe 2 pounds of muscle a week. Have you done any research on that yet? Is it even possible? Or let’s say you have been able to gain good muscle every week now, but training is taking up too much of your time. Have you tried to improve your performance so that you can still afford to hang out with friends and do homework while reaching your training goal?