Setting goals and setting a particular time frame to achieve them is a great way to challenge yourself toward continual improvement, but it’s also important to have ongoing goals that are built upon throughout your lifetime. These lifetime goals are maintenance goals, something that you wish to continue to achieve, rather than something you have not yet achieved. Maintenance goals cover everyday aspects of life such as wealth, health, weight, and leisure, and can easily be incorporated into your normal routine.

Wealth Maintenance Goals

A wealth maintenance goal could be as simple as deciding to save or invest a fixed amount of money each month.

The accumulation of money for most wealthy people essentially is a habit. For every person who wins the jackpot or gains a major inheritance, there are many more who earn their wealth through periodic saving and investing. Such wise individuals realized at some point along the trail that putting away a little at a time as early in life as possible would enable them to benefit from compounded interest and growth.

While some people mistakenly believe that their annual gross earnings will lead to wealth, it’s not how much you earn, it’s how much you save and invest. Stories abound of domestic workers who were able to retire with grace and ease, put their children through college, and even travel the world, although their meager hourly earnings or annual salaries would seem wholly insufficient to an outside observer. Conversely, if you’re earning $30,000 a month, but your expenses total $31,000, you don’t need a calculator to determine that you’re going to be $1,000 in the hole every month.

Those who are adept at setting wealth-related maintenance goals seem to share some common characteristics, with the most highly visible being that they are frugal with each and every dollar.

You or I might whoop it up following a $10,000 windfall. Those who have long-term goals related to wealth, however, maintain and apply the same discipline to virtually all funds that come their way. It’s as if these individuals have an ingrained notion and profound realization that some portion of every dollar that comes their way contributes directly to their personal net worth.

Rather than regarding themselves as miserly or austere, they actually gain a sense of deep satisfaction, if not joy, as they continue to build and build and build toward their desired financial outcome.

Health Maintenance Goals

Becoming wealthy is a habit. Becoming healthy or maintaining health is no less a habit. If you could follow a healthy person around for a day and observe what he or she does, invariably you’d observe some common behaviors and characteristics.

Sure, some people have good health as a result of heredity. Sweeping those aside for a moment, however, the healthy people among us seem to have an active set of maintenance goals that prompt them to do such things as

• drink plenty of water each day,
• take vitamins,
• engage in some type of physical exercise,
• get proper rest,
• eat an average of at least two square meals a day,
• take time out to stretch and relax, and
• avoid known carcinogens.

Your body is often forgiving. If you engage in unhealthy activities or behaviors, even for an extended period, once you turn the corner and start exercising regularly, eating more nutritious foods, and getting proper rest, your body will begin to respond in kind.

In a matter of days, you’ll begin to feel better; in a matter of weeks, you’ll notice a marked change for the better; in a matter of months, you’ll feel like a new person; and after years of engaging in health maintenance activities and behaviors, you may be among the most healthy and fortunate individuals in society.

Abraham Lincoln once said that after age forty a person’s face was determined largely by what that person did. One could make the same observation about one’s waistline, blood pressure, posture, and even skin tone.

Do you want to set some challenging health maintenance goals for yourself? Any maintenance goals in a world that beckons you to overindulge on junk food, foods heavily laden with preservatives, alcohol, and other harmful substances, are challenging.

When the television stations beseech you to watch them for all hours of the night, and everywhere you turn, there’s more information and more choices competing for your time and attention, and when you’re asked to do more and more at work with less resources, maintaining your health is a worthy, appropriate, and highly challenging goal.

Weight Maintenance Goals

On the heels of health come weight-related maintenance goals. After getting out of college, if you were to add the minute sum of a half a pound every six months, by the time you were 42, you’d be twenty pounds overweight and by the time you were 62, you’d be forty pounds overweight.

Like compound interest in the financial world, small gains in weight tend to add up quickly. Worse, combined with a sedentary lifestyle and lack of desire to exercise, added weight can have a compound effect on you by inhibiting your desire to exercise.

Conversely, if you hold the line this week, and the next week, and for the whole month, and the next month, and so on, you can actually go through your whole life at the same weight. Since weight is something you can monitor simply by standing on a scale, devising a chart that plots your weight is a simple and effective exercise.

Too many people put their scale in the bathroom, where it does less good than if it were placed in the kitchen (that’s where I keep mine). If you step on the scale and notice that you’re above your desired weight, that’s a pretty good indication that perhaps you should have smaller portions for the next couple of meals.

Concurrently, you don’t want to fall into the trap of believing that minor fluctuations in your weight indicate a long-term trend in one direction or the other. Usually, the fluctuations represent water weight. All too many of those diet programs you see on television and in books make outrageous claims.

In one inane infomercial, people step on a scale and announce how much they’ve lost in the last week, usually ranging between four and eight pounds. Losing four to eight pounds in a week unless is usually related to water loss. Indeed, that much weight loss in a week is unhealthy and potentially dangerous.

It would be a supreme challenge to lose only one pound a week, and more realistically, one pound every two weeks, hence, two pounds a month, and twelve pounds in six months.

Leisure Maintenance Goals

It is a fallacy to believe that you can force leisure in-between periods of otherwise frenzied activity. Stressed-out career professionals often think that they’re going to get all “caught up” in terms of their need for leisure over the next long weekend.

Unquestionably, three days away from work, with complete rest and relaxation, will offer immediate benefits. However, if it’s been weeks or months since you’ve given yourself leisure time, don’t expect miracles. Like sleep, weight maintenance, health maintenance, or wealth maintenance, you can’t “catch up” all in one weekend.

If you are serious about having true leisure in your life, then it needs to be a maintenance type of goal. You want to have some leisure at the end of each week and at certain times during the week.

If you’re a career-type who frequently works late and then takes work home from the office, perhaps you can establish a goal of having one night a week be a work free night. On Wednesdays, for example, you might choose to have fun regardless of what else you’re facing in life. This is the night when you’ll go to the movies, take a long walk, or have an ice cream cone with your kids.

On weekends, you’ll carve out true leisure for yourself instead of pretending that an hour watching the ball game and another taking your kids to the mall will meet your needs.

If you’re committed to having true leisure time in your life, you’ll start setting goals that support your quest to have vacations that yield substantial leisure benefits. You’ll be on the lookout for ways to engage in self-renewal. Perhaps you’ll even get to the point where you’re comfortable going whole days with no agenda!

Challenging Maintenance Goals

Sticking with the four areas discussed above, health, wealth, weight, and leisure, what are some highly challenging, maintenance goals you might set for yourself? The following are suggestions. Please modify these to fit your own situation or add others if the spirit moves you.

1. Challenging Wealth Goals
Here are but a handful of challenging goals that may be right for you:

• To save $500 every month, starting this month, for the next twenty years.
• To join an investment club this month that requires that I invest X amount per month for five years.
• To direct my employer to deduct an automatic sum from my paycheck which will go directly into a savings account that I cannot touch without severe tax penalties.
• To identify a savings/investment partner, preferably my spouse, with whom I will invest a matching amount of no less than $250 per month until December 31, 2010.

2. Challenging Health Goals Among many health-related goals you may wish to take on, here are some suggestions:

• To meet with a nutritionist or dietitian within the next ten days and establish a plan I will follow for six months, and then renew or modify the plan accordingly.
• To sign up for exercise, aerobics, swimming, or other classes at the local YMCA that require three workouts of at least forty-five minutes per week for the next six months. Thereafter, to renew my enrollment.
• To walk for at least twenty minutes (this is roughly one mile) every evening for the rest of my life.

3. Weight Maintenance Goals There are an endless number of weight maintenance goals. Here are a few you may wish to adopt:

• Hereafter, to buy clothes only in the size that corresponds to my target weight.
• To move my bathroom scale down to the kitchen, weigh myself every morning, record my weight on a chart, and maintain the chart for a complete calendar year, after which I begin again.
• To begin buying, starting now, fat-free or reduced fat versions of the products I have normally been consuming.
• To read the nutrition labels on all products and not purchase anything that contains greater than a forty percent fat content by calories.
• To team up with a partner who seeks to reduce his/her weight by the same amount that I do. Having enrolled such partner, to report to each other on a daily basis our respective weights.

4. Leisure Maintenance Goals Among the many, many leisure goals you may choose, here are a handful:

• Starting this Wednesday, to take no work home from the office on any Wednesday hereafter, regardless of what work situations I face.
• To schedule a relaxing weekend trip with my family once per month that invoes a minimal amount of travel, an optimal amount of sleep, and at least two 30 minute periods of complete solitude.
• Having at least one leisurely lunch per five-day work week including not rushing to or from lunch, slowly and carefully digesting food, not having any work-related thoughts.

By setting challenging goals and taking risks to achieve them, you will open new doors for yourself, enjoy life more, and accomplish what you had previously thought impossible.