Do you know where you’re heading?

Have you heard of the 1 in 60 rule?

It’s a rule of thumb for experts in air navigation. It states that for every one degree that a plane travels off course, it misses it’s desired destination by 1 mile for every 60 miles you fly. So the further you fly, the further you land from your destination.

If you’re off by 1 degree, after 1 mile you’ll be off by 92 feet. Not so bad.

If you’re off by 1 degree and fly around the equator, you’ll land 500 miles away from your target.

And if you’re off MORE than 1 degree? You get the picture.

And so it is with our health.

Not eating a nutritious breakfast? Off 1 degree.

Run through a drive-thru for lunch…off another degree.

Didn’t drink enough water? There’s another degree.

Stayed up later to watch one more show? Add another degree.

Do these things once or twice and you won’t notice much of an impact. But if you’re in the habit of doing it DAILY, you may not land where you’re planning.

The point isn’t to make you feel bad about your choices. The point is to show you that they MATTER.

Our days are filled with choice points, as Susan David, PhD writes in Emotional Agility.

Tweaking little things adds up over time (and over a lifetime!) Small shifts in diet may seem like they don’t add up – in both ways! “What difference does will it REALLY make if I add a vegetable to my lunch or take the stairs??” Or on the other side, “What difference does it make if I have a soda each day?” or an iced coffee, a glass of wine, a donut, etc.

We often feel like we need to make a complete overhaul – and sometimes we may have reason to. But if you want to instill LASTING lifestyle changes, making little shifts to our hourly, daily, weekly habits – over time this adds up. It changes our course.

What we do in the health and wellness realm has cumulative effect. Our health is built in the little choices. People don’t make one unhealthy choice and end up overweight, out of energy, or with a diagnosis. These are often created from our small daily habits involving our diet, sleep, exercise, and stress (internal and external).

There are SO MANY small ways to put yourself back on course – drinking a glass of water in the morning when you wake up, adding a vegetable to your lunch, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, choose herbal tea instead of a glass of wine at night…the possibilities are ENDLESS.

What are some small tweaks that YOU can make? Come up with a list and start implementing something each week. You may not see a big change overnight (or even in a few weeks), but just like that plane flying around the equator, you want to be on course! And you will be more likely to end up where you want to go.