Everybody loves to set goals. Whether it be for health and fitness, work, personal hobbies, or anything else, goals can be a fun way to stay motivated to achieve certain things in life. However, if you rely on goals and goals alone, you may find yourself unable to sustain any accomplishment for a long period of time. This is because goals are short-term targets--ranging from days to years--that you strive to hit. Sometimes you hit them, sometimes you don't. And when you do hit your goals, you don't necessarily maintain whatever you accomplished. Goals involve time-based, short-term periods of achievement.

For example, most people don't set goals to pay their bills or to take care of their family--people just do them. This is because these are things that need to be done on a consistent basis, regardless of how well you slept, whether or not you had your morning coffee, what the weather is like, etc.

This is where standards come into play. Standards set the baseline for your health. Standards are not targets you strive for, but benchmarks that you maintain. They are the foundation of your behaviours and actions, which are in turn the foundation of your success in any area of life. Your long-term physical health, your financial health, your relationship health, and more are all determined by the standards you live by, day to day, throughout your life. Therefore, if you want to sustain good physical health, among other types of health, you have to set standards for behaviours and actions that you uphold on a daily basis throughout your entire life. Standards are not time based, they are something you maintain indefinitely. And your standards can change over time; they just aren't based on accomplishing something specific within a certain amount of time like goals are.