Set Meaningful Goals
You can set goals anytime, but there’s something about the start of a new year does feel like the perfect time to reflect and set intentions for the year to come. It’s an opportunity to bring awareness to the things that are working well and to the areas where we would like to see growth and improvement. We’ll get into specifics for goal setting shortly, but change cannot happen without awareness of where we are starting out. With that in mind, I invite you to embrace this period of reflection, possibly utilizing some or all of the prompts below.
Questions For Reflection:
Over the past year/s, what insights have you gained regarding your mindset and habits around health, exercise, eating, recovery, sleep and connection with others? Have you learned that your body, mind and spirit respond really well to certain habits?
If you have veered away from “ideal” habits in recent weeks, that’s actually really useful! Breaking away from your usual healthy routines - and the consequences - can provide great insight about what behaviors serve you best, and reinforce your commitment to healthy habits. So instead of beating yourself up, take note. For example, if you found yourself eating more sugar than usual recently, how did that make you feel?
Do a personal assessment of where things are working well and where you are feeling like there is room for improvement in your life. In each of the following categories, give yourself a score 1-10 with 1 representing an area you see great room for improvement, and 10 being an area where you feel 100% satisfied:
Physical Health
Mental Wellbeing
Environment/Surroundings
Hobbies, JOY, Restorative activity
Romance
Friends and Family
Finances
Purpose / Career
Spirituality
Personal Growth
Giving yourself a score can guide you in deciding what areas of your life you’d like to make a priority, and repeating this scoring exercise later in the year will allow you to gauge improvement as you practice new habits.
Are there areas of your life that you’d like to give more time and energy to, but feel blocked, or like other things get in the way? Are there things that have been taking your time and attention that you’d like to do less of in the coming year?
Tie it all together: Write a “vision” for your future, 1 year, 3 years, or 5 years down the road. Without filtering or editing, allow yourself to free-write in as much detail as possible. What do you want your life to look like? How do you spend your time? What experiences have you had? What is the status of your health and fitness? What goals have you accomplished? How does that feel?
Next Steps:
After reflecting, and considering the insights you have gained, and ask yourself:
Where would I like to see change in my life? Choose just one or two areas for goal-setting at this time.
What do I feel ready to tackle right now? How ready, willing and able you are to approach change in different areas of your life? Sometimes it makes sense to start with the “big rocks” - the things that are truly holding you back from your best vision of yourself. Overcoming these can make a huge impact, like the domino that pushes over the other dominos. On the other hand, it can be equally powerful to focus on the “low hanging fruit”- small, do-able actions that will add up to make a positive impact. Those little wins will build confidence toward taking on bigger and bigger goals. Be honest about where you are in your life at this moment, knowing that living your best life is simply about being a little bit better, all the time.
How will I define success? You may have a specific outcome in mind, but consider multiple ways to look for progress, focusing on behaviors in addition to outcomes. For example, if your outcome goal is to lose 10 lbs, you can celebrate the behavior of consistently working out 5 days/week.
Set Your Goals!
Write down 1-2 goals you’d like to start with, and identify the outcome you want.
Then, think about the process of accomplishing that outcome. Make a list of every step you can think of that is involved, down to the little stuff. What are all the little things that need to happen in order to be successful in those areas. Or another way to think about it, what would a person who has accomplished this goal be doing consistently? Grab a pencil and just brainstorm all the behaviors you can think of that relate to each outcome goal. This will provide a road map to take you where you want to go. Example: If your outcome goal is eating a healthy balanced dinner at home 4x per week, the behaviors involved in that could include: menu planning, grocery shopping, washing and prepping vegetables, scheduling time to cook and/or planning use of slow cooker, etc.
Look at the list of steps and behaviors you’ve written down and notice which seem easy to approach which are more daunting. Consider where you feel resistance and why. For the above example, "cooking a healthy dinner at home 4x/week," maybe you feel resistance (like, oh man, this is going to be HARD)…so ask yourself what that’s about? Is the resistance due to lack of confidence in cooking? Due to feeling like it takes too much time? Worry that you don’t know what to cook that is healthy? Too expensive? Your family won’t like it? For anything you feel resistance about, make a note of anything that comes up, just to be aware of it. It could be that where there’s a great deal of resistance, this might not be the best place to start. Instead you may want to begin with something a little easier and build some success right away. For example, if cooking at home 4x/ week feels like too much, could you try 1-2x/week? Or, you could reframe what the process looks like. If your resistance has to cooking 4x/week at home has to do with lack of time to shop and cook, you instead investigate a healthy meal delivery or meal kit service. There is usually more than one route to success! Again, take the time to brainstorm what it could look like to approach the process of accomplishing each goal on your list by practicing different behaviors.
Once you’ve gotten this list of behaviors, ask yourself what you are ready, willing and able to do right now? Choose one or two new behaviors that are simple and attainable.
Create an implementation intention for each behavior. This is a statement of when, where, and what you are going to do. For example, if your goal is to drink more water, your implementation intention could state: After cleaning up the dinner dishes, I will fill my water bottle for the next day and put it in the cup holder of my car so that I will remember to bring it to work. Write it down, put it in your calendar, set up reminders - whatever you have to do to keep your commitment to your new habit at the top of your mind.
For the next 2 weeks focus on your behaviors rather than the outcome. Create a tool to track each day you completed the behavior- a simple checklist will do.
When you’ve been successful at sticking with these 80% of the time, and it feels easy to continue, you’re ready to revisit your behavior brainstorm and choose a new habit to practice. Building little successes incrementally, and taking on small changes that can be sustained in the long run is more effective than approaching several big goal all at once without a plan. :)
You’ve spent the holidays taking care of everyone else so it’s time to ask: What gift will you give to yourself in the coming year? What type of care and attention to your health will allow you to feel your best so that you can show up more for everyone else that you love and care about? You deserve to feel amazing, so set some goals to accomplish that!
With gratitude and friendship,
Elizabeth