With goals at the forefront of everyone’s minds in January, I thought the world didn’t need another “goal setting” article. What we do need is a goal-getting article. It’s easy to come up with a goal - big or small. What’s more difficult (as shown by the consistent abandoning of goals after a month), is to keep working towards those goals and bring them to completion. Anyone can set a goal. Most have trouble actually keeping it.
As a nutritionist with training in both health psychology and behavior change, I see this phenomenon time and time again. Women come in having had these big, lofty goals for years, but have never actually gotten to where they want to be. They don’t know how to get from here to there and, maybe even more importantly, they don’t know why they want to achieve that goal in the first place.
Find Your Values
First comes the why. In order for goals to actually stick, they have to be connected to some internal motivator. The deepest way to do that is to lay out your core values, and then see where your goals align with those values.
Quick Values Exercise:
Write down all of the values you can think of (you can head here for some examples).
Circle every value that resonates with you and the life you want to live. No minimum or maximum - all the values that stick out to you.
Group the values you’ve circled into categories of your own choosing. These can look like “work, family, community” or “love, money, happiness” - whatever feels in alignment. Again, you can have as many or as few categories as feels right to you. Once you’ve placed the values into categories, take a look at the names of each category - these are your “Core Values”. These are what you want to be striving for on a daily basis and what you’ll connect your goals to.
Establish Small Steps Toward the Main Goal
Once you have your values and have aligned your goal to one or more of them, you start to fuel the desire inside yourself to achieve the goal - that’s the fire you need to keep stoking to achieve your goal. You keep the fires burning by coming up with baby steps you can easily achieve on your way to the big goal. For example, if your big goal is to finally tackle a full marathon, your smaller goals along the way could be putting money down on the race registration, finishing a ½ marathon, and joining a running group for motivation and inspiration. (Full disclosure - this is one of my own goals for this coming year.) If your goal is to eat healthier, find a way to quantify that with your smaller goals. Eat 10 different plants each day, drink 8 glasses of water daily, or practice meatless Monday. Whatever your big goal is, breaking it down into smaller goals along the way will help motivate, inspire and stoke that inner fire within.
Determine Potential Roadblocks
Once you’ve decided on your smaller goals, the next step is to foresee any possible roadblocks in your way and figure out workarounds for them. For example, your biggest roadblock may be finding childcare in order to work towards your goal. Your workaround may be setting up a nanny-share, finding a co-working space with childcare, or allocating part of your monthly budget for a babysitter a few days each week. By taking into consideration the roadblocks that likely stand in your way and tackling them before they drive your plans off the road, you’ll be more likely to stay on track.
Track Your Progress
Once you have all of these details and pieces surrounding your big goal, place them somewhere you can see. Put your marathon training calendar on your bathroom mirror, or use one of those fundraising fill-in thermometers to track your income goals. Make it a point to track your steps and re-visit your goal in a big way (aka out from behind a screen where it will most likely get lost and forgotten). With all of these pieces in place, you’ll be far better equipped to bring those abstract goals out of your head and into reality.
Let’s break it down again quickly:
Find your values and align them to your goals.
Establish at least three smaller goals to keep you motivated and inspired on your way to that big goal.
Figure out what roadblocks may be in your way, and determine workarounds for each before you start working towards your goals.
Create a visual reminder of your goal and a system to track your steps along the way.
Whatever your big goal is, stop thinking about it in abstract terms and start taking steps to bring it to fruition. I promise, once you lay out a tangible plan for achieving your goals, you’ll already feel more confident about achieving it.
