Many people set goals that go unachieved. This can often be attributed to unrealistic goal setting. People will create goals without taking into consideration their life situations, time constraints, or education in their goal’s subject. One might make a goal to build muscle but not consider that they work 80 hours per week, have a family to spend time with, and don’t know how to perform proper exercise technique.

You’ll first need to choose your goals. There are a few types of goals that you can consider:

  1. Outcome Goals: These are goals with an endgame like how much weight you want to lose, or how much weight you want to add to your squat.
  2. Learning Goals: These are typically set if you’re inexperienced in your goal’s subject manner, but can also be a main goal, like learning how weight-loss is achieved, or how to do a proper squat.
  3. Behavior Goals: These are habit changing goals you might need to set to achieve your learning or outcome goals. You might need to start going to the gym three days per week or start reading daily.

Feasibility is important when thinking of the goals that you set. Be realistic; it’s unlikely you’ll save a million dollars in one year, but you might be able to save $25 per week. Working with no reward will probably only cause mental fatigue and bitterness towards whatever you want to achieve. On the other hand, reward with no work isn’t going to lead to habit building and could cause indifference towards your goals. Pick smaller goals that lead to something big. Checking stuff off the list alone can feel good.

Make your goal personal to you. Having an internal motivation, especially if it is something that tugs on your heart strings and brings out emotion, will probably be easier to achieve than something that is externally motivated. It’s hard to stay motivated for goals that require lots of work over a long period of time like weight-loss if you’re doing it for external reasons like impressing a friend. That doesn’t mean external goals are always useless. Having an external reward for short goals like reading a book can be helpful.

Consider your knowledge base when setting your goals. If you want to lose weight, you should audit your understanding of how weight-loss works. If you don’t currently have the understanding of how to achieve your goals, you may want to reconsider your goal to a learning goal. For example, if you want to lose weight but don’t know how, you may want to consider changing your goal to learning how weight-loss is achieved and the different options available to you. This will delay your ultimate desire but if you jump headfirst into a goal you don’t have knowledge about, you could set yourself back in the end. This is common with weight-loss goals. Many people will diet down and regain weight because they didn’t take the time to understand how to maintain their weight-loss.

Make your goal trackable. This is important because if you are not keeping track of your goal, you might not realize you’re making progress when you actually are. If you have a goal to walk to work more, but you notice you still drive often, you might not realize you walked to work 4/7 days this week instead of 2/7 days. Small progress is still progress. Some goals are easier to track than others. For example, you can track strength progress by the weight you’ve added to your lifts week to week, but for a learning goal, you’ll have to track in a less obvious way. Perhaps you track by pages read per night, by setting up a test after each chapter and quiz yourself to see your understanding.

Follow these first principles of goal setting and you’ll have yourself set up fairly well to accomplish your goals. There is more you can do to really create a solid goal. Stay tuned for the next blog: Goal Setting (Part 2). See you there! 🙂