Goal Setting: Finding Your Why
So we’re all in that weird week where nobody knows what day it is and it all kind of feels like we’re waiting until the 1st to start doing stuff, right? It’s not just me?
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Today I was talking to a client about preparation and how she has, historically, done a much better job sticking to her goals when she is prepared for the week. That typically applies to most people and most goals. We can often get so caught up in our every day lives that we forget the goals we set for ourselves. A lot of people take issue with “New Years Resolutioners”, and it used to be something I had a hard time understanding as well, but as you get older and more responsibilities and life events take you away from yourself, you realize a good reset button is needed sometimes. But we can’t go into our New Year with goals that haven’t been prepared for. If we want to hit the ground running, we need to know which direction we’re running.
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This week, I’d like to help you out. As a certified Behavior Change Specialist through the American Council on Exercise, and through working with hundreds of clients, I have a lot of experience in setting and achieving goals. I want to help you achieve your goals too. This week, I’ll be putting out a series of blog posts about goal setting, both breaking it down and maybe enlightening you on some things you hadn’t thought about. Today, we’re starting with square one: Finding Your “Why”.
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Finding your why
Finding Your Why is the most important part of setting your goal. We all spend a lot of time in the “planning every little detail until it’s exactly perfect” stage, but that tends to be the least helpful part of goal setting. When you feel connected to your purpose, you naturally want to achieve your goal. It is the deep-seated emotional connection to your goal, and it’s never as surface level as it seems. How do you go about finding your why? Let’s explore:
Define your goal. For the purposes of example, we will use this goal: I want to lose 20 pounds.
Sit with the emotions this brings up first. Imagine staying the weight you are now. Why is your life negatively impacted by this current weight? Imagine yourself in 20 pounds. Why is your life better? What does achieving your goal allow you to do that you aren’t doing now?
This is where you’ll begin journaling. Literally pen to paper. Being ULTRA descriptive here is important. This isn’t just “I’ll feel better about myself”, this is putting yourself into REAL life examples of how your current state is impacting your life and how your life will be better after you’ve achieved your goal. A few real-life examples I’ve had from clients to get your wheels turning:
“I want to be able to take selfies with my daughter and feel confident in them, and feel that losing weight will give me that confidence.”
“I never use the pool we installed in our yard because I am not confident enough to wear a bathing suit.”
“If I continue down this path, I will die before I’m able to walk my daughter down the aisle.”
You can see how all of those examples are VISUAL. They put you inside the situation. They mean a whole hell of a lot more than the original “I want to lose 20 pounds”, don’t you think?
Is there any other way to achieve your goal?
Because you’ll start looking for it when things become difficult.
Why are you choosing this path? Are you fully educated on the pros and cons of this path? Do you know what difficulties you will encounter, what sacrifices you’re going to have to make? Are you ok with that?
How will you feel in 3 months if you do not start now?
Honestly, sometimes the answer is “I’ll feel just fine”. Sometimes the answer is “I’ll wish I would’ve started”. If you feel a deep sense of longing and regret when you think about not starting your goal, you should start now. If you don’t, it’s probably not important enough to you to start.
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Keep in mind, finding your why is not a way to CONVINCE yourself of a goal. If the reason you want to lose weight is because your boyfriend thinks it is a good idea, dump your boyfriend, but also, that goal does not mean anything to YOU. Your weight isn’t impacting YOU, it’s impacting him. If you do not feel connected to your goal, nobody can convince you to be connected to it. This has to come from you. Finding your why is just as much about filtering goals that are important to you as it is finding the reason they are important to you. Be careful of falling into the trap of setting goals that you THINK you should set. If you aren’t finding the goal you set is invoking some sort of emotion in you, it’s probably because it’s not even coming from you in the first place.
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Be sure to put pen to paper and write things down for this first step. You are going to want to reference your writing later when you are working on your goal. And if you’re having trouble figuring out where to start, click “Contact” in the menu above and you and I will chat about it together.
