Goal Setting Breakdown
When you look at goal setting and expanding on goal setting, its often very useful to look at successful entrepreneurs, business owners, athletes etc. because success leaves clues and one of them is goal setting.
There is a notion where people will read or listen to a concept like goal setting and feel good about listening to or reading this concept, but then not doing what the concept is telling you to do. For instance, watching a 20min video that goes into great detail about the quantitative measurable effects of goal setting and how important it is to write down your goals. Then by the end of the video you would just feel good about watching it, but not taking action on what the video recommended. Having said that, I’d like you to write things down and do some homework after reading this article.
Hopefully before tackling goal setting, you have your head around your “why”. Your why is the emotional things that drive your actions and your decisions around your goals. After you have your “why” fully established the next step is goal setting. Start by asking yourself what are you actually trying to accomplish? This is going to be the things that you can write down. These goals may change and evolve over time, sometimes the goals may be simple like training 5 times a week and doing cardio 3 times a week. Or it could be eating 4 meals a day, or hitting your macro goals. Whatever it may be, this could be your short-term or long-term goals and everything in-between. This is certainly a very personal thing, you don’t have to write 30 pages of your goals in detail, it may just be a sentence or two.
Write your goals down
That is your homework for this topic of the month! Write down your goals, every type of goal from training goals to nutrition goals, weight on scale, physique goals etc. for most of us in some shape or form will have training goals. Write things down that relate to your training. This could be something like form with lifting, where you take the next 4 weeks or so to take your form on a particular exercise from a 6 out of 10 to a 9 out of 10. Then perhaps on other exercises your form is good so you may take it from 6reps to 10reps or from 50kg to 70kg. These goals could be weekly, monthly, or even yearly. Write down these goals and tick all the boxes, because the more times you set a goal and tick it off and accomplish it, it has a snowball effect and actually makes it easier to keep accomplishing your goals.
It is extremely important that you take the time to write your goals! Do this with everything, with a lot of people their training goals or physique goals can even be intertwined with their profession. If your goals have a carryover affect then write them down.
Compare, Measure and Track
After you have written all your goals down in detail, the next step is to compare, measure and track. This is the first step once you have your goals established, you are putting all of these actions in place and choosing these essentials for your macros, exercise selection etc. ultimately you want to have some kind of short-term gauges of “is this working” are you accomplishing this goal that you set forth for diet or training. Then is that relating to your other goals such as are your physique photos changing, are you progressing? Again, if you don’t have very clear-cut goals how can you know if you are moving towards that goal specifically. If the goal is very vague and you are not measuring and tracking consistently, then you don’t know if you are making progress or not. If your goals are not clear and your making changes, you don’t know if it’s moving you in the right or wrong direction. To know if something is working or not only works if you are measuring and tracking.
Set a Time Limit
Set an amount of time that you are going to measure on your progress towards your goals. This can be a daily checklist that leads into a weekly, monthly checklist and so on. You constantly need to revisit and measure, then that will guide your decisions of should you change things. Then you can start to implement changes if necessary, if everything is going perfect and you are progressing then don’t change anything! But if you are tracking and things aren’t changing then you can start to look from your long-term goal back to your short-term goal. Did you hit your diet or logbook goals? If not, you clearly know whether you are moving in the right or wrong direction. Then you can start to go and look at your essentials, analyse the things that are involved, then make an educated decision on what you want to change.
Be Prepared to Adapt Your Goals
You also need to realise that sometimes it is alright to adapt your goals, in most cases it has to happen. Right now, it may be great to be singular focused on a particular goal like building overall lean muscle mass. Then it may change to you wanting to add more muscle to a specific body part, then your focus could go towards getting stronger or getting the scale weight to go up or down. Your goals will and should change and progress as you go along.
This all comes back to the power of writing your goals down. You can look at it and see it, its not just in your head. One of the biggest mistakes human beings make is that they don’t take time to step back and say why am I doing the things that I’m doing? Actually, analyse your actions and measure progress and see if you are going in the right direction. By writing it down and constantly revisiting it, whether it’s every day, week or month it doesn’t matter as long as its consistent. Then from there feel free to change and evolve your goals, this will always comeback to your ‘why’ if your why is for some emotional reasons that may be related to a specific physical look, or if it is related to a specific performance like improving your gym lifts, whatever it is your “why” and goals are all intertwined, and as your why evolves often your goals will evolve, as well as the feedback that you are getting from the scale, your appearance, gym lifts etc. your end goal will evolve as well too.
Homework! If you are not currently doing this and writing your goals down, I would ask yourself why are you not doing this? Take some time to think, it doesn’t matter if it’s only one sentence or a note in your phone. Have something written down and use that powerful tool and move in that direction. Take time to keep revisiting your goals because your goals will change massively as time goes by and they will continue to keep changing. This process will make sure you are very clear on where you are going, and if the actions you are using are aligning with that ultimate goal.
