Stop setting goals! Use systems and daily habits instead
Are you someone who sets goals? Have you ever been told that to improve your health, you need to have a good goal.
For example, you want to do yoga four times a week – that’s your goal.
Below you’ll learn exactly why these kinds of goals can hold you back and stop you transforming your health. Instead, I’ll give you a different way to focus on your goals.
In a results-driven society, you are told to set goals to be effective. In fact, my clients often come to me with goals like this:
By Christmas I want to run a 10K
My goal is to cook all my meals from scratch
Sound familiar?
Quite possibly the obsession with goal setting comes from the study set at Harvard business school in the 70’s. Do you know the one?
Basically a class of MBA students were asked: Do you set goals? 84% of them set no goals at all and the rest of the class had some goals, some of which had written them down. The results? 10 years on, the students that set goals were making way more money.
BUTTTT
Would you be surprised to find out that this study isn’t even real? It was NEVER conducted. There’s no such thing! Yet it’s cited everywhere as THE reason to set goals!
Society, organisations, self-help gurus, health coaches, they’ve told you to set goals. Hell, even I’ve focused on setting goals yearly and monthly.
So, what’s wrong with setting goals?
The problem is, focusing ONLY on results and outcomes can lead to anxiety, overwhelm and feelings of failure. Especially if you don’t hit the goals straight away.
OK, so by now, you may be thinking, BUT LARAAAA….
Goals are great because they give me a focus
I’ll be happy when I achieve that goal
I’m EXPECTED to have this goal
I’ll prove I’m successful or healthy
If I achieve this goal, I’ll prove I’m WORTHY when I achieve this goal.
But the problem with these is you’re basing your self-worth on your accomplishments, focusing on the outcome rather than the process.
This creates huge pressure where reaching the goal becomes your only focus. You are putting off feeling happy and content – I’ll be happy WHEN I am thin, fit, healthy, weight a certain number of kilos and so on. You don’t need to reach these outcome goals to prove that you are a good and loveable and worthy person.
So let’s see how you can tweak what you are currently doing to set yourself up for success.
#1 Understand goals versus systems
I love this quote by James Clear:
"Goals are about the results you want to achieve, systems are about the processes that lead to those results"
Have you ever been on a faddy diet to lose weight? I know I have! I tried the Atkins diet, I’ve tried juice/soup diets, heck I even tried a ridiculous diet where you ate potatoes on one day, tomatoes on another and chicken on another… all in the crazy attempt to lose quick weight. And yeah, in some instances I lost a few kilos, so you feel great right?
Butt if you don’t change your systems, your habits, the process that leads to lasting change (in my instance this was wanting to lose about 4 kg) then you’ll just end up putting on weight.
If your daily habits include a sedentary lifestyle, slobbing out on the sofa each night watching telly, eating a daily bar of chocolate and snacking on crips, what do you think will happen when you stop the crazy diet? You’ll end up putting on the weight again and it happened to me over and over again!
It’s not the results that need to change, it’s your habits, your systems that need to.
If you think about it, your fitness is a measure of your exercise habits. You have to put into place the right systems, to develop daily habits (the process) that will help you achieve the goal (outcome)💯
#2 Learn to love the process
Results oriented goals focus on the outcome, so you obsess with hitting a specific target (4 X yoga per week or running that 10K) and if you fall short you might feel a failure.
Process oriented goals focus more on how you feel whilst pursuing your goals, enjoying the process, learning to love the journey, focusing on feeling GOOD about the journey. So rather than putting OFF feeling good until you have lost 10kg, how about doing something you love starting now?
Maybe you want to do exercise but you’re bored of a gym, can you find something else you enjoy? Wall climbing, reformer pilates, cycling outdoors, yoga, something you enjoy attending that you can love as part of your process.
Getting to your final destination (i.e. running the 10K) is not the point, being on the path is, when you’re on a journey it’s just about staying on the journey.
By having a process-oriented focus, you unlock the potential for joy & happiness in the here and now, rather than putting it off to some point in the future.
#3 Create daily habits
Big outcomes goals can be demoralising. We don’t hit them, we give up, or worse still feel like a failure. Instead, a much better way to achieve something is to start small through tiny habits.
For example, when I first started going to Reformer Pilates, my tiny habit was to lay out my workout clothes the night before and put them straight on when I got dressed in the morning. The hardest thing is getting started. So you want to start with a tiny habit.
Better yet, piggy back onto something you are already doing. Let’s say you already make yourself a cup of coffee in the morning and you want to shake up your breakfast routine. Make yourself a smoothie alongside your coffee and make it easy by putting your smoothie maker next to the coffee maker, that way you’re piggy backing onto something you are already doing.
If you want to delve into this topic further, I highly recommend James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. It’s literally the bomb. No pun intended!
If you want to learn how to improve your health mindset, then download my FREE guide. It will - quite literally - change your life!