Goal Setting

As French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery said; “A goal without a plan is just a wish”. Goal Setting is something many people talk about doing this time of the year and can be a very powerful process setting up your vision for 2017. In the following piece, I will discuss 3 points of Goal Setting to make your 2017 Goals become accomplishments.

1) Make Goals realistic and specific

You need to make your goals realistic and specific for YOU. This is sometimes a hard pill to swallow, but you need to be honest with yourself to actually attain results. On the fitness side, setting a goal to run a 6:00 mile, but right now your fastest time is a 10:00 mile and your fastest 400m is 2:00, that goal might be a little out of reach. A more realistic goal using that same example would be an 8:00 mile.

Not only do your goals need to be realistic, but they also need to be specific. Let’s switch gears and use weight loss as an example. If a person makes a goal of “I want to lose weight in 2017” that is a lot different than saying “I will lose 20 pounds by July”. Being specific helps in the long term vision of this goal (which I will discuss in point #2), but it also has a different tone using a phrase like “I will” versus “I want to”.

2) Time Table and Mini Goals

Once you have established realistic and specific goals for yourself, the next step is to work backwards from the date you would like to achieve this goal and set up some “mini goals” or “benchmarks” along the way. Using the weight loss example from above; “I will lose 20 pounds by July”. If you started this journey February 1, it would give you five months to accomplish the goal. Now that you have that laid out, work backwards and look at it like a Chipper WOD. It’s not 20 pounds, instead look at it as 4 pounds a month, or even smaller, 1 pound a week. Breaking things up in small pieces is very important for the mental side of reaching a goal. 20 pounds seems like an immense amount, but 4 pounds in a month seems more than doable.

3) How will I attain this?

Up to this point, you have made a realistic and specific goal, and have set up a time table. Now you need to think about the most important part to attaining that goal, which could very easily be number 1. You NEED to understand sacrifices that will have to happen in order to achieve this goal and make a plan of attack. Not only the sacrifices, but WHY you are trying to attain this goal. Go back to Article 7: 2016 Reflections, to get a refresher on understanding your “why”. You have to be committed to the PROCESS of attaining a goal, not just the goal.

Staying with the weight loss example above, it will be necessary to evaluate things such as your nutrition, WOD attendance, and Intensity inside of those WODs. How willing are you to commit to this goal and what are you going to do on a daily basis to make this happen?

Nutrition- What does your nutrition look like? Do you think it’s “good”? Maybe you are

pretty disciplined and eat well 80% and not so well 20%. To reach your goal, you may need to be disciplined enough to go to 100% and 0%. You may need to not even have one bite of that sweet (or whatever your vice is). You may need to weigh and measure each part of each meal Monday through Sunday. This is where you need to be willing to do whatever it takes to reach that goal. Can you commit to that?

WOD Attendance- Do you come to the box or workout most days? Maybe you get a

workout in five days a week. To attain this goal though, you may need to workout six or

even seven times to reach your goal. Not saying you have to do a workout that will leave you suffering and struggling for air, however, this means you may have to get up at 4:30 a.m. to make the 5a.m.

class, or come to the 7:30 p.m. class after a long day of work, OR you may just need to

get up and do a 7min AMRAP of burpees before your day starts just to make sure you

do something. Make it a habit and do it every day.

Intensity- You know what, maybe you already workout Monday-Saturday; however, do you come in and really give it everything you got, every single day? Or did

you go a little too heavy with those power cleans and in turn have to do singles (slow down) instead

of scaling the weight and doing them unbroken (faster). Yes, you need to check your

ego at the door and scale reps, movements, weights, one or all down.

It will get hard, it will get tough and you might fail, but how committed will you be to the process? If you are not committed to the process and the sacrifices that will have to be made, you are already behind when it comes to reaching your goal. If you give everything you have to reach a goal and don’t. SO BE IT! It is not a failure, instead you have gotten better through the process. Mark Twain once said, “20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do”.