Try This Simple Way to Set Goals and Find Your Motivation
It’s easy to set ambiguous goals. We do it without even trying to. “I want to be healthier this year” or “I want to lose weight” are a few examples of well-intentioned but vague platitudes. It’s not wrong to want those things, but the issue here is the lack of specificity. For example, what does it look like to be healthier? Or how much weight are you trying to lose?
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Activity:
Take a moment and think about what your goal is. Is it having more energy than you currently have? Is it feeling better in your body? It your goal to lose weight?
Now let’s get as specific as possible. For example, if your goal is to have more energy, think about what that looks like in your life. What specific things do you want that extra energy for? Maybe it would look like, “I’m an uncle now and I want to have lots of energy so I can play freeze tag for at least 15 minutes with my sibling’s kids.” Or maybe, “I work in a competitive job, and I need more energy to stay at the top of my game.”
It's exercise time! Write down your goal, giving as much detail as possible. Once you’ve written that down, ask yourself a few questions about the motivation behind your goals. I call this the “why.” Here are a few prompts to find yours:
Why is this important to me?
What will happen if I don’t achieve this goal?
Why do I want this?
How will my life change once I achieve my goal?
The goal here is to find out what attaches you emotionally to those goals. So that might look like, “I want more energy to play with my sibling’s kids because I want for us to be a close family.” Or “I want more energy so I can stay at the top of my game because I see a lot of my peers losing opportunities to younger, more energetic people.”
The deeper you dig into your why, the more clarity about your goal you will have, and it will be easier to access the motivation to get there. If you think about it, the goal is a surface-y way to measure what we really want, but if you aren’t connected to the reason why, then it’s easy to run out of motivation.
Take the time to do this exercise, and feel free to set a consultation. You might be surprised by what you discover!