As cliché as it may seem, the start of the New Year is the perfect time to set your sights on a better, healthier version of YOU. After all, there’s always room for improvement. What are your goals for yourself in 2020?
In his book 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute, Richard Wiseman shares some fantastic insight into goal-setting. Specifically, Wiseman talks about setting SMART goals. What does that mean? SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Based.
Whether you’ve already set your intentions or you’re still tossing ideas back and forth, this is an excellent framework to establish razor-sharp focus on your health and fitness goals for 2020.
Contrary to setting SMART goals, many of us tend to be wishy-washy about what we want. When it comes to health and fitness goals, we’ve noticed that people are often very ambiguous. For instance, people frequently say they “want to lose weight”, or “have more energy”, or “sleep better”.
As you can see, those endeavors are missing some key ingredients. On the other hand, committing to “losing 15 pounds in 12 weeks” is a much “SMART”er approach.
So, when you think about what you want to accomplish, take the SMART criteria to heart. Be as specific as possible about what you want, when you want it, and how you’re going to measure your progress.
Now, being “realistic” doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t think BIG. By all means, we want you to think BIG. Just remember that goals need to be time-based, and if you have a bigger goal for yourself (such as losing a large amount of weight or owning your own business), you may need to break that SMART goal down into smaller, more manageable, bite-sized chunks.
We’re going to be digging more into goal-setting, and more importantly, the keys to achieving your goals, over the next several newsletters, so stay tuned!
What are your goals for 2020? We’d love to hear from you, and if there’s anything we can do to help, that’s why we’re here!