I know I’m a little late on this, but happy new year! I am personally super excited for 2024, because I have a lot planned. As of now, I am just starting my second season of coaching a volleyball team, and I am looking forward to graduating high school, working at summer camp, and starting college in the fall. All of this stuff can be scary, yet right now I am finding all these new opportunities very exciting. In the last month or so, I have realized that in order to achieve all of these new things, it takes a lot of hard work and perseverance. In addition, you have to have good goals that push you and prepare you for what’s next. I think that this blog post comes at a very interesting time, because people are using the new year to set goals for this upcoming year. Lots of people set goals in January, yet I don’t know many people that keep them until December, or even March!
I think that this is because of a few different reasons. First, a lot of people setting goals don’t have the right reasons for why they are setting these goals. Secondly, even if they do, they don’t know how to set a goal, or how they can take everyday steps to achieve these goals. Today, I want to learn a lot of insight about goal-setting, including the “how” and “why”, in the hopes that we can learn how to become better at both setting and reaching goals.
Why do we set goals?
I find that our reason for doing anything is the greatest factor in how we do that thing. This doesn’t just apply to goals; in fact, I mentioned in a recent blog post that your motivation for working out affects the actual process. A common theme in New Year’s Resolutions is that people set goals not because they are motivated to reach them, but because they feel an outward societal pressure to do so. This is the thought of “If everyone else is doing it, I should too”. The obvious fault is that if you have no desire to complete this goal, and are only setting it to meet the standards you see around you, there is pretty much no chance that you are actually going to put in the hard work and discipline to reach this goal. This is why I am convinced that if you want to set a goal and reach it, doing it on New Year’s Day is the worst day to begin, because someone who truly wants to get better begins immediately, and does not wait for a specific day or event to start.
If you find yourself setting goals and never actually doing anything to reach them, look back to when you made that goal. Was it thought-out and desired, or was it simply a statement you made one day? If you just made it to appease outside factors, you’re never going to reach it. It takes self-discipline to reach a goal, which requires a desire to get better that is greater than the desire to stay the same.
SMART Goals
If you are not familiar with the acronym SMART, it stands for “specific”, “measurable”, “achievable”, “relevant”, and “time-bound”. These five words should be your goalposts for setting a goal that you are able to track and reach. A lot of people make goals that are too broad, and so vague that you cannot tell if you actually reached it and made improvements. The example that I am going to use is drinking water. If someone’s goal is to “drink more water”, this is too vague. If someone drinks an extra spoonful of water every day, they are technically beating their goal, but there will be no actual effects of that, so the goal will be purposeless. Having these parameters allows you to have more effective goals.
Specific: A goal that is specific explains what needs to be done, as well as what steps it takes to achieve that goal. A goal that is more specific looks like saying “I am going to drink more water by bringing a water bottle everywhere I go, keeping it filled with water and ice, and making sure it needs to be filled up twice a day.” Making a goal more specific allows you to see how it can practically be done every day.
Measurable: When setting a measurable goal, you need to come up with a statistic that will make it clear whether or not you are reaching your goal. An example of a measurable goal is saying “Drink 64oz of water every day”. When you make a measurable goal, you are able to see a clear indicator of if you did it or not. If you drank 40oz, it is clear that you did not meet your goal, and if you drank 70oz, then you will know for certain that you met that goal. Unmeasurable goals are not attainable, because you have no standard that you are trying to meet.
Achievable: This is where you need to be realistic. One one hand, you will never reach a goal if it will take a miracle to accomplish. And on the other hand, setting a goal for a year and reaching it three days later does not push you, and therefore you will not be better because of it. You need to find a goal that will challenge you, but is still in reach to accomplish. An achievable goal looks like saying “I will drink 90 oz every day”, because this number is the recommended water intake for a female. Setting a goal of 200 oz is so hard to hit, and just because it is a high number does not automatically mean that is what is best for you. On the flip side, setting a goal of 30oz will not help, because you probably meet that goal without even trying. This can take some trial and error, but find a good spot, and only move that if it is desperately needed.
Relevant: Please, please, don’t set a goal just because other people are. If you simply copy and paste another person’s goals onto your goal sheet, you will not reach what you want to achieve in the long-term. Every person is different and unique, which means that our wants and needs are all going to differ. Oftentimes, people set goals to either fix a problem that is present in their life, or to improve a piece of their life. If you are a great student and find no problem getting good grades, making an academic goal really isn’t going to push or improve you. You need to have a good reason for why you are setting that goal, as I mentioned earlier, and it needs to have a specific purpose. It is good to work toward your goals alongside other people, because community helps us all grow, but taking all of someone else’s goals really won’t maximize your results.
Time-bound: Some time boundaries are external, which means that we don’t set it, but someone else does. For example, if you want to graduate with all A’s, someone else has already determined your graduation date, and so that needs to be when your goal is done. Other goals, ones that are not brought on by other people or events, need to be time-bound by you. For example, it is very likely that there is nobody else telling you to drink water by a certain day, so you need to set a realistic time for how long you want to set this goal for. This way, you can see an end to the goal, and know when you have completed it.
Short-term vs. Long-term
Typically, short-term goals are to be achieved in a few months’ time, while long-term goals take a few years to reach. I believe it is important to have a mixture of both at all times. Long-term goals usually refer to the overall direction of your life, whether it be in relationships, careers, etc. Meanwhile, short-term goals are most often stepping stones to reach your long-term goals. They help break up a long-term goal into smaller steps so that you can make a long-term goal more realistic and attainable. I would recommend making your long-term goals first, so that you can make short-term goals that help you reach those goals. Then, you can make other short-term goals that are unrelated; smaller goals that are not necessarily tied to a bigger purpose, but are still helpful for your overall well-being.
I know that I struggle with following through with goals, and that is often because I either make them too big and therefore unreachable, or I try to put too much on my plate at once. It seems nice to work towards six big goals each month, but in my experience, that is starting off too strong. I would recommend starting out with 2-3, preferably two, and then going from there. For some people, it is easier to take on a few tasks at a time, so then you would benefit from increasing the intensity of those few goals. If you are a person that is able to take on many different goals at a time, create a variety of 4-6 goals, but do not make them all intense on their own. Make sure that you are always able to reach those goals at the end, but not without a lot of hard work and discipline.
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Goal setting is hard, and not many people are able to follow through on their goals, but nothing worth doing is easy.
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