Use Smart Health And Fitness Goals To Get the Best You!

Goal setting and achieving your goals are two sides of the same coin; they are both needed if your life is to have any attachment to purpose and meaning. 

Personally, I’ve set 1,000s of goals and achieved 10s of them. I’m getting better. Much better, but it took changing the way I set my goals to achieve them. I needed to learn how to be “SMART” about goal setting. 

 If you want to achieve your goals, you have to know how to set the right ones — the smart goals.

The First Step Of Goal Setting

Setting your smart goals will be the first step. That’s when you clarify, list, and construct the step-by-step process on how to achieve your dreams, and understand WHY you want to achieve them. This also is the time that you will need to reflect, not only about your past achievements or frustrations but also about your future worries and obstacles.

To prevent yourself from being overwhelmed with plans, however, smart goals have to be simplified and broken down into much smaller units. In this way, you will easily access every angle of your smart goal, whenever there is a need to review any of its components.

Since the very purpose of goal setting is to be achievable, your smart goals should be challenging enough to stimulate you but realistic enough so as not to discourage you in the end.

For instance, you want to set a smart goal for your personal health, for yourself and for your family. These two can be easily confused into one thing but they are different. Do not make the mistake of planning to improve your personal goals in order to “carry over” your family goals. Attack them separately.

Of course, it is only natural that some aspects of your family’s health goals are preset in your personal health goal setting and vice versa. However, personal health goals should always take priority as they most often carry over to family health-related improvements.

The SMART Of Goal Setting

SMART is an acronym for the way in which you can formulate a goal.

S-specific
M-measurable
A-Attainable
R-realistic
T-time sensitive

Whenever I ask clients to set goals, we use this tool to identify if we need to think about anything else that could make it easier to achieve the goal. Then, once we have all the details in the 5 categories of SMART, we identify WHY we want to achieve that goal.

What are the benefits? What are the obstacles? How will achieving this goal require you to change? What tools and resources are necessary to achieve this goal?

You can think of the process of creating a SMART Goal like asking yourself a series of questions in order to collect all of the information for each piece.

1. (Specific) WHAT do you want to achieve? List out in detail exactly what you want.
2. (Measurable) How will you know you’ve achieved it? What unit of measurement will you use, how will you track it?
3. (Attainable) Can YOU do this? Is this possible and how do you know?
4. (Realistic) Is this relevant to what you are working toward? Does it align with your purpose and values?
5. (Time Sensitive) What is the timeline in which you will complete this? Are there milestones along the way? 

The Second Step Of Goal Setting

Setting your smart goal is very important. Just don’t forget that creating and planning detailed ways to achieve it are equally important. You also should have a method of checking in and measuring your progress.

Say, for example, you have decided to prioritize your personal health and you have set a smart goal for this. What you will need is a procedure so you can monitor each step of the and make the necessary revisions. 

To do this, create a roadmap. For members of the LadyBoss® Personal Results Coaching Program, refer to the “Yellow Brick Road” in your Success Playbook for a detailed example of how to create a roadmap for any goal! 

Along with your roadmap, identify every “next step” or milestone you intend to reach and what you will need to do next once you have reached that milestone.

Remember, your goals should not be isolating. Make it a habit to surround yourself with people who share your vision. 

This will help you motivate yourself into achieving what you set out to do. 

LadyBoss builds these relationships into the LadyBoss Lifestyle at every level you participate in. If you are a member of the LadyBoss Community on Facebook, you are surrounded by women on the journey to living healthy. 

In the LadyBoss® LIVE 28 Day Weight Loss Challenge, you’ll join a squad of women and have a coach to lead you. 

In Personal Results Coaching, you’ve got a Coach in your pocket 24/7 and levels of support from Results Sisters, Power Hours, and the Results Coaching members ONLY Facebook group. It’s built-in support of like-minded women and expert support for every step in reaching your health goals.

Achieving Your Goals

Setting up smart goals will never be any more useful than the napkin you write them on if you don’t make a continued effort to achieve them. Notice, I didn’t say effort as if it just needs to happen once. Reaching goals means making a consistent and continued effort. 

Writing down a goal isn’t just there to be put on display or to remind yourself that once upon a time, you were sensible enough to create a goal for yourself. 

And don’t try to convince yourself that there are goals that are really meant to be written and nothing more; there is no such thing.

Goals are meant to be achieved. This “achieving part” completes the smart goal-settinggoal setting process. What makes achieving goals twice as difficult compared with the goal-settinggoal setting part is that people tend to separate the two. Don’t do this. The setting and achieving is intertwined, in fact, two parts of a whole process.