Setting meaningful goals

Values are your desires for how you want to act and treat yourself and others. Our values give us direction, but you can never complete them, unlike goals.

When we get started on our fitness journey, it’s very common to set weight loss or physique goals. But we also want to keep in mind how we want to live our lives; without awareness of what’s important to us, we end up aimlessly wandering or getting sidetracked and pursuing goals we don’t want.

It's better to have more motivators than just body composition to increase our likelihood of change.

If you were asked what your top 3–5 values were off the top of your head, you’d probably struggle to answer that question.

Here are four different areas of your life to think about when thinking about your values: work, relationships, health, and leisure.

We can use goals related to our values to serve as markers to help us navigate and let us know if we are on course, and then create actions to engage in daily or weekly that will lead to our desired goal.

Use this list to help you identify your own values:

You can ask yourself, "How would you like to be remembered?" What traits do you admire in other people?

After you’ve clarified your values, let’s think of the actions that reflect these values.

Here is an example of one of mine to help you out:

Value: Health

Goal: Take care of your physical and mental health.

Actions: regular and enjoyable movement; a nutritious and satisfying diet; sticking to my sleep schedule; socialising with friends.

When it comes to goal-setting, we want to focus on the process rather than the outcome. A processed-oriented goal might be to eat 3 portions of vegetables a day; this goal is measurable, whereas an outcome goal may look like I want to lose 5kg of body fat. If you solely focus on the outcome, you may feel like you are failing all the way until you achieve it. But if we set process goals, we can see the progress we are making that will lead to the outcome anyway.

It's also helpful to focus on approach-oriented goals rather than avoidance goals.

Avoidance goal: I want to eat less junk food.

Approach goal: When ordering in restaurants or takeout, I’d like to focus on mindfully eating food and paying attention to my fullness cues.

The approach goal is more detailed and gives you something you can actively do rather than focus on the negative.

Now that we’ve clarified our values and understood how we create goals in relation to our values, let’s explore SMART actions.

Specific: Is your goal clear? What will you do? When? Where?

Measurable: How will you measure and monitor this change?

Achievable: Do you have the skills and resources you need to make the change?

Realistic: Is this realistic for you? How confident do you feel that you can achieve this?

Time-based: When will you get it done?

Let’s break down the action of regular and enjoyable movement some more. 3 weight training sessions a week (specific) following my resistance training programme (measurable/achievable): Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the morning before I start work at 7 a.m. (time-based) as that’s when I feel I’ll have the most energy (realistic).

I hope you found this article helpful!

If you did, drop me an email to let me know at odonoghuefit@gmail.com.