Keeping yourself accountable is so important when you’ve chosen to make your health a priority. But this doesn’t mean that you create unrealistic goals that are impossible to reach! The best goals are specific and equate to small changes you can make to your lifestyle ongoing and not just for the next few months!
So where do you start? Firstly, decide exactly what ‘health’ means to you and what outcomes you want to achieve. For example, is it about how you feel or about your strength or the amount of activity you want to do? Goals can be anything from trying to instil good habits, like drinking at least 1 litre of water per day, or doing a short yoga stretch every morning through to a personal best time for a 5km run.
Make your goals simple and measurable so you can track your progress easily and start to see the outcomes. We always talk about setting SMART goals with our members, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
- Specific: Give yourself a timeframe and what exactly you want to accomplish. A specific goal might be: ‘To do 30 minutes of exercise 3 times a week’ or ‘To practice 10 minutes of mindfulness each day’.
- Measurable: Establish criteria for measuring progress of your goals and to help you stay on track. If ultimately ‘health’ is about how you feel, start a mood diary and track the difference in how you feel each week or month.
- Attainable: Make sure your goals are achievable as well as being important to you. It’s best to set smaller outcomes that can be achieved in shorter timeframes and keep expanding your goal as this keeps you motivated. For example, if it’s about a PB for a run, set a mid-way goal and then an ultimate so you can appreciate the progress.
- Realistic: A goal can be both high and realistic you are the only one who can decide just how high your goal should be but be sure that every goal represents substantial progress in what you ultimately want to achieve.
- Timely: Giving yourself timeframes for progress checks is the best way to set your conscious mind into motion in terms of achieving that goal. If you don’t put boundaries around the goal then you lose motivation to achieve it.
Once you’ve set your goals the best thing to do is to write them down or even set yourself a little tracker to keep ticking off what you want to be doing each day, week or month.
We want to hear about the goals you’re setting yourself for your Year of Health!
Take the pledge today to Make 2022 Your Year of Health and tell us what your health goals are!
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