Unlock your potential: 🎖️ The secrets to effective goal setting life habits

👋 Welcome to our latest edition! Today, we’ll dive into goal setting—its application, importance, and how it can be a sustainable life habit. We’ll not only create goals but also map out actionable steps to achieve them.

I want you to keep in mind that goals are more like milestones in a marathon, or like train stations 🚅 on a journey. They are just signs and stops on a path meant to be enjoyable and challenging. Goal setting is also something that requires patience, resilience, and optimism through gaining life experience and letting it compound over time.

So, with that in mind, let’s dive a bit deeper:

🎯Why make goals? How do they benefit you?🚀

➡️ Goals helps us with direction and focus; they give us a better understanding of what we truly want, and where we want to be. They help us grow in motivation, give a sense of purpose, and help us move forward. As we achieve goals, they can also boost our self-confidence, and encourage us to try new, bolder things.

 🌱Interestingly, goals also help in other areas of personal growth. By using goals, they help us to:

- Manage our time better
- Prioritize tasks
- Make effective decisions.

They also give us deadlines to help us be accountable, push us to learn new skills and discover growth opportunities.

🔦 According to Locke & Latham (2006), goals have a secondary subconscious effect. They act like a reference point that our mind uses as a guide for our actions even when we aren’t thinking about them. Regular reviews and reminders also help this stay aware of them. I wasn’t aware about this at the time of writing, but can say I have experienced it through having my annual goals written on a piece of paper and stuck to my wall as a checklist (will discuss further in the 👉 blog).

So, now that we know how goals benefit and help us grow as people, lets figure out the basics and work our way up together 🙏

📚 Where do we start with Goal Setting?📚

1. 🧩 MOTIVATION! The first piece of the goal setting puzzle.
   What do you want to do and why do you want to do it? From this interesting TED-Ed episode, we see that Internal motivation from a personal drive or desire is more likely to get you to succeed than external, as those with internal (intrinsic) motivation were more likely to persist. An easy way to define these motivations are:

• ❤️Internal motivation: Something you enjoy as a result of personal drive or desire. It has meaning to you because you find it personally rewarding.

• 🎖️External motivation: When you do/achieve something in order to receive something e.g. good grades to get a good job, praise from other people, etc.

2. ✨ SELF-BELIEF! Also called self-efficacy, in his paper about, “Goal setting theory and motivation”, Lunenburg (2011), defined this as: “the belief that one can attain a goal with their capabilities and competencies.” This is why goals can’t be abstract, easy or automatic, but they need to stretch us, be challenging, and be specific, while remaining achievable.

📐 Goal Structure and Timeframes⏳

Now that we know we need to be driven and believe in ourselves, how are we going to make these goals? 🤔 Well… let’s start with how we make them: 👇

Structure

In Goal Setting psychology, Locke & Latham (2006) emphasize that goals need to be specific, challenging; something that stretches you out of your comfort zone, and that you believe it can be achieved. Therefore, the goals must be difficult and require greater effort and persistence to achieve.

HOWEVER, these goals can’t be lofty or feel impossible to you, nor can they be easy, or abstract. It’s a balance that takes time and experimentation. The point is to create goals, then enjoy the journey. Learn along the way. You improve through trying and learning, rather than doing nothing.

Timeframes

Everyone is different when it comes to making a timeframe to complete their goals. Some people prefer annual goals that are steps feeding into a larger five to ten-year plan. Others prefer short term goals such as weekly, monthly, or yearly targets. Some like to combine both.

THE KEY POINT: THERE IS NO WRONG ANSWER HERE! 
You 🫵 need to find the goal style that works best for you. Again, it takes time and experimentation. For me, I prefer an annual series of goals that are stepping stones to a five+ year flexible plan.

 🔥Goal Styles: the Mastery Approach 🔥

We are going to use The Mastery Approach from the meta-analyses of Bardarch et al. (2020), and Epton et al. (2017). According to them, the, ‘Mastery Approach’ yielded the highest success rates for goal achievement.

The Mastery Approach: Involves the personal drive (motivation and self-belief) to learn and achieve a goal by learning, developing competence, and mastering new skills.

In addition, I would add that it’s not just about mastering the skill, but maintaining it. Or once achieved, aiming for something higher with this same process, i.e. it’s sustainable. We’ll call this the ‘Lifestyle Approach’.

With the mastery, and lifestyle approaches in mind, the internal motivation, and the self-belief, we need to understand that each goal has two fundamental parts:

1. Outcome – The goal itself.

2. Behaviour – The process to achieve the goal. Involves taking the time to learn and apply the skills to achieve the Outcome. Ideally, this should be enjoyable. If you can make the behaviour enjoyable, you will be more likely to succeed.

🚧 Goal Construction 🚧

Still with me? Good, because now comes the construction of the goals using the S.M.A.R.T. method. This helps us frame our goals into something more tangible, where each letter stands for:

• S: Specific

• M: Measurable

• A: Achievable

• R: Realtistic

• T: Time-based

When SMART goals blend internal motivation alongside a mastery/lifestyle approach with an outcome goal, and a behavioural goal, they can then be much easier to visualize, create a process, follow-through with, and actually achieve. This is what Swann et al. (2023) highlights in their paper where they believe that we can’t just focus on the end result, but, we also need to focus on the learning/mastery aspect to get there.
Now, let’s see how this all comes together with a demonstration and an exercise for you to try out! 👇

📝 DEMONSTRATION TIME! 🧭

Let’s give an example to make this whole thing easier to understand:
A person decides they want to lose 10kg by the end of the year.

Is it SMART?
Specific & measurable: Yes – we have a target number
Achievable & Realistic: Yes – 10kg can be lost in a year
Time-based: Yes – Goal deadline is set for the end of the year

Does this use a Mastery and Lifestyle approach with an Outcome and a Behavioural aspect?

• Mastery approach: Yes, losing 10kg requires learning new skills, processes, etc.

• Outcome aspect: Yes – we know what the end result is.

• Behavioural aspect: NO – we know what we want to do, but we don’t have a plan/process. 👉 So, we need to decide how we are going to achieve the goal by learning, and creating a process to get us there. In this case, it could be to start with a Personal Trainer, or make a workout plan alongside learning to do calorie counting, or ask friends what they did to lose weight, etc. Ideally this process is something enjoyable, e.g. Going to the gym with a friend, taking up a new physical activity as a hobby, or something similar to this.

• Lifestyle approach: No (kind of) – This is because we are only talking about the end result, not what happens after it. To ensure sustainability, the goal would be: “I want to lose 10kg by the end of the year and keep it off.” This approach avoids regaining the weight and promotes a sustainable lifestyle. It also promotes the idea of continuing to use the skills/process, especially if we LIKE and ENJOY it.

🫵 Want to try it out? 🫵

To make things easier, we are going to adopt a month strategy, but feel free to adjust this as you like:
Make at least one goal that you would like to achieve by the end of July.

Remember:

• Make it SMART (The outcome goal with a mastery approach. It needs to stretch you and you will learn something new).

• Make a plan in order to achieve the goal and start working on it

• Is your goal sustainable once it’s achieved? We are aiming for sustainable lifestyle goals, but not all of them fit this category. E.g. You want to finish a specific project, or read a specific book in a set amount of time.

Some goals can incorporate the Outcome and the behaviour aspects in one, e.g. I will read 20 pages per day for six days of the week for the next month. This could turn into a lifestyle habit, but it doesn’t have to. It’s up to you! 😁

Normally I would have an anecdote here, but this time, I am going to write about my experience with goal setting and some of my 2024 goals over on my blog: 👉 Here

I will add some explanations with them as well. If you have questions, leave them in the blog, and I will do my best to help out 🫡

✍️ Quote to ponder: ✍️

What are you training for? – Adam Sciascia, CrossFit MANA, New Zealand

📖 Want something else to read? 📖

Blogs where I expand on the Newsletter and go more in-depth about goal-setting alongside other topics can be found: 👉 Here
More newsletters 👉 Here
Sci-Fi Fantasy Short stories 👉 Here 

🎨 Lastly, this edition’s Artwork Alcove design: 🎨

At the time of writing, these are just artworks, but soon, these are going to be made into t-shirts and posters, so watch this space for when they are ready for purchase!)

Final note:
There will be setbacks. DO NOT let them get you down. Pick yourself up again and keep going. Everyone makes mistakes and slip ups. Just stop, give yourself a chance to breathe, learn from them, make a plan, improve, and move on. Persistence overcomes resistance. Also don’t let ideas such as age, education, etc. get in the way. Jason Grubbs at 37 as a self-proclaimed overweight man got into CrossFit and later became the world champion; Martha Stewart began an incredibly successful company at 50 years old; Alexis Ohanian started Reddit at 22 years old as a dropout. That list can go on and on, but:

That’s it for now. As a heads up, this is a two-parter. The next edition we are going to look at “Complementary Strategies” to help you in the process of achieving your goals. After writing this, the strategies to help us stay on track are too much to include in just this newsletter, so we will explore them next time.

If you liked what you read today, give the exercise a go, or share some of the content with others! We’d love to make this into a big community that wants to apply and inspire long-term sustainable positive lifestyles to lots of people! If you have any ideas, suggestions, or comments please leave them here, or you can add them to posts on my Instagram (where I am more active), Facebook, or X/Twitter: @the_norskiwi_nz

Until next time!

Much love to you all, and see you in the next one!

🍵Cheers!☕

Norskiwi