The Thing That’s More Important Than Setting Goals
Another new year is on its way! Can you believe it?? It feels like just yesterday I was preparing for the last change over of the calendar!
This time of year is flooded with messages of making changes, setting new goals and the opportunity to buy ALL THE THINGS to help you feel good about those decisions. It’s so easy to let ourselves get caught up in all the hype, because if you’re anything like me, you love the idea of a fresh start.
Here’s what I’ve come to know though,
The hype and the ‘things’ don’t really help you achieve your goals.
For instance, you might have a goal to lose weight this year, so you go out and buy the latest brand of shoes and activewear. And you might even join a gym if you haven’t already.
And then you feel good about starting the journey because you have all the things.
But then what happens when it’s raining and cold outside, or work needs you, or even the kids. What happens when you’re tired, and exercise is the last thing you feel like doing?
You choose those other things over exercise.
The questions then becomes, why are you doing this? Why do you want to lose weight?
See in this hypothetical situation, the shoes and the activewear, and even the gym membership will only take you se far. Then what?
If the answer is to get healthier, then it must mean you want to be a healthy person. Because otherwise you are still the same you, trying to be someone you’re not.
And that’s a hard façade to keep up.
Ooooh. Mic drop.
If we really want to see lasting change, it has to be about WHO we want to be. And that might require a bit of soul-searching and telling ourselves some hard truths. But who wants to do that…
The hype tells us it’s ok to not do it. The ‘things’ give us false hope that we are making progress when it reality they just add to our overwhelm. And so we slowly give up on our goals.
I read an article earlier this year about ‘Quiet Quitting’. It’s when someone starts doing the bare minimum at work to fulfil their employment contract but no more than this. It usually comes from a sense of dissatisfaction, a breakdown in relationships with management, and a lack of recognition for a job well done (in whatever form they feel is needed). But I think we can draw some parallels to our personal life too. We get unsatisfied with results, we are disappointed by relationships, and there is no reward. So we give up and quietly quit.
Steven Furtick, a speaker I really admire, put it this way, “I will hide behind the excuse that I don’t want it anymore”. It’s that little competitive spirit in us that says “If I can’t win at it straight away I’m just not going to try”.
Maybe you’ve been telling yourself for so long that you won’t win, that you don’t even know that you started to try once; now it’s just who you are, so you can’t be any different. And that right there is what will determine whether or not you achieve your goals. You have to believe that you CAN be that person before you can set goals to match.
If we really want to see lasting change, it has to be about WHO we want to be.
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, discusses the idea that for habits to truly stick and therefore reach your goals, they must be identity-based. He narrows down building successful habits to two steps:
- Decide who you want to be
- Celebrate the small steps you take to get there
The only tricky part in actually knowing who we want to be is the realisation that that might not meet other people’s expectations of who we should be and who we already are. And that’s not even taking into consideration our past experiences and trauma that stop us from ever really being able to love ourselves fully and completely.
It took me a long time to realise who I really am, and that the real me is a beautiful person, inside and out. My beauty, (and everyone else’s), is my identity. We should all be chasing dreams and passions and setting goals to reach them.
So as we move into the new year, I want to encourage you to think about WHO you want to be, even if you’ve been told that will never happen.
Find yourself your people. The ones that encourage you and help you do hard things.
And then find the beauty of you. Because beauty really is more than skin deep.
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