Yep: still writing about goals

We all have goals, whether or not we express them.  (Yes, even striving to avoid all conversations about goals is a goal.)  Some of our goals are fuzzy, like wanting to feel “good” or “fit” or “healthy.”  Some are more concrete, like wanting to fit into those jeans at the back of the closet.  If we want to achieve those goals, however, how we articulate them becomes more important.

First, we want to make our goals less fuzzy.  That means we have to spend some time defining good, fit, and healthy in terms of things that can be tracked and measured.  Measuring good might mean something as simple as assigning a grade for how good we feel on each day’s calendar box and seeing if we can get those grades up over time.  Fit might mean something about a target time for a mile run or a target weight for a heavy squat.  Healthy might be a body fat percentage or a cholesterol level.

Then we get to make some choices.  Specific goals fall, loosely, into three categories:  outcome, performance, and process.  Outcome goals work best for the super competitive among us because they are about winning and losing.  This is the kind of goal for someone who wants to take first place in the next 5K.  For those of us who are less motivated by the total win, we can skip this kind.

All of us need the other two kinds.  Performance goals focus on targets.  “I want to achieve my best time ever on my next century ride.”  Essentially, they are about competing with ourselves to reach our peak.

Process goals are about how we get to performance goals.  “I am going to do interval workouts to improve my cardio three times a week.”  “I am going to increase my leg strength by weight training twice a week.”

In practice, this means that we might have several goals that together add up to a single goal.  That is great as long as we are careful not to overwhelm ourselves with too many things to do at once.  We will get there.