Goals, Part One: SMART

Now that we’re in 2022, we might be making some goals for the year.  I’m going to be writing about goals all week, beginning with today’s topic:  SMART goals.

 

There are lots of ways to make goals, some more effective than others.  A fair amount of research suggests that SMART goals are useful.  So what the heck are they?

 

SMART goals are Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely, thus the acronym.  Explaining further is best done with an example.

 

Let’s say we, like nearly everyone else after the holidays, want to lose weight.  We could say, “I want to lose weight,” and call our goal-writing done, but how will we know when we’ve met our goal?

 

We begin by making it specific:  I want to lose 10 pounds.  We’ll know, assuming we weigh ourselves, when we’ve reached the goal.

 

For a lot of fitness goals, specific and measurable go together.  We get specific by choosing a measurable thing.  Pounds are a measurement, so by making our goal in terms of pounds, we have automatically made it measurable.  (Reaching a milestone lifting weight or beating a best mile time would be other examples of measurable fitness goals.)

 

I’m going to be a little wacky and go out of order here, but that’s because it makes more sense to talk about the time thing next.  A lot of us do better with goals that have an end date and/or a deadline.  So instead of just generally wanting to lose ten pounds sometime between now and when we die, we can say we want to lose ten pounds by March 31.  Now we can do some math and realize that we need to lose a little more than 3 pounds a month, or about a pound a week—we’ve just made ourselves some mini-goals to go with our big goal.

 

The attainable bit comes into play right around the part where we start making time goals.  I’m sure all of us would love it if we could lose ten pounds by tomorrow, but that’s not an attainable goal (at least by any method I would suggest as healthy and sane).  It is totally all right to get help with figuring out what an attainable goal is.  A fitness professional can guide us so that we don’t set ourselves up for disaster.  (Pro tip for weight loss goals:  healthy weight loss is between one and two pounds per week, so 26 to 52 pounds per year.)  This is also the part where we consider how our goals fit with our real life, not the fantasy life we wish we had.  We get realistic and say that our birthday week, for example, is probably not going to be a week in which we lose two pounds and we might want to pencil in staying the same as a goal for that week.

 

Finally, let’s talk about the relevant part.  We need to choose our own goals.  We all get lots of messages from our loved ones, our acquaintances, and our society at large about what we are “supposed” to be.  Making changes is hard, so it really helps to want those changes deep in our hearts.  Maybe somebody else wants us to lose weight, but we are happy the way we are—those somebody elses can go pound sand.  Healthy bodies come in many shapes and sizes.  We need to choose what gives US joy.

 

Tomorrow:  another way to look at goals.