WS#49 - Effective goal setting to influence long term habits
Week of 3/18/24
People develop new habits all the time. Think about your day and look at the common threads. Everything you did was not some pre-planned event that took work and effort to make happen. Some habits are formed out of necessity, others out of will power. Habit forming in general is easy, it’s the ones that take management and will power that are hard.
I was speaking with a client this week about some habits she is trying to stay on top of. She is using a spreadsheet to track these each day. I love this method. Tracking things will always increase your odds of success. As we were talking, it became clear that if the tracking went away, so would her habit(s). This is normal. The saying, “what gets measured, gets managed” comes to mind. So, what is she going to do? Is she going to use a spreadsheet for the rest of her life to make sure she sticks to her plan? Instead, I recommended that it would be a good idea to attach a deeper meaning to her goal and get more specific with the benchmarks of that goal.
If a goal is generic and does not have a meaningful purpose attached to it, it sometimes proves difficult to make that goal a reality long-term. Here is a personal example. I tended to eat sweets at night. This did not cause me to gain weight, or lose control of my health in any way, but it did feel like something I shouldn’t do. It just felt wrong, and as if I was setting a bad precedent and example. I tried to cut out sweets in the past and did not have success until recently. I made my goal much more specific and attached a purpose to it. I use an app that reminds me why I am doing what I am doing and provides a means of tracking (the app is called Atoms). Instead of, “I do not want to eat sweets after dinner because it is unhealthy,” my goal is, “I will not eat more that 15g of added sugar after dinner, every weekday, so that I can become a better example of health for myself and family.” The structure of this goal is specific to the gram of added sugar and days of the week. It also has a reason that resonates with me and provides me with a meaningful reminder of my purpose. Another sneaky part of this goal is that I did not cut the added sugar out completely. Instead, I created a situation that if I chose to eat a food with added sugar in it after dinner, I would need to check the label or do some sort of work to ensure I stay within the parameters of my goal. I added resistance. So far, this has resulted in my avoiding added sugar completely on weekdays and some weekends. I have been at it for about a month and it is the most successful I have been at trying to make this goal a reality.
Goal setting and habit forming is an interesting and worthwhile process to go through. You learn a lot about yourself and your tendencies. When setting your goals and habits, there are a few things you should do to set yourself up for success, as mentioned above. Make your goals specific and realistic. Add an element of resistance to the goal, like how the specific amount of added sugar means that I must measure. Attach a purpose to your goal that resonates deeply with you and have a means of tracking your progress. If you can create a goal that checks all these boxes, your odds of sticking to your plan long-term will go way up.
-Matt