“The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.” – Jim Rohn

Have you created goals for this year yet? Did you already make them in early January only to watch them fade away? Or are you still on track with the goals that you’ve set?

Either way, I want to encourage you to write down a goal right now that you want to accomplish this year. At FitTown Jupiter, we are currently creating a goal board to display all the goals of our FitTown community. 

As we write down these goals for 2023, let’s WRITE them down in the RIGHT way. 

Creating goals has an interesting response in the brain. Research has shown that endorphins actually get released from simply creating the goal. Many times, people will post their goals publicly in the name of accountability, and receive yet another endorphin kick. 

Sometimes this pleasure hit can be enough to satisfy the mind and allow the person to fall back into previous patterns. The urge to change is lost because it was pacified by the act of goal-making and publicly presenting it. The goal itself gets lost in the process. 

Instead of just getting high off the thought of feeling confident in a bathing suit come boat season, I want you to be actually looking and feeling great in three months from now. To make this happen, we need our goals to contain something more than high hopes…

Our goals need ingredients. 

Think about your goal like a big cake you want to bake. (Sorry for talking about cake and weight loss together.) How do you make that cake? You can post all the pictures you want about the cake, tell all your friends how you’re going to make this awesome cake, and dream about how great you’ll feel to have your friends enjoy the cake you make. 

But sooner or later, you’re going to have to pull out the recipe to the cake, gather the ingredients together, and get to work making the cake. The cake is not going to bake itself, no matter how hard you wish it into existence. 

When you create a goal, it’s not enough to just have a strong why or awesome endpoint. 

You need a recipe, AND you need the ingredients. 

Coaches are incredible resources because they can often provide you with the recipe and ingredients needed to create change. They can’t do the work for you, but they can arm you with the tools needed for the job. 

As we create our goals for 2023, let’s make sure our goals have some ingredients behind them.  

Ask yourself, what habits will be necessary in order to achieve this goal? 

Sometimes, our clients will choose the habit as their goal. For instance, they create the goal of making homemade dinners 5 nights/week, or their goal is to hit the gym 5 days/week.  

Their real goal is probably a 6-pack to show off on the boat that is not Bud Light, but they put the emphasis on the process because they are elevating how important the habit is to them. They are placing the focus back on what matters in getting to the goal, the ingredients. 

Having the habit become your goal will also allow you to reap additional benefits from achieving the goal. You may have made the habit goal of making the Committed Club every month for all of 2022 with the dream that certain clothes would actually fit again. But you didn’t realize how much it positively affected your mental clarity and productivity at work. You also didn’t realize how a consistent workout would alter your eating habits for the better, and help you sleep a lot sounder. Your health markers have improved and you may not have to rely on that medication you’ve been on. 

A lot of coaches advocate for SMART goals; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. While I encourage these guidelines too, it can get confusing to people who don’t live in this striving-for-self-betterment world that I do. 

Let’s simplify it by making sure our goals have substance. 

Our goals have to have ingredients and a clear path to what success means to us. 

Let’s trade pie in the sky for a cake we can make. 

Write your goals down, make them real, and make them even more real with the actions you’re going to take to attain them. 

All the best to you in 2023!

-Coach Tony