I’ve been thinking about goals a lot this year. And yes, I know the year is not even two weeks old. Still, it’s something I’ve been thinking about.
One of the problems people have meeting goals is the goals themselves. It strikes me that many of the goals we set are too vague or open-ended. Consider this one: lose 10 pounds. You hear it often enough. “I want to lose 10 pounds.” Or let’s say five. Seems easy enough, right? When we start asking questions, though, the goal begins to show its holes. By when? Using what methods? And if you haven’t lost five pounds by next week, do you push it back to the week after? The week after that?
I set two firm goals related to health this year: walk every day at 10 and 2, and live better. So far, they’re working well. The first is simple. I either walk at 10 and 2 or I don’t. There’s no fudging it. I have reminders set on my phone. After they go off, I get up as soon as I can and I head outside and I walk.
I’m lucky. I live in Florida and can survive outside these days (though sometimes it’s a little warm and I have to roll up my sleeves). But if I lived in a place that tried to freeze me, I’d have a slightly different goal. Maybe I’d just walk up and down the stairs in my building. Maybe I’d go visit Mary in accounting on the far side of the office complex. Or maybe I’d do fifteen minutes of Wii fitness before I left for the office and another fifteen after I came home. Whatever my goals might be, I think it’s important to be able to answer yes or no. And if no, then why “no”?
And just so we’re clear, “I didn’t feel like it,” is a shitty answer and darkens your soul. Seriously. It can lead into a serious feedback loop of feeling sorry for yourself until finally you give up all goals. Better: today I was lazy. Tomorrow I won’t be. And mean it.
The other goal, live better, seems incredibly vague, but I don’t think it is. Rather, it leads to a binary question I end up asking myself, very briefly, with every decision I make that’s somewhat health related. When I begin heading to the elevator, I ask myself, “Is this going to be help me live better?” When the answer’s “no,” I change course and head for the stairs.
There are millions of small decisions we make every day, and if we can attach some kind of simple, binary question to them, we can help ourselves immensely. When you reach for the M&Ms, is that living better? When you dodge a call from a friend, is that living better? When you decide to make an impulse purchase (oh, how I need to become more self-aware on this one), is that living better?
Again, this all comes back to mindfulness. You can’t ask yourself the living better question if you’re not aware of your actions. If you’re reaching blindly for a dish of M&Ms on your desk, then you’ll never be able to ask the question. Instead you’ll be asking, “Where did all my M&Ms go?”