Don’t focus on your goals.

In the proper spirit of a new year (and new decade!), many of us are setting goals to orientate ourselves with the future self that we aspire to be.

I personally love this; I think that, no matter what time of the year it is, creating goals to improve ourselves should be something we all take the time to do.

However, what I’d like to advocate for is that after we create that goal, rather than continually revisiting it, we should try to not focus on the goal itself.

Seems counter-intuitive? Let me break it down.

Typically, when we set goals, it is a short statement that suggests a desired endpoint—like ‘Lose 20 pounds’ or ‘Become fluent in Spanish’, or ‘Read one book every month’. And it’s great to set these big targets for ourselves—they are good for orientating us towards our ultimate desired achievement. But I have found that when it comes to actuallyachieving that goal, focusing on this grand statement really does little for actually moving us towards the accomplishment.

Why do I say that? Well for one, the brevity of the goal very much contradicts the actual undertaking of it; for example, weight loss takes time, and language acquisition requires diligent attention. If we spend too much time focusing on the goal statement itself, it can honestly become overwhelming, because we end up thinking, why haven’t I been able to accomplish that measly littlefragment? Or, it could go the opposite way; those few words may hold so much meaning to you, that it could seem like your goal is an unsurmountable mountain that the likes of you could never take on, talk less achieve. 

Most important to my point is the fact that our goal statement only tells us ‘what’ (and sometimes ‘when’, if you confine it to a time parameter). It doesn’t give any indication on ‘how’—which, at the end of the day, is the only thing that is going to move you towards your goals.

So what should we be focusing on?

Micro-decisions and actions.

Instead of always keeping that big goal statement on your mind, you want to train your yourself to hone in on the decisions you make on a daily basis, and how those can either move you towards or away from your goal. Like for weight loss: you’ll want to focus on what you’re consuming and how much physical activity you’re getting from day-to-day. Where can you start making trade-offs in your diet that can decrease your caloric intake? Is there a point in your day that you can swap out the hour of TV time for listening to a podcast while taking a walk? It all starts with one small decision—and every consecutive small decision that follows. By taking things one decision at a time, your goal becomes less daunting, because you can start to build the consistency you need to crush that goal. 

This being said, you don’t want your focus to be too micro. This is something perhaps we are all guilty of; after one day at the gym, we’ll hop on the scale to search for smaller digits than the last time, or check if we have abs after one set of sit-ups. The place we find ourselves currently didn’t happen in just one day; so surely we can’t expect to get to the place we want to be in that span of time either. Remember that the person you are now and the person you’ll be after reaching a goal are one in the same; and that being is deserving of love and patience no matter what step along the journey they are!

So make your goals, but don’t let them occupy your focus too much. Instead, focus on the small actions that you can take to cultivate habits in favor of whatever it is you set out to achieve.