The following is adapted from Habit That!
Writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” We think we are making goals, but what we are really doing is making a lot of wishes when it comes to our health goals—and a lot of vague wishes at that!
You ever wonder why it’s so hard to keep to your weight loss goals, but so easy to head down to your local taco truck? Simply put, “I wanna lose weight” is a vague, abstract concept. Tacos are real and super delicious.
But I’m also a healthy person. And healthy people can still eat tacos and not sweat it. Instead of shaming myself for eating a delicious street taco, I let myself enjoy it. I have my moment. Then, I get on with my healthy life—and find tacos with healthier ingredients.
If you create healthy habits, the weight loss will follow, but that’s just a positive symptom of overall good behavior.
That’s why I’m a fan of the SMARTER Goals system. Most likely, you’ve seen this acronym before, or at least variations of it. Usually, the S stands for something like specific, just as it does here, while the meaning of the other letters tends to shift around a bit. For our purposes, the SMARTER acronym stands for Specific goals, Motivation, Action plan, Roadblocks, Timetable, Evolve and evaluate, and Record and reward.
Let’s talk about each of these elements point-by-point and learn why they’re going to empower you to become a better goal setter.
Step 1: Specific Goals
In the broadest terms possible, your goal is to be healthier. Write that at the top of your goals page. It’s a great goal, but it’s not very specific. How do you want to be healthier? What does that involve?
Perhaps you want to lose weight. That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still not very specific. Sure, you could put a more concrete figure on the goal and say, “I want to lose twenty pounds,” but that’s still more of an overarching goal. It’s a result, not a plan. It’s not effective because it’s not repeatable.
Repetition is the key to learning. Seriously, repetition is the key to learning (see what I did there?). You don’t learn a tennis serve by practicing it once. You learn it by practicing it thousands of times. Your SMARTER Goals will follow this principle. “I want to lose twenty pounds” may not be a repeatable goal, but eating seven servings of fruits and vegetables every day is. By listing this as one of your goals, you’ve given yourself something you can practice and track every day.
Step 2: Motivation
Motivation isn’t permanent. To make a sustained effort toward achieving your goals, you need to know your real why inside and out. What is the true reason behind your desire to live healthier?
Why is this so important? Because on the inevitable day that you don’t feel like exercising for thirty minutes—even though you planned for it—you’ll have that real why ready to give you that extra kick in the pants to get going. Once you connect your real why with a specific goal, you’re going to be a lot more likely to stick to it.
Step 3: Action Plan
You already got a taste of how the action plan works when we talked about specific goals. It’s a lot better to say, “I’m going to exercise for thirty minutes, three times a week” than to say “Gosh, it sure would be nice to exercise.”
The more specific, the better. Get out your calendar and block out your time. For instance, maybe every Sunday afternoon you get groceries and chop vegetables. If you can visualize the activity and plan ahead for it, then you’re far more likely to follow through.
Step 4: Roadblocks
No matter how well you build out your action plan, something will disrupt your routine at some point. A ruptured disc in my back kept me from jogging for months. The hospital food I ate while recovering from appendicitis got me way off my normal eating plan for a time. Roadblocks are going to happen.
The question is, what are you going to do about them? At this step in your SMARTER Goals, your job is to list all the roadblocks that could get in the way of you and your goal. Maybe work will leave you too tired. Maybe your kids will get sick. Maybe you’ll sprain your ankle. Maybe you’ll be abducted by aliens.
Jot down as many possible roadblocks you can think of—no matter how big or how small. To the right of each roadblock, write down what you’re going to do if it happens. How are you still going to get to your goal? If, for instance, those aliens totally derail your exercise routine, let them know they can study human physiology better if they let you use their treadmill.
Step 5: Timetable
We all need deadlines. It’s just the truth.
You want your deadlines to be both ambitious and realistic. Two sit-ups a year, for instance, is plenty realistic, but not very ambitious. On the other hand, two thousand sit-ups a day is plenty ambitious, but not very realistic. You need to find that middle ground.
Whatever deadline you set, be it a week, month, or year, ask yourself what you can do today to reach that goal. For instance, one of my current goals is to exercise three times a week for an entire year. That equals 156 workouts. So, I put a sheet on my wall with 156 blank boxes. Every time I exercise, I check one off.
You may find it’s easier to stick with the weekly or monthly goals. Nothing wrong with that. Just be sure to set up those checkboxes or other reminders each week/month to make sure you keep at it.
Also, make sure your goals are action-based, not result-based. It might sound like a good idea to say, “I’m gonna lose twenty pounds by this date,” but you don’t know how your body is going to respond to your new routine. Besides, depending on what you’re doing to exercise, keep in mind that you’ll likely be gaining muscle mass, meaning that although your body is getting healthier, you’re not losing as much weight in some instances. Focus on the action and remember that your big-picture goal is to be a healthy person, and the results will follow.
Step 6: Evolve and Evaluate
When I hurt my back, I couldn’t do much physically. I definitely couldn’t lift weights or run. I had to evolve my expectations and my practice. All I could do for a while was take walks—slow, agonizing walks, during which I felt that a senior citizen with a walker could outpace me—so that’s exactly what I did.
Sure, I wanted to do more. I felt super impatient all throughout my recovery and wanted desperately to push myself harder. However, I knew that if I did, I would hurt myself worse and would be out even longer. (How do I know this? Because I did it and set myself back—ugh!)
Despite my frustration at the slowness of my progress, I was still able to check boxes and keep working toward my goals.
You will have to evolve and evaluate your habits, too. I knew someone who decided she was going to exercise every day for a year. It was too ambitious, and she found pretty quickly that she had to step back and reconsider. I’ve known other people whose goals were too easy, so they had to step them up. Either way, it’s better to evolve the goal than to set something completely unrealistic, fail at it, and then quit because you see yourself as a failure. The thing is, you can’t be a failure, no matter what you do. As Zig Ziglar often reminds us, “Failure is an event, not a person.”
Whatever the case, remember that the only thing set in stone on your SMARTER Goals worksheet is the line at the very top: “I want to get healthier.” That one is carved in granite. The rest are written in pencil.
Step 7: Record and Reward
You are what you measure. If you record it, you’re more likely to do it. If you reinforce that behavior with a reward, you’re more likely to keep doing it. Let’s looks at these one at a time.
First, Record
Right now, I want you to stop reading, grab a piece of paper, and create a visual checklist that will help keep you on target.
If you’re like me and trying to exercise three days a week, put twelve boxes on your fridge each month. Or, if your goal is to complete exercises three times a week for a whole year, put 156 boxes on there. When I make a goal like that, there are some weeks I do less than three and some weeks I do more than three. It all depends on a variety of factors. Whatever the case, it is the overall goal that is important, not whether you followed it perfectly each day.
Maybe you’re not the pen-and-paper type. Maybe you’re the smartphone type. You know the old saying, “There’s an app for that?” Well, that’s doubly true when it comes to healthy living. I’ve seen firsthand how much food-tracking and goal-tracking apps have helped shape people’s healthy habits.
Another reason record and reward works is that it holds you accountable. If you eat a bag of Skittles, you have to record it, just like you would anything else. But instead of shaming yourself, use it as motivation. The next time you pick up that bag of Skittles, ask yourself if you really feel like recording that in your food journal for the day.
Maybe apps aren’t your thing. Here’s something even simpler. Take a picture of whatever you’re about to eat. Then ask yourself how badly you want it. If you do want it, how much are you going to eat? Are you going to eat the whole cake, or just the slice?
Then, Reward
Now the fun part—setting up rewards for yourself along the way.
With rewards, be mindful of the reward you choose. Ask yourself in advance, “What would make me feel good, and what do I feel like I want as a result of this?”
For me, I rewarded my jogging goal with a new pair of running shoes. I’d never been much of a runner, but now that I’d reached a milestone, I’d begun to see myself as one. The shoes reinforced this new positive label and gave me an extra boost to keep building this good habit. Plus, I’m sure the bright color makes me run faster. My kids insist this is true with their light-up shoes!
Generally, I’d recommend against using food as a reward. If you do, though, tie it in with a different reward. For instance, maybe you’re going to a party later in the month where you know the host makes killer nachos. Let the party—and all the nachos you can eat—be your reward for the month. Next month, reward yourself with something different.
As you set your SMARTER goals, think of yourself as a snowball on top of the hill. As you start to roll down, you get bigger and bigger, building more momentum as you go. If you focus on each step of the journey and savor your quick wins, a year from now, you’ll look back and be astonished at everything you’ve accomplished.
For more advice on creating healthy habits, you can find Habit That! on Amazon.
Dr. Jaime Hope is a dual board-certified physician working outside of Detroit, Michigan, in one of the busiest emergency departments in the country. In over twelve years on the job, she has learned that no matter what brought her patients to the ER, they all want the same thing: to live happier, healthier lives. Today, whether she’s helping patients, teaching future doctors, or engaging the local community, Dr. Hope is showing others how to create better habits and make healthy living fun, practical, and accessible.