Episode 34: Why I Broke Up With Traditional Goal Setting (and What I'm Doing Instead)

I’m breaking all the coaching rules with this one. SMART goals and habit building are useful tools, but they don’t work for every situation (or with every personality). This episode talks about why I broke up with SMART goals and habit building and what I use instead, both with myself and my clients. If you’re ready to stop “starting again on Monday” and actually stick with your goals, this episode is for you. 

Episode Transcript:

INTRO MUSIC: Welcome to The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I'm Alex Treanor. I'm a Nationally Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and I am so excited you're here. The wellness industry is full of do's and do not's, should's and should not's. But I like to take a different approach. I'll be sharing all things health and wellness from a joyful, real-life compassionate perspective. If you're ready to drop the cookie-cutter approach and create a life you truly love, while eating a cookie or two along the way, let's dive in.

Hey, friends! Welcome to this week's episode of The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I hope your day is off to a beautiful start. It is beautiful here in the desert. Is it getting warm where you are? I'm curious. I have a lot of East Coast clients and they are not feeling the warmth quite yet. Still seeming a little wintry. So hopefully spring is on its way hope you're having a good day regardless of what the weather is.

Today, I'm going against everything that my health coach training tells me and tells every health coach who has been trained, and we're going to do things a little bit differently, let's say.

So if you have worked with a coach before, or really, if you've been involved in goal setting in any structured sense, then you're probably familiar with SMART goals. SMART goals are taught as a technique for goal setting. Very common. I would say every health coaching program or training that I have been in, that talks about goal setting brings up the idea of SMART goals. I know it's also used a lot in corporate settings, there's lots of worksheets, it's very popular.

My personal opinion on it, it does have its place, it can be a very helpful tool, especially for certain areas. But in lifestyle change, I would say it's not the end all be all that a lot of people like to claim it is. So we're gonna dive into SMART goals and a little bit about habit building as well.

But let me frame up what SMART goals are in case you are not familiar with them. SMART is an acronym. It stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely or time bound. This is a really popular tool for goal setting because it helps you take this vague concept of what you hope to accomplish, and turn it into something actionable, it kind of gives you this five step checklist to make sure that you're setting up your goal in a way that you can achieve it. For example, it needs to be specific so that you know exactly what you're doing, you're very clear on what the behavior is. It's measurable so that you can track it and you can know if you achieved it or not. It's attainable, which means it's realistic, and that you feel confident in your ability to achieve this goal. It's relevant meaning it matches into your longer term goals, your vision, everything that you're working towards, it fits and heads you in the right direction. And lastly, it's timely. So it is time bound. It has a deadline, you know the timeframe in which you're hoping to accomplish this goal.

And that sounds great. It's very neat. It's very tidy, it's structured. Here's the problem with it, though life is very rarely neat and tidy. SMART goals fit into a worksheet life does not fit into a worksheet right? When we set goals this way, it often sets us up for this pass/fail mentality, that all or nothing thinking that is so common when it comes to lifestyle change in particular. All or nothing thinking is not a problem in itself, but if you are someone who is hard on themselves, who struggles with self-judgment or beating yourself up when you don't achieve a goal, then this idea that you can fail at something or that you can not achieve that goal can be a huge momentum killer. It just sucks the joy right out if you feel that you're constantly failing with every goal that you're setting.

So let's walk it through an example. Let's say you're wanting to be more active. So you set a goal, a SMART goal, to walk outside for 30 minutes, four days a week. This goal is specific, you know how to measure it, you know, the timeframe. It's attainable, it's relevant to your goal of being more active. So Monday comes, that's the day we all start our goals, right? Monday comes, you're planning to walk in the evening. The time comes, you start getting your shoes on, you go to walk out the door, and your kid starts talking about some school project that's due tomorrow and they forgot to tell you about it. And you don't have time to walk anymore because you've got to go to Michael's and get the poster board and the glitter and all the things. I actually don't know if kids still do projects like that. Back in my day, when I was a kid, we did projects with poster board and glitter and rubber cement and all those things. So who knows what kids do now? Anyway, so you don't have time for your walk is the point. So then Tuesday comes and the only time you have on Tuesday to walk is during your lunch break, when you have a little bit open window. But the meeting that you have right before lunch went a little bit long. And now you only have 20 minutes for lunch. 20 minutes does not give you the opportunity to hit that 30 minute walk goal. So you skip it, it's not worth it, you can't achieve that goal. It'll just be another rest day. Wednesday comes. And now your schedule is finally clear. You have a calm, relaxing day. But turns out the weather's pretty crappy. And you just don't feel like walking out in the cold in the rain getting all wet. So we'll skip Wednesday, you can still hit that four day a week goal by doing Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The problem is if anything pops up on any of those days, the goals over right? It is no longer achievable in any way. And what are the odds that you don't have something pop up? You've had something pop up every day for three days. What makes you think that in the next four days, everything is going to go completely to plan. It doesn't often work out that way.

So when we set a SMART goal, it gives us a standard to reach, which is why they are good for goal setting. And at the same time, they also aren't very flexible. Life often requires flexibility. Goal setting often requires flexibility, especially if the goal that we have is something we want to stick with long term. If you are someone who struggles to adjust and pivot in the moment, who maybe likes the rules and the structures, but then beats yourself up when you can't keep up with it. Or if you get down on yourself when you don't achieve goals. SMART goals can be really challenging, and they may not be the best approach for you.

We encounter a similar problem when it comes to habit building or habit stacking, any of these habit concepts that are so popular right now. The idea with these is that you have a cue or a trigger, something that inspires you to do a behavior. And then after the behavior, you have a reward or something that brings you back to do the behavior again. So it completes that cycle and inspires you to say this was a good habit, I'm going to keep up with it.

So a classic habit building example is you get out of bed in the morning, that's your cue. And the first thing that you do is go to brush your teeth. That's the behavior. After you brush your teeth, your mouth feels fresh feels clean, you feel ready for the day. And that feeling is a reward that then inspires you to brush your teeth again the next morning because you know it feels better when you do that every morning.

This is a great system and it works for some behaviors beautifully. And that is awesome. You use it when it works for you! However, some circumstances or some goals don't always fit into this cue, behavior, reward system. You can set a habit with brushing your teeth, because there's not a lot of variables that are going to pop up between the time you get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. When we're thinking about lifestyle change, things like activity, improving our nutrition, there are a lot of variables and it is very unlikely that you will ever automate your physical activity routine or your meal prepping routine into a habit.

In fact, I don't know anyone who has made activity or nutrition or managing stress or getting to bed on time into an automated habit. It will likely always require a conscious effort and a constant awareness of getting those pillars into your day.

So instead of using these rigid, structured approaches to discipline or force yourself into making maintainable changes, what you need instead is a flexible approach. Something that helps you to increase your awareness, to strengthen your flexible thinking skills (being able to pivot in the moment), and also helps you to build consistency over time.

One tool that I use both with myself and with my clients is setting a daily minimum. And what this looks like is to plan for at the very least, what can you accomplish towards your goal on a daily basis? And we're thinking here of the very busiest of days, the days that the unexpected does happen and your schedule is thrown out the window and you're flying by the seat of your pants. When you only have a few minutes for yourself in a day, what do you feel confident that you can do daily? That's what we're looking for.

You can even use this idea and concept of a daily minimum with a SMART goal if you'd like, maybe your overall goal is to walk those four days a week. But if you can't, then what? What is the minimum that you feel you could do? What is the smallest option that you will feel good about?

It's important to note that this is a daily minimum. So even if you're wanting to walk 30 minutes a day, four days a week, we also want to be thinking, what can you do daily to build that consistency? If you aren't able to get the 30 minute walk in, can you do five minutes? And can you do five minutes every day?

The reason that we're looking at daily is actually from some of the research on habit building, we can take a lot of that research and apply it into a flexible approach. What we know is that frequency, how often we're choosing a behavior, is more important than doing it consistently without missing a day. Does that make sense? So if you do something 20 times a day, that's going to be better for building a habit than doing it 20 days in a row, the more often we're doing it, the more it becomes ingrained. So if we have a goal, we want to do something four days a week, we want to be active four days a week, we can help ingrain that habit by still planning to do something daily, even if it is just that minimum that five minutes instead of the 30. Doing it daily, builds it in and helps us to build awareness around it and makes us think about every single day, 'where can I fit that five minutes in?' And the better you get about thinking 'where can I fit that in', the better you're going to be at staying flexible when life throws all the curveballs at you. You'll be able to pivot better because you have the skill you've been building, that skill of considering 'how can I fit this in?' rather than thinking you need the 30 minute block and it's all or nothing? This applies with any lifestyle behavior. So at minimum, what can you do each day to care for your nutritional well being? At minimum, how can you care for your emotional well being? How can you manage your stress? What is the minimum thing that you can do daily to build a routine that incorporates daily stress management.

It's important to keep in mind too, you can always do more! We're not saying only walk five minutes a day, and that's better than 30 minutes. When you have 30 minutes. For sure, walk the 30 minutes enjoy that time! But on the days that you do need more wiggle room, give yourself the wiggle room have some flexibility in your approach.

This is a super subtle shift. I know the idea of daily minimum, it sounds similar to smart goals and habit building, it's just a little bit different of a way to look at it, a simple shift. But those simple things are often the most powerful, especially with lifestyle change. It's all about how we think about things. Shifting our approach to goal setting, just that little bit, can open the door for more positive feelings about the experience by daily giving yourself something that is super achievable. The more positive feelings you have about the experience, the more likely you are to keep it up. It's much more enticing to do something you feel good about than to feel like you're constantly failing at whatever the SMART goal is, or you can't automate your nutrition into this perfect plan that should just be happening on its own. Those things aren't realistic.

The daily minimum approach gives us that little simple shift, to give ourselves some grace to have a flexible approach and to make changes that we can actually stick with and feel good about day to day.

That is what I have for you today. I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you so much for joining me. If this message resonated with you as always, I would love to hear from you feel free to send me a message, rate and review the podcast so we can get this message out to as many people as possible. I do still have a few coaching spots open. So if that is something you might be interested in, send me a message. There's also a link in the show notes to schedule a free call and I would be honored to talk with you see what we can come up with together and see how I can best support you.

Have a wonderful week and I look forward to talking with you next week.

OUTRO MUSIC: Thanks for joining me on this episode of the compassionate wellness podcast. If this message resonated with you, please share it with someone you care about. I'd love to connect with you as well follow me on Instagram @alextreanor.coaching, or visit my website alextreanorcoaching.com. And as a reminder, Treanor spelled kind of goofy, it's T-R-E-A-N-O-R. For any references mentioned in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to make time for something you enjoy.