Death to Resolutions! (or How to Set Better New Year’s Goals)

A few years ago, sometime while I was finishing up PT school, I set some vague New Year’s resolutions like many of us have done and then I promptly set about ignoring them. I had written them down and was really planning to keep up with them, so I really had to question the purpose of resolutions when I found them hidden on my desk a few months later.  

            I began wondering why we call them ‘resolutions’ in the first place, instead of setting goals for the New Year. After all, a resolution was something I usually thought we needed when we had a problem. Starting a new page on the calendar seemed like a good time to make some changes but was never a problem, and in PT we always ask our patients what their goals are. From that point on, I started setting goals for my New Year instead of resolutions and I have been a lot more successful in following through with them.

            When it comes to goals for the New Year, we likely have them for many aspects of our lives: financial, health/fitness/performance, or personal growth or many others. Regardless of your goal, there are frameworks out there to help set better, more achievable goals. We will touch on two popular frameworks here – for two different goal purposes.

            The main framework I use to set most of my goals is the SMART goal framework. This gives us five components of a goal that help to make sure we can stay on track and make progress so we eventually meet our goals.

·      Specific – Your goal needs to be specific. If you are a forward on your soccer team and want to run faster, then your goal should be detailed on how fast and why. For example, “I want to improve my 40-yard sprint time so I can beat defenders to the ball and score more goals.”                                                                                                                                    

·      Measurable – If you can’t measure it, how do you know you’re making progress toward your goal? In our example of the soccer forward, you need to know how fast you currently are and then choose how you want to measure getting faster. It could be “improve by a quarter of a second” or “improve by 5%” but regardless, it has to be measurable!                                                                                                                                     

·      Actionable – This aspect is just going about setting up your action plan, or how you are going to achieve the goal. One way is to set up smaller sub-goals along the way. For our soccer player, this may mean hiring a performance coach or reading more about sprint training.                                                                                                                                                

·      Relevant – We obviously want to set goals that mean something to us and our values, philosophy, or tasks at hand. Otherwise, what’s the point. In our soccer player example it may vary based on the level, but getting faster to score more goals can help the team win games and maybe a championship, get a scholarship for college, or even lead to a professional contract.                                                                                                                      

·      Time – A time component is crucial to keeping us on track toward our goal. If we don’t put a timeframe on our goal, there is always the possibility we may procrastinate on our action plan and not meet the goal. For instance, our player may be in the offseason and want to accomplish this goal before returning to the team for preseason.

If we put all of these components together for our soccer player’s goal of getting faster, the final product would look something like this: “I want to improve my 40-yard dash time by 0.25 seconds by the time preseason starts in August, so that I can score more goals to help my team win a championship. To achieve this goal, I will hire a sports performance coach and commit to three training sessions a week.”

            The SMART framework is an excellent way to set up your goals for 2023 (and whenever you find yourself setting goals), but sometimes we may have ideas and goals that just don’t necessarily fit neatly in that box. This is why I also try to set one or two BHAG goals every year. BHAG stands for “big, hairy, audacious goal” and I’m not sure who put hairy in there but I am sure there were better adjectives out there. Generally, a BHAG would be a longer-term goal, something for the whole year because these goals could seem pretty daunting in the short-term depending on what they are. If we return to our soccer forward, a relevant and inspiring BHAG may be “I want to be named player of the year in my league at the end of the season.” Even with these more lofty goals, you can always use the SMART framework to set them up and set yourself up for success!

With all that said, no more resolutions because as Daniel Pink says in Drive, “Goals work.” So go out and set incredible goals, then blow past them and create your legacy!

Head over to our Instagram (@legacyperformancept) and let us know what some of your health, fitness, and performance goals are for 2023 and reach out if you need help achieving them!