Goals Vs Dreams?
Many of us say we have goals. Most of the time, if we’re honest, what we have are dreams, not goals. We have distant dreams, but they aren’t goals.
Goals are specific. They are achievable. Goals are achieved by doing something – not just thinking about them and sharing them on Instagram or Facebook.
When we apply this to fitness, lifestyle and nutrition – where does that put you?
S.M.A.R.T. Goals
When I studied Business years ago at school, one of the acronyms we learnt was SMART – it stood for
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time Based
While it is a cute acronym and just remembering it got me a few marks in my exam, it can be helpful when applying it to your actual goals – more specifically your fitness goals.
For example, if I said that in 1 month I wanted to put on 1 stone of muscle and lose 2 stone of fat, would this be a SMART goal?
Specific? Yes
Measurable? Yes
Achievable? No
Realistic? No
Time based? Yes
While it connects some of the dots, it’s so unrealistic and unachievable that it can be dismissed immediately. Back to the drawing board.
Your Goals
If you apply SMART to your fitness / nutrition / health dreams how would this transform them into goals?
If we reverse engineer things we need to place a time limit on our goal. When will you know if you’ve achieved your goal or not?
Is it a realistic goal? Is getting your first pull up in 1 month realistic if you haven’t done any physical activity before and you weigh over 20 stone?
Is it achievable? Does current scientific data say it’s even possible to do in the time frame you’ve given yourself?
The main reason we avoid goals
Most of us avoid setting ourselves goals for a variety of reasons.
1) We fear failure
2) We prefer dreams to reality
Failure isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, “going to failure” in bodybuilding training is THE goal when building muscle. Failure tells us if what we have been doing is working or not. It’s a helpful signpost on the way to achieving your ultimate goal.
The truth is that some of us prefer to dream of being able to run 3 miles without having to stop, bench pressing 100kg, having defined abs, fitting into a size 6 dress or whatever that goal looks like to you.
Putting in the small, consistent steps each day to achieve it isn’t something we actually want to do. So, we prefer to just dream about it, talk about it to our friends, half joke about it, but we don’t have realistic plans to ever make it happen through patience and daily execution.
Goals aren’t everything but they can be helpful in getting us to where we want to be. Don’t fear goals if you know you need to set yourself some. After a while, when you’ve achieved that small, achievable, realistic goal, you might find that it isn’t even the goal any more. Perhaps you’ve shifted the goal posts, because you can at that point.
Defining Your Goals
Maybe you’re thinking your goal is too difficult to define. Try to breaking it down into smaller goals. For example, if you want to have a “6 pack” by the end of the year, this can be quite difficult to define.
Instead, you could make smaller goals such as, maintaining a healthy calorie deficit every day for the rest of the year, while performing high intensity workouts 3-4 times each week.
Measure your progress once a month to make sure things are going the right way. You’ll be blown away by the end of the year.
Dreaming is Your Starting Point
The biggest difference between Goals and dreams is that with goals you’re doing something to make them happen. You have a plan and you’re putting in the work.
Dreams are fluffy, difficult to measure and there’s no real effort required.
Which one are you going to go for?