Personal Health Goal Setting

It’s a New Year and the perfect time to reflect on the past year and think about what your priorities and goals are for 2019. We all know how it goes with New Year’s resolutions and how we often have the best intentions, starting off strong by eating healthy and going to the gym, only to lose motivation and not get the results we expected.

Why Set Health Goals?

Setting health goals is an essential first step for thinking about your ideal health and wellness and motivating yourself to turn your vision into reality. As is often said, if it doesn’t get measured, it doesn’t get done. Therefore, by establishing up front what you want to achieve, you can determine where to focus your time and resources to make it happen.

Types of Goals

There are many different types of goals. Goals can be short, long or medium-term and can be individual or collective. They can be created for different areas of your life such as your health, career, relationships, financial, etc. The same techniques can be used for setting goals in all areas of your life.

Goals and Values

People often confuse goals and values. Goals are more specific and achievable and they can be checked off and completed. Values represent what is important to you, tend to be constant over time and are never really completed or finished. Goals, on the other hand, are more likely to be achieved when they are based on our values. For example, if Good Health is your value, some related goals could be eating healthy and getting regular physical activity.

SMART Goals

A helpful way to make goals effective is to use the SMART theory of goal setting. SMART stands for:

• Specific: Goals that work include specifics such as ‘who, where, when, why and what.’
• Measurable: Ideally goals should include a quantity of ‘how much’ or ‘how many.’ For example, ‘exercise 4 times per week, for 30 minutes.’ This makes it easy to know when you have reached the goal.
• Achievable: Goals should be challenging but achievable.
• Relevant: The goal should seem important and beneficial.
• Time-related: Deadlines can motivate efforts and prioritize the task above other distractions.

For example, instead of having ‘lose weight’ as a goal, it is more powerful to use the SMART goal ‘Lose 10 pounds by May 1, 2019.’

Tips for Setting Personal Health Goals

1. Create a vision of what you want to achieve with your health: Think about your big picture vision for your health. How do you want to feel and look? Use a notebook to write it down or create a vision board and start documenting your vision for your health. For example, maybe you want to be full of energy every day, be a healthy weight and be fit and toned, or have clear glowing skin. Or maybe you’d like to be free of physical pain, digestive discomfort or have healthy cholesterol and blood pressure levels. It’s all about your vision for the health and life you want.  You can even create a motto or phrase that will encourage you throughout the year. Visit the Food Matters website HERE to learn more about how to make a vision board.
2. Create SMART goals: Once you have created your vision for your health, identify the large-scale health goals that you want to accomplish.  Then break these down into smaller targets that you must hit to reach your goals. Make sure that your goals are SMART, as outlined in the ‘Personal Health Goal Setting’ section above, to set you up for success.  Include dates, times and amounts, so that you can measure your achievement.
3. Build your goals around the fundamentals of holistic health: To achieve optimal health and wellness, a good practice is to build your goals around the fundamentals of holistic health, such as good nutrition, regular physical activity, stress management, quality sleep, social connectivity, as well as emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. Each of these areas are important on their own, but viewed holistically they can be a powerful factor in achieving your goals.
4. Find an accountability buddy: Choose a reliable friend or family member to be your accountability buddy. Tell them about your goals and ask them to join you for different activities and check-in with you on your progress. They can help keep you motivated and hold you accountable when you experience challenges.
5. Track your progress & celebrate your accomplishments: Once you have your plan, start working on it. Make sure to review and update your action steps and observe the progress that you’ve made towards your goals. When you have achieved a goal, take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so and reward yourself (way to go!). As Tony Robbins says, “By rewarding yourself in the moment, your brain elicits positive emotions, leading to the realization that your efforts result in a positive reward. By doing this continuously, your brain will start to link pleasure to accomplishing the task or objective and move towards it in the future.”

You can record and track your health goals using any tool that works best for you. When you’ve completed the goal setting exercise, you should have a clear map of your most important health goals and the action steps needed to help you achieve your desired results!

Here’s to Health and Happiness in 2019!

Jen