Modern Goal Setting

Written by Kyle Ligon - MovementLink.FIT Head Coach

The goals most choose to focus on are typically in the categories of aesthetics, athletic performance, finance, and career. It is surprisingly rare that people have goals involving their friends and family, how they want to spend their free time, what they actually want their lives to look like, and the person they want to be. Traditional goal setting over-emphases chasing aesthetic, performance, financial, and career goals and leds many people towards goals that are not aligned with the life they actually want to live. More money doesn’t always equate to more happiness. People often set off on a path towards narrowly specific goals without considering their values, the true impact that reaching their goal will have on their lives, or how the amounts and types of efforts required to reach that goal fits into the big picture of their lives. As a result, as their journey inevitably brings challenges, most people are left lacking purpose and therefore motivation as the methods they chose to tackle their goal possibly interfere negatively with other aspects of their life.

My fitness journey has taken me through the typical stages most of most people’s fitness journey. My goal is to hopefully allow you to fast track your perspective into one that gets results in a sustainable way as you side-step years of lessons learned the hard way. When I was early on in my fitness journey, I got it in my head that my strength was my biggest weakness and decided to choose a squat and bench press goal. My strength was probably in the top 1% of people in the world for my body weight, but because I was not able to zoom out and view what is really important for my life back then, I simply viewed my fitness vs the best in the world and the best around me and from that perspective, my strength was lacking.

These goals led me down a path that had me dedicated to following a highly demanding, aggressive, CrossFit, strength-biased workout program, to target maximally improving my strength in the next year. Because I chose these goals in a short-sighted way and without the context of life, it really led me down a rough path. Following such a demanding program was fun in the beginning, but eventually the accumulated fatigue caught up to me in a big way. Not only did workouts that were once enjoyable all start to feel like a grind, but the program didn’t care if I had a nagging pains. If I was going to stick to the strict plan, I had to push through. The path I chose was also very time consuming, and to reach my goals, I felt like I had to prioritize my workout program over social invitations with friends and family. I would even say not to things like playing sand volleyball, because it would have a negative impact my training.

Eventually, injuries piled up,and the program was a real grind. To survive the grind, you must have a very strong why and this grind provided me with my epiphany moment. My strength has never limited me in anything in my life. I am not trying to be a professional athlete, but I was training like one, at the detriment to other aspects of my life. Although I would like to be stronger, I am already very strong and this commitment to a goal without deep consideration of trying to add as much additional strength as possible as fast as possible was actually making my life worse. The epiphany was simple: I expanded my time horizon, focused on goals that fit within a bigger picture of how I want to live and experience life, then I can find a balance of getting fitter, healthier, stronger, while I resolve my nagging pains and have time to actually enjoy life. Once I developed a deep understanding of the life I want to live, not only was I able to adopt a workout program that fits in perfectly, but I have developed a strong sense of purpose, which has helped me stay motivated even when things get tough. Now, years after the epiphany moment, I am much older and I am the fittest and strongest I have ever been in my life. I didn’t have to give up on getting stronger, I simply had to define why I was getting stronger to find a program that fit the life I wanted to live.

Goals and commitment to the process can be extremely powerful, but we need the ability to zoom out, reflect on our current processes in relation to the entirety of our life, and re-strategize as necessary. The MovementLink approach to goal setting can help you avoid the pitfalls that come with traditional goal setting by helping you gain a deeper understanding of the person you want to be, the life you actually want to live, and the reality of what’s required to create it. As a result, not only can you save enormous amounts of time and you can avoid tons of frustration, but the end result will actually be a lifestyle you want to live. It all starts with defining what your dream life is.

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” -Norman Vincent Peale

We strongly believe that when you have a solid grasp on 1) the things you want in life, 2) the processes that, if performed consistently, will generate those things, and 3) a commitment to those processes, big things happen.

If you haven’t yet explored the difference between a Fixed Mindset and a Growth Mindset - believing that you can improve, dramatically, almost every single personality trait and skill that you’re interested in improving, it may be one of the most powerful perspectives to bring with you into your goal setting and we highly recommend exploring it further here.

The Being / Doing / Having framework

Inspired by Tim Ferriss’s Dream Line, we will define your dream life using the Being / Doing / Having framework. From there you can identify exactly what efforts will translate into creating the life you want to live.

First, choose a time-frame. Usually 10 years is a good place to start, but choose any timeframe far enough away where it is easy for you to imagine you having almost everything you could dream of. Note: We find the 10 year view to be the most immediately useful, but if this exercise resonates with you like it does us, we have found a lot of value in scaling this exercise out each decade all the way to being 100 years old. This ensures that our short-term approaches are always balancing a long-term strategy as well.

Imagine you’ve achieved your dreams. Who would you be, what would you be doing, and what things would you have?

Start with Being

Here is a link to the MovementLink Being / Doing / Having spreadsheet template if you’d like to use it, but you can also do this exercise without using the template.

Note, there are multiple sheets within this workbook and examples included:

Being / Doing / Having
Cost of Dream Life
Strategy
Examples
Kyle’s Core Values

First, create a list of attributes of the person you want to be. Do you want to be a doctor, someone who is fit, someone who is altruistic? You can refer to a personal mission statement or a set of core values that you live by. If you haven’t yet defined your Core Values, this is a great opportunity to define the person you want to be.

Some of the things on your Being list may be things that you can achieve immediately, while others may take more time and effort. There may also be things that you need to do (Doing) in order to achieve and maintain the things on your Being list. Add the types of things you want to be doing daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. What does your work schedule look like and what types of things do you do? What do you do with your time off? What types and how many vacations would you like to go on each year? What types of hobbies do you want to be involved in? For example, if being Fit and Healthy is on your Being list, your Doing list may include things like Exercising 4-6 days a week, Eating a Healthy Diet, and Prioritizing Sleep.

For each Doing, there may be a Having and a Price to include too, so add the types of things you want to have. Do you want to live in a specific location or size home? What type of car do you want? What types of things do you want in your house? What do you need to live? What retirement accounts do you want to have? What toys, equipment, clothes, etc. do you dream of having? For each Having, there may be a monetary Price and including that can provide perspective on what types of income you may need to live that dream life. It may surprise you how achievable what you consider a dream actually is.

For example, for the Doing of Exercising 4-6 days a week, a Gym Membership may be on the Having List and the monthly price of the gym membership being in the Price column.

So, start with Being and fill in as much as possible from that, but as you feel you’ve exhausted that route, continue to add to your dream lists by writing down a Doing or Having and working back and forth across the three categories. This will take some playing around with which is why we like a digital version that allows you to copy, paste, and add rows.

This layout will not only help you define what you want, but can help you start organizing the efforts and the amount of money it will take to achieve and live this life. By actually seeing a path towards your dream, you may actually get inspired enough and actually make it happen!

Phase 2 - Financial Goals

If you have completed the Being/Doing/Having exercise and included prices for all of the things you want to have, you can estimate how much income you will need to fund your dream life by adding about 25-30% to account for income taxes. When the intent behind spending gets shifted towards creating a dream life, excess spending plumbits as a higher percentage of your income gets spent on things that really matter to you. Note: this is calculated for you on the Cost of Dream Life Sheet in the Doing Having Being Framework spreadsheet linked above.

You can also get a sense of if your current career is capable of creating the life you want to live and can motivate continued education and career development, but it can even help people see that they can drop the number of hours they worked sometimes to get a better work/life balance.

Phase 3 - Strategize

We want you to take action as a result of this exercise. The goal is to define who you want to be so that you can create habits that will help you achieve your goals. Life does not come about from a few heroic efforts, but consistently acting in a way that pushes you towards your Being / Having / Doing.

Now, what are your goals? If you actually took the time to complete the exercise, you will likely have an entirely different perspective on how to answer that question. We want to help you identify the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. habits and efforts that will help you achieve your goals. We feel exercise and a healthy lifestyle should be a vital component to everyone’s Being, Doing, Having lists and want to be sure that the goals you commit to and fight for are actually pushing your life in the direction you want to go.

Next Steps:

Develop a Mindset of Growth and Viewing Challenges as Enhancing
Complete the Being, Doing, Having Exercise.
Extreme bonus points if you spend time defining your Core Values. We have found this to be one of the most powerful things you can do for your life.
Strategize and Get Your Plans Together - This is where working with a coach can have major benefits by helping you choose strategies that work.
Focus on Following Through on the Processes, the Habits, and the Efforts that, when done consistently and with intent, will have the highest probability of success.
Gather Data to Review the Effectiveness of Your Efforts