A System for Setting Health Goals in 2024

SHOW NOTES

Welcome to year two/season two of Man in the Arena with Craig Spear! 

Today I am talking about goals.  Not because it's the new year.  I am talking about goals because GOALS MATTER.

Goals make use happier, they make life easier and most importantly, goals give our lives meaning and purpose.

It turns out that how you set goals also matters.  

With that, in today's episode I'm sharing my system of how to set health goals and actually follow through on them.  

I'm also sharing  five key mistakes we make when setting goals and how to use my system to avoid them.

Lastly, I am going to tell you about The Arrival Fallacy and what you should focus on instead as you pursue your goals.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to man in the Arena. This podcast is for men over 40 who want to master their health and weight loss goals once and for all, with innovative strategies, practical tools and insightful interviews. My goal is to help you overcome your limiting beliefs and achieve your optimal health. It's time to look good, feel good and do better. Hello and happy New Year, and welcome to Season 2, year 2, of man in the Arena podcast. This year, we are primed to accomplish even bigger goals and make an even bigger impact. So buckle up, stay tuned. We've got so many great episodes ahead, and thank you so much for stopping by. I don't know about you, but I'm feeling really good. After the holidays. I had a lot of downtime, relaxing with my family and enjoying the freedom of just doing nothing, but now it's go time and I'm launching a new fitness program that is going to last the entire year, the entirety of 2024. It's something I'm doing as well. So, with all of my clients and guides in the arena, I'm doing this. We started yesterday on phase one of the program, and this phase is going to last three weeks of workouts and then we're going to do a week of active recovery and then we're going to head into phase two. Now, what's great about this program is you don't have to think about what to do next. All of the workouts, all of the planning is completely done for you. So all you have to do is show up and do the workouts. Plus, you're working along other guys who are doing this at the same time, so there's this natural body double effect going on. And, lastly, you get to track all of your progress in my custom app, where the workouts are delivered every day with videos and descriptions and all that kind of stuff. Now, best of all, I've designed all of these workouts for all different fitness levels, so I have four tiers. No matter where you are, if you're just getting started or if you've been working out for a long time there's options for you. And in this phase in particular, we're doing an added push up challenge, and the goal here is to do a push up test early in the month and then test again at the end of the phase. Even if you cannot do a push up right now, that's okay, because I guarantee you, by the end of the month, you will be doing push ups. So if one of your goals is to get healthier this year, be sure to head on over to the spear methodcom, slash the arena, and I want you to join up, because we're doing this work right now. We're going to do it all year long and by the end of the year, we are all going to be in the best shape of our lives. Speaking of goals, I have a great episode for you today. I'm going to teach you my system for setting goals for your health and your wellness in 2024. Last month, I held my first annual goal day, and this is something that I'm going to be doing every year, and it's going to be on the second Saturday of December going forward, and in this workshop, we had such a great turnout. Now, much of what I shared in that workshop I'm going to share with you today. In fact, I'm sharing the exact same workbook that I created for goal day here. All you have to do is go to the link and download it. You can find that in the show notes, so be sure to pause this episode and do that, because you're going to be able to follow along and create all of your own goals as we go. A big theme of this podcast and man in the Arena this year is to provide you with effective, usable systems each week. I think systems are integral to our success because they allow us to stay consistent over time, and that is such an important ingredient. Succeed is key, and there were a lot of times where I set a goal and I never followed through. In fact, this happens to a lot of us. We all set goals, and about 80% of us set goals in the beginning of the new year and by the middle of January we've completely bailed on them, and I believe the reason for this is we just don't have a great system in place. If you create a solid system for setting goals and taking action, you will succeed. So that's why I jumped into the research last month and actually way back into October, november, and I studied as much as I could about setting goals and in the process, I created this system where you're not only going to define your goals, but you're going to refine them. In today's episode, we're going to talk about why goals matter. We're going to talk about the definition of a goal. Every goal has two components and we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the five mistakes we often make when setting goals and how that inevitably leads to our demise, and then we're going to create a one-page plan that's going to keep you focused on achieving your goals all year long. Sound good? Let's jump in Now. A big question I often get is how do I set goals when I don't even know what I want right, especially when it comes to health. Health is such a big topic. There's so many variables. There's our sleep, there's our exercise, there's our nutrition, there's, you know, hydration, there's stress management, exercise. There's so many different components to our health that require attention. Here's my biggest takeaway from not only goal day, where we talked about this, but just in general being a coach when you set goals for your health, I want you to focus on one area, just one area, and this might sound contrary to what maybe you've heard before, but in my opinion and in my experience, this is going to lead to success guaranteed when you focus on one specific area and, in fact, this becomes what's called a keystone habit, and the benefit of this is when you see progress, when you attain a goal in one area, it actually leads to this momentum that's building and success in other areas. It becomes a positive, virtuous cycle, and that's what we want to do right Now. It seems contrary to us because we think we have all these different problems. You know, I'm not sleeping well, I'm stressed out, I need to lose weight, I need to eat better, and then, of course, all the other things that are going on in our lives and our careers and our relationships. We need to fix it all. There's so many different things that require our attention, and so our brain kind of freaks out a little bit and wants to give attention to everything, but we know that that doesn't work. So as part of this process, right, I really want you to focus in on one area of your health. Okay, and the analogy I want to give you is this okay, when you think about a football game, when you're down in the game by a lot of points, right, you know, you think about the Patriots when they were playing the Atlanta Falcons and they were down big. I think they were down either three or four touchdowns at one point, and so you're not going to score all those points to get back into the game at one in one drive, right? The message is just score your next touchdown, score your next points and then build momentum. And what that does is when you build momentum, you build trust, you build a routine, you get into the practice more often. So that's what I want you to focus on. We're not going to focus on every variable, we're going to focus on one. And, believe me, when you do that, that's where you start to see success. And then it becomes this positive virtual cycle, okay, so with that, all right, this is the basic overview of this system. I'm going to kind of break this down as we go. But we go from the top of the funnel the goal funnel, where there's a lot going on, and then we define our big dreams or our big, you know, things that we want, and then we define them down into one thing. We refine that one thing through the process I'm going to explain, and then we finish with a one page plan, all right. So we start big and we funnel down. That's how we create the system to set goals. Now I will say this as you go through this process, as you go through the year and you are pursuing your goals, right, expect your goals to change, that's okay. That doesn't mean anything's gone wrong. It doesn't mean you failed. Expect that your goal is going to evolve and shift and change. That's actually a good thing, all right, it doesn't mean anything went wrong and you have to start all over again and set a new goal. Okay, that just kind of creates a lot of dissonance and it creates, you know, a lack of success, in my opinion. Okay, so expect your goals to change. The first step here we're going to start at the top of the funnel is I want you to dream big. Okay, I want you to. And if you look in the exercise workbook, there's an exercise there where you can list 25 things. I want you to list 25 things that you want related to your health. So maybe you want to lose 25 pounds, maybe you want to sleep better, maybe you want to run a marathon or a 5K race, maybe you want to do more push-ups, maybe you want to get stronger, whatever those things are. I want you to pause this episode, set a timer for five to 10 minutes and just list 25 things related to your health, your health and your wellness that you want. So this is dreaming big. This is a brainstorm. It doesn't have to be perfect, and if you don't get to 25, that's okay. If you go more than 25, that's okay as well. Right, once you've done that exercise, I want you to go through that list and pick one, pick one thing. Okay, if we focus on too many things, nothing's going to get done. So I want you to focus on one thing. I went through this process myself back in December and as I went through this, I did this brainstorm and one of the things that jumped out to me was my desire to greatly improve and focus on my sleep. I use a device called WOOP, which is a tracker, a health and wellness tracker. It tracks my sleep, among other things, and what's really neat about the WOOP is they send out a yearly review in December to each user, and one of the things that I learned from my own personal review is my sleep consistency was not nearly as high as I thought it was. I scored a 70% and it should be well over 90. So, having done this brainstorm of 25 things that I want, I realized that sleep is really important to me and I know, as a health coach, just how important sleep is, not only for our overall health, but once you sort of establish really good sleep habits and consistency, it's gonna sort of trickle down into other areas of your health. So that's why I started to focus on that. So that's step one. We dream big. We list 25 things that we want and then we pick one, and that's where we're gonna go from here. Okay, before I go on to the next step, I wanna discuss why goals matter and why do we set goals. Well, goals make us happier, they make our lives easier and, most importantly, they give our lives purpose and meaning. That's why goals matter. In fact, they did a study at the University of Wisconsin and what they found was that people experienced lower rates of depression, anxiety and fear when they set goals. And think about your own life, I imagine that you've been your happiest and most fulfilled when you're pursuing a goal in your life, and when it comes to your health and wellness goals, this is no different. So my goal for you with this episode is to help you set one health related goal by the end of this episode, and if you're using this workbook, you're gonna have a one page plan that's gonna keep you focused to achieve it. Now I came across research at the University of Oregon where a man named Dr Elliot Berkman is leading a lab and this is where they study goals and, among other things, they study neuroscience and he's come up with a definition of a goal. It's actually a great definition in my opinion, and he says that a goal is anything you desire that would not otherwise happen without you doing something different. Okay, let's kind of unpack this a little bit Without you doing something different. Okay, so that means, if you're going to achieve something that's really important to you, you have to do something. That's gonna create discomfort and resistance. It's gonna create discomfort and resistance for you. So, in other words, a goal is a detour from the path of least resistance. Right, that's so important, that's so important. So, when you start to pick out that one goal, I want you to funnel it through, filter it through this definition Is this going to create discomfort for me? Is there going to be resistance? And so, for myself, with my sleep goal, I know that I'm lacking in sleep consistency, and one of the reasons why is I'm not getting to bed at a consistent time each night. Some nights it's nine o'clock, some nights it's nine, 30, some nights it's 11. And so I really wanna dial that in, and I know that there's some discomfort there. Okay, I'm either on my phone and not getting to bed, I'm watching TV. So that is something I'm going to have to overcome and do differently. So that, for me, has been filtered through, goes to the definition of the goal. Okay, now the next thing that Dr Berkman talks about is that there's two components needed for each goal, and the first one is the will and the second one is the way. Okay, so the will is the motivational and emotional aspects of the behavior change. The will is your why? Okay, this is so important because if you don't have a strong enough why you're gonna bail on your goal. The reason that is is the will, the why. It involves the dopaminergic centers of our brain, the reward system of our brain, right, and oftentimes we are faced with an impulsive decision, something that gives us a lot of comfort and pleasure in the moment, and so we seek that and we often disregard our goal. But when we have a strong enough why? When we have a strong enough reason why we want to achieve our goal, it often elicits that same dopaminergic pathway, and that's what keeps us connected, that's what keeps us going in pursuit of our goal. So, if you reference your workbook, there's three important questions that you can ask to clarify your why. Number one why does this behavior change important to you? Why do you want to change, and why? Now, as you answer these questions, inevitably I want you to get to a why statement, and the why statement is basically a statement that really clearly defines why this goal is important to you. Now, the way, which is the second component of a goal, is the cognitive and informational aspects of the behavior change. The way is the how. So basically, we've got the why and the how, and this is important. The how is important because it involves your prefrontal cortex. This is where we make decisions, we solve problems and in some most creative centers of our brain, and so we have these two important parts of our brain that need to be involved in the pursuit of our goals. And how do you find out your how? Well, again, you ask these three questions how is this behavior change going to unfold, what skills and capacities does it require, and what's my specific plan for achieving it? Now, part of the one page plan that you're going to create at the end of this process is you're going to identify five do goals that are going to allow you to pursue your goal and create and achieve the goal. Ultimately, right Now, what's a do goal? A do goal is any action that you need to take or in action that you need to avoid in order to accomplish your goal. So there's five things that I want you to address. So, with myself, I'm going to explain my will statement, my why statement and my how. So I want to sleep more consistently because it is essential to my longevity and my legacy as a men's health coach who promotes well-being. It is important for me to lead by example and it supports my desire to be the healthiest I can be. So that's my why, that's my will. Okay, so I want you to, by the end of this episode, have one statement you can go to connect you with why you're doing this and why you're pursuing your goal. The next thing is the how or the way, and there's five do goals. So, for myself, I identified five do goals. So my phone is away by 6pm. I set a weekday bedtime of 8.30pm and a wake up time of 5am. I set a weekend bedtime of 10pm and wake time of 6.30. I adhere to the bedtime routine 4-6 nights per week and then I limit water intake to 6pm each night so that I'm not up and getting out of bed and going to the bathroom. So by this point, if you're following along, you will have your will and your way, you will have identified five do goals. So as we go through this goal setting system and further down the funnel of defining our goals, thank you. With that, let's address five mistakes we make when we often set goals, and the reason why this is important is so that you can avoid making these mistakes and better clarify and refine your goal as we go along. So mistake number one we focus only on the how and not enough on the why. We focus too much on the way and not enough on the will. So, as part of this system, you need to get really clear on what your why is. So believe me when I say develop that will statement, it's so important. In fact, if you're going to skip out on either one of these, I'd rather you skipped out on the how and focused more on the why, because my belief is that when you have a really strong why, the how is going to fall into place. But we often focus on the how instead and expect the why just to kind of magically appear Doesn't happen. So that's mistake number one. Mistake number two is we set way too many goals, and I kind of alluded to this in the beginning of the episode. But as part of this system that you're creating. Following here, you're going to be asked to refine down to one goal. Right, because I want you to remember, diluted efforts lead to diluted results. In fact, there's something called she hands wall, and she hands wall basically states that if we have that one goal, we're trying to break through the wall. If we are trying to do too many things or we're focusing on other goals, we're not going to develop the effort we need to break through Now. Once you break through that wall, once you've really focused on one goal and broken through and achieved it now you're going to achieve other goals, or organically. So that's the takeaway I want you to focus on one goal. Mistake number three you're missing the sweet spot. So you're either setting goals that are too big or too small, and think of this as the goalie locks principle. So you have to believe that your goal is achievable, but that it's also not too hard either. So think of it this way If you're learning to play tennis, you don't want to play against a five year old, because you'd win that game every time, but you also don't want to learn to play tennis against a guy like Roger Federer. That'd be way too difficult, you'd never win and progress. See progress and success. So you've got to find the sweet spot with your goal. As you continue to refine down, think about how can you really find the sweet spot with your goal. The next thing is the next mistake we make is that your goals are too general. So this comes from research from Dr Halverson at Columbia University and she had a brilliant question that she asked people when they're setting goals. You have to ask yourself when will you know when you succeeded? When will you know when you've succeeded? Okay, and this will make sense as you go through the one page plan, because at the top there's sort of this defining statement for your goal. And the last mistake that we make is our goals are often too specific and so it kind of is in contrary to the two general principle and again it comes back to that Goldilocks principle. We want a high low range goal, and this comes from Florida State University. Basically, they said it easier to lose two to four pounds than it is to lose three pounds. Easier to lose two to four pounds than it is to lose three pounds. And the reason in this is is our brain interprets this and we think well, the low range of the goal is achievable and that is motivating for me. But the high end, high range of the goal is motivating because it's a challenge and I know I can go after that. Now it can't be too much of divide there. You want to have a high, low range goal that you know you can achieve. So we find that sweet spot there. Okay, moving through this goal setting system, what I want you to do once you get to this point is define the milestones that you're going to reach along the way. What are the checkpoints that you're going to reach as you go through this? So if your goal is to lose 30 pounds in the first six months of the year, well, you know that each month you've got to lose five pounds. Those are your milestones. For me, my milestones with relation to my sleep is I want to sort of see this 5% increase each month in my sleep consistency. So 70%, 75%, 80%, all the way up to 90 plus percent. Okay. So I have really strong milestones set up and I also know how I'm going to celebrate when I get to each of those milestones. That's important as well. We don't want to just fly through and not acknowledge our progress. We want to make sure we definitely are aware of where we are seeing progress. Okay, now, this is where we get to the crux of the most important part of this process. We develop our one page plan. A one page plan is where we distill all the work that we've done into one simple page which we can reference every day In order to achieve our goals and pursue our goals. We want to be able to quickly identify what's our goal, why are we doing it, how are we doing it and what's our next milestone, and that's what the one page plan is all about. Okay, we don't need this binder full of a game plan in order to achieve our goal. So, as you go through this workbook, you should get to this one page plan and have it very clearly define what your goal is. Okay, I want to end this episode by sort of explaining to you something really cool that I came across by a guy named Tal Ben-Shahar out of Harvard University, and he identified something that a lot of people do when they set goals and they achieve goals, and it's called the arrival fallacy. The arrival fallacy is the belief that once we achieve a certain goal, then we're going to kind of reach this state of nirvana and ultimate happiness, joy, pleasure and everything is going to be amazing, and the reality is that simply isn't true. Okay, in fact, he studied celebrities musicians, actors and actresses. He studied Olympic athletes who won gold medals, and what he found was there is often a high level of depression related to these people having succeeded. The reason being is they didn't have their next goal, they didn't have the next thing that they were pursuing. Right, they already won the gold medal. Now what? And so we have to understand that achieving the goal is not the purpose of setting the goal. Okay, the happiness, the meaning, the purpose comes not from achieving the goal, but from setting them and pursuing them. That is the most fulfilling aspect of setting goals when we pursue them. So I challenge you to take the time to sit down, go through this podcast again, use the workbook, set one goal that you're going to focus on and pursue. I promise you your life and your health are going to get better, your life is going to be easier and it's going to be more fulfilling. That's all I have for you this week. Next week, we'll be diving into a system for better sleep. Until then, keep showing up to the arena so you can feel better, look better and do better. Now is the time to take action and change your life. Head on over to the spear methodcom and discover how I can help you get started on your path. Better health and weight loss.