Striving toward flashy, monumental goals can feel overwhelming and derail your progress. Here’s how working toward a smaller feat can keep you on track.
Most athletes understand the value of goals. They keep you consistent in your routine, give you something to look forward to, and continuously challenge you to be your best self. Walk into the Club without a purpose, and you may find yourself wandering around the floor without any clear game plan.
“It's like putting a destination in [your GPS] when you're driving,” says Candice Williams, Ph.D., a licensed mental health counselor and the director of mind health and wellness for the Boston Celtics. “Goals help dictate the process…They drive what we need to do in order to see growth.”
But some people may be making one crucial mistake when goal-setting: Setting a particularly extravagant feat and focusing on the end result rather than the process.
In concentrating on a single big ambition, such as running a marathon in three months’ time, rather than breaking it up into smaller targets (finishing a mile, then a 5K, 10K, and half marathon), you’re likely to lose steam quickly. “If you start off big and you try to work toward that goal, people tend to get into this rhythm where they're consistent for a week or two, and then they actually fall off because that goal is a little bit too lofty,” says Williams.
Part of this trouble with consistency can stem from a perceived lack of progress. Imagine you’re updating your phone’s software. When the status bar shows just a third of the update is complete after 10 minutes, you feel like your phone is never going to finish updating. But when you progress through multiple pages of status bars that quickly reach 100 percent, you’re more likely to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“[You want] a goal that, within the first couple of weeks, you yourself can recognize that there's some change or some growth,” says Williams. “There's that saying that [even if you take it] one step at a time, you can cover a lot of distance, and I think it's about setting small, incremental goals versus the big-picture goals.”
In establishing small goals that build up to a larger accomplishment, you’re also more likely to notice if your overarching goal needs to change and, if that’s the case, be open to switching it up. Say your initial goal is to lose 15 pounds, and you’ve broken it down into weekly milestones. After a few weeks of working with a trainer, lifting weights, and doing consistent cardio, you might realize that you enjoy how you feel with more muscle and decide to refocus on this new aspect of health, says Williams. But if you’re zeroed in on that larger weight loss target — and you’re not checking in with yourself throughout the process — you may be less amenable to changing gears.
Not to mention, big goals aren’t always realistic to achieve with your current abilities or free time — and that’s okay. Sure, you could run a half marathon if you really put your mind to it. But if you’re not currently a distance runner, your strengths lie in sprints, and you have only an hour to spare for training each day, you’ll likely be better off starting with a small goal, like jogging a 5K. Once that’s checked off, you can progressively work toward bigger goals, says Williams.
To avoid deciding on too lofty of a goal, Williams recommends thinking about your “why” before you set it in stone. If you want to be stronger, build incredible endurance, or feel like an Olympic gymnast, establishing a target like deadlifting 200 pounds, finishing an ultramarathon, or performing the splits will help you get there. But so will adding five more pounds to your lifts, running two minutes longer than yesterday, and stretching a bit deeper into your forward fold. Although they may not be as flashy or recognition-worthy, they can be just as, if not more, impactful.