#Goals. Are yours SMART? And who gets to hear them?

The Questions

"Hey, do you think I should squat every day?"

"Should I do jumping pull ups or negatives?"

"How do I make my butt look like that emoji peach?"

"Should I eat more carbs?"

"Am I eating too many carbs?"

"I don't remember what I was going to ask you but it was definitely carb-related."

These are all starting points to conversations I have actually had in the real world with people at the CrossFit gyms at which I work and frequent. And without exception, I have struggled to answer them each time. This is mainly due to a dirty little secret I am going to let you in on: I don't know. I have no idea. Not only do I have no idea, but I'm willing to guess that if you have asked a question like this, your coach probably is clueless as well.

This is not an indictment of coaches and trainers, but a statement of fact. Unless you have sat down with your coach and had a detailed discussion about your short, mid-, and long-term goals, they most likely cannot tell you with great certainty what you should or should not be doing. If you want to train well and train efficiently, you need to use your goals to inform what you are doing. Believe it or not, this very simple truth is often not considered when people begin any fitness endeavor. Generally, people want simple answers to complicated questions and this leads to people assuming that there is one solution to all fitness "problems"

Before you can have a conversation with your coach, you need to have a conversation with yourself. In my last post I detailed some of my mistakes with goal-setting. So my goal for this post is to help people avoid some of the errors in setting goals that I myself have made and to show how I create goals for some of my clients. I actually don't like the word "clients;" it is a bit too sterile for my taste. Sometimes, half-jokingly, I will refer to the people that I write CrossFit programming for as my "frients," a fun portmanteau of "friends" and "clients" This however, makes them sound like food, which I am also not particularly comfortable with, but here we are.

Much of the hard content that you are about to read comes from the book The Champion's Mind by Jim Afremow and my own education getting a Master's Degree in Education from Dominican College. The book is amazing and I would recommend it to athletes and NARPs alike. The master's seems like an extravagance unless you plan on teaching middle school English and theater like myself.

Writing SMART Goals

If you want to achieve meaningful results, creating your goals should be a long and thoughtful process. You need to be SMART about your goals. SMART is an abbreviation for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. If your goals are these five things, you are setting yourself up for success from the beginning of your journey.

Having a specific goal makes it clear that you know exactly what you want and there is no confusing what success looks like. "Get good at CrossFit" was one of the first goals I wrote down when I began this sport almost 8 years ago. That's a pretty vague goal. In 2017, my goal was to be in the top 400 men in the Mid Atlantic region. Your goal should be specific enough where someone can read it and objectively judge if you were successful without much prompting.

Measurable goals go hand in hand with specific goals. When you put numbers on something, it takes the subjectivity out of it. For a long time, I have needed to improve my range of motion in my hip flexor. This goal is is not necessarily measurable because there needs to be data to support an improvement. To make this goal measurable, I have written down the goal of: Be able to pass the Thomas Test by January 2018. The Thomas Test is a hip flexibility screening that I check in with once every two weeks to see if I have been making steady improvements to my hip's range of motion.

Attainable goals are where things get tricky for athletes . Many people fall into the trap of setting goals that they are just not ready for. Jim Afremow recommends setting up a three-tier system of gold, silver, and bronze to keep your goals both realistic and gives you the opportunity to outperform your expectations. Gold should be the best case scenario where everything has worked out perfectly and I have achieved my ultimate goal. Silver should be something I really want but not the absolute pinnacle of performance. Finally, Bronze should be an outcome that is desired but falls short of my expectations.

Relevant goals are all about keeping your “why” in mind. In my last blog post, I discussed a time when I achieved my goals but it turned out that I didn't even want what I thought I did. If I can clearly understand what the result of achieving my goal is, I am far more likely to be fulfilled by my attainment of said goal.

Finally, having time-bound goals places a sense of urgency on what I am looking to execute. If my goals are nebulous and have no deadline, it becomes far easier to put them off or not implement whatever steps I need to take in the present moment to work toward my future goal.

Who Gets to See Your Goals?

As stated previously, this process requires an investment of time and effort to make sure you are crafting your goals so that the final result leaves you better off than you were before. Once you have taken the time to create your goals, write them down and put them somewhere you can see them every single day. Just the act of seeing what you are working toward everyday will reinvigorate you and remind you that you should be doing something in the present to be working toward the future that you want.

I have a little journal/planner/notepad that I keep with me at all times. On the front and inside cover of the journal there are a bunch of goals that I am currently working toward. The majority of them are fitness-related, but I also have financial, personal, and creative ones on there as well. I have found in my few years of doing this, that when I look at this journal, I get hit with a rush of enthusiasm and excitement to work toward my goals. Having them written in ink right in front of me keeps me honest. I mark off when I hit them and cross off if I miss the goal. This is a picture of what my journal from last year looks like. There are more goals inside, but these are the mostly fitness-related ones that I kept.

What I caution people against is sharing their goals with everyone or even more than a few important people. There is a plethora of research that says when people talk about their goals, it releases the same brain signals that occur when they accomplish the goal. This could actually make you less likely to achieve said goals. Derek Sivers has an excellent TED Talk about this phenomenon that I will attempt to link to the end of this post. (And plus, bald is beautiful.)

This is not to say you should be a hermit when it comes to what you want. I do believe you should share your goals with the people you spend the most time with. A select few should be aware of what you want out of life. This will make your friends and family understand a bit more of what you are trying to accomplish. My goal for the 2018 CrossFit Open is different than in previous years. My wife, my coach, and a few close personal friends are aware of my goals. My wife, Sarah, is supportive of my goals, and when I am at the gym late performing progressive & regressive angular isometric loading, she gets it. My coach, Brannen Dorman of Training Think Tank, knows my very specific dreams because they shape how we tackle my biggest weaknesses. And finally, my closest friends know that if they are looking for a drinking buddy from January to April, it's not happening because of what I am working toward.

My mission with the Mindful Meathead blog and business is to get people to be a bit more introspective in their life and fitness journeys. While some may call it navel gazing, I think that only good things can come from self-examination. I am not advocating plotting every moment of your day around your certain set of goals, but I believe that mindlessly tackling your goals is setting yourself up to fail. A phenomenal comedian, Pete Holmes, once quipped, "I may not be the best person to captain this ship, but I'm the only one there is." So before you outsource your actions to someone else, take a closer look inside, and I'm certain you'll find the answers you are looking for.