Happy New Year!
Though not specifically gender related, I thought I’d talk about my current goal setting process. This is something that has helped me maintain a sense of progress and control which is especially important during unpredictable fluctuations in my gender, frustrating stages of transition, or other stressful life events.
Step 1: WHAT is your goal?
During the second half of December and first half of January, I think about the different areas of my life that I want to set goals for. Mine are typically health, creative projects, and housework. I pick 1-3 goals per category but no more than five total. For example, last year in the health category I had a weight goal and a cardio goal. This year I have a general fitness goal.
Goals should always be something that is important to you, not something you think you should do. They should be something you can easily state in a few words and something that you will feel motivated to work on for a whole year. If there is something you are working towards that will be completed halfway through the year (a competition or event), think about what you might want to work on for the rest of the year once that is done (whether or not you achieve the result you wanted).
Step 2: WHY is the goal important?
For each of your goals, write down as many reasons you can think of as to why this goal is important to you. How will it enrich your life? Will it improve your mood, help you connect with someone, decrease your stress, give you a sense of purpose, help you achieve an even larger goal, decrease dysphoria, build community, or increase your energy level?
Take some time with this step. Be holistic. I usually have 3-5 per goal. The things you write in this section will keep you motivated to achieve your goal when it gets hard or get back on track if you get derailed.
Step 3: HOW will you achieve your goal?
This is where you come up with strategies to achieve your goal. Trying to achieve a goal through sheer willpower is ineffective and exhausting. When forming a new habit or trying to make steady progress towards a goal, there are internal and external factors that will make it harder. This is called friction. For example, not having your exercise clothes with you when you could go to the gym or having snack food around that you constantly have to resist in order to eat healthier.
The strategies you are looking for are ones that decrease the friction for you and make the goal easier and as automatic as possible to achieve. These should be as concrete and personalized as possible. They might take some trial and error to figure out but don’t take too long to settle into a routine.
One habit forming hack is to connect the new behaviour to something you’re already doing. If you have an established morning routine and you want to meditate ten minutes a day, get up ten minutes earlier and fit it into your morning routine. If you have a weekly planning routine, plan out which days you are going to exercise instead of leaving it to chance.
Another good strategy is accountability. Find a buddy to exercise with. Find a friend with a similar goal and set up a regular time to meet up and review both of your progress and help each other solve roadblocks. If you’re even more brave, you can post your goals on social media with regular updates.
And lastly, rewards. If you respond well to rewards, include these in your strategies. Try to find rewards that won’t make another goal harder to achieve – for example, rewarding yourself for completing ten workouts by going out for dinner when you’re trying to decrease spending or change your eating habits. The best rewards are ones that support the same goal – rewarding yourself for a fitness goal by getting new workout equipment, new workout clothes, or new headphones (again, not a good plan if you’re trying to decrease spending but you get the idea). Another option for rewards is to have someone else decide on rewards for you which they will provide when you achieve a milestone (adds some anticipation, randomization, and excitement). This is a nice combination of the rewards and accountability strategies.
Step 4: WHEN is your goal complete?
How will you know when you have achieved your goal? This is the stage where you decide how you will measure your progress and end point. Every goal is measurable, you just have to figure out how. Different types of goals can be measured in different ways.
A specific process or habit based goal can be measured by doing the habit a certain number of times per week. If you multiply this by 52 weeks in the year, you will get your goal for the whole year. Or you can keep it as a weekly target and measure it by how many weeks of the year you met the target. This also works for daily or monthly goals.
A more general process or habit based goal that doesn’t have a weekly target can be measured in percentages. You might have to set up a tracking system for various parts of the goal to do this. The one that I do this with is my housekeeping schedule. My goal is to ‘maintain a clean house’. Doesn’t seem measurable, right? I set up a cleaning schedule that includes some weekly tasks, some monthly tasks, and some seasonal tasks. I have a grid of 52 weeks for each weekly task, a grid of 12 for each monthly task, and so on. I colour in the corresponding square when I complete the task. I then calculate how many I completed out of how many I was expected to complete and multiply by 100 to get a percentage. In the ‘when’ section for this goal, I have determined three targets for weekly tasks and three for monthly tasks – a minimum, good, and awesome percentage as a benchmark.
For an outcome based goal you will likely already have a measurable end point in mind – finish a project, run a marathon, achieve a certain weight. The difficulty with these is that the target is so far away that it’s hard to tell if you’re making any progress. So you’ll have to break it down into smaller pieces. Set as many measurable milestones as makes sense for your goal. Attach a timeline to each of these milestones so that you know if you’re still on track to reach the outcome.
Step 5: REVIEW PERIOD
How often will you revisit your goals and review your progress? Waiting until the end of the year doesn’t give you the opportunity to adjust your effort, strategies, measurement, or expectations. For some goals I have a weekly tracker or a monthly tracker built in but I will be reviewing all my goals and assessing my progress quarterly. This is a nice frequency because it roughly matches up with the seasonal changes and isn’t too far apart to forget why it’s important or get too far off track if my strategies aren’t working.
You know that burst of motivation that you get at the beginning of the year when everyone is talking about goals? Revisiting your goals and assessing your progress a few times a year gives you another smaller burst of the same motivation.
What are your goal setting and planning strategies? Leave a comment below if you have something different that works for you! I’m always looking for new ways to set, maintain motivation, and achieve my goals.