The best goal-setting advice I've ever heard

A behavior change expert shares 6 secrets to achieving your resolutions

Happy New Year, friends! We’re three days in, and I’m happy to share that I’m already making progress on one of my Try January goals: taking more walks outside, even if just for a few minutes. On the first, I somehow convinced my homebody 7-year-old to join me for a quick jaunt around the neighborhood (a small miracle!), and I got a whole earful of information about the TV show Knuckles, which he watched on a recent flight and which frankly sounds horrible. Yesterday morning, I took a cold but sunny stroll to work at Esquina, the studio where I teach Pilates, and it felt so good to be outside and moving.

My little walking buddy on January 1

Listen, we’re, again, only three days in, so I’m keeping my expectations managed, but it does feel really nice to be off to a good start.

That said, have I started at all on my other goal of working toward a pull-up? Reader, I have not! But I’m not too worried about it, because of some smart advice I got a few weeks ago from the behavior change expert Karin Nordin, PhD.

You might remember Dr. Nordin from the post a few days ago where we started talking about Try January, although I admittedly didn’t have the name yet. (End-of-year burnout had sucked my creativity dry, but it’s back, baby!)

A 30-day movement challenge to feel stronger and better in your body

Anyway, I sort of teased it in that post, but the reason I had all this great material from Dr. Nordin is that I interviewed her for an article I wrote for The New York Times that went live on Wednesday: “5 Fitness Resolutions That Have Nothing to Do With Weight Loss” (insert air horn sound here). Of course we could only squeeze a few of her gems into that article, so I wanted to round up and share a few more tips she talked about that I found truly mind-blowing.

Before we get into it, I want to say this: Like pretty much everything else within the realm of fitness, I do not believe there’s such a thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to goal-setting. We are all individuals, and our bodies and brains and lifestyles and personal histories and levels of privilege and access to various resources are all extremely different. And of course if any or all of the advice ahead doesn’t resonate with you, that’s fine! Take the approach that works for you, which may well include not setting any goals at all. But I do think this advice is really smart, surprising, and worth at least taking into consideration:

Find a Goldilocks goal.

Aka not too big and not too small. As Dr. Nordin said in my Times piece, “I always recommend setting a goal that challenges you a little bit, feels a little intimidating and even scary,” but it can’t be so far away from your current abilities that it’s nearly unachievable, she told me: “A lot of people are setting goals that are in that [unachievable] zone at New Year’s. They’re high on motivation and the fresh start effect and putting this very intense demand on themselves.” Instead, do look for something challenging, but “on a scale of 1–10 for how confident you are that you can achieve this, you want an 8 or higher to that question.”

Examine the value or quality behind your desired behavior.

The editor in me is allergic to running super-long quotes without breaking them up, but frankly I love this whole thing, so please don’t haunt me, ghost of Condé Montrose Nast:

“If you want to go for a daily walk, maybe that’s because you value being, or want to be described as, an active person. The quality is ‘active,’ the behavior is ‘go for a daily walk.’ Let’s say one Tuesday there’s torrential rain outside. You can ask yourself, What does an active person, the active version of me, do in this situation? Maybe you jump on your Peloton, or put on some music and dance around with your kids. You have an anchor for how you can be flexible with that behavior and still show up the way you want to show up. People think they need to be more rigid when they actually need to be more flexible. Being flexible is a cognitive skill, and most people are really bad at it because we aren’t trained to do it, unless you’re in the military. The value gives you an automatic built-in mechanism for that flexibility.” — Karin Nordin, PhD

Look for your sweet spot on the qualitative-to-quantitative scale.

I asked Dr. Nordin whether setting a goal with specific numbers is helpful or harmful, and she said, “Everybody is going to have a sweet spot for this question. It’s a spectrum.” On one end you’ll find the one-word people (AKA folks who decide on a single word to set the tone of the year, like “fearless”). On the other end, you’ll find the SMART goal people, who say they’ll wake up at 5:00am to do a workout on at least 300 days out of the year. Somewhere in between you might find a goal like, “I want to be more fearless, so I want to try something that scares me at least once a month.”

“If the number helps you give yourself credit, that’s a good thing. If the number gives it too much pressure or you have a strong aversion to fitness-related numbers, then make it more abstract,” Dr. Nordin said. “The important thing on either end of the spectrum is that you have both pieces: You know your bigger ‘why’ behind the ultra-specific stuff, and if you’re on the more abstract side, you have some semblance of a plan for what the actions could be even if you don’t have numbers involved.”

I’ll get a bit more specific here and say that numbers can be challenging or even dangerous for those with a history of dieting or disordered eating or exercise. I certainly wouldn’t endorse goals that have to do with calories or pounds lost; but even for other quantitative goals please take care and make sure the numbers you’re considering are truly supportive of your wellbeing and won’t lead you down a tricky path. You know yourself best, but if you’re in doubt, this is a great thing to speak to a mental health professional about to help sort out what truly will be most beneficial and minimally risky for you.

Predict and plan for your mental objections.

To quote the Times piece:

Once you’ve picked your goal — and made a realistic plan to achieve it — consider the obstacles that might crop up and how you’ll respond to them.

“We all have thoughts, often objections, that pop into our brain over and over, like I’m too tired, I don’t have time, I can do this later,” Dr. Nordin said.

Think about what your mental objections to exercise are likely to be, and prepare a “thought rebuttal” to draw upon when needed, she said: “If your brain says, ‘I’m too tired,’ you say, ‘I’m tired, and I can do hard things while I’m tired.’”

Even if mental roadblocks derail your progress, she said, that doesn’t mean you chose the wrong goal.

“I would bet 90 percent of the time,” she said, “it’s just that you needed to manage your thoughts a bit better.”

As Dr. Nordin told me, “You need to pay more attention to your cognitive habits than your behavioral habits. A lot of people get obsessed with, ‘I’m going to make working out a habit.’ We don’t realize we have habitual cognitions too.”

One skill to practice is called “cognitive defusion”: basically, learning to examine the way you’re thinking; to recognize your thoughts as just that, thoughts; and to question them. “That doesn’t mean you gaslight yourself, but when your brain says you’re too tired to work out, you ask, ‘Is that true? Is there some form of this workout that’s going to feel restorative to me? Maybe I am tired and the workout is what’s going to give me energy and drive today,’” Dr. Nordin said.

Turn your failures into flops (aka FLPs).

That’s Failure, Lesson, Plan. If you aren’t making progress toward your goal, or you missed a day or week, spend some time processing what happened, Dr. Nordin suggests. “If the ‘failure’ is, I chose not to go to the gym because it was raining. The lesson, what I learned from that, is that maybe I need to look at the weather ahead of time so that I know when that resistance is coming,” she says. And then make a plan: maybe buying a better raincoat or finding a workout you can do at home on rainy days.

“Everything you need to succeed is hidden in your failures,” Dr. Nordin said. “People are like, ‘I didn’t work out last week,’ and they think the self-compassionate thing is to say, ‘It’s fine!’ No: Self-compassion is fundamentally about honesty, taking real stock about where you are, and are not, showing up for yourself. Come face to face with your failures and say, ‘This is what happened, I’m taking responsibility, and I’m going to learn from it.’”

Notice she didn’t suggest saying, this is what happened, I’m terrible and I’ve failed forever. It’s not about guilt or self-punishment, or letting your shortcomings define you; it’s about reframing your thinking so you can continue to work toward achieving the things you want for yourself.

Make getting started as easy as possible.

“For a lot of people, the resistance isn’t to the workout itself, it’s to the initiation of the workout,” Dr. Nordin said. In other words, once you’re moving, you’re in the groove, but actually getting into that groove can be really hard. Her favorite tip is to pack her workout clothes in her backpack the night before, and get up in the morning and go directly to the gym in her pajamas. I get this! When you’re still sleepy and cozy in your room, the thought of wrestling yourself into a sports bra sounds like a pretty rude awakening. But by the time you get to the gym, the hard part is pretty much over, so it’s pretty easy to get changed in the locker room. Worth noting that for at-home exercisers, I fully endorse simply working out in whatever you’re already wearing, and I definitely exercise in my jams (or my cozy cat sweatshirt) on a not-infrequent basis.

I hope you found this guidance as helpful as I did. In future posts this month, I’ll go into more detail on the specific goals I outlined in the Times piece, including trying running, getting up off the floor using fewer supports, and (yes!) working towards a pull-up. Remember that paid subscribers can get support and share their Try January progress in the How to Move chat. We’d love to see you there! Oh, and just a reminder that my holiday sale ends Sunday, so now’s a great time to upgrade your subscription if you haven’t already.

xo
Anna