By now, hopefully you’ve read my posts on setting effective goals.

Now, I want to take a moment and discuss how goal-setting relates to activity trackers. Do you have a Fitbit, Jawbone UP, Misfit Shine, or anything similar? Does it tell you that you have to walk 10,000 steps to reach your goal today? Based on everything we learned about setting effective goals, does that seem like a quality goal you should be setting? For the sake of this post, keep in mind the example we came up with the other day.


We have our outcome goal, which is the destination:

     Outcome: I will run the local 5k on January 1st in under 30 minutes.

And we have process goals, which provide us the road map of how to get there.

     Process: I will limit my junk food consumption to once a week on Saturday evenings.

                      I will eat more calories than my daily expenditure to aid recovery and training.

So, last time, we came up with our outcome goal, the ultimate goal we want to achieve. How do we achieve that goal? An effective goal won’t just tell us where we want to go, but how we get there. Just like you wouldn’t set off on a cross-country road trip without a map (or GPS, for the younger generation), you shouldn’t try to make a change to yourself without understanding how, and what it takes, to get there. Process goals act as that road map to tell us how we achieve our ultimate Outcome goal.

So you want to make a change. How do you know where you want to go?

Goals are the fundamental building block of change and self-improvement. As everyone knows, goals tell us where we want to go. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether it’s running a mile or a marathon, setting a goal provides us with a clearly defined thing that we want to achieve. Everyone has some goal they would like to achieve. Let me help you realize your goal.

Why do some people thrive in stressful situations, while others collapse? Why are some better able to adapt to changing circumstances than others? Why do some athletes, who have all the physical gifts, fail to realize their potential? Why are some people able to stick with exercise routines, while others revert back to their old ways? We spend so much time training our bodies, but we tend to neglect the aspect of ourselves that can make the biggest difference in whether or not we succeed. Our minds.