getting started (part 2): goals and steps

Okay, so if you read the last installment, you know you need to think about two things.

1. Goals: what you want to change, as specific as possible. Bigger goals may also be broken down into sub-goals.

2. Steps to accomplishing the goals (it is only necessary to have the first step for each goal, though having more will help you as you go on). Those steps represent the tweaks.

Let’s take some examples:

Let’s say Karen wants to reduce stress: that’s one goal.

She also wants to get into grad school: that’s the second goal.

So what needs to be changed? What contributes to that stress? What could help reduce it?

• Karen does not sleep enough
• she does not exercise enough
• she drinks too much coffee

One set of sub-goals would be changing those habits:

• get eight hours of sleep a night
• exercise 5x a week for 30 minutes
• go from 3 cups of coffee a day to one, or switch to half-caff or decaf
• add habits or practices that reduce stress (T’ai Chi? Yoga? Meditation? Therapy?)

Still, we need to break those down further.

Just working on the coffee concern alone, she might come up with a number of possible steps:

• cut out caffeine after noon
• make each coffee “half-caff”
• go to one coffee per day
• go from one coffee per day to one half-caff
• go from one half-caff a day to just decaf

I do not expect Karen will feel the need for all those steps. Her next action would be to pick the one tweak which takes her from where she is now (3 cups a day) close to her goal (which she has to identify as one half-caff, decaf, whatever).

What Karen needs to do is not make things too hard or too easy. Tweaks should take you somewhere. You should be better off at the end of the week than the start, at least in this area of life!

But they should not be so strict as to be unmanageable (e.g moving from 3 coffees to only decaf overnight). That will give you headaches and you are probably less likely to succeed.

Moving towards the larger goal (de-stressing), Karen might brainstorm the following tweaks, any of which could be a week’s project, with no particular order required by many of them:

• go to sleep by midnight every night
• relax for an hour before midnight so she can fall asleep
• start walking 30 minutes 3x per week
• up that to 30 minutes 5x a week
• take two yoga classes this week
• take two T’ai Chi classes this week
• make an appointment with a counselor to talk about stressful issues
• stop watching the 11 o’clock news

The other goal (getting into graduate school) would call for its own set of tweaks.

At the end of the week, Karen can decide if she wants to keep it (”I will continue to go to yoga twice a week”) or dump it (”Forget yoga! Let’s try T’ai chi next.”)

Either way, a new tweak can be added the next week.

None of this should be stressful or onerous. Try to brainstorm tweaks you can manage. And be open each week to what your intuition will tell you you need, and what you can manage that week.

If your overall goal is eating more whole foods and less processed ones, then don’t try to do it all at once. The first week, swap white rice for brown. The next week, have an ounce of nuts every day. And so on.

It helps to know yourself. If you have had trouble keeping to resolutions in the past, it may be because you take on too much at once, and expect perfection. I know that was my problem. So this time, I am going to come up with concrete steps, tweaks I can manage. Just for a week, if need be.

There are 52 tweaks in a year, and I think you can get really far by changing just one thing, every week.