The Power of Making Your Goals Smaller
JONNY ROMAN
A client of mine was sharing with me the importance of meditation in his life.
When he meditates, he told, literally everything in his life is better. He’s better able to show up for his wife, he’s more effective at work, he can navigate life’s frustrations more easily…life is all around easier. He even went so far as to say it is the most important thing he can do to improve the quality of his life.
There was only one problem. He wasn’t meditating.
What?! You just said it was the most important thing you can be doing to improve your life, and yet you’re not making time to do it?
Well, he said, I find it hard to find 20 minutes in my day. It feels challenging to carve out the time when things feel so busy.
Can you relate? How many of us have something similar we can relate to? We literally know what we can do to make our life better, and yet we’re not doing it.
Another client was sharing a similar story about running. He loves to run, loves to move his body, and knows how important it is for him to do it…but he was really inconsistent. When I asked him why, he said his running coach was no longer able to meet as frequent, and he prefers to run when he can measure his progress and wants his coach to be available to do so.
In both of these cases, I helped my clients see that their goals were simply too big. And as a result, they simply weren’t taking the necessary action needed to accomplish it. So instead of changing their approach, they simply stopped doing the thing they identified as vital to their quality of life.
So I worked with them to focus on a smaller goal. Instead of meditating for 20 minutes, make the minimum 5 minutes. You can find 5 minutes to close your eyes and breath in a day, right? If it’s the most important thing you can do to improve the quality of your life, you can make sure to carve out 5 minutes in a day. If not, something is wrong with your life!
Ultimately the goal has nothing to do with how long you meditate – the real goal is consistency. I don’t care if you meditate for 1 minute, or 30 seconds. Just meditate. It doesn’t even need to be every single day, unless you want it to be. I’d rather you do 5 minutes twice a week for 10 years than every day for a week and then fizzle out. Consistency is what we’re really after. And you putting an arbitrary 20 minute minimum on your meditations is preventing you from simply meditating. When I helped my client see this, and we changed his goal to simply meditating a minimum of 5 minutes, he started meditating every day. Some days 5 minutes, other days 15-20 minutes, and even some 45-minute sessions in there as well!
And with my client who loves to run, we shifted his goal to identify the bare minimum amount that would be acceptable to him to run in a week. He said the bare minimum is 3 times per week, 30 minutes a run. So we ran an experiment, and that week he ran 4 times, whereas the week prior he ran once.
That’s the power of scaling back your goals.
Now we’ll start to look at consistency. Is 3x/wk a good minimum? We’ll know if it is if he keeps it up, and we’ll know if we need to change if he doesn’t do it. If he doesn't, then we’ll aim for 2 times per week, or even 1. Because consistency is what we’re after first…in a way, we want quantity over quality. Once we have that, then we can start improving our quality.
We often let our egos drive our habit creation, which is extremely inefficient and ultimately idiotic. Why? Because our ego says “it needs to look a certain way, otherwise it doesn’t count.” And we look at the bar our ego is setting and we lose motivation. It doesn’t need to look a certain way, it just needs to get done! And get done again, and again…and again, over time.
What have you identified as something you know will create a huge positive impact in your life, and simply haven’t been doing? How can you make your goal smaller, so small that it’s almost harder not to do it than do it? Run an experiment and see if you can keep that up for 3 weeks in a row. If so, you’re well on your way. If not, make your goal even smaller and try again. If it truly is one of the best things you can do to improve your life, the effort will be worth it.
Love,
