Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Whole Human Podcast. I am so thankful that you are here and listening today. The best part about Whole Human is the community, and I am so happy that you are part of it. If you, if I don't know you yet, please head over to my Instagram at it's Kayla J and send me a DM letting me know that you're a listener.

Chatting with you is my favorite, so come and introduce yourself. Like I said last week on our first episode on this podcast. Every single week. Our goal is to make sure you leave with actionable takeaways. No fluff, just real stuff. So this week being the start of the podcast still, I want to talk about the start of getting your results, and that is in your goal setting.

I've been helping people set goals for. almost 15 years and I have learned a lot about it. And today I'm passing all of that knowledge onto you because I know that this time of year, if you are listening to this live time is when we are in that New Year Energy. And I personally love that New Year Energy.

I know that there are people who say things like, oh, you should be starting your goals anytime of year, not just in January. And I agree with you a hundred thousand percent, but I also believe that having the calendar year is a great way to. Reflect, assess, adjust as needed and make plans for more growth.

So whether or not you make your goals in the new year, or you make them throughout the year, this episode is still for you. Because goal setting strategy is just goal setting strategy. And maybe you're like, well, coach K, I'm not a goal setting person. It's not my jam. And you know what? I've heard that before too, and my initial reaction is always Tell me more.

Tell me. . I think a lot of people who claim to not be goal setting, people actually are goal setting people and they just don't even realize it themselves. Just because they don't formally recognize that they're making goals doesn't mean that they don't still have goals in life. They might say that they're not a goal setting person, but be working for a promotion.

They might say that they're not a goal setting person, but wanna run a marathon for the first time, cuz it'll be a fun challenge. They might say that they aren't a goal setting type of person, but want to buy a. These things. My friends, my friends who think you don't set goals, these are goals. And recognizing them as such and building out action plans and ways to monitor them on our way only makes you more likely to reach them and less confused about where you are in reaching them.

So with all of that being said, setting your goals, let's get after it. I grew up, and maybe you did too, learning about the acronym, the smart. S M A R t in all caps, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. And I really truly used to follow that and real like I would set up in my planner, even those letters, and then put my goals into E each section.

You know, I love to color code everything, but as I've set goals over the years and as I've helped others do it, I've actually really grown to have some strong problems with the quote unquote smart goals. So me and smart goals, we've got beef and I want to talk about that. , if we lean too far into some of those points in the smart goal, I really think we end up cutting ourselves short and also setting ourselves up for a sort of failure of not reaching our goal to the fullest that they can be, and also leading ourselves to be kind of confused and have a vague sense of where we're going.

Even if the first word is specific. So today I wanna break down the smart goal and why I think it isn't actually the smartest way to set and reach your goals, then I will give you my three steps. Only three steps to setting a goal in a way that leads you to success. So let's break it down and let's start with the S specific.

This I don't think is so bad. Sometimes we can say specifically what we. I want to run a marathon. I want to buy a house, but where this can get really muddled is when we confuse progress markers for the goal. . But one area where I see this a lot, a lot, a lot is in weight loss. People will pick an arbitrary number or a weight they were once before and strive to reach that.

And it may sound like a specific goal, like I want to lose 15 pounds, but they're really thinking like that seems like it's probably right. And they start planning their goal and basically set their entire goal up around a guess. A guess isn't specific. The number 15 is specific, but how you choose it is not our next problem is that actual goal itself.

That 15 pounds lost is not actually the thing that is going to make you happy or change your life. When people make a weight loss goal, what they don't realize is that your. Is not the end goal. Your weight is actually a progress marker of reaching a bigger different. , if you know that you will feel happier when your body is lighter and you can move better or more easily, then fat loss and weight loss can be part of that goal.

But your end goal is not that. Your end goal is feeling happier and lighter and more mobile. Right, and we can also look at other progress markers to take us along the way. So in starting to plan our goals, we're already working on trying to create success around a guess and the wrong end point. That is not the way to start.

So as we get through this, I'm gonna continue to give you an example about how I feel about the SMART goals, and in the end, I'm going to give you how to fix that and how to think about it differently. So let's continue with the letters. M. Measurable, how will we measure our goal? Well, Measuring your goal is really important.

Like I was just talked about, progress markers are important, but where we do ourselves a disservice here is we create one way to measure our goal, and that creates a disservice in two ways. One, it cut, it cuts off the amount of celebration and the progress that we can see and how we can see what we're actually.

Accomplishing. And the second is that it makes planning and knowing how to reach your goal limited as well. So with you only have one progress marker. It shows me you don't actually know all of the steps in order to reach your goal. So for example, if you are wanting to buy a house, your one progress marker that you might choose would be save money for a down payment.

But you need way more than that to buy a house. When you are buying a house, you need the amount of money you save. Your down payment is a progress marker. How your credit score is increasing is a progress marker. Narrowing down the type of house you want as a progress marker. Finding a real estate agent is a progress marker.

Getting pre-approved for a mortgage, all of those things show. Progress towards your goal, but if you were to just be focusing on money for a down payment, let's say you have a month like December where you might not be able to increase your savings. You might even tap into your savings to like travel home to see your family.

You might be buying extra gifts. You might be a gift giver at heart and be like taking people out to dinner, whatever it is, right? But if you are only looking at saving money, December's gonna feel like a failure. When you are looking at, Ugh, I didn't put any money towards my down payment. I failed. I sucked.

December was the worst. It didn't help me move towards my goals. But maybe in December you found your real estate agent. Check that is forward movement. Maybe in December your credit score went up three points. Check that is forward movement. So when we are only looking at one thing, we're missing a lot of progress that we're actually making.

And this same thing goes for weight loss again, a lot of people say their end goal is, let's say, losing that 15 pounds. When they do that, they're only looking at the scale. And so if you have a month like December, that's also another really great, uh, example, or a month when oftentimes in the holidays, we don't, we don't stay in progress mode.

We end up on maintenance and by the end of December, everybody's mind is spinning thinking, oh, the scale didn't go down at all this month or only went down one pound. I'm a. . But when we are looking at weight loss, when we are looking at what our true end goal is, we need to be looking at so much more than just the scale.

How's your energy? How's your sleep? How's your recovery? Digestion, your self-image, your self-talk. Confidence in your decisions that you're making. Confidence in yourself and how you feel. How do you feel when you get dressed in the morning? Those are all progress markers too. So maybe the scale didn't move in December, but maybe you showed up feeling bomb as fuck when you went to that Christmas party in that new cocktail dress.

That is progress that you miss if you are only looking at the scale. So when we think about measuring our goals, we have to be thinking about all the ways that we can measure to make it holistic for who we are as a whole human. So the next letter is, let's see. S. A and r achievable and realistic. So let's look at them and let's look at them into our examples, and let's really lean into the idea of realistic or achievable.

This would be really, really great if we knew. what was realistic for us if we knew what was achievable for us. But most of us don't have any idea when it comes to our goals because a lot of times our goals are something we've never had experienced before. There's something that's new to us, that's why they are a goal, right?

So for me, like thinking about buying a house, it used to seem so unrealistic and unachievable to me growing up. How I did it literally was never something I fathom was part of my life when I imagined myself growing you. Up having kids, which was part of my imagination. When I was younger and getting old, I never thought I would own a home because when I was young, we could barely make rent.

When I was young, we were homeless multiple times. When I first decided to buy a home, I had no idea what it would take, and it didn't even seem realistic or achievable to me. So I say instead of achievable and realistic, we need to be just dreaming. . We just need to be dreaming big. Whatever you feel like your heart wants, want it, that's great.

But with that, we also have to be flexible. So if the Kayla in the past went to go buy a house, I maybe thought, you know, I had no idea what it would take. And so my path would like curve. And curve and curve again, right? A fork in a road I have to choose. So not only am I dreaming big, yeah, that's great, but I have to be really flexible with that.

I have to be ready to curve. I have to be ready to pivot. I have to be ready to choose at the fork in the road, and that's totally okay. But I say we just abandon those two letters altogether. We dream big, but we just plan to be. Flexible. If you wanna lose 50 pounds, that's awesome. Dream big. Have that as your goal.

But if you start going down the path and you feel fine as fuck after losing only 36 pounds, be flexible and stay there. Right? You can update and change and create your goal however you want, but we need to be flexible. But you do need to be able to dream big. The last letter in Smart is, Timely, and this leans into that realistic and achievable part.

It moves right into the timeline because if we don't know what is realistic and achievable, we hardly ever know the amount of time that it can take. Usually our experience with something helps us guide and build our timeline. So unless someone is experienced in doing that thing, they probably don't have a very great guess on what they will be doing.

And so often people guess, oh, I can do X, Y, Z in this amount of time. I j I just, that seems, that seems right. That seems reasonable. But again, we don't know what realistic and reasonable is. So for buying a house, . If you've done it one time, you will know a lot better how to buy a home again, right? If you've done it once, you'll be able to do it again, and it'll make more sense.

You'll have an idea of how long it takes you to do house searching. You'll have an idea of how much communication you need with your real estate agent. You'll have an idea of your budget and how long it took you to save a down payment before, so you'll be able to know and be able to predict with that again.

When it comes to losing weight, for instance, we don't know how much time it will take, and we always guess if you had successfully lost and kept off 50 pounds, then you would know what it takes to lose 50 pounds and to keep it off. But if you've done that successfully, you're probably not making that goal again.

right? If you've lost 10 pounds before, but you need to lose that same 10 pounds again, you cannot use your past timeline because that was not successful. That didn't work because of those past experiences, because of those fad diets, because of tabloids and social media, people often believe that losing 10 pounds, losing their weight can be done super fast, two to four weeks, and for some people, It can, but as an expert, I can tell you this isn't usually the case.

Very few people lose that amount of weight in that short of time. In reality, losing 10 pounds could be five to 15 weeks. And I wanna say something right now. As I'm going through all of this, I want you to know that it is okay that you don't know. It is okay to say and recognize, oh, I am guessing at my timeline.

Oh, I am guessing at if this is achievable. Oh, I am guessing at my. That is okay. You are an expert in weight loss and health. There's nothing wrong with not knowing, but beyond being an expert, something that we also forget and we need to take into account is our personal preferences. When you create your timeline for saving for a down payment of a house, did you consider how much you wanna travel?

Did you consider how you like to surprise your partner with little. . If not, then your budget isn't going to be successful. You have to consider how you wanna live your life. And the same thing goes for weight loss. When you create your timeline and your mind for weight loss, did you consider how much you wanna travel that factors into your weight loss?

Right? Did you consider how often you wanna go out on the town? . So when we make this timeline, just like our general goal, it's often a guess and we forget to factor in all of the other parts of our life. But where this becomes really detrimental is when we're not hitting that timeline we want, or that timeline, we guessed that we get so freaking frustrated.

That we say shit like goals aren't for me and I'll never be skinny again and I can't do this and I'm a failure, and that is not okay. We need to be building goals around things that keep us excited and motivated and moving forward and talking positively to ourselves. And so that's why it's really, really important to create a timeline that matters.

And I'll show you how in a minute. We're getting really, really close, and this is why it's so important. Also just to remember, you are a whole human. Your life doesn't exist in a vacuum of like just saving money for your. Your life doesn't exist in a vacuum of only focusing on weight loss. It has relationships, routines, social life, family, friends, good food travel experience.

All of that is wrapped up in you and your goal. So what should you do differently with your timelines? A lot like the idea, again this, this meshes together with abandoning the achievable and realistic. You need to learn to be flexible. Learn to pivot. Learn to accept the path. Be willing to take how long, however long it takes to reach your.

right? Instead of thinking you should end at a certain time, what we need to do is create checkpoints so that you can assess your progress and see where you are. So we've gone through all the letters, but there's also something really, really important that I think the smart goal is missing and something I work with all of my clients to build.

And this is a key, key, key component in reaching your goals, and that is positive momentum. This is a completely overlooked part of your goal. We want to set up your goal in a way that it builds what I have coined positive momentum, and that is keeping you excited. And how would describe positive momentum to my clients is this, like you've all seen the analogy of the exponential snowball, that as it rolls down the hill gets bigger and bigger and bigger and like starts going faster and faster and faster.

And I want you to think of that snowball as like your positive, good feelings and your motivation. , when you're starting something right, you have to create that snowball and you start pushing it down the hill, and as you push it, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, right? And you wanna build that feeling.

You wanna build that snowball because as it's bouncing down the hill, it's gonna hit a rock. And when it hits the rock, if your snowball is big, a little chunk of it's gonna fly off, but it's gonna keep rolling. If your snowball is small, it's going to hit the rock and just like explode. and that is not what we want at all.

But we see that all the time. And you've probably experienced that where you're like, yes, my snowball's going. I'm rolling. And three weeks into your goal, something hard happens and. you like quit four weeks into your goal, six weeks into your goal, you slow down, you're less fired up. We need to change that.

We have to build positive momentum and we have to be cognizant about it. It does not come on its own. It's something we have to try and practice and create in ourselves because it will make your goal as you go easier. It'll keep you excited, it will keep you motivated. So some ways that you can build that positive momentum are real check.

Really check in on your progress markers. Have mini markers, smaller. Along your way, have plans for sharing your accomplishments and your progress. Tell people about 'em so that when you say it out loud, you can build that inside you and that feeling, and you can celebrate. Have accountability buddies that you can check in with.

Plan events in your calendar, plan ahead. Exciting things and ways to celebrate and celebrate. Everything. Every single day. Every single day there is something that you've accomplished that brought you closer to your goal. And we don't see it because we don't try to see it. But even if you lay in your bed all day asleep, that probably meant that you needed the rest of the re recovery, and you could count that as a celebration that you actually gave it to yourself because you never normally do.

It is vital that we create that positive momentum. No one got. By beating themselves up and shitting on themselves all the time, we want to create that for ourselves. So let's lay down our three simple steps for setting a goal that will bring you success so we can forget all the steps of smart. And I want you to do these three things.

I want you to start by thinking about what your goal is. So we're gonna use the example of 10 pounds. I want you then to ask yourself why this is your first step. Why do you want that? , you will come up with the other reasons. And remember when we were talking about specific and are measurable, 10 pounds is a progress marker.

It is not your end goal. Why do you wanna lose those 10 pounds? That is your end goal. Maybe you wanna feel more energetic, you wanna move easier, you wanna feel more confident when you go on dates. Okay? So your goal is not to lose 10 pounds. Your goal is to feel more energetic, more confident, and more.

this is actually your specific goal. 10 pounds is not a specific goal. Your energy, your confidence, and being mobile is so that's your first question. Why do you want that goal? Next, ask yourself, what will that look like? If you are more energetic, you will not have a 3:00 PM slump every day. You will not fall asleep on the couch at 6:00 PM right?

If you move easier, going up the stairs won't be so hard. You'll be able to roll around on the floor with your kid without a big. If you're more confident on dates, you'll be able to put on clothes, look at the mirror and say, damn, girl, you'll, you will feel like your image expresses who you are as a person.

Those are the things that make it measurable. Those are the things that you will measure, and because you asked yourself those questions, it is realistic and achievable. Those are things that you mentioned. When you know what it'll look like, that's how you see it in your life. That's realistic and achievable.

How long it will take. is however long it takes. This is how you should be thinking about your timeline. So in setting your goals, you need to start with those two clarifying questions. Why do you want that goal? , what does it look like and feel like to achieve the goal? And then your third step is instead of a certain time that you need to reach your goal, create check-ins.

You have those weekly check-ins, those monthly check-ins, nap those check-ins. You will assess your progress, you will assess your mini steps. You will celebrate and you will create that positive momentum. . So those are your three things. Why do you want that goal? What does it look like and feel like to achieve it?

And instead of a timeline, create check-ins to assess your progress as you go. I wanna hear all about your goal. I want you to head over to Instagram at its Kayla jury and drop into my dms and tell me. Why do you want your goal? What does it look like and feel like to achieve it? And then how will you do your check-ins?

Will you do 'em weekly? Will you do 'em monthly? And give me some progress markers that you're gonna be looking at at those check-ins. I'm gonna respond to every single person who drops into my dms, cuz like I said when I opened up this podcast, the best part about Whole Human is the community, and that is you.

So let's set your. Together. If you love this episode, please leave a review. Share it with a friend who's also setting goals right now, or maybe they're an antigo setter and they need to listen to this all together. Let's be in this together as a community and get a little better every day.