GOAL DIGGER

SELF-DEVELOPMENT GURU NICHOLAS BUNNEY LAYS OUT A GAME PLAN FOR SETTING ROCK-SOLID GOALS AND CHOOSING GENUINE VALUES OVER QUICK FIXES

Spring may have given way to summer, but many will be feeling disheartened; guilty that all the big plans made for 2024 have not come into fruition. Perhaps you haven't managed to go to the gym every day. Maybe you haven't completed a marathon. The 20lb weight loss you envisaged, for some reason, has not happened. Halfway through the year and it's back to old patterns.

If that sounds like you, you've likely been the victim of some unhealthy goal setting, which comes about when we don't realistically and genuinely assess the goals that we set.

Fitness goals in January are dominated by this phenomenon. We respond to a period of lower activity and excess by making equally excessive commitments for the New Year. These commitments fall foul of both 'planning fallacy; (underestimating the time it takes for things to happen) and 'overconfidence effect' (overconfidence in our judgement compared to reality).

We blindly create goals that we will 'smash in 2024' and then proceed to barely give them a squeeze.

WHY DO WE FAIL?

The failure is not in the process of going for your goals. The failure is in the creating of the goals in the first place.

So much of what we choose to target comes from places outside of ourselves. We see others on social media, have storylines we adhere to based on our childhood, and automatically pick the goals that are prescribed by the prevailing cultures and peer groups without much thought. Then we’re surprised when we can’t find the motivation to stick with them – we don’t even know why we’re pushing for them in the first place.