I'm going to try something different here.

I'd like to go a little deeper with my writing which means I need to expand on things a little more.

That means longer newsletters from me but more value for you.

Here's the first of a series of deep dives to come... enjoy 🙏

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For the majority of people, goal setting is just a box ticking exercise.

They put no real effort into it and they’re most likely setting it because someone else has asked them to.

Past experience has led them to believe that it’s a bit of a pointless exercise.

“I didn’t reach my previous goal, so what’s the point in setting a new one?”

But here’s the thing.

If we don’t set goals for ourselves then what happens? We have no real aim or objective by definition so we don’t bring our actions to the forefront of our mind and make them conscious to ourselves.

Instead, we wander around aimlessly with no objective or purpose behind our actions. The negative aspect of repeating cycles takes over here and we slowly let bad habits and routines take over.

If we’re lucky enough we might get a slap in the face one day and ‘come to’ where we zoom out and realise we’ve let things fall apart simply because we weren’t working towards anything.

We obviously don’t want to find ourselves in this situation.

I want to present a much more meaningful goal setting process that isn’t just:

“Step 1 - Create SMART Goals”

When your goals hold no meaning or purpose behind them then yeah, they’re a bit pointless.

The thing to realise is that goal setting is not the end goal itself. It’s to give us direction.

This is the whole idea of the goal posts always changing for a goal, which they should. We’re never in a permanent state and we’re always changing. So with the right goal setting process we can account for that and feel much more content and fulfilled with the progress we make towards our goals rather than annoyed and guilty that we didn’t reach them.

Goal setting is a process and not a stand alone action. It needs to feedback on itself in order for it to have an impact on your daily actions and lead to the big shifts in behaviour we want to make.

With the right process in place we can rid ourselves of bad habits and distracted action that can leave us feeling stuck and underwhelmed about where we are in life. Instead, we can tap into the levels of focus and attention that give us energy and life-force when we have a meaningful pursuit ahead of us.

This is how the process of goal-setting is supposed to be…

You Need to Become Aware of Your Current Reality

My job leads me to have very interesting conversations with people.

When you’re at some form of party or event and meeting new people, the conversation naturally flows towards what line of work people are involved in. When people find out that I teach movement, they’ll start talking about their own experience with physical activity and what they’re currently doing.

This is always a very interesting moment to observe.

If they’re someone who has been ignoring physical activity as an area of their life they need to develop, then this situation often forces them to confront their excuses. Not only that, but they naturally feel obligated to explain themselves and their reasons for not being physically active.

They’re caught off guard by the situation as they’ve most likely been suppressing any thoughts about their physical activity for longer than they realise.

There’s a model for behaviour change called the Transtheoretical Model or the Stages of Change Model (link). It was developed in the 1970’s after examining why some smokers were able to quit and others weren’t. It’s a great model to use for when people decide to become more physically active because it focuses on the decision making of the individual and is a model of intentional change.

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The first stage of this six stage cyclical model is ‘Precontemplation’. In this stage we are unaware of our behaviour. We don’t see it as problematic, we underestimate the pros of changing our behaviour and we have no intention of changing.

When people have an unexpected conversation about their health and physical activity, it shines a light on their behaviour that they’ve potentially been ignoring for years. They’ve managed to grapple with it personally in their own mind and never had to explain their actions to another person.

Until they meet me at a party… Sorry!

I’m always amazed at how many people have the same story.

When they were a kid they played some form of organised sport. This was either through the school or their parents. They were involved in loads of activities when they were a kid and a little less as they got into their teens.

When they left secondary school and started working or going to college there are two big things that happen.

They had no pressure to continue with their sports from their school or parents so people often give up their sports at this age. Other priorities seem to take over and it’s seen as less important.

“I’ll get back into it at some stage.”

The other thing that happens, especially in Ireland, is we discover alcohol. More free time, easy access to alcohol now that you’re 18 and an increase in social gatherings means alcohol consumption goes way up.

A massive decrease in habits and activities that improve your health and well-being coupled with a massive increase in habits and activities that aren’t so harmonious with health and well-being. You can imagine where things go from here.

I’m not pointing the finger here. I went through it myself and saw a huge change in my physical health and overall well-being as I transitioned from my late teens into my early 20’s.

It seems as if we all go through this in some form or another, or at least this is what all the conversations I’m having with people has led me to believe.

The thing I want to point out here is that it’s not all doom and gloom.

There is hope for us if we want to break free from the shackles of poor habits and routines that have led to the decline of our health.

A confronting conversation like this, where you lay out your actions in front of you, can often be the spark needed to ignite the process of behaviour change.

The next stage in the Stages of Change Model is ‘Contemplation’. This is where we start to recognise our behaviour might be problematic and we start to weigh up the positive benefits of changing our behaviour.

It may not seem like much, but bringing your problematic behaviours to the forefront of your mind and not ignoring them can be a huge demon to face but a worthwhile battle to have.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

― C.G. Jung

How We See Reality

There’s an exercise I’d like to go through to show you how we view reality.

I want you to take a moment to look around the room and look for as many objects you can find that are the colour red.

I’m serious, look up from your screen and count as many red objects as you can…

Have you got the number in your head?

Perfect!

Now, tell me how many objects in the room were the colour blue.

You’re probably a little confused right?

I said to count the amount of objects that were the colour red. You scanned the room and put a filter on your awareness which started excluding any object in the room that weren’t red and including objects that were red.

You had tunnel vision for red objects. So when I asked what objects were blue you were probably left a little stumped. Now look around the room and look at the amount of blue objects that there were, that you just completely ignored.

The spiritual teacher Ram Dass would talk about this in a different way where two people can walk down the same street and see two completely different places.

One guy walks down the street and he’s hungry. You ask him what he thought of the town and he says “Yeah it was pretty nice. They had a McDonald’s on the corner, a few nice restaurants and a donut shop.”.

The other guys walks down the street and he’s horny. You ask him what he thought of the town and he says “Yeah it was pretty nice. There was a tall blonde right on the corner, a few nice brunettes and a beautiful woman in a red dress.”.

Same town, two different realities.

These two examples are connected to a famous study called the Invisible Gorilla experiment which tests for selective attention.

People are shown a video of two groups of people, one wearing black shirts, the other wearing white shirts. They’re told to count how many times the team in white passes the basketball. The teams then start moving around the room, passing the ball to each other. Because of the amount of people in the room and their being more than one ball being passed, you have to really concentrate and focus on the team in white to make sure you count all the passes.

While all this is going on, a man in a gorilla costume walks right into the middle of the room between players, beats his chest, and walks out the other side.

When participants are asked whether they saw the man in the gorilla costume, roughly 50% of participants didn’t see him.

They were so focused on counting the passes of the ball that they failed to see the man in a gorilla suit!

This experiment demonstrates how our attention shapes our reality. We subjectively experience reality through the lens of our thoughts, beliefs and our goals.

When we have a goal we start to view reality through that goal.

You will be much more likely to notice something if it has an effect on your goals.

For example, if I have a clear and meaningful goal laid out then I’m going to start becoming more aware of the things I’m doing that are either helping or hindering my goal.

The more meaning and purpose behind a goal, the more laser focused you’re going to become on your actions and the reality you live in.

To Change Your Behaviour, You Need to Set a Goal

We need a frame if we’re going to put a stop to the automatic nature of our actions and actually change our behaviour.

It’s like having the bumpers up when playing bowling. You make it much more likely that the ball is going to make it down the lane and hit the pins.

So by setting a goal, we now have a frame of reference for your actions.

I think this is one of the major issues that people have with setting goals.

You’re told that you need to set a SMART goal, be super Specific, make sure it’s Measurable, realistically Attainable, Relevant to what you want and Time-bound. There’s nothing wrong with this model but the rigid boundary and the expectation it sets can weigh heavy on our shoulders. More often than not, the goal is figuratively put to the back of the mind and we forget about it within a few weeks.

So, why didn’t it work?

A process like goal setting needs to go way deeper than any SMART goal. A SMART goal is cold and robotic. It’s the type of goal you’d set for ChatGPT.

Like it or not, humans are driven to action by emotions. We may justify our actions rationally but the majority of the time we make big decisions based on the emotions we feel at the time.

We can tap into this psychological bias of ours and use it as a way of preempting our SMART goals. We want to ground our goals in something visual and so detailed that it causes a visceral reaction. The estimates vary but “more than 50% of the cortex, the surface of the brain, is devoted to processing visual information” (link).

We’re going to use this information to create two vivid pictures in our mind. Humans have a hard-wired negativity bias. It’s believed that we have this because of years of biological evolution. Your nervous system wants to protect you and keep you alive. By evolving to become hyper-sensitive to potential threat it is pretty good at keeping you out of harms way.

Imagine for a second that you could pause time. With the clock stopped, we can consider how much motivation we have towards taking our next action when the clock restarts. We can have two polar opposite motivations to take our next action.

We can move TOWARDS something ideal and personally meaningful, or we can move AWAY from potential threat and danger in the form of a personally defined and realistic worst-case-scenario for our life.

A Vision and an Anti-Vision.

Now let’s restart the clock. You’ve got your deepest and most meaningful aspirations in life right in front of you, but you’ve also got your personally defined version of hell behind you. How motivated are you going to be when it comes to moving forward in life?

Let’s first consider the Anti-Vision and how it can motivate us into taking action.

Your Anti-Vision

One thing you need to know when you go to think about your Anti-Vision is that it can be a very psychologically challenging task. I feel like a fair word of warning is needed if you want to go and do this. We can easily spiral if we have a tendency towards negative emotion or we’re not in a stable mental state at the time of doing this.

Consider honestly whether this would be the best thing to do right now given this warning.

Even if you feel you’re capable of doing this, you have your work cut out for you.

According to the neuroscientist Richard Hanson, our nervous system isn’t just primed for the external world. Humans approach and avoid mental states as well as physical objects. Which means we pursue self-worth and push away shame.

It’s going to be easy to think of your Vision. It’s going to be naturally hard to think of your Anti-Vision considering your brain wants to avoid these mental states.

It’s the same issue people have with me at parties when they’re confronted with repressed thoughts about their deteriorating health.

When you attempt to think of potentially realistic negative outcomes for your life, your brain is going to start sounding the alarm bells and want to avoid what you’re doing.

I think we’ve all at some stage had the experience of being on our own, low on energy and a negative feeling or thought burrows it’s way into our mind. In an attempt to avoid the negative feelings, we search for an immediate distraction and some form of positive feeling in the form of food, the TV, our phones, whatever your vice is.

Sitting with the negative is challenging. The response from our system may be intense. But we can almost use it as an indicator as to whether we’ve done the task in an honest, confronting way or whether we’ve just done a tick-box exercise and actually shied away from prying deeper into our own mind.

Once again, another reminder to do this when you feel you’re in a stable and healthy mental state.

If you want to go ahead with this then ask yourself:

If I continue to let my negative habits, tendencies and qualities to grow and take over my life, what is potentially the worst outcome for me?

Think of how it will effect your health, your relationships, your attitude to life, your career and anything you see as important in your life right now.

Paint as vivid a picture as you possibly can.

I’ll give you a process to follow at the end so no need to go through this right now.

Your Vision

Let’s set that aside for a moment and look towards your Vision for the future. While this task might be a little easier than the last, we want to make sure we spark a sense of meaning and emotion from our vision. This is what will really pull us into the future.

Simply put, we’re all after “The Good Life” in some way right? There are subtle differences from person to person but you can think about your vision from a few key areas.

We all want to move freely and comfortably in our own body. You’ve got to imagine what are the things you’re doing on a regular basis to make that a reality. Your body won’t just maintain itself. You’ll need some form of input and preferably something you enjoy.

We all want to connect with friends and family on a deeper level. We want strong connections with those around us that we can help through tough times and we know can be an anchor for when we inevitably go through tough times as well.

With this I think it’s important to point out that it’s not as if your Vision will not house any suffering. We can’t avoid suffering. But we can certainly find ourself in a strong enough standing in life that suffering is reduced, and like an alchemist we’re able to take that negative experience and transmute it into positive transformation of the Self.

We all want to have a loving partner, a side-kick, a partner in crime that helps us recognise that love is a deep well within us. From there we’re given the power to be more kind, caring and considerate of others around us. We may even want to start a family of our own and fulfil a deeply biological urge, but an immensely spiritual one too.

We all want to be safe and secure in life with a house we can retreat to when needed and a career that not only financially fulfils us, but we also derive a sense of meaning from too.

We all want freedom to explore our interests and to create in some form or another to pull us into the here and now, and bring something into existence filtered through our unique lens of reality.

What a life that would be…

Make It More Meaningful

But before we create our vision I want to tackle the idea of meaning and purpose.

Because even with this rough idea of “The Good Life” laid out in front of us, you may be thinking that it’s a bit of wishy washy or a pie-in-the-sky idea.

“It sounds great but, not gonna happen!”

This is why I want to reinforce your Vision with more meaning and purpose behind it.

When you hear the word ‘meaning’, you may be reminded of the book Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

In this book, Frankl recounts his experience as a prisoner in concentration camps during World War II and the horrors he went through and witnessed.

By observing his fellow prisoners, and more specifically those who eventually accepted death, he concluded that the way a prisoner imagined the future affected his longevity.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Another quote that features heavily in the book and inspired a lot of Frankl’s work was from Nietzsche - “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

This idea of a purpose was the key to survival despite the unimaginable suffering.

Frankl describes “Three Wells of Meaning” in the book:

1. Through work, by performing a deed or creating something that is meaningful to oneself or others.
2. Through love, by coming into contact with someone or experiencing something that is meaningful to oneself or others.
3. Through suffering, by experiencing unavoidable suffering and taking a positive attitude toward it.

The reason why I’ve mentioned Frankl’s work is that it’s very easy to make a task like ‘map out your vision’ turn into a surface level task.

You can choose NOT to go deep and dig into these existential issues. As I said, it’s natural to want to avoid this. But by attempting to sit with these reasons and to keep peeling back the layers you can start to uncover these wells of meaning that Frankl talks about.

Now that we’ve looked at why your Vision needs to be grounded in a sense of meaning, you should consider these areas of development. As I said, there will be small differences from person to person but these should help guide you when mapping out your vision:

Body (Physical Activity)
Family and Friend (Relationships)
Partner and Kids
Security
Career
Freedom & Creativity

There’s of course an intermingling of all things rather than seeing them all as completely separate from each other.

The Process of Goal Setting

I want to give you more of a concrete step-by-step approach now that we’ve had a look at the main reasons why we should be setting goals.

Step 1 - Establish Your Vision and Anti-Vision

I gave loads of details above and a fair warning about when it’s not a good idea to go through this process, but here are the questions again.

Anti-Vision

If I continue to let my negative habits, tendencies and qualities to grow and take over my life, what is potentially the worst outcome for me?

Think of how it will effect your health, your relationships, your attitude to life, your career and anything you see as important in your life right now.

Vision

What do I want my life to look like in these key areas:

Body (Physical Activity)
Family and Friend (Relationships)
Partner and Kids
Security
Career
Freedom & Creativity

Bring to mind what your day will actually look like, how you’ll feel, the person you need to become and the qualities you need to work towards in order to become that person rather than any fleeting pleasures.

For both tasks, set a timer anywhere from 5-10 minutes for each and complete it via Stream of Consciousness Writing. Just keep writing no matter what. don’t worry about correct grammar or punctuation. Just keep writing and see what comes out.

The combination of these two will stop you from spending hours on this task and only having a few words down on the page by the end.

Just make sure what you do have is emotionally vivid and honest.

Step 2 - SMART Goals

Create 1-3 SMART Goals based on your vision. I would personally start with the area of your life that most bothers you right now. In my eyes, the more time and energy you can direct towards that the better so try not to dilute your decision making between lower priority areas of your life right now.

Reverse engineer your vision and ask yourself what are the habits I need to change and what is the lifestyle I want to live. This will be the aim of your SMART Goals.

I promise to go into much more detail about behaviour change and habits in my next newsletter! #### Example: Your Vision for your physical health involves you being very fit and involved in multiple activities that allow you socialise with other people, play with your kids, gives you energy, challenge yourself and makes you feel confident and strong.

At this current moment in time you’re not consistent with your training. Some weeks you go to the gym 3 times, other weeks you don’t even go.

Your SMART Goal should be something as simple as:

“I will go to the gym three times per week (Monday, Wednesday and Saturday) for 45 minutes for the next 30 days.”

See how this SMART Goal is based more on the habits that will lead you to your vision.

You can of course make it more relevant to you and where you’re at right now. But all I want you to do for the time being is establish 1-3 habit-based SMART Goals for the next 30 days.

Specific (outcome)
​Measureable
​Attainable
​Relevant (to your Vision)
​Time-bound

Set a timer for 5-10 minutes to complete this task.

Step 3 - Take Action

This is the most important step AND the one I don’t want you to get stuck on. I gave time limits for the above steps because it’s easy to find yourself delaying taking action by investing so much time in the planning stage.

You think that you just need to find some more information on the topic before you’re ready to take that first step.

It’s the idea of ‘being in motion’ rather than ‘taking action’.

When we looked at the Stages of Change Model earlier it’s the next stage past ‘Precontemplation’ and ‘Contemplation’. ‘Preparation’ or ‘Determination’ is all about preparing to make a change in your behaviour.

Now that we’ve mapped out our SMART Goals, we want to move swiftly into taking action.

This is the part I can’t really help you with.

You have everything mapped out on front of you. Only you know what the next move is and you’re the one that has to take it.

Step 4 - Review

When we talked about setting your SMART Goals I said to set 30 day goals. In the early stages of goal setting I think this is a reasonable time-frame to set for your first goal.

If it’s a somewhat fresh pursuit then there are going to be a lot of variables that you’re just unaware of. How were you supposed to know about them in the first place?

This is where we have to zoom out and think of the bigger picture. We need to give ourselves some grace and allow for error.

In this review stage you can look at all the things you just didn’t anticipate when setting the initial goal. This is how we learn along the way. We need to get our hands dirty in order to discover where the real roadblocks and obstacles to our goals are in our life.

After 30 days we can adjust our goals if necessary and refocus on our vision.

When you set your initial goals you should set some form of alarm or reminder to go through this review of everything.

Similar to the way we approached everything else, set a timer for 10 minutes and review in the most honest way possible how well you did with your goals and whether you achieved them.

Step 5 - Set New SMART Goals

Now that you’ve reviewed everything you’re in a much better position to set new SMART Goals.

You can re-read your Anti-Vision and Vision to reignite the fire the lit in the initial few days.

Focusing on habit change was an important step in the process and it’s something I’m going to go into way more detail in my next newsletter. I’ve already taken up a lot of your time and I didn’t want to make this too long.

But right now you’ve got a much more meaningful goal-setting process that can have a huge impact on where your life will be in the next 30 days.

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If you want to grab a free resource that will help you over the next 30 days then you should consider grabbing my 4 Weeks Free Movement Coaching.

The big focus of my work with my students is on looking at these other areas of life and how we develop them.

It’s not as simple as “just go train”.

There are a whole load of lifestyle factors that either help you or hinder you.

So if you want to grab that for free then click HERE.

See you on the next one!