Do you have the SMARTS?

If you’ve ever set goals before, you might have heard that they should be SMART.

This acronym stands for:

✅Specific

✅Measurable

✅Achievable

✅Relevant

✅Time-bound

When it comes to goal setting, laying them out according to such a framework is better than winging it by relying on vague statements. Making your goals SMART gives them structure so you know just what you’re setting out to achieve and how you’ll know if you’ve accomplished the things you intended.

Instead of setting a well-intentioned, yet fuzzy, goal such as I’m going to eat healthier, you would identify exactly what this means to you and how you’ll evaluate whether it happens or not.

To make this statement specific, I’m going to eat healthier could be rewritten to: I want to include more vegetables in my daily diet.

Reconfiguring it to be measurable, you could say that you’ll add one cup of vegetables to your morning meal seven days a week.

You could list out several veggie-forward menu ideas that you know you would eat, so that you know your plan is achievable. Menu examples could include a smoothie with ½ cup frozen cauliflower + ¼ cup avocado + leafy greens; a tomato-zucchini omelette; or a breakfast sandwich with tomato and lettuce and a pile of sliced cucumbers on the side.

By default, adding veggies to your breakfast ties directly to your goal of including more veggies in your diet, making the action you plan to take relevant.

And finally, your goal should be time-bound. Starting this Monday would be a way to meet that criterion.

Putting it all together, your goal now becomes:

I’m going to start eating more vegetables beginning this Monday, by adding one cup of veggies to my morning meal each day of the week, including weekends. This week, I’ll rotate through three meals, which include a smoothie, a veggie omelette, and a veggie breakfast sandwich with a side of cucumber.

The beautiful thing about following the SMART goal framework is that it takes the ambiguity out of your goal and makes it a real thing. It calms your brain by creating a plan, so you know exactly what to do and when.

While I love the concept of SMART goals, there is one thing missing from the framework that often derails people, preventing them from achieving their goals.

Can you think of what that might be?

The “S” in the title of my email probably gave it away. It’s the concept of sustainability.

If you set goals that are too ambitious, complex, rigid, or restrictive, they will only be a temporary fix to what will otherwise remain a persistent problem.

Extreme solutions might fuel fast results, but they never lead to forever results. Forever results mean a commitment to changing your lifestyle—for the rest of your life!

But how do you know if you’re being overly ambitious when you set your goals?

There are a couple of tells.

The first one is immediate. If, when you set your goal, you’re already looking forward to it being over, it’s not a lifestyle change. It’s a temporary break from a behaviour or habit that you can’t wait to return to. And as soon as you return to your old ways, your results will disappear even more quickly than you achieved them.

The other indicator that your goal isn’t a good fit will come a little later and it won’t be because you’re longing to return to your old behaviour. In this case, your intention for lifelong change might be something you’re very committed to. But once the initial motivation for your plan wears off and your brain starts to realize you bit off more than you can chew and you truly can’t do it forever, the plan will fall apart.

And the feelings of confidence and empowerment that you originally felt will be replaced with that inevitable—and likely familiar—sense of failure, despair, and frustration.

When it comes to revamping your health and wellness, the last thing you need to do is set yourself up to fail. You may have a history of starting and stopping diets or exercise plans and already have a failure-forward mindset about your personal ability to be successful.

That’s why rewriting your goals so they show you have the SMARTS is a much more success promoting practice.

Adding the S means making sure what you set out to do is sustainable. If you want to set yourself up to win, you need to evaluate whether the action you’re planning to take in the interest of your goal seems like something you CAN and will WANT to do, ideally for the rest of your life. If it isn’t, it may be too ambitious, restrictive, or wild.

Take our example from above. If you start imagining executing it the way it’s written week after week for the rest of your life and you start to panic a little, the sustainability aspect needs work. Maybe your mind is worrying about whether you’ll want to have a cup of veggies during weekend brunches or whether it’s even possible when you’re a guest in someone else’s home. If so, perhaps the goal needs to be dialed back a bit.

It might become:

I’m going to start eating more vegetables beginning this Monday, by adding one cup of veggies to my morning meal on my workdays. This week, I’ll rotate through three meals, which include a smoothie, a veggie omelette, and a veggie breakfast sandwich with a side of cucumber.

Instead of seven days a week, you’ve now made it a focus for the days when you work, because your meals are planned and predictable. It leaves room for flexibility. You can absolutely exceed your veggie intake goal on the weeks you can make it work, but there is no obligation to do it when it doesn’t.

Is your mind suddenly more at ease? Mine is.

A realistic change in your habits should not be something that becomes anxiety-producing or frustration-generating. No one is primed for growth and change when they’re in a stressed state. This is ESPECIALLY true when it comes to nutrition goals because stress often leads to the exact opposite of what we want—overeating, avoiding, procrastinating, and eventual quitting.

Overambitious goals are a sneaky form of self-sabotage.

⬆️Say that one out loud to yourself. Maybe a couple of times.

After reading this, do you think that sustainability is the missing ingredient needed to break the diet rollercoaster for YOU?