Field Notes: The Right Goals For The Right Reasons

As you make your resolutions, don't set yourself up to fail.

It’s the first day of the new year. Many of you have probably spent the last few weeks reflecting on 2022 and making plans for 2023. A lot of those goals or resolutions likely revolve around changing something you’re unsatisfied with. As Thomas Edison so succinctly put it: “Discontent is the first necessity of progress.”

But before you commit to that list of changes you’d like to make, I want to check in with you about why you’re making them.

Last year, I turned 40. My gift to myself was that I was going to get into the best shape of my life. I’d been working out since I was a teenager and following a fairly regimented diet for most of my adult life, but I wanted to take it to the next level. I wanted to put on even more muscle and lose even more body fat.

I had always tracked my progress in weight training routines, but I started tracking everything. I weighed my food, logged everything I ate into an app that made sure I was hitting a certain number of calories and macros, used a pedometer to insure I walked a minimum number of steps each day, and began every single morning with a weigh-in so that I could take a weekly average and see if I was gaining or losing weight at the ideal rate.

Now, none of those behaviors are inherently bad. The problem was my reason for implementing them. I wasn’t competing in a show. I wasn’t trying to momentarily rein everything in for an upcoming vacation or event. No, it all started because I looked in the mirror before stepping into the shower one day and absolutely hated what I saw.

My workouts, the diet, the tracking… I wasn't doing any of those things to better myself. I was punishing myself.

This went on for months, even as there were more and more signs that something was amiss. I had horrible insomnia, I was always freezing cold (I had to wear a jacket on a trip to Disney World when everyone else was in t-shirts and shorts), my hair was brittle, my skin was dry, and I was always tired. Burnout was inevitable. I was speeding toward a brick wall and I just kept making excuses for all of it.

And then the week before my 40th birthday, I had my annual physical and the results of my bloodwork were pretty shocking. I had destroyed my hormonal profile by undereating and overtraining for too long. “Whatever you’re doing,” My doctor said, “you need to stop right now.”

And you know what the cherry on the sundae was? Despite what everyone else was telling me, I thought I looked exactly the same as when I’d started. When my wife told me she was concerned about how gaunt my face was getting, all I saw was that I was still too small where I wanted to be bigger and too big where I wanted to be smaller. Happy Birthday to me.

You cannot set goals that are based on self-hatred. There’s no gold medal at the end of that race, just an endless amount of track.

“Getting into the best shape of my life” was not a bad goal, but if I had defined what that actually meant to me at the time and truly interrogated why it was so important, I would have noticed several red flags. The main one being that way too much of my self-worth was tied up in how I looked.

And that was because I wasn’t experiencing enough fulfillment in other areas of my life. So if I wasn’t the guy who was in really good shape, then who was I? What else did I even have to offer? There were so many other things I felt like I’d lost control over that I started hyper-fixating on something I could control. To an obsessive and dangerous degree, it turns out.

Except I was never actually in control of any of it. Not really. I had set myself up to fail because my why was based on punishment and not compassion.

You know what really hammered this home? After that doctor’s visit, I still relied on all of those same tools for measuring and tracking my progress. But instead of chasing some nebulous aesthetic goal, I was doing it for my health. Not to look better, but to feel better. Instead of working out five days a week, I scaled back to three. Instead of a reckless calorie deficit, the amount I ate was based on how I was sleeping, my energy level throughout the day, and how I was progressing on key lifts. My why had completely shifted.

Take a wild guess which approach was more sustainable and gave me better results.

It’s a new year. A clean slate. Your motivation’s at an all-time high. But motivation doesn’t last, so regardless of what your goals are, reframing your why into something positive will sustain you even on the days you’re not feeling particularly motivated.

Side note - this is another reason why I’m now a much bigger fan of goals that are based on cultivating daily habits as opposed to a pot of gold that’s waiting for you at the end of a calendar year.

But either way, take another look at your goals. Get crystal clear on why they’re important to you. And remember: compassion, not punishment.

Happy New Year, friends. I’ll talk to you soon.