GOAL DEEP DIVE: What Should I do When I’m Falling Short on a Goal?
Callie is halfway through the month-long timeframe for her daily exercise routine goal and she’s already falling short. Should she scrap the goal or keep working at it?
I get this question a lot, both over email and at my in-person courses. What do I do when I’m partway through the timeframe for a goal and I’m already falling short? It’s a great question and one that has come up many times for me over the last decade of goal setting in my life (and if I’m honest, it STILL comes up).
I got an email this week from Callie, who is having the same issue. Callie set the following goal: □ Callie completes physical therapy strengthening exercises 2 times per day, every day for a month. And then she listed out all the dates for the month (1-31) with two little checkboxes next to each date. She emailed me on the 18th day of the month and she was completing about 1 box per day (the goal was supposed to be 2 per day), some days she did both, some days she did none, some days she did one. She asked me if she should keep working away at the goal or if she should scrap it and start over. That’s a great question!! Here’s my response:
When I’m falling short on a goal, I check first to see if I made one (or both) of two mistakes: Either (1) I wasn’t being realistic about my values (motivation), or (2) I wasn’t being realistic about my ability (time, money, skill).
In the case of Callie’s goal, to determine whether it’s really in line with her values, I would ask: is completing your physical therapy exercise really that important to you? Why? Being able to articulate the why (the value) behind a goal will keep her motivated when the going gets tough. If the goal is truly in line with her values, then the next question is whether she was being realistic with her ability. Was setting an expectation of 100% perfection, twice per day, for a month setting the bar too high? Maybe the goal shouldn’t be every single day, maybe it should be 20 times over the course of the month. Or maybe shorten the timeframe to twice per day for one week.
If introducing a new behavior into daily habit is the goal (every single day forever), Stanford professor BJ Fogg has a simple method for instilling new habbits: find a trigger.
He lays out the framework in his New York Times Bestselling book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. You can read the book, or I highly recommend that you take 18 minutes and watch his TED talk on this subject below.
Put simply, there are three things that have to happen at the same moment to cause behavior change:
1) Motivation
2) Ability
3) Trigger
In Callie’s case, the motivation is there (the goal is in line with her values) and the ability is there (she has the time and skill to do it), then her next step is to design a trigger. In BJ’s talk (above) he explains that the best way to trigger new behavior is to pair it with something you already do. Here’s what it looks like to design a trigger:
“After I [existing habit], I will [new tiny behavior].”
Here are a couple examples of new tiny behaviors BJ has turned into habit:
“After I pee, I will do 2 push ups.”
“After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth.”
And don’t forget to celebrate!
“Plant a tiny seed in the right spot and it will grow without coaxing.”
“When you know how to create tiny habits, you can change your behavior—and your life—forever.” —BJ Fogg
