Knowing what you want

Goals are a funny thing. We all have them, but we don’t all know it. It can be quite a challenge to put your real goals into words so you actually understand what you are striving for, and others do too. It is something we have to work with every day in the studio and if we don’t take that step of pinpointing the root goal with our clients they won’t achieve it. On a personal note this is something I have had to face for myself recently.

Back in April I set my big goal for the year: Run a marathon. But it was better than that, I was going to run the Nike Womens Marathon in San Francisco on October 16th in 4 hours or less. As far as goals go this one looks on the surface to tick all the boxes. It was very specific, it had a definite timescale by which it was to be achieved by (October 16th), it was manageable and there was even a performance criteria attached to it. Much better than the usual “I want to be fitter” goal most people present with when they first come to speak to us.

However this goal only gives you the mechanics of the event that will take place. It doesn’t look into the emotions behind it. Without understanding the emotions that led to the goal being set you don’t know when the goal has truly been achieved or when it needs to be changed.

When I injured my foot we were forced to re-evaluate my goal. What was the important part of it? Did I want to run a marathon? Did I want to run that particular marathon? In under 4 hours? Or was it something different? It took quite a lot of guided soul-searching to figure out the answer.

For me there were several things behind the marathon goal. Firstly most of my friends run marathons all the time. I wanted to have done one so I could justify from experience that I wanted to stick to shorter races. I wanted to satisfy my curiosity of whether I was capable of living up to the challenge. I wanted something to inspire me to do more training and get me to the stage of running feeling effortless. And finally I wanted my body to look better, which is usually a side-effect when I get into more serious training.

So now that the Marathon itself is off the cards due to my stress fracture where does that leave me? I now know that running a marathon itself was not too important. I don’t feel like I have anything to prove any more. I may revisit this goal in the future but for now I am happy to let it go. I am also happy to have the pressure removed, it was taking away from the enjoyment of running and turning them into a chore. Having let the marathon goal go I now feel more inspired to go running again (yes, I’ll not do that until my foot has healed…) and it has also allowed me to remember how much I love swimming.

The goal of wanting my body to look better is still there. Maybe that means it was the central goal, all others just being window dressing. I don’t know and right now I don’t care. The swimming I am doing will help towards my body image goal but I know it won’t get me all the way there. So in the future I will need to decide whether I want to hit the gym again or add something else in.

Through this entire exercise I have found that getting to the root of my wants has enabled me to really focus on my goal and not be sad when the one I put down on paper is no longer going to be achieved as planned.

This is what we try to achieve with our clients. Nailing down what the root is of what you want means we can find ways to achieve it that are fun, fulfilling and something that makes you feel better about yourself right now.

Corina