Now that we’ve officially started the new year, you may be feeling pressure around setting new goals or resolutions. This is a very common time of year to take on new goals, especially around our health. If you’re feeling inspired and excited to make changes in your health to begin 2024, let’s discuss some ways to increase your chances of being successful while decreasing stress along the way. 

Before we begin, I’d like to note that the new year is not the best time for everyone to take on big changes in their health. If this is you, note that these tips may be helpful for you at a later date and it’s okay to give yourself permission to not take action now, even if you feel outside pressure to do so. 

When it comes to setting new goals for ourselves, it’s easy to focus on the desired outcome. For example, we may want to lose weight, decrease body fat, increase strength, or improve health markers in our blood work. Starting with our desired outcome is very important, because without knowing where we’d like to go, we can’t make the path to get there. 

The issue we often run into is that we stop once we identify our desired outcome, and become stuck on the fact that it hasn’t happened yet. If you set a new year goal to lose twenty pounds and we focus on that each and every day, we will constantly be disappointed until we reach it. This is where process goals come into play.

A process goal consists of specific actions you’ll perform that will help increase the probability of reaching your outcome goal. 

Going off the outcome goal of losing twenty pounds, some process goals could include exercising for at least thirty minutes each day, eating an increased amount of vegetables and protein while decreasing processed carbohydrates, and drinking half of your body weight in fluid ounces of water. These process goals are very specific actions you can take each day and it’s very easy to tell if you did them or not. 

Focusing on process goals rather than our outcome goal releases the pressure of the outcome goal, while creating positive momentum in the right direction. 

Another way to make achieving our outcome goal easier and less stressful is by creating a time range for completion, or releasing the timeframe altogether. If you set a goal to lose twenty pounds in three months, but completed it in four months, would that be a failure? 

It’s only a failure if we get stuck on timetables that we arbitrarily create for ourselves. Setting an ideal timeframe on our goal can help us determine the intensity levels required for our work, but once we have that determined, releasing the pressure around the timeframe will release a lot of stress with it. 

Lastly, be open to changes in your outcome and process goals as you begin to take action, learn new things, and change as a person. It’s okay to set a goal today and have that goal evolve over time. The only constant thing in our life is change, so embrace it.