Rachel wanted to lose ten pounds.
Then she answered the identity questions and found something underneath it. She wants to feel good about herself when she looks in the mirror. She wants to find someone to love and spend her life with, and she has not felt like someone worth finding.
Ten pounds is not Rachel’s real goal. The real goal is always an emotion. Rachel wants to improve her self-esteem and feel loved and connected to someone.
You probably ask yourself what you want to accomplish. The better question is who you want to become, and what emotion you want to feel once you are that person.
SMART goals ignore this. They were created to help managers assign tasks to employees, and you can’t delegate your eating to someone else.
Over the next five weeks, you will watch Rachel build a goal with the IDEAL Goals™ framework, one letter at a time. Here is what she is building.
Identity-Based. Decide who you want to become and how you want to feel.
Data-Driven. Create measurable action steps from expert guidelines, size them to what you are confident you can do, and track your progress.
Environment-Focused. Arrange your home, work, automobile, vacation, or other environment so you stop running into the foods you are cutting back on. And flood your environment with the healthy foods you are trying to eat more of.
Action-Ready. Write down when and where you will perform your action steps.
Leveraged. Use proven habit change tools for additional leverage, instead of relying on willpower.
Try this:
Write a few sentences about who you want to become. Think about what you want to look like, how you want to feel, who you want to spend more or less time with, what you want to spend more time doing, what you want to spend less time doing, and what you want people to think or feel about you.
Next week, Rachel creates action steps that will bring her closer to her goal.
