PROLOGUE
Before we get started, I would like to say that if you have not yet set up your goals for the new year, it is not too late! I enjoy the fresh start aspect of having everything ready to go by New Year’s Day, but you 100% can start at any time. And having a plan that says “In January, I will work on what I want my year and my future self to look like” is perfectly acceptable. We each have our own lives. We each are allowed to make up our own rules on how to live it. (As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone…yada yada.)
Also, I have some references at the bottom that might be of interest. Part of why I’m taking the time to write this is so that I myself will have this to look back on any time I want to set new goals or in future years. If you have other references or book recommendations that you think I might enjoy, I’d love to see them in the comments or just message me.
I’ll be back to my usual “bodybuilding - how my week went” posts next week.
LET’S BEGIN!
A behavior change coach I follow said that New Year’s is her Super Bowl. I feel the same way! I get so excited at the idea of having a fresh start to improving my life and view of the world around me.
Fresh starts can happen any time there is a change in life. They can occur environmentally such as when you change jobs, move to a new living space or at the beginning or end of a relationship. Or they can be occur temporally such as at the beginning of a new day, week, month, year. There is absolutely no reason one can’t create their own fresh start. There is nothing inherently different about January 1st. But since we assign it as the first day of the year, it takes on a magical quality that wouldn’t otherwise exist. And I LOVE this magical quality!
There has been so much development in the area of neuroscience in the last 20 years and learning from this science and incorporating evidence-based techniques is the best way to create positive change in your life. Gone are the days of the pattern of “I’m going to lose weight this year” followed by dieting through strict restrictive eating, giving up because it’s too hard, and then beating myself up for not being disciplined enough.
OUR BRAINS and NEUROPLASTICITY
We (as in the collective scientific community) now KNOW about synaptic pruning and neuroplasticity. Neurons connect to one another in the brain to communicate information we need to enable us to do things. The more times we do the same thing, the more automatic and stronger the connections become. If we wake up and make ourselves a cup of coffee in the morning first thing many times, this pathway/habit will be more and more solidified.
The way I view this in my mind is the more I drive down a dirt road especially after a rain, the more grooves are created. I likely will drive down the same part of the road (the middle) every time thereby, causing these grooves to become deeper and deeper.
Synaptic pruning is a process our brains uses to strengthen neural networks by getting rid of unused ones. (Alila Medical Media, 2020 and Dixon, 2020). This is a use it or lose it sort of situation. I’ll give an example. I learned how to speak Spanish in high school and college. I rarely speak it as an adult. Therefore, my brain has pruned much of that information out. If we use our coffee example, the more times I choose coffee in the morning over water, the stronger that habit will become.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of our neurons to rewire themselves and create NEW neural pathways. (Alila Medical Media, 2019). It used to be thought that once we reached adulthood, our brains are set as is and cannot change. Research has shown us that this is not the case. We indeed have the ability even in adulthood to change our brain, to learn, and to improve memory. This has tremendous positive implications for recovery from traumatic brain injuries and it also teaches us that we CAN change if we have the right tools.
This knowledge alone puts me into a growth mindset and creates so much excitement around the idea that I have some control over my life, how I choose to view the world, ridding myself of habits I no longer want, and creating habits and a life that fuels me.
So how do we use synaptic pruning and our neural pathways to our advantage? There are lots of methods to do but one way is through habit stacking.
Habit stacking is the process of using a habit we already have (like drinking coffee in the morning) with a habit we want to create (drinking more water). If I remind myself daily to drink a glass of water with my coffee every morning, I will create a new neural pathway that says “I drink a glass of water every morning”. The more I do that, the deeper that new rut will become. I can use tools to help me remember to drink water every morning to help make this process easier such as place an empty glass next to my coffee pot before I go to bed. Or I can write it as an actual “to do” item in my planner, which I look at every morning.
Understanding how the brain works allows us to work with ourselves to create new neural pathways rather than the method of forgetting our goal and then beating ourselves up about not being disciplined enough or motivated enough or whatever whatever enough. If we make a mistake (like we forgot to put the glass out the night before) and we are reminded of that mistake and do it the next night, we have sent another message to our brains that this new pathway is important and are likely to remember it the next time. Teaching ourselves that we are allowed to make mistakes and to then give it another go builds resilience and confidence along the way in addition to developing the actual new habit.
Going back to our example of the dirt road, when we try to drive either to the left or to the right of the grooves, often times the wheels will hit part of it and the car will deviate back into it. This is normal and just physics really. The same thing will happen to us as we are working towards establishing new patterns. But the more we then move that car back out of those grooves, the more we will create new grooves in the road. The same occurs with our brains.
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS AND GOAL SETTING
I absolutely recommend reading the following article from Stronger by Science to get the full details around the science of setting goals. (Trexler 2021) I want to share today the goals I personally chose to set this year. However, there is a lot of meaningful content in this article that will provide the basis for understanding how I set them up. https://www.strongerbyscience.com/goal-setting/
Establish a goal hierarchy
One concept that was discussed was the benefit to establishing a goal hierarchy. In years past, I would set broad goals such as “be healthy”. These types of goals are vague and can mean so many different things. It was hard to know where to start first and I beat myself up for not being able to make progress. Other years, I would set narrow goals such as run 5 times a week every week. While this type of goal moves me more towards action, it is rigid, does not take into account life what I am to do if I can’t meet that goal one week, and I may lose my “why am I doing this” reason along the way. Having a goal hierarchy incorporates both ends of the spectrum - the broad and the narrow and provides a complete package view.
A goal hierarchy includes superordinate goals, intermediate goals and subordinate goals. If we look at my previous example, this would look like: be healthy at the top, be in good athletic shape in the middle, and run 5 times a week at the bottom.
The article has awesome visuals on how to do this using the most common New Year’s resolution of ”be healthy”.
Equifinality and Multifinality
These two concepts are hugely involved in motivational theory and I’ll briefly defined them. (Kruglanski 2015)
Equifinality is the concept that one goal can be served by several means (habits). Think about the phrase “all roads lead to Rome”. Using our goal of be healthy as an example, one intermediate goal might be to “get enough sleep” and a subordinate goal might be “go to bed by 4:30 am” (2nd shift gal over here). The concept of equifinality says that this goal of being healthy can be served by multiple sub goals including getting enough sleep and being in good athletic shape. Sleep is super important for many things such as our mood, our immune system, our energy levels, etc.
If we want to be healthy, it is important to get both sleep AND exercise. If we only focus on the exercise part at the sacrifice of sleep, this doesn’t get us to our overarching goal of being healthy. Conversely, if we always prioritize sleep and skip exercising, we won’t achieve our defined goal of health either. The benefit to establishing our goal hierarchy is to help us see the forest through the trees and to find ways to balance all of our subordinate goals in order to find the best way to reach our superordinate goal.
Multifinality is the concept that one means (habit) can serve several goals. Think about the phrase “kill several birds with one stone”. For me, sleep is also a good example of this. The habit of getting enough sleep enables me to reach my personal goals, which include aspects mental health, physical health and fitness. It puts me in a better mood and decreases emotional lability. It gives me energy to hit it hard at the gym. It creates the mental reserve I need to stick to my food plan. If I can manage the singular habit of getting good sleep, several other goals will be more easily reached.
Utilizing the concepts of both equifinality and multifinality when setting up our goals and being an observant spectator in what goals we set and our behaviors and thoughts around these goals will help us in our path to reaching these goals.
MY GOALS FOR 2023:
At the center of it all are my two words of the year. I learned of the concept of choosing a word of the year from Gretchen Rubin a couple of years ago from her podcast titled The Happier Podcast. The idea is to select a word of the year that carries meaning associated with what you want to focus on for the year or the ideal self you want to be. I grappled with the idea of choosing the word Chisel this year. I like it because there are many projects I want to chisel away at such as going through all of my belongings that had been in storage from my previous homes. We downsized our home significantly in the summer of 2021. Trevor and I have a goal of “everything has a place and everything in it’s place” but that is not a quick process for me. I still have not gone through all of my household and memorabilia belongings. I also have many horse and tack related items that I have accumulated over the years that need to be sorted through.
Chisel also represents the process of chiseling through a photo album project that I want to do. I have tons of photo albums from when my kids were little back when photos were printed and not digital. I have digitized many of them but they are not organized in any one particular digital space. I also want to make photo albums through a digital photo service like Shutterfly to have a trimmed down and fun tangible place to store my photo memories.
Lastly, chisel seemed to be a good word for my physical goal of competing in a bodybuilding competition. I’m probably a year out from doing so and the process of building a body is one that must be chiseled away at over a very long period of time.
But I ended up steering away from chisel because it seemed too “grind” focused. Much of my last several years have involved a lot of change and a lot of grinding. While my goals themselves are not changing, I’m drawn to the idea of approaching them with light and fun and joy and anticipation and in a way that makes sense to me and I can share with others in order to show my struggles along the way and to also get support. The word chisel just seemed to be too heavy for me. And that’s when it hit me…Light! And the word Fly just seems damn fun. I can fly in my dreams and it is freaking awesome every time! I wrote my following wishes related to these words below.
May I be strong enough that the weights I lift seem light.
May I fly towards behaviors, people and things that fuel me and light my fire.
May I be light in the saddle so that my horses may be strong.
May I see glimmers of light when my mind has wandered into the dark.
May I be light in my heart so that my soul can soar.
May I be lighthearted and warm so that I and my family and friends can consider me a safe person to hold space for them when needed.
May I be light in mood so that my husband and I may welcome more fun and less stress into our lives.
May the weight of my worries become lighter so that I may have strength to pursue my goals.
May I embrace the light of the sun when it is out so that I may improve my sleep, which is at the very core of my mind, body, and spirit.
May I fly away from behaviors, people and thing that don’t serve me.
Middle Layer
The second layer of circles represents the different values in my life I’d like to focus on for 2023. They are categorical in nature and probably fall somewhere between superordinate goals and intermediate goals.
Outer Layer
The outer most layer of circles represents my intermediate goals and housed within them are the subordinate goals that represent the corresponding behaviors.
I wanted a comprehensive view of all the things I would like to tackle this year, but I realize that trying to do everything at once is a recipe for falling short in many areas. There is some literature out there to support the notion that once you begin to focus on one behavior, it makes it easier to add others to the mix. So I have outlined 2 behaviors to specifically target each month. This does not mean that they are any more or less important than any of my other behaviors or goals that they target. But I did place some strategy behind which ones I selected when.
For January, I have a goal of drinking a gallon of water a day. If you have been watching my journey, you will know that is massively hard for me. However, it is a core habit that I know impacts some of my other habits. It falls into that multifinality of two birds with one stone in that if I drink more water, I am more satiated and will snack less. If I know I have to drink more it will weirdly get me to the gym and run more because it’s a good habit stacking item and it’s easier for me to drink when I’m exercising.
The second goal I have for January is to focus on organizing my belongings. Trevor will be completing our patio in the coming months and he needs all my stuff out of there or at least organized in order to do so. I also have horseback riding adventures I would like to do this year so I need to go through all of my tack and horse related items.
There is some method to the madness for my other monthly goals for the year as well. Even though I have them all outlined and prettied up, I’m open to the notion that things change and, therefore, might need to be moved around. I’m ok with having an outline for how I THINK things might or should go, but I know that being rigidly attached to this exact picture is not helpful if things need to be adjusted in the future.
This brings me back my words of the year. I want this process to be light and to feel like like I’m gliding through the air and flying towards my goals. I want it to overall be fun and exciting even though at times I know it will be boring and annoying and hard.
4 MAIN GOALS
Finally I set up 4 overarching goals for the year that overlap with my goals diagram above. One is regarding organizing my space, which I mentioned above. Two is to read 23 books in 2023. I have set reading goals in the past and have really enjoyed them. This is another one of those goals that helps in several areas. I have read books in the past as part of book clubs, which hits my spend time with friends goal within my Memory making value category. Three is to continue practicing all the behaviors I have established in 2022 when my word of the year was consistency and taking the next steps towards competing in a bodybuilding competition. And fourth, but not last is my goal of attacking my fear of heights. This was a last minute add but it hits several areas as well. Rock climbing is fitness and strength related but it also addresses feelings of anxiety and learning how to overcome those. I won’t get into all the physical and mental health aspects of anxiety today, but I really am excited to tackle this one…and terrified…also really terrified.
If you are still here reading all of this, thank you for being my friend and for being curious about my journey. I love to share all of it and will continue to share as we move through 2023. I’ve listed a few references below as well as images of my 2 goals for each month and my words of the year.
Let’s get this party started!!!
Book recommendations on habit development
The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg
Better Than Before - Gretchen Rubin
Atomic Habits - James Clear
Switch - Dan and Chip Heath
Alila Medial Media. (2019). Neuroplasticity, Animation [Video]. YouTube.
