Can you believe February has come and gone and it’s already almost March? Now is a great time to take a moment and check-in with yourself – are you taking steps to reach your goals? Did you already completely forget your New Year’s Resolutions? Is life crazy busy right now that you don’t even have time to think about it? Trust us, we totally get it.
We love a new month because it’s the promise of something new and while we are firm believers in start today, not tomorrow, there’s just something about starting one the 1st that is really satisfying and motivating.
If you follow us on social media (which if you don’t go do it right now) – we wrote a post on setting goals to make them achievable and attainable. Setting and writing goals should take a little bit more time and effort than just saying them to yourself. If they’re too vague or too big, they become intimidating and unrealistic and honestly, that’s just setting yourself up for failure and we want you to set yourself up for success.
We’re about to get pretty nerdy here but if you want to reach your goals, they have to be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely
So what all does that mean? Your goals have to small enough to be specific, so instead of saying, I want to drink more water you would say, my goal is to drink X amount of ounces of water per day for one month. Measurable? That’s already done – you can easily track how much water you drink per day. Attainable – absolutely! It’s a small goal that you can easily track and you have to drink water to stay alive right? It’s realistic because you drink water, you’re just increasing your intake. It’s timely because you set a goal of 30 days (or however many days) and you can track and follow through. See how just changing a few words on your goals make it so much more doable?
Now, you can have a bigger goal and then smaller, SMART goals that will get you there. For example, your big goal can be Exercise More and your SMART goals, depending on where you are on your fitness journey, would be:
Run/Bike/Move 1/2/3 times per week for a month
Take a daily 15 minute walk for 30 days
Sweat every day for 30 minutes per day doing whatever activity
For March, we are refocusing and working on setting up some SMART goals and invite you to do the same and follow along with the hashtag #RealSMARTGoals. Here are ours, feel free to tag along or make up your own:
Big Goal: Clean Up our Skincare Routine
SMART Goal: Switch out three products with clean and safe ingredients and use them every day
Why is it SMART? Because this is a big change in our routine, by picking only three products we are making it specific enough to be attainable (and affordable) and realistic – see how it all works together?
Big Goal: Increase Movement Throughout the Day
SMART Goal: Hit our Apple Watch Movement Goal every day for a month (you can hit whatever movement goal you want with any other tracker or promise yourself to stand up and move every 2 hours, for example)
Why is it SMART? We personally love tracking and prefer tracking movement over steps, but anything trackable is immediately measurable. We each have a different move goal that we will work on reaching every day and for each of us, it’s attainable and realistic.
Big Goal: Limit Social Media At Night
SMART Goal: Do not log on to social media in the middle of the night
Why is it SMART? We really wanted to limit cell phone use overall before bed but because we are currently in completely different time zones (13 hours apart to be exact) we do most of our communication at bedtime/early morning. That said, we have a pretty bad habit of grabbing our phones in the middle of the night if we wake up and it’s one we want to break so we are starting off small and specific by limiting social media altogether from the moment we go to sleep to the moment we wake up in the morning.
We know, SMART goals aren’t sexy, but we promise they work! Think how satisfying it is to check off your to do list and usually your to do list is made up of little things to accomplish a larger goal. We are committing to these three goals over the month of March and will check in with you every day to make sure we are hitting them (or not) and would love to cheer you on with your goals. Let’s do this!