SMART goals

A SMART goal is one that is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound. The purpose of a SMART goal is to really hone in on one specific aspect of your aim and calculate an achievable manner in which you can complete it. To illustrate this, we will discuss what is perhaps the most pertinent example for many taking this course, or those you will come in to contact with.

A common goal that relates to the overall aim of living a long and healthy life is to lose weight, but this goal is incomplete.

The goal “I want to lose weight” is incomplete, making it a poor goal for a number of reasons. Firstly, if you lose 1kg you have succeeded, and if you lose 10kg you have succeeded. If you value one of those more than the other then this tells you your goal is not fully formed.

Next, if you choose to aim for 15kg weight loss but only lose 10kg then you may feel disappointed. That disappointment, tantamount to feelings of failure, can result in higher rates of weight regain than is seen in individuals who are satisfied with their achieved weight. If you have not calculated whether or not 15kg was possible in the first place then you have no real grounds to be disappointed.

Finally, losing 15kg might be a realistic target but the question must be asked – would you be as happy with that loss taking 5 years as you would with it taking 8 months? These factors all matter a lot because, as discussed, precision is critical – without precision you don’t know whether you’re moving in the right direction, at the rate that you would like. This is the role of the SMART model.

Here is how you would apply it to the above goal:

• Specific: “Losing weight” is incredibly vague which means that attainment is open to interpretation. More than this, losing weight is often a shorthand manner of saying something slightly different (an individual may wish to look leaner, fit certain clothes or improve their health and/or fitness). Many looking to lose weight don’t really care how much they weigh, they are interested in what their bodyweight means for these other factors. To make that goal more specific you could look to define a certain metric. That could be bodyweight meaning you want to lose kilograms, it could be inches lost, clothes sizes dropped or something with more impact, such as blood lipids or the improvement of other disease markers highlighted by a doctor
• Measurable: Once you have defined your particular metric, the quantity of that metric needs to be specified. If you were in a race it’s not enough for someone to tell you to go as fast as you can until you win – are you supposed to stop at 100m? 800m? 26 miles? For a goal to have meaning you need a finishing line to aim at, so how many kilograms, dress sizes or blood pressure points would signify victory to you?
• Attainable: Let’s say your goal is to lose dress sizes, measurable by losing enough dress sizes to fit a size 8 – now, is that achievable? Only you can really determine that, but it’s worth keeping in mind the rates of weight loss and gain mentioned in module 1 to help define this
• Relevant: Is your goal relevant to your overall aim? This question is simply asking you if your goal actually means something to you, and is a very important one. If your goal here is to reduce your bodyfat percentage to 8% in order to have a full 6 pack but your overall aim is to live a happy, long and healthy life while also maintaining a social circle which revolves around playing a sport, then although dropping to 8% is a more measurable and specific goal than simply losing weight, and it may be achievable, it’s not in line with your overall aims and therefore you will not feel the same level of purpose that you otherwise would. Once the difficulty of losing bodyfat increases (as it will do, as you get leaner) then you will be more and more tempted to give up; without an alignment of goal, aim and values then this becomes almost inevitable. In this example, dropping to 12% bodyfat would play in to the overall aim, meaning the compulsion to continue will be far stronger
• Time-Bound: A goal needs a time constraint because otherwise procrastination and extended breaks from effort don’t matter or hold consequence. If something matters to you then you should make it happen as fast as is possible (given what we will say later), and that means it needs a deadline. By definition, taking longer than needed to reach a goal that really matters to you is simply taking too long

What may or may not be obvious is that some of these factors play in to each other. The feasibility of losing 4 dress sizes really does depend on the timeline in which you are operating, and the same goes for losing 15kgs. If your desired level of change is at odds with your timeline given your considerations of how achievable it is, then either your timeline or your goal needs to change. The key thing to remember when doing this is to make sure that your goal still remains relevant to your aim. If your goal becomes too conservative and easy to achieve it will likely lose some of its power. For example, a goal to lose 10kgs in a month may be unreachable, but that doesn’t mean that you should drop your target to 1kg in the same timeframe – if a goal is not challenging it quickly becomes boring, to say nothing of the fact that this meagre weight loss is unlikely to alter health outcomes and therefore align with the overall aim.

The reason that it’s wise to set a SMART goal is that it sets out a sensible, manageable and well-considered set of steps towards achieving your overall aim in a reasonable amount of time. SMART goals guarantee success so long as diligence and effort are maintained during the pre-defined timeframe, but they are axiomatically non-ambitious. Ambition, however, is no bad thing. Significant and fundamental change can often be done in a short time frame provided large amounts of effort (and an undeniable amount of luck) is applied, which is why it’s a good idea to set a stretch goal, too.