Goals are funny. At some point we’ve all wanted to be rich, beautiful, or a professional athlete or musician or insert any other career here. For a long time I thought being goal-oriented was key - but I’ve changed my mind slightly in the last few years.

I still think having a goal can be very helpful in providing a general direction, but it’s not where I try and put my energy any more. Instead, I put my energy into the process.

It’s the day-to-day things we do consistently that will determine whether we ever reach the goals we set. For this reason, this blog will provide some simple tools to help develop our processes and maintain consistency with our habits.

You need to have an idea of what you’re trying to achieve.

A compass, a map, or a GPS won’t do you much good if you have no idea where you’re trying to end up. Having a rough goal in mind can give you some direction for figuring out what habits will be beneficial to you. When we know what we’re trying to achieve, we can brainstorm the attributes or steps we need to take to see success.

For example, let’s say my goal is that when I’m 80 I’ll be able to get on and off the floor to play with my grandkids. That seems impossibly far away at the moment, but I’ve seen enough patients in my practice who struggle getting out of their car, or wish they could participate more actively with their kids, that it makes me think about these things.

Like any goal, there are a few things here that I won’t be able to control. But barring major injury or disease, there are many things I can do over the next 50 years to improve the odds of attaining my goal.

Once you have your goal, break it down into bite-sized chunks.

Once we’ve figured out what we’re trying to achieve, we can begin to digest it and break our goal down into the smallest pieces possible. Let’s continue with the goal of getting off the floor in our 80s.

I need to figure out the attributes necessary to be able to get down to the floor and back up. I figure this will require hip and shoulder mobility, as well as overall strength and adequate balance. There are other factors at play, but lets focus on these for now. Luckily, I know I can improve strength, mobility, and balance in the gym.

Because research tells us that we start losing muscle mass and balance over the age of 50, I’ll want to give myself a good cushion of capacity and maintain that cushion for as long as possible. What I mean by this is that I’ll want to be way stronger than necessary to get up from the ground so that as I age, I don’t fall under the necessary strength level to accomplish this feat (perhaps I’ll use some RPE-based training to achieve this). As well, I want my balance to be excellent and to have great mobility just in case I start to lose those attributes with age as well.

Make the processes and habits that will bring you to your goal achievable.

I can start working toward my goal by building tons of strength and muscle when I’m young. This is a good time to be honest with ourselves.

Are we currently doing anything that is building strength and muscle? If not, how can we start?

This is generally where a professional can step in and provide guidance. At Highlands Wellness this is part of our offerings, because teaching patients the tools they need to improve their own health is the key to long-term wellness. Our treatments don’t just end when pain ends - we work on mobility, building strength and providing accountability to continue building a better foundation of health.

If we already have physical activity as a normal part of our routine to build resiliency, we can make small changes to ensure we are developing the attributes we need to achieve our goal.

The key is to make the smallest, easiest changes that you can perform consistently. Over time we just keep layering on small changes.

Eventually we’ll wake up one day and realize we’ve come a long way since we started and many of the healthy habits and small changes we’ve made are just second-nature and require no effort to continue doing.

• For example, a small change I could make is to ensure that my workouts include lots of transitions from the floor to standing. This can be achieved by pairing certain exercises together within my workouts - crunches with overhead press, a million varieties of burpees (if you like that kind of thing), pushups with pullups etc. The smallest change I’ve made here is changing the order of exercises to practice my final goal more often.

• For the balance component, I could being brushing my teeth on one foot, doing household chores on one foot, and performing one leg exercises in the gym such as lunges and split stance deadlifts.

• To begin working on my mobility, I could introduce one new stretch and repeat it in my warmup for 30 seconds for the next month. Once that became easy to do and didn’t require any thinking, I could add something else.

I think if I followed that plan for the next 50 years and slowly progressed each of those three attributes, there is a good chance I could achieve my goal. The nice thing is, even if I for some reason don’t achieve my goal, I know there are still huge benefits to being stronger, having more muscle, increasing my mobility and improving my balance. These are attributes that will make my entire life better.

There are tricks we can use to make new habits easier to stick to.

The hardest phase of changing our processes and habits is at the start. Any time we introduce something new, it is going to require a lot of bandwidth in our brain and we are going to look for reasons to quit.

Make your new habit obvious.

• If you habit requires equipment, have the equipment in clear view.

• Say out loud what you intend to do. For example, “As part of my warmup today I will practice getting up from the floor at least 3 times”.

• Stack your habits together. If you already do an exercise in your workout, superset it with something that will improve your balance or mobility (the new habit). If you already brush your teeth morning and night, practice your balance at the same time.

Make it easy.

• Only add one new habit at a time. Our odds of successfully mastering multiple new things at once are drastically lower than being consistent with one small change.

• Automate your habits. Work on one thing until it doesn’t take any effort to continue. Then once it’s automatic, work on something new. This slower process of behaviour change makes for change that actually will stick.

• Temptation bundling makes many habits easier to stick. This works especially well for things that you might consider boring and monotonous. For example, if you think doing some cardio exercise will help you reach your goal, pair that with watching your favourite show. The boring cardio is a lot more tolerable when you can look forward to watching an episode of your favourite show at the same time. This also works great with podcasts and audiobooks at the gym.

Make it satisfying.

• At the beginning, you may need to reward yourself for sticking to a new habit. Keep a note in your phone, and once you’ve succesfully made a streak of a whole week or a whole month of performing the good habit, go get a coffee at your favourite shop or treat yourself to something that makes you happy.

You don’t need to use any or all of these tricks to help build a new habit, but it’s good to have options. If you’re struggling implementing any of these changes, reach out to us at the clinic. The research supports having accountability and guidance as useful tools when trying to improve health and wellness. As such, we have made it our job to develop the skills to implement and practice these changes and guide our patients through the process.