In a post last week, I wrote about some easy New Year’s resolutions for runners can take — baby steps, if you will — that will help make them better runners. This week, I wanted to take another look another problem that runners often have with their New Year’s Resolutions: making resolutions that aren’t specific enough for them to be met.
New Year’s resolutions are goals. They are often self-improvement goals, but goals just the same. We see in the new year the opportunity to improve, so we set out to change something in our lives to do things differently.
Goals are meant to help us reach new milestones or make changes in our behaviors and they can be very effective in doing so. But in order to be effective, they need to be actionable and they should be very manageable. Whether it be to lose weight or to run faster, if the goals are going to stick then they need to be specific.
Perhaps the biggest problem in making good goals is that they are not specific enough. The two goals that I just mentioned above — losing weight and running faster — are great examples. They are so non-specific that you’d have little chance to turning them in to reality. How are you going to lose weight? What would you do to get faster as a runner? These are just the first of many questions that will come up with goals that are missing specifics to help you attain them.
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