Feelings Fitness Podcast
Feelings Fitness Podcast
222. Navigating Success with SMART Objectives
Embark on a mission to conquer the holiday hustle and glide into the new year with a winning strategy for success. I'll take you through the art of crafting SMART goals, providing a roadmap to achieve your aspirations in 2024 with precision and purpose. As we wrap up our 52-week expedition, I offer a sanctuary of stress-relief with a mini movement exercise, inviting you to unwind through meditation and conscious breathing. Together, we'll narrow down our ambitions, setting our sights on one impactful goal, bolstered by actionable micro-goals, ensuring a year of meaningful triumphs and personal growth.
As your guide and fellow traveler on this year-long odyssey, I've transformed my struggles with time management into lessons that fuel our collective journey toward a balanced life. We'll revisit the highlights of our transformative road trip, reminiscing about the pivotal episodes that have carved our path to a healthier home, a happier mind, and habits that support our well-being. By the end of our session, you'll be equipped with the tools and clarity to be the hero of your own story, setting a SMART goal that resonates deeply with your pursuit of a life well-lived. Join me as we forge ahead, ready to embrace the joy and potential of the year to come.
Welcome to the Feelings Fitness Podcast. Let's flash back to 2023, when we took a 52 week road trip together to discuss home health, happiness and habits. We created a road trip to work towards feeling fit mind, body and spirit. Now we'll revisit those 52 weeks in just 52 days. There are many more adventures in store for 2024, but let's look back on how far we've come and set ourselves up for more success.
Speaker 1:Welcome to week 50 of our 52 week road trip through 2023 together. We are in the home stretch for sure. So I'm wondering how are you feeling? And if you're anything like me, you are probably intensely feeling the pressure of the holiday season. You also may be feeling some pressure to feel like 2023 was a successful year filled with many accomplishments.
Speaker 1:I'm going to make a suggestion and I'm going to myself lean into this suggestion as well, and the suggestion is release some of that pressure meditate, breathe, move your body. So last week we did a mini meditation and this week I would like to do a mini movement to release some tension and pressure and whatever you may be feeling that's weighing you down. So I'm going to suggest meditate, breathe and move your body. And last week we did a mini meditation and this week we'll do a mini movement and what I'm going to invite you to do is to find a comfortable seat. If you can't do it right now, you can just listen in and then come back to this afterwards. But finding a nice comfortable seat, preferably on the floor, seated in Sukhasana or Easy Pose or crisscross applesauce, wherever you are at in your yoga lingo, relaxing the arms down alongside, rolling the shoulders up, back and down, looking up and down, stretching out that neck, looking left to right and back to center, and then with those arms released down alongside, just really relaxed fingerprints down into the earth, nice, deep breath in as you sweep the arms up and press the fingerprints in to one another up overhead and exhale, twisting to the right, reining the fingertips down, pressing the fingerprints down into the earth. Inhale, sweeping those arms back up, coming back to center, pressing the fingerprints into one another and exhale. Twisting to the left, reining the fingerprints down, pressing down into the earth. Inhale back up to center, pressing those fingerprints together up overhead and exhale, reining the fingers down back alongside. The arms are relaxed, taking a moment to just take a nice deep breath in and a full exhale out and then bringing our hands to heart center, closing the eyes if you haven't already done so.
Speaker 1:Really pressing into the hands, pressing into the palms, pressing into the fingerprints and going through a little bit of a heartfelt visualization visualizing what a peaceful morning during the holidays would be. Visualizing what a wonderful work day would be like during the holiday, visualizing yourself tackling your to-do list with ease as well as handling the holiday stuff with ease as well, preparing presence, parties, all of it. And then visualize yourself settling into a restful sleep, feeling very successful at the end of a day during the holiday season, and it's all too easy to get carried away with the craziness. So be intentional with your time. Be realistic about what's possible. Be present for the joy that is possible, which segues us into the topic for today, which is setting smart goals. One of my main realizations of 2023 is really that I must be intentional with my time, and it starts with setting goals. So I have definitely realized that I get so much more done if I plug tasks into my hourly calendar. I miss out on so many windows of time to get tasks done because I don't think I have enough time to complete the task. Therefore, I don't even get started on it. Then lots of little things pile up and it gets super frustrating. So we'll talk a little bit more about some of this actual time management stuff next week.
Speaker 1:For this week, I really just wanted to share this idea of setting a big picture smart goal, because we talked last week about creating that vision board and really having that visualization. Now we can have a tendency to throw so many different things onto a vision board that even that can get cluttered and confusing, and the idea of that was to create this clear vision. So you may want to go back to the vision board too, if you've already done it, and think about what's on there and maybe reevaluate a thing or two. It's entirely up to you. But the idea with these smart goals and the stumbling block that I ran into when I did them for the first time was I set a ton of them and my suggestion to you is don't set a ton of smart goals. What I would suggest is choosing one goal and then having maybe three micro goals to go along with that big goal. So this week let's look big picture for 2024 and choose a goal and make it smart. One year I honestly chose so many that I actually didn't really accomplish? I don't think any of them, honestly. It was so sad, but I've gotten better with this idea of picking these goals, making them smart, not choosing too many and then actually achieving them.
Speaker 1:There's a quote that talks about. It's like a Russian proverb or something of that nature, and it goes something like if you chase two rabbits, you won't catch either one. And so really it's this idea of if you set so many different goals and you're trying to achieve so many different things, you're really not gonna actually achieve any of them. So choose one goal, maybe a couple of micro goals related to that one goal. I keep saying this, and perhaps some of you don't even know what a smart goal is. So a smart goal has a lot of different words attached to it, but they all mean the same thing. So smart can stand for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based, or there's others specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. You see what I'm saying. They're really just different ways of saying the same thing, and I heard this quote too. It's like what you track? You fast track. So when you make something really specific and really smart, then you're definitely more likely to achieve that goal. So that is. I feel like that was a little bit all over the map today, but you catch my drift, I think. I think we know each other by now.
Speaker 1:The ultimate goal for the week is to be thinking about this concept of smart goals, do not. You can look back at your vision board. If you have one and you can pull things off, but don't make all of them smart. A vision board can have really so many different things on it. But again, think back to that vision board and think remember, the goal of even the vision board is to send a clear message to the universe. So get clear on that vision board. If you need to go back and make some adjustments, do that and then use that vision board as a spot to pull off one main goal, a couple micro goals. Make them smart, make it specific, make it measurable, make it achievable, make it realistic, make it time sensitive whatever words that really resonate with you to go along with smart.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I will meet you back here next week for week 51. Oh my goodness, we have two episodes left. I want to make it worth your time to be here. It's an honor for me to have been your guide on this journey. You are the hero. You are in the driver's seat. I am simply here going through some of the things that I've learned throughout the years that have helped me to feel good right. So next week we'll tackle some time management because, like I said at the beginning of this episode, yeah, time management has been maybe my enemy my entire life, and I feel like I'm probably not alone. So let's talk about that next week. For this week, come up with your smart goal. I hope you're enjoying 52 weeks and 52 days a compact version of the transformational road trip we took through 2023. We're revisiting those 52 episodes and it's a review of home health, happiness and the habits that guide the way to feeling fit mind, body and spirit. It's also a food for thought for how you want to feel.