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\u201cSetting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.\u201d<\/i>\u00a0\u2013 Tony Robbins<\/p>\n
Setting goals is one of the most important things you can do to go from where you are to where you want to be.<\/p>\n
One reason goals are so powerful is that they give our lives direction. Setting goals helps us filter out what\u2019s important and take clear action steps to accomplish those goals. Whether fitness, career, or lifestyle-related, goals help give our lives meaning and purpose by giving us something to work toward.<\/p>\n
But goals can be overwhelming \u2014 paralyzing even \u2014 when you\u2019re early on in the process. Being an awkward beginner<\/a> is by no means easy or enjoyable. If you only focus on how far you have to go to reach your long-term goal, you\u2019re likely to get overwhelmed and give up way before you\u2019ve had the chance to make any real progress.<\/p>\n The trick to tackling big, long-term goals is to chunk them down.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n If I had focused on my long-term goal of holding a one-arm handstand when I first started training handstands over seven years ago, I likely would have been so daunted by all the work I had ahead of me that I would have given up immediately. Instead, with the help and encouragement of my fellow more experienced students, coaches, books, video tutorials, and other resources, I broke down my goal into many smaller chunks. This began with the goal of being able to hold a regular two-arm handstand away from the wall.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve followed the same process with every single one of my long-term goals. From working up to a push-up and pull-up, to learning boxing and martial arts, to writing a book \u2014 I\u2019ve consistently found that the key in avoiding overwhelm and sticking with my goals over time has been to chunk them down.<\/p>\n When we chunk goals we set sub-goals that, when pieced together over the long-run, help us achieve our high, hard future goals.<\/b><\/p>\n For example, if your goal is to be able to do ten pull-ups in a row, and you\u2019re nowhere near doing even one, you\u2019d chunk down your goal into sub-goals such as:<\/p>\n \u2026and so on until you reach your final goal of ten pull-ups in a row.<\/p>\n You can do this same process with any fitness or non-fitness-related goal, from running a marathon to writing a paper to, yes, holding a one-arm handstand.<\/p>\n This process of chunking gives us small wins, resulting in our brains releasing dopamine each time we meet a sub-goal. This helps keep us motivated along the way to our longer-term goals, making it much less likely that we\u2019ll quit along the way. As Noel Brick and Scott Douglas write in\u00a0The Genius of Athletes: What World-Class Competitors Know That Can Change Your Life<\/a><\/i>, this process of chunking goals also increases our belief in ourselves:<\/p>\n \u201cSetting and achieving short-term sub-goals boosts our belief and increases our longer-term persistence because doing so lets us know we\u2019re making good progress; that\u2019s useful feedback we don\u2019t always get when we set only more distant, long-term goals.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n\n