By: Rachel Nannola

So you know you want to make a change to benefit your overall health and wellness, but you’re not sure where to start. Setting goals is a great way to get started with a plan, and it helps keep you motivated because you’re working toward something specific. When setting a goal, you want to make it something that’s achievable for you because, if it’s not, it’s much harder to stick to your plan and achieve it.

If you were to make a goal to become healthier, there are so many questions left unanswered. What can you do to become healthier? Is it exercising more? Eating less? Quitting smoking? Let’s say you choose to exercise more, what type of exercise are you going to do? How many times a week? For how long?

Setting goals that cover all of these questions is a great way to set goals that are more attainable.  A good goal setting method that’s very popular is setting a SMART goal, which stands for:

S– Specific
M– Measurable
A– Attainable
R– Realistic
T– Time

This goal setting technique makes sure to cover all of the bases. So let’s make an example SMART goal. “I will lift weights at the gym for 30 minutes 3 days a week for the next month.” This could be a good goal for a person that wants to increase their physical activity.

Another example could be, “I will eat one serving of vegetables at least 3 days a week.” This would be a good goal if you don’t usually include vegetables in your eating plan but would like to start doing so.

Smart goals can be made for a variety of topics, not just limited to health. So next time you want to make a goal, try using this specific SMART goals technique to help focus in on how to achieve your goal.

Source:

• https://bewell.stanford.edu/smart-goals