66. From Reflection to Action: Making Achievable Goals

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger walks you through a step-by-step guide to setting meaningful, achievable goals for the year. Learn how to move from reflection to action by identifying your top priorities, assessing your current progress, and aligning your goals with your bigger purpose. Whether you're aiming to lose weight, improve fitness, or make healthier lifestyle changes, this episode provides the framework for success. Discover how mindful planning, small actionable steps, and a focus on one or two key goals can set you on the path to lasting change. Tune in for practical strategies and motivation to make 2025 your most successful year yet!

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Transcript

Welcome back to Weight Loss Made Simple! If you're tuning in today, I’m assuming you’re ready to make some big goals for this year. Maybe you’ve already let some questions marinate, maybe you’re ready to go, and maybe you’re feeling overwhelmed because you set some goals and you tried to work on them, and they haven’t quite worked out. Well, I’m going to simplify this process of goal setting. We’ve been setting the stage for the last couple of episodes, so let’s go!

Alright, everybody, in our last episode, we focused on asking some big questions to get clear on our purpose, right? So I hope you’ve done that. If not, it’s OK. Just figure out what you want your year to be. We’re going to take it a step further by taking that reflection, and I’m going to teach you the steps into action. So we’re going to work through setting one to three meaningful goals this year, and then I’m going to set you up for success. Goals can seem overwhelming, and our plate is already usually pretty full, so I really want to encourage you—if you’ve made a list of like 25 things you want to get done, let’s back that way down again. After a couple of months, or quarter two, maybe we can add some things back in, but right now, starting the year, I want you to pick one—one big goal. And I’ll let you have maybe two other accessory goals.

When we spread ourselves too thin and we’re trying to do 25 goals, we dilute our focus and our energy, and they lose their meaning. I hope, like mindful, meaningful goals, is the key here. And if we can just focus on one, I would love if you could just bring it to one for this first quarter. I think that will be the most powerful. That means we actually have a little time and attention that we can give it, and we have more chance of success. So, we can have goals that span various areas of our life, depending on what’s most important to you right now. So let’s walk through a couple of areas if you haven’t really thought about it.

Health and Fitness is usually somewhere in everyone’s goals. So this could be about our physical health. This could be our fitness, eating well, or just our overall wellness. So, this could be all different types of things. This could be losing weight. This could be getting more cardiovascularly fit. This could be getting stronger (that’s mine). Eating more nutritious food, getting better sleep. So we’re not just going to write down "better health" or "be healthier." I want you to pick one. Am I going to lose 5 pounds this first three months? Am I going to walk more and get more cardiovascularly fit? Am I going to start taking more steps? I’ll teach you how to set a goal for that. Am I going to get stronger, right? So I’m going to increase my muscle for this year. Am I going to eat more nutritious food? Maybe that’s setting a vegetable goal, or eating less sugar, eating less processed food, getting better sleep? I’m going to get eight hours of sleep, OK? So we want to be specific.

Personal Growth: Maybe we want to dive deeper into personal development. We want to learn a new skill. If we want to read a certain number of books—I love that as a goal. It’s amazing. Maybe we want to overcome a fear. Maybe there’s something we’re really scared of. When we check that box, that word that we faced that fear this year.

Professional and Business Goals: Maybe we want to take our career to the next level. Might get a promotion. If we want to start our own business, learn new skills for that job, get more money-wise—earn more income, save more.

Relationship Goals: These are the core of what makes us happy and fulfilled. So maybe we want to strengthen bonds with our family, deepen our friendships, or improve our romantic relationship.

Financial Goals: I know everyone is feeling the pinch right now, and financial goals can sometimes—I’m just as guilty, right? We do the ostrich where we don’t want to think about it, so we stick our head in the sand. We want to educate ourselves financially, right? That goes under financial and personal growth. We want to get smarter about investing, so it doesn’t seem so scary.

Now, we face-to-face, some of these can overlap, some of these life spheres, right?

Mental Health and Well-Being: This is a huge area where we often forget goals. And this is where I think one of those accessory goals would be great. So maybe it’s something like building mental resilience or managing stress better, learning how to practice mindfulness. So maybe it’s getting a coach to help with those things.

Hobbies and Recreation: Let’s just mention a few things that bring us joy. So maybe we want to learn a new instrument or take up a sport. Maybe we don’t play pickleball, but we want to play pickleball, right? And that would cross over into health and wellness, and maybe that even relationships, because maybe we’d be meeting more people. That’s why I want you to pick something specific—not necessarily one of these life realms or life spheres. So we’re not just going to say, “I want to be healthier.” We’re going to pick something because it’s going to cross into all of these things.

Maybe we want to be more creative, artistic. Maybe we’ve let some of our hobbies and personal passions go because we’ve gotten too busy. Maybe we want to bring that back. Maybe spirituality is an important part of your life, and you want to set a goal around that. I had a client Bible in a year. It was very meaningful and transformational for her. It was excellent. Maybe you want to start a meditation practice.

Community and Giving Back: Another sphere. Maybe we want to volunteer more, support a cause, a nonprofit, help somebody with their nonprofit.

Organizational Goals: Maybe it’s just too cluttered and disorganized in your house and you want to declutter. Maybe it’s not the physical stuff, but maybe it’s your digital files, maybe your finances that feel cluttered. I did this halfway last year. I got halfway, which I was very proud of. I was going to get rid of 280 bags of clutter, I got halfway, and I can tell you there’s a difference, and I continue that one for this year. I’m not done. I’m going to keep going. I think for our house, decluttering is going to be constantly on one of those back burners of something we have to be mindful of.

Time Management: Maybe you want to reclaim your time, right? I think two years ago, maybe my focus word was balance, and this was the time management for me. I needed help managing my schedule, avoiding overcommitment, so I could probably use that one this year too—truth be told.

But those are just a few examples. There’s lots of areas in our life that we might want to set goals, but we just want to pick one to three things that resonate most right now. Remember, these things—there’s a season for everything. And if we set one to three things and we’re just really rocking it, like maybe in July we’ll have a couple of things. If we’re trying to make life changes, none of it’s an emergency. OK? There’s not, if we’ve been doing things for 30, 40, 50 years and we want to change those things, it doesn’t need to happen overnight. So if we need to put one of our goals to July because we want to focus on three other goals for the first half of the year, that’s fine. If fewer, more impactful goals will let you be more focused, more intentional in your actions, and more likely to succeed, because we can put all of our energy toward those priorities. If I’m setting 10 goals, I do not have energy—the success energy, right? Success energy takes a lot of energy and focus. If I want to guarantee my success, I can’t do that over 10 different realms. I need to pick one, two—maybe three—and really it’s one, and two and three are like little side things, like that would be nice if that improved.

We want to pick one where we’re putting like 90% of our focus. Alright, so we’ve picked our one. The next step is to assess where we are with this goal.

OK, so if I choose, we’re going to do cardiovascular fitness, so just because I think it’s easy because there’s numbers, right? Math is very definitive. So if I say, I want to be more cardiovascularly fit, and I am going to start by walking more, and then I’d like to be running by the end of the year, first I need to assess where I am. So that might mean—and this is an honest reflection. OK, because sometimes our brain will tell us we haven’t been doing anything, and sometimes our brain will very rarely tell us we’ve been doing too much. So we need to do an honest assessment. So where am I? How many steps am I taking now? How many days am I getting up and taking a walk? Never five days a week. Am I already walking 8000 steps? Am I walking 5000? Do I have no idea how many steps I’m doing? OK, how can I know where I’m going or if I’m making progress if I don’t assess where I’m at right now?

So that might mean these first few weeks, this first month, if I’m going to start taking steps, this is what I did. So if I want to increase my step count, OK, how many am I taking? No idea. OK, so I need to measure that. So I had to figure out a way, like a Fitbit. Most watches do it now, right? I need to figure out how many steps I’m taking and write that down, like take the numbers down. So I did that for a month. Then I could set a real goal, right? Because if I’m only walking 5000 steps a day, setting a goal of 10,000 is a really big leap, and my chance of success is not as high as if I say, OK, by the end of the year or by July, I’d like to be at 10,000, right? Because then once you’re at 10,000 steps, adding in some jogging is not as bad, because 10,000 is doing pretty good. 5000 is kind of secondary. So if I want to get a 10—if I want to start running by December, July, I’d like to be at 10,000 steps. So if I’m starting at 5000, it lets me see how easy it is then to decide, OK, so February, I’m going to up it to six. March, I’m going up to seven. April, eight. May, nine. June, ten, and by July, I’m walking 10,000 steps.

But if I didn’t know where I was starting from and I wasn’t clear on where I wanted to go, I would not be able to set those intermediate little checkpoints to see how I’m doing. Right? I love that one because there’s actually a month leeway built into that too. If something happens and I’m like, oh, I really didn’t get to 7000 this month, I had trouble making that leap, let’s do 7500 instead of jumping all the way to eight. We left yourself a little wiggle room.

So have I started on this goal at all? What’s my baseline? Where do I want to go? How can I make some interim goals? I want to go back to that other podcast we did a few weeks ago about forgiveness. When we are doing this assessment, there might be some judgment that comes up, and we need to remember that we just need to, like Elsa from Frozen, and just let it go. OK? If you do a step assessment and you’re walking 2000 steps and you know 5000 is the standard, and you know you’re walking more, and like you’re starting to judge yourself, and how, like, why aren’t you moving, like, you’re so lazy—like, stop all that. Let it all go. If we are putting a goal down that we’ve put down before and we start having a lot of judgment about how we haven’t achieved that goal before, we need to let that go. OK? If we’ve set this goal before and we have not mastered it, and we’re putting it again and we do our assessment, and we say we really made no progress, this is an opportunity to ask ourselves, what held me back from achieving this? Did I not have time? Was it fear of failure? Did I not have the system set up? OK, so instead of beating ourselves up, we’re going to forgive ourselves and get curious. Why didn’t I achieve that before? How can I achieve it now?

So what have I been holding onto? Like, what do I need to let go of next? I want to just do a check-in. Does this align with my goal and purpose? If I want to feel stronger because my word is strengthen and I want to help women feel beautiful, and part of that is me feeling healthy and beautiful, yes, that’s all in alignment. OK, just a check-in. Is this aligned? What is my “why”? Like, I want to get healthier and stronger so that I feel stronger and can help other women feel stronger. Yes, got it. Boom, boom, boom. Check, check, check.

So we want to do a check-in and make sure that we’re aligned with our goal and our purpose. And then, I alluded to this earlier. The last step, really, is to visualize success and work backwards and do these interim goals. So when I use the example, I want to be getting more cardiovascularly fit, I would like to be running by the end of the year, or maybe I want to do a 5K by the end of the year. Set some real goals for that. Visualize, OK, I’m crossing the finish line. I’m getting my medal. Excellent! Now I need to work backwards. So we know where we’re starting. We know what we want to end up, and we need to make some stepwise—like we’ve got to put the ladder rungs there. OK, so I want to be walking 10,000 steps by July, and then in July, I’m going to repeat this process. Do a check-in. Where am I doing an assessment? Is my goal still the same? Right? Because a lot of things are going to happen. Either I didn’t make my 10,000 goal, or I met my 10,000 goal and I’m already jogging, and I’ve already done a 5K, right? So a lot of things are going to happen by July. So we’re just going to check in, revise, make any revisions that we need to, but I want you to think about the year as smaller steps. It’s really 12 mini-goals to get to our one big goal. And if we can’t think about 12, that’s OK. Start by breaking it into four. 4/4, right? So if I want to be walking, or I want to be running a 5K or 10K at the end of the year, break it up into goals. So I’m going to walk. I’m going to get to a certain point at this one. I just think it’s easier by half, but we break it up in half, right? So I want to walk 10,000 steps by the first half of the year. I’m going to be running a 10K by the end of the year. OK? So if I, from July to December, if I want to go from a 5K to a 10K, from walking 10,000 to a 10K, maybe quarter three that quarter goal is a 5K, and then I do it backwards, right? If I would be 10,000 steps by July and I’m starting at 5000 steps, and I need to be about 7500 by the middle. And then we can take it and break it down monthly. So when it feels very ambiguous and very big, and we’re not aligned, you can see where maybe goals didn’t work out before. We weren’t successful. When you do it this way, we just are setting ourselves up for success.

So what’s our big goal? Where am I at doing the assessment? What’s my visualization of success? How can I break it down into mini-goals? And then I can go back and set, like, if this is what I’m doing for the month, if this is my monthly goal, what do I need to do weekly? What do I need to do daily?

Alright, so I hope that is helpful. Again, I did this with my walking goal, and I found where I was at. I didn’t—I will say I still wasn’t fully into coaching. I still didn’t know exactly where I was going to be at the end of the year. I just knew I wanted to walk more. So I just knew I was going to go up by 500 steps a month and see where I was, and that’s OK. So if you’re wanting to get more cardio, you want to add more steps, and you don’t know exactly where you want to end up, let’s just know we’re going to increase every month and see, and like until we plateau, and then we’re going to revisit this whole thing. Right? If we want to get stronger, and like how are we going to measure that? I’m going to go do an in-body, and I’m going to find out what’s my body fat, what’s my percent muscle like? Maybe it’s I want to lift so much. I don’t know some of that. It’s hard to know if you haven’t started doing it yet, so that’s OK. But let’s set what we can and then like make a date with ourselves of when we need to reevaluate and reset.

OK, alright. I know this was longer than normal, but I think this is really important to set these goals in this really intentional, mindful way, because I promise you this is how we get successful.

OK, alright, everybody. I hope that was helpful. Please, please let me know. Just check in with me. I want to know how everyone’s goals are. OK? I do have a Facebook group, Weight Loss Made Simple. Jump in there. Share your goals. Get some peer support. We love when people help, and we have this team effort. So jump in there, let’s do that. Alright, everybody, have a great, great week, and I will talk to you next week.