Episode 30: SMAR Behavioral Goals with Annette Zapp, CSCS*D
It's the nature of the beast. As firefighters, we are very clear-cut. The world is black or white, with no shades of grey. We are on or off the wagon entirely, not doing 'something.'
My girl Dana asked for an episode to help her crew set goals, and here we are!
So what, now what?
Making behavioral rather than outcome goals is clutch. You have control! Keeping those behavioral goals small and habit stacking or anchoring to an existing behavior keeps things easy.
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Thank you for joining me on the Fire Rescue Wellness Podcast. I'm your host AZ. I find the research and resources and then provide the fire service with the so what now, what to ensure the health and wellbeing of every member of our profession together. Let's thrive. Hello listeners, it is AZ back for another solo podcast episode.
This is episode 30, and I know, I know, I know. I threw you a curve ball last Friday with not only a guest, Dr. Jacob Moda, but a co-host. I know it was crazy, but we're back to normal now with the short solo episodes. Today is February 10th, which means it is officially four days until my favorite holiday.
Yes, yes. I know it sounds ridiculous, but Valentine's Day is my favorite holiday, and our podcast guest on Valentine's Day is going to be my girl, Rachele to talk about all things cardiopulm and covid and long covid. So buckle your seatbelts. You're gonna love that episode. But today I am going to talk about goal setting, and this episode is thanks to my girl Dana.
Shout out to Dana. I was having a conversation with her in the direct messages on Instagram, and I don't remember what we were talking about. Nonsense, I'm sure. And I just threw out to her, Hey, any topics that you would be interested in delving into on the Friday episode? And she said, goal setting. So I said, my girl, I got you.
So, today we are gonna talk about goal setting, but you're probably not going to hear what you're expecting because when you break it down, there are two main types of goals. The. Goal that most people are talking about when they say goal setting is an outcome. Goal, meaning my class reunion's coming up. I have to look good, so I want to lose, fill in the blank, 15, 20 pounds, or I want to gain giant guns and a six pack, whatever those are outcomes. What we really need to be talking about, when we're thinking about goal setting is behaviors. The behaviors will lead to the outcomes and the delicious, wonderful, beautiful thing about behavioral goals is that we have all the control. We don't have a lot of control about the outcome.
We can do the things and cross our fingers and hope for the outcome that we want, but at the end of the day, the only thing that we can control is our behaviors. And so when you are looking at setting behaviors, some people like to talk about the SMART acronym, and so we, firefighters love acronyms. Vent, enter search
You know, we have them all. And so you've probably heard of this one before, but SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely, or time-based, so, so let's break each one of those down just a little bit. The first one is specificity, and when I think about specificity, the word that comes to my mind all the time is more.
Many times when my clients are attempting to set behavioral goals, they will make them too broad. They will say something like, I am going to. More water. I am going to eat more protein or potentially less. I am going to indulge in less desserts. But do you see what the problem is? It's really not specific.
What does more. And if we back it up even a step further, many times, instead of saying, I will eat more vegetables, they say, I'm going to try to eat more vegetables. So it becomes even less specific. So how do we drill down to that specificity that we need? While I would suggest instead of. I am going to try to eat more vegetables.
I will eat a fruit or vegetable with every meal. That's pretty specific. I will eat a fruit or vegetable with every meal. I will drink eight ounces of water as soon as I wake up in the morning. that is very specific and that specificity rolls straight into the M, which is measurable. If you have set your behavioral goal appropriately, you should be able to just figure out, did you do it or did you not do it?
I will eat more protein. Not specific, also not measurable. More than what? So specificity and measurable, in my opinion, go hand in hand. The third one is, is it, is it attainable? Can you actually do it? And I feel like attainable and realistic, the A and the R, reasonable or realistic go together as well. I will get eight hours of sleep every night.
Might be attainable on nights that I am not working, but it's probably not that realistic for nights when I'm on duty. So the specificity and the ability to measure go together the at obtainability and how realistic. The goal is go together, and then finally timely. I feel like timely or time constrained really falls more into when we are setting our goals for outcomes versus behaviors.
So that would be saying something like, back to that class reunion, I am going to lose two pants sizes by July for my class reunion. Well, that's definitely a time-based goal, but it is an outcome goal, and if you rewind back to the very beginning five minutes ago, those outcome goals are probably not the way to go.
So when I'm setting behavioral goals, I just use the acronym SMART S M A R. Are they specific? Are they measurable? Are they attainable? And are they realistic? It is much easier to feel like you are winning, it is much easier to accumulate, as my friend Hunter says, accumulate the small wins when you are measuring behaviors that you can control.
So behavioral goals are specific. They're measurable, they're attainable and realistic. Now let's talk about layering behaviors, because let's face it, we are the fire service. We are black or white. We are on or off a program, so black or white. There's no gray on or off. There's no, we're doing something consistently.
We're either on or off. And. What I would like to invite you to consider is that starting with a behavior, one behavior that's very simple, you can get a win with that behavior and then start linking other behaviors to the one that you already have as an. So, for example, one of the things that I try to remember to do every single morning is take my vitamins after I get out of bed.
One of the first things I do, wander down to the kitchen and take my vitamins. That is already a pretty good habit. I do not forget to take my vitamin. More than a couple times a year. So it's already habit, it's already behavior. So if another behavior that I would like to layer would go well with that behavior that's already in place, kind of like how jelly goes with peanut butter, that would be a great habit to layer on. So I'm already going to take my vitamins. It's probably a pretty good idea to take my vitamins with some water. And drinking water is one of the behaviors that I want to make a goal. So I habit stack. I stack the drinking of the water with the taking of the vitamins. Pretty soon, I'm drinking an eight ounce glass of water first thing most mornings.
The other thing that you need to consider is that these habits should be so easy that you laugh like, of course, that's so simple. I could do it every day with my eyes closed with no effort. Perfect. That is where you want to start. We firefighters again, black, white, all, nothing on or off a program. We need to take a step back and say, doing something consistently.
Is better than being perfect for a while and doing nothing most of the time. So when we're looking to create those behavioral goals, we wanna make sure they're really small, really simple, and in our brain we say, oh heck yes, I could easily do that. So once you have that small stack of habits, for me it would be get up, take my vitamins, drink my eight ounces of water.
Once I'm doing that super, super consistently, then I can layer on something else that feels really easy. And for me, one of the very logical things to do would be empty the dishwasher. It's something that needs to get done. I hate doing it later in the day. So once I'm ready to layer on another small habit.
I can empty the dishwasher and it's specific. It's not: I will try to take more dishes out of the dishwasher. It's simply I will empty the dishwasher. It's measurable that I do it. Or did I not do it? It's attainable in my time constraints. I can definitely get it done and it's realistic. I'm an able-bodied person that can get that task done in a short amount of time.
So keeping it short as well. I was almost gonna say as always, but remember last Friday? I had a guest keeping it short as I do with the solo episodes. And again, shout out to Dana. Thanks for the topic. When you're setting your goals, set behavioral goals rather than outcome goals and make sure they're smart, specific, measurable, attainable, and realistic.
Anchor those behaviors to existing behaviors, layer behaviors on one, one on top of. And finally make these behavior changes small enough, so it feels like it's not a big deal. That's all I have for you today. AZ is out.
