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Hello, and welcome to the Single Girls’ Guide To Life, your weekly guide to single life living and embracing that single life of yours as a single woman. I, Chantelle the Coach, am a quarter-life and confidence coach to single women that have gone through breakup, divorced or separated, and just want to get back to enjoying their single life, to realizing that they're not alone and expanding their mind and growing in their single life and learning to enjoy each and every day. Today, I wanted to talk about setting goals. Now, it's the middle of September, which means that we're coming up to October, starting to round that up. That means that there are three months left of the year. We are on that wind-down of 2021. Can you believe how quickly it has gone?
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Some people would write off the fact that we're coming towards Christmas or the shops are starting to get stocked with things, even though it hasn't even been Halloween yet. They'll be like, “I'll focus on 2022,” but there are three months left. That's a quarter of this year to go. That means that we can't waste that time. Yes, we should look at 2022. There's a natural point of a “fresh start.” Lots of people use the new year to set those goals, to evaluate what they want to do, make decisions and start taking action. However, we also know that for those that set those goals at the new year, within all the studies, there's a general consensus that around 80% of new year's resolutions will get abandoned in February time. Following up, four to six weeks after, it doesn't necessarily continue. That's such a high proportion, 80%. You have to be in the minority. You have to be one of the lucky ones as it were to even continue with your goals and to be working on them, not just achieving them, just continuing to work on the past four weeks.
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That's why I wanted to share how to create your goals, have them and continue working on them with success. There is no point in setting a goal that you don't then get to achieve, or at least work towards for a long period of time. That was just a flash in the pan. You don't want that for your single life. Being single gives you opportunities, freedom, and the chance to try things out. Within that, there might be goals. There might be things that you want to push yourself into. Dating is often one that people want to get back into and try again, but there are things that hold them back.
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They want to get confident at dating. They want to find someone, and whilst you can't necessarily set the goal of finding someone because there's an element of not being able to control it in that sense, you can set yourself goals that work towards making sure that you go on enough dates so that you can get confident on things. You have to have clarity around what you really want to get good at, what you're going to focus on, and then you have to commit to it. There's a process of making sure that you set goals accordingly. You may have heard of this before, you may not, but they're smart goals. Now you might roll your eyes if you have heard of that before and be like, “Yeah, I know this. I get that.” SMART goals, we've heard those at work. That's been around for a while. I know that I experienced them at school, but it was done in such a way that it felt like a tick box exercise. Yet I know that nowadays when I set smart goals, I'm much more conscious and involved in how I use them.
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Looking back, the reason that it felt like that at school is because yeah, someone found out about this and it's part of personal development and a really good strategy to actually make goals that are the acronyms of SMART, which I'll go through in a minute, but it was explained in a way that meant that we were then able to execute it. It's just that we wrote down a very smart goal. I will go into what a SMART goal is and how to set it but before that, you have to understand the process prior in order to not only set the goal effectively, but actually to have some success with it. Anyone could set a goal. Anyone at all can set a goal and someone else could set you a goal. It's a bit like a manager who might set you a target. Even if you sit there and work out how smart that goal is and refine it doesn't mean you're going to do it.
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Ultimately, we have to have a really clear motivation of why are we going to do something. You have to know what is getting you up every morning to get it done. I am currently sat here at 6:15 on a Thursday morning before work because this podcast episode needs recording. Some people would go, “Why?” While I don't necessarily have numerical goals for this podcast and the way it works, the measurable part isn't necessarily there. I probably do need to sit there and look at a metric of making sure that things work, but I know why get up, because I know how many of you respond, share messages and say how helpful it's been. There's a motivation. There's a reason that I find it useful to get up and spend time in the morning recording an episode just to make sure that they go out on time, that they're there for you consistently, and that people can take something away from it.
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You have to be involved in your goal. You have to care about the goal you're setting, and you have to have a reason for doing it. You have to have that motivation. It can be positive just as I described then. It's because of what I want to be able to give back and how it benefits others, or it might be the fear of something. I know for example I need to cut some Pepsi drinking out of my life because of the amount of sugar in it. That's therefore working against a negative of I really don't want to give myself health problems based on doing that. It's just having that little bit of, why are you doing this? Why are you bothering? Why are you even setting the goal, and what impact is it going to have either on your life or other people's lives?
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It depends there. Sometimes your goals are gonna be for you. Sometimes your goals are going to be for others and you need to know what it is that matters and what you're doing it for and why. That comes before you even set the goal, or you set the goal and then you work out if it's really a goal that you want to put the time and effort into. It’s motivation first, setting the goal, and then following up from it would be changing your behavior. For example, I'm currently in the middle of training for a half marathon. I had an operation recently, I have done a 10K just before that. Whilst I took 12 weeks off, six weeks for official recovery and then another six weeks off of kind of taking it easy and not pushing myself, I need to get back on the bandwagon. I need to start getting that exercise back in because the first six weeks of that time, I increased my walking from not really being able to walk at all to building up steps and going for brisk walks and so on following surgery. Really, I wanted to get back into the swing of exercise and I lost that. Once you take six weeks off or longer, it's not part of your routine anymore.
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Part of it for me was setting the goal of a half marathon, and we can go into the specifics exactly of how I define that goal. My motivation is to get moving again, to be healthier, which is very important paired with the old Pepsi drinking. I have those. I know why I'm doing it. I know what I'm working towards, but after that, well, I could just sit there each week and go, “Yeah, I'm working on a half marathon. Yeah.” But if you don't take action, if there's nothing supporting your goal, you aren't going to reach it. You're not going to get there, so you have to work out and you usually work backward from where you want to be and the timescale that you've got in order to do it. In my instance, it is mid-October to a month from now that I have this half marathon. I've specifically signed up to one to hold myself accountable. I've then scoured some online training programs to look at 12-week programs. I actually only had 10 weeks, but at the same time, I have run a 10 K before so I know that whilst I'm out of practice or routine and my fitness is a little bit lower, I also know that I can probably accelerate through at least the first two weeks if not four.
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I've basically devised my own schedule for running each week and for doing exercise so that I can see what it's going to take to get there. In a month's time or in the first month that I started out, I wasn't just going to go, “I'll get started on Monday. I know I need to run. I'll go this week.” It's about being specific and mapping out. How far am I going to run, and when am I going to do it?” I don't just mean the day. I mean the time as well. Am I going to run before work? Am I going to run after work? Am I going to have to run at the weekend? Quite frankly, I could do with, “What route am I taking?” Because half of it is making the decision about where to go. Any extra decision you have to make before you take that action has every potential of stopping you from doing that action because it's one extra thing that your brain has to process.
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Whereas if you already know the information, where, when, what, how, who, your brain has no excuses or brainpower to have to use in order to carry out your goals. Before you even get clarity on what you're going for, you have to know what's motivating you and you have to think, “How am I going to get there after that?” Now, in terms of setting the goal, as mentioned already, SMART goals. Just in case you haven't heard of it or it's not fresh in your mind, then we are looking at specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Specific in the context of a marathon, let's go for that, or half marathon, at least. It would be less specific if I just said, “I want to run.” Okay, you can go out for one run and you've done it. That goal was very open. It didn't really say what you wanted to do other than one single verb.
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Also, it wasn't very challenging. Was it a really worthy goal? It was more like a to-do list. You need to be more specific. In my case, it’s a half marathon and there's a distance. I could add a time to it. In some cases, you could say, “I want to run a half marathon in under two hours.” That is not my goal. I know I'm going to roughly be about two and a half hours. For me, the importance is getting it done, but for some other people, the priority would be improving the time. Maybe my second or third half marathon, if I choose to do them, I might go, “I want to run a half marathon in less time than I did the first.” Then the third one, “I want to run a half marathon in under two hours.”
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A goal shouldn't be forever anyway. You should be reviewing them after a good period of time. We're looking at sort of 90 days most of the time. Anything that I work on, generally speaking, I like to work for 90 days because you get a real chance to implement everything. If you see my Quarter-Life Crisis journal, then you'll know that that has 90-day plans in it in order to change your life and improve your life. There's a link to that in the description if you want to check that out. I also do run short programs. There's a four-week habit tracker that you can grab as well. That was thanks to my mum wanting to focus on food and her diet for four weeks, so I created her a habit tracker. I would advise keeping that go for three more rounds or at least introducing something new to it to keep tracking. It depends on how much success you've had in four weeks, but you want to be able to show that you can sustain it over time as well. It’s about being specific about what you want.
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Measurable is that there is some way of measuring it. This can be harder if you're working on confidence because confidence, you can change within a moment almost, and it can fluctuate, where something more standardised that actually has a numerical measure is important. In this case, it's how far I'm running. It could also be the time that I'm doing it in. It could be the number of people you speak to on a dating app. If you're starting to enter that world again, make sure that it's something that has some numerical way of measuring it preferably, even if it is a scale that you have to use for confidence.
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Attainable, is it achievable? Can you do it? Is it within your current potential given the time that you have? With the half marathon scenario, I might question if I could do it if I was going from not being able to run to doing it in a 12-week program. Personally, I think I would have really struggled. I remember the first time I did a 10 K and found that incredibly difficult. It was for the British Heart Foundation at the Tower of London. I hadn't really run a 5k, let alone a 10 K. I just figured that that was some sort of reasonable amount of distance to run. I can't remember how long we had to prepare for it either. I clearly, wasn't very good at setting my own target back then. I think this was 2012. Whilst it was attainable, I felt like if I'd gone for half marathon, I'd have probably ruined my relationship with running quite well because I found the 10 K hard anyway.
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Going straight in with the half marathon, this is all very personal. Some people would go in with a half marathon, but for me, that would have been too far and I wouldn't have done it. It would have been de-motivating. You're looking for something that is just pushing you outside of your comfort zone by one little layer. It doesn't have to be far, but it has to be something that you find challenging. A half marathon is double the length of a 10 K, so instantly I'm like, “Okay, that's so much longer.” I think I'm not allowed to listen to music. I don't think we're allowed earphones in this race, which I was gutted about because if you followed on Instagram stories before, you'd have seen that I always miss a run if I listened to music, but my podcast listening seems to be the way that I pace very well.
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For a half-marathon, it is about consistency rather than rushing. It needs to be a constant keeping on of running and podcasts were keeping me doing well, so I was a bit gutted about that. I've got to, at some point, adjust my training to not have any sound in my ears and get used to running for a fair amount of time without that. That is the truth. Even so, they're conditions. They're not necessarily the thing that's going to stop me from reaching it, but is it within the next layer of your comfort zone? If it's too far out, you're always going to find that it's difficult to motivate yourself because it seems so far away. I was going for a marathon. I know I'd need more time. If I've got that mentality already that it's too far out, then what's going to get me up in the morning? Not that. I’m not going to want to do it. You've got to make sure that it's enough to challenge you, but not so far out that it puts you off and that you've already convinced yourself that you can't do it.
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Relevant, we've kind of already covered. That comes back to the motivation. There's no point in setting this if you're not interested in it. That's what makes work-life quite difficult sometimes. If you set something, you don't really care about it even though it's your job. There might be an element of it where there's a target set and they need you to do, achieve, or work on it. It doesn't matter to you. If you ever had that scenario at work, you need to come up with a way of transforming it into something that is relevant. Whilst the surface level might be, if you are in sales, for example, here in a particular target, an estate agent or so on, you need to actually change it in a way that makes sense to you.
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They might do it for money and for sales, even just the wording of it could make it really useful to you. “I want to help X number of people find their dream homes.” It's not about making the sales. You've shifted it to helping people. If that's one of your values, then that is going to be a more relevant way for you to understand how setting this goal is going to develop you. It might be that you do stick with the metric of making particular sales, but it's because you want to learn how to get better at doing it. Yes, that's the measurable part, but you could also add a, “By learning how to do this, by experimenting with these different ways.” Whilst the goal and the target is still there, you define how the skill that you're learning becomes important to you. That's all the part that feeds into the motivation and also the habit and the action that you're going to take afterwards. It's not just what it is, but how you're going to actually apply doing that in that sense.
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The last one is time-bound. It's been touched upon within this because I spoke about it during the marathon section. There was a time goal because the half marathon takes place in mid-October. Your boss wants you to achieve that by a particular quarter. My mum's doing a four-week section. You have to have something that says, “Where's the cut-off?” Because if you say, “I want to run a half marathon,” you could do that way in 10 years’ time. You have to put an end measure on it. Again, I wouldn't give it too far, unless that really is the way to do it.
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You're looking at something that's within the next couple of months, and that's probably possibly why some of the new year's resolutions tie it off. We say we're going to do them, but it's at the start of a new year so you feel that you've got the whole year to do it. You don't hold yourself accountable or you don't check-in. You just say you're going to do it. Yes, you might have the motivation, but have you got the action? Have you got the point at which you're going to check how it's going? 90 days is always really good, around three months. At the start of each month, you've got another natural new start. You can check how you're doing in your progress, in your commitment to what you said you were going to do. How often have you stuck to the schedule you created and how often have you left it?
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It can be longer. It can be shorter. It's just that you then have to build in those checkpoints as yet another way to hold yourself accountable. Now, as a single woman, you might be like, “Well, this is my time to be free. I don't want to have to set goals.” You don't have to set goals, but they're useful for keeping you challenged, for not letting you sit still and waste opportunities. Even if you want the freedom to go traveling, you might in the background say, ‘In the next six months, I want to have visited twelve new different countries,” or “I want it to have had this many new experiences.” You might still phrase it in a freedom-style away. “I want to have X number of spontaneous evenings where I make no plans but explore a city and just do whatever takes my fancy.” You can still build in freedom within your goals.
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It's just a nice way to keep tabs on what's going on and to reflect as well. Those checkpoints are lovely when you see the progress particularly over 90 days and you've done progressive points every 30. It makes all the difference to see how far you've come, and all of this you can do on your own. It is possible to do, however a coach like myself is someone that can help you do that. They are there with you either weekly or fortnightly to check-in, to explore what's holding you back. That's something that probably has a big impact on the new year's resolution tail off. It will be time. It will be the priority that someone doesn't make it. It's that their habits don't quite match up. They're scared of failure so they just write the task off that they came up with. They can't do it with the mentality they've got. Suddenly setting their new year's resolution was a great idea, but actually executing it, “Maybe I'm not ready for this.”
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Whereas with a coach, that's exactly what they're there to do, to keep you accountable, help you keep exploring and make sure that you achieve those goals. You can find out about how to be coached by me by checking out the website. There's a link in the description below. Overall, you just need to know what you're doing, make sure you apply those SMART goals. That’s specific, measurable, relevant, attainable, and time-bound. Then, you have to start thinking about what actions you're going to take to get there. Work backward, allocate time specifically to what, where and when, and then you go, keeping tabs along the way. You can grab that four-week habit tracker. I'll make sure there's a link for that as well so that you can cross off your success and make sure that you show up, that you're doing the things that are the best things for you.
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They're going to improve the quality of your life and help you to keep moving forward in this world. I hope you've enjoyed that episode. If you have, feel free to DM me or share on your social media and follow on Instagram, @ChantelleTheCoach. I'm also on TikTok, too. There's even more content on TikTok than there is on Instagram at times. Feel free to follow me on either of those platforms and you can join the Single Girls’ Club as well, our community in a Facebook group of like-minded single women all wanting to embrace their single life. I hope you have the most wonderful week and until next time, keep thriving.