Transcript

Short-term Goals Will Transform Your Life | Cathy Utzschneider | TEDxBostonCollege

[Applause] welcome do you ever think about wanting to get something more out of your life and you also want more calm and control i'm here to share this message and that is short-term goals will transform your life they will help you see it with a new perspective they will help you achieve pace perspective achievement calm and ultimately excellence i'm going to share a goal achievement method i created that's been used by individuals teams coaches professionals of all kinds and they have used it for all kinds of goals and there are four essential elements they're interrelated elements they're almost like four wheels of an of a four-wheel drive they're inter independent and they're interrelated here's the first one the goal used to begin with an experimental short-term goal based on a vision you have second you keep records a calendar you keep six-week goals in a calendar and then you keep weekly goals in the calendar and then track daily action steps third and very important you also have accountability and feedback with a meeting with a coach a mentor a friend once a week at the same time every week because it makes you very aware of time both what happened in the past week and what happens in the next week and finally you review what you did in the six week period this is the fourth essential component what happened over the six weeks so you can say well do i want to continue this goal or not do i want to do something else do i need to refine it so this goal achievement method is rooted in physical goals why physical goals because it's used for all kinds of goals physical goals because they're more concrete they're more measurable they're they're less nuanced than personal and professional goals and yet the method works for all kinds of goals so people for example recreational athletes have used it to run their first race to learn to swim to improve their tennis game elite athletes have used it to to enter the olympics to qualify for the olympic marathon trials to win championships etc you get the idea the exciting piece also is that the method gets people so excited because their achievements are measurable i don't have to say you're doing a good job they know they're doing a good job that they have also written books gotten promotions built businesses you know what i mean they've done they've achieved major life balance and yet it's not as if they don't encounter adversity they do i mean job loss uh illness uh divorce all kinds of things real life stuff that everybody goes through but yet they still achieve so i'm going to tell you a uh story here uh with a road map and there are three things we're going to point out first i'm going to tell you five ways in which short-term goal setting because this is based in six-week goals as i said short-term goal setting will help you have a sense of progress and help you achieve focus and help you develop better habits help you get a greater sense of calm and help you learn new strategies to solve problems so you'll get all these benefits so i'll tell you those and then i'll develop those and then i'll tell you the essentials of goal achievement that i've learned from my own life from being an athlete and from being a professor and researcher and from what i've learned from the terrific people whom i coach who aspire to dreams and will embrace the the short-term challenges that go with pursuing any goal so here are first two very different stories that i want to share with you because it shows how different the people are who use the method it applies to every everyone so here are inez and peter i ness has used the short-term goal method for 10 years to run track and field and she's podiumed in national championships she happens to be an orthopedic surgeon so she's also used the method with her patients to help them know where they are after surgery to take steps to get better so they know where they are and she ran for office and used the method to run for office her husband peter was so inspired he started using the method too and he said oh let's start biking he had done lots of biking in the past so together they started you know 10 15 20 mile rides and they built up 250 or 60 mile rides and last august they biked 187 miles in the pan mass challenge peter got so excited by the method he said all right i'm going to get a job and he got a job as the an emergency reserve ecologist for fema very different story toby the method works for people of all ages he's 14. hey i want to do spring track he said never run uh run spring tracks so anyway he came to weekly meetings kept the calendar uh had his busy social life his friends of course video games uh and you know so we said all right toby you got to do these things but it was all reasonable goal setting which is what the method is anyway six weeks later he dropped his two two mile time by three minutes and 40 seconds and he and his mom were really happy because he spent less time on his video games and his grades were better so you know it affects the rest of our lives it gives a sense of control and balance now these are the ways that you can benefit so you will experience progress with the short-term method more than you will with almost anything else and we need a sense of progress first of all we're living longer than ever in 1950 the average american lived to be 68. and 2021 it was 79. and time is those most precious commodity we don't want to let it drift so goals give us a sense of milestones and mark markers and those milestones are i once was talking to national public radio about goal achievement i said goals are like punctuation in books periods paragraphs and chapters they help us understand where we are in life remember perspective is one of the goals the gains from the method so you will also improve focus i mean how many of you out there isn't overwhelmed with you know texting snapchat emails i mean it's crazy we live a crazy life it's really hard for me and i know for many others to focus so and dr dan levitan writes about this in his fabulous book the organized mind and he said because we don't focus enough we end up multitasking right and multitasking is crazy i mean it inspires the stress hormone cortisol and the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline to flood our brains and he says it causes mental fog and scrambled thinking so that we feel that we're running fast just to stand still you will focus more if you set a short-term goal next these two stories illustrate the next points you will learn more if you set a short-term goal because you will encounter challenges and you'll have to find solutions to them so here on your left is cheryl cheryl's goal was to hike the 48 4 000 footers in new hampshire mountain by mountain challenged by challenge she hiked through cancer that goal kept her going and she learned all kinds of new strategies she took wilderness first aid she learned more about elevation maps how to use bike gloves with hiking poles etc etc learn more then there's joe malloy i don't know if any of you know joe he was a student of mine at boston college where he learned the short-term goal achievement method he had always wanted to quote make the olympics and he was a swimmer captain of the swim team assistant swim coach at boston college anyway short-term goal by short-term goal refining his habits was key that's the point that his story illustrates refining his habits of hydrating of sleep of training for three different sports he not only qualified for the 2016 olympics in rio but he was the first american finisher fast forward to today years later he says the method has taught him the special the special value of time and he's got two young daughters he spends more quality time with his daughters because of this awareness than ever the last point uh that to develop is that of the great calm we get from achieve setting and achieving short-term goals how many of us are just so busy and overwhelmed have a lot going on it's hard to get priorities and think of what do i have to do when francesca is someone who sits down in the morning she of course is uses the method has done so for 10 years meets every week and sets her goals and every morning she will sit down and say all right what do i have going on today because the reason that goals increase our sense of calm is that they remind us when to stress ourselves and when we need to recover when we need to think done enough well she's got it going on a lot going on she is a professor of statistics at harvard she's co-director of the harvard data science initiative she's a wife and mom and she's an athlete i mean you know you pick up the new york times and there's one of her one of her art research articles she's all over the place but she's got control so in 10 years she's run 10 marathons she's done 20 half marathons and the method inspired her to experiment with a short-term goal to be a beginner again which is one of the best things she couldn't blow a bubble when she started and well she's finished by now eight sprint and olympic distance triathlons and maybe most touching is she's grown a bigger heart she understands adversity so with her family and her students when they encounter adversity she says i'm more empathetic it's fantastic so i'll share a little about my own experience as a researcher as a human being as an athlete to tell you about short-term goal essentials so that you can leave here thinking about whether you might want to implement the short-term goal method first is i learned from neuroscience about the great importance about the generation effect the importance of creating our own goals as opposed to just receiving instruction from others so the example of nate here in the yellow shirt shows the generation effect he came to me wanting to qualify for the boston marathon he had tried for three years using an app which gave him instructions about what to do but failed then he used the method and he lowered his marathon qualifying time from in six months three hours and 25 minutes to two hours and 55 minutes he lowered it by 30 minutes he's not the only one who's made these kinds of accomplishments then i also learned about the great importance in research and so forth of respecting tiny steps by saying hey yeah it's really important to write down this tiny little detail i would say cheryl can you write down this detail of eight to ten such and such as yes you got to do that not too many records but essential ones so james clear writes a fantastic book it's come out called atomic habits and he documents exactly how much short term tiny little action steps compound into really remarkable results and then being accountable so this is an interrelated goal achievement method a lot of people write down goals not everybody does but putting them all together is what it's about and um dr gail matthews wrote a wonderful study conducted a wonderful study and found that those who not only write down their goals but who also meet with someone regularly for feedback are much more successful than those who just write down their goals and by the way in my doctoral dissertation which i wrote on 103 national and world-class masters women runners 94 of them wrote down their goals and i myself have used this method with a coach so i keep myself accountable too as do all the people in my practice so this is the end story which suggests the end of a journey of what i learned about short-term goal achievement first i've always been a planner and i found my husband found a journal the other day and he said oh my gosh what's this it was from fourth grade it said play the guitar from 4 to 4 30. all right so there was the trace of this i also also loved to run and i ran the neighborhood olympics very official with the finish line being a crack in the sidewalk and but then i went to high school and to college pre-title nine almost uh before running was offered as a sport and i knew i was fast so i did other sports in high school and college at any rate that i i suddenly became 40 and i heard about masters running and i was interested and i also needed the method but i didn't have it so i had to create it i'd done all this research on goal achievement and excellence in my dissertation at any rate my head was spinning i did not have calm i did not have pace at all it was like whew so i had two young kids my husband traveled quite a bit i was in doctoral program i was starting a coaching practice and i was starting to try to run so i started the method and it proved my experience what everyone else has found with this which is that short-term goals will ultimately amaze you as they compound if you've set your ladder against the right wall so i did achieve ten national titles nine in track and field and one in aquathorn and swimming i started in swimming got a bronze and silver medal in world championships age group championships uh and you know i never would have thought i would i would be there i also learned in my doctoral dissertation in my own experience that you can be as fast after five to seven years as those who did get the chance to go to the olympic trials or the olympics that was very cool so let's say you might want to get go home and say i'm going to try this method i want to share an example of a calendar because this calendar illustrates how tiny the goals are and it also illustrates the importance of what we call range goals so here we have a runner not a runner a walker who wants to be a runner and say they walk 10 miles a week so this person is gonna jog three to four days a week and a total of six to eight minutes with some walking it's very very small and the reason for range goals is that range goals allow us to fail i've failed so many times so we you know we're just normal people but we want to embrace flexibility and failure so that's the kind of calendar you want to to keep you also want to find someone to meet with and what are you going to talk about you're going to talk about what else is going on in the rest of your life you're going to talk about maybe what challenges you anticipate you want to talk about how you're going to evaluate your goal at the end of it my practice has quite a number of forms that people use to support this but you can do this on your own too with a friend you need a committed friend so my final message is yes anyone can experiment with the short-term goal method and you can achieve peace perspective achievement calm and ultimately excellence and i have no doubt that if you have any kind of idea of a goal in your mind now you can have your first achievement tomorrow and whether you're 14 or 94 you can identify a new starting line thanks very much [Applause]