Is it ok to not have goals?

Whilst I’m big on helping my clients achieve their health and fitness goals in a sustainable way that doesn’t sabotage their mental health or relationship with food - I also think that setting and working towards goals in every single area of our life for the rest of eternity is a little over-kill.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the whole point of setting goals is to come up with tangible milestones that signify that you are indeed living in alignment with your greater values.

If you haven’t done a values assessment before, plenty are available online that are worth doing at least once every couple of years or so, for example this one.

Identifying 4-8 core values that are important to you can help you continually assess where you should be investing time and effort to live a life that is most fulfilling to you.

Once you know your values, you will then be able to ask yourself ‘How can I live in better alignment with my values?’ - from THERE you can set your goals.

So in other words, goals don’t necessarily have to be things you achieve.

It’s awesome if you’ve decided that you’d like to run a marathon one day, do a pull-up, or drop a dress size - but something I try to emphasise is that if you can’t tie that goal back to your values somehow… You’re not going to find that goal very inspiring after a while. 

You also need to recognise that goals are something that you need to be willing to compromise on and change, and be flexible with in order to stay true to your own values - NOT the other way around.

I don’t encourage my clients to set and fixate on having a ‘goal weight’ exactly for this reason, I actually wrote an article on my blog about this a while ago. 

For example, if one of your values is ‘well-being’, you might decide that losing weight aligns with that for you, so you set a goal around that. However, if you get sick, or injured, or you are going through some kind of dramatic life crisis - continuing to pursue weight loss could negatively impact your well-being. If you choose to pursue weight loss instead of honouring what might be best for your well-being, you are sacrificing your values for an outcome that isn’t guaranteed to make your life better, and may even make you feel worse.

Even if one of your values is appearance, and you prefer the way that your body looks at a particular size - you need to consult your values as a whole before AND during the process of working towards said ‘ideal body’. I highly doubt that you don’t have values that relate to people and causes outside of yourself (no judgment if so, I guess), but I want you to think critically about the potential effects of prioritising weight loss or aesthetic changes in your body has on everything else in your life if you take it a step too far. 

Being overly concerned with your appearance, eating a certain way, exercising a certain amount, getting all of your steps in, and avoiding certain foods - will eventually affect other areas of your life. Your relationships with your friends and family, your work performance, your creativity, your sense of purpose and your ability to simply be present and engage with the world will all be affected if you are always hungry or distracted by thoughts around food and your body.

Regardless of whatever your values are, if you place too much importance on chasing a specific goal for the sake of only aligning with one of your core values (in this instance, well-being or aesthetics) - you will inevitably neglect your other core values - meaning you won’t be satisfied at the end of it.

You’re putting your own happiness and life satisfaction on the line.

So, coming back to goals - I think that if you’re stuck to set goals, or you don’t know what you’re wanting to work towards right now, rather than pulling a random goal out of thin air because you think it would be cool to achieve… 

I encourage you to think about what your values are and brainstorm ways that you can live more aligned with all of them.

I’m curious…

Have you ever done a values assessment? Have your values changed over the years? Feel free to reply and let me know what yours are if you’re open to sharing. I love hearing about what other people are passionate about and find inspiring in their own lives. 

Do you currently have any goals that you are working towards? Have you thought about whether they are in alignment with your values, or whether they contradict with any of your other values?