How to Change Your Life in 3 Months: Goal-Setting Science

today we're going through a tried and tested evidence-based seven-step goal-setting framework to set you up for success or whatever your goals are it's never too late to set new goals or update our existing ones though the way that we set and pursue those goals can actually have a huge impact on whether or not we can achieve them and some common goal setting practices can actually be harmful rather than helpful to Our Success while I was studying medicine at Cambridge I spent dozens of hours reading books articles and Studies by experts in the field about effective goal setting as getting this right is actually really important when piloting a plane a one degree change in trajectory can change the Final Destination by literally thousands of miles and maybe even ending up in a completely different continent in the same way tiny shifts to the aims and the systems we set ourselves can have a huge influence on the outcome of Our Lives over time and ultimately failing to plan is planning to fail so in this video I'll first explain the evidence-based goal setting strategies I'll break down the seven step framework and then I'll show you how I can put this into practice in your own life by using my 2023 goals as an example if you're new here my name is Izzy I'm a Cambridge graduate and a doctor working in London so without further Ado let's get into the video there's a careful balance to be struck while setting goals between focusing on the end destination to use that as a compass versus enjoying the actual journey to get there it's almost like a yin yang balance between looking to change yourself or move towards something different versus accepting yourself just as you are in the present moment both of these perspectives are essential and generally on the day-to-day I tend to focus on the journey and enjoying the moment and enjoying the present but periodically reviewing our goals and updating them can really help set the direction for that Journey I'm synthesizing a lot of the information in this video from experts and articles and studies which I'll link Down Below in the description if you're interested in the original Source the first principle of setting goals is to make sure that the goals that you set are moderate yet still meaningful what this means is that don't set goals that are either too easy or too hard and this sounds really obvious but we often fall into this trap all the time if goals are too easy they don't actually inspire us to really be ambitious and strive for them but if they're too hard they just feel completely overwhelming there are a number of psychological studies that actually back this up and show that moderate goals are actually the most effective for prompting goal directed Behavior with moderate goals meaning that they are still a challenge and slightly Beyond where you are now but they're definitely realistic and they're still meaningful the second key principle is narrowing your focus down this essentially means not setting too many goals because if we set too many goals our brains can't actually keep track of all of those and make sure that we actually achieve all of them by spreading ourselves too thinly we just reduce the chances of us succeeding at any of them it's okay to set loads of different goals but make sure that you also know exactly which ones are the ones that are most important to you and are the ones that you'll sacrifice the others for life can get crazy sometimes and things will probably come up that mean that you have to compromise on any routines or goals that you've set and if you know your priorities then you'll be able to protect those and make sure that those goals actually happen ideally we would want to narrow our Focus to three or fewer goals that are really our top priorities for any given time and this gives us the best chance of truly being able to give them the time that they deserve the third principle is goal specificity which means being really clear about your concrete action steps that you can take along with implementation intentions and what your next steps will be this means knowing what success looks like and what achieving that goal actually means to you and this is essential because if you don't know what achieving your goal actually means then how on Earth are you supposed to even begin to move towards that by being specific with either the inputs or the outputs for our goals this allows us to really actually make meaningful progress towards them and actually be able to identify the next step the fourth principle is dynamically reviewing your goals as you go along assess and review regularly for your highest priority goals you want to be be assessing and reviewing around once a week and for other goals that are a slightly lower priority or more in the background maybe once a month would be enough these reviews give us the opportunity to assess how we're doing with our goal how we're progressing towards it and also any changes that we need to make based on any circumstances that have changed or new information or new priorities which means that we can shift our goals over time and it can adapt dynamically to our lifestyle the main thing I'd like to say with this is to be kind to yourself try not to beat yourself up and just bear in mind that there are so many other contextual factors and lifestyle circumstances that can change and this context is a huge influence on whether or not we can actually achieve what we set out to do it also might actually reflect a different structure of your priorities so for me for example if I realize that I'm not hitting one of my goals repeatedly then maybe I need to actually examine why I'm doing that goal and if I really actually think it's meaningful to me so try to approach these reviews from almost a third person objective viewer rather than from yourself almost with the spirit of curiosity as to how things have gone rather than trying to criticize yourself the fifth principle is actually where the literature diverges quite significantly from many common practices in goal setting which is actually over visualizing success or the big wins isn't actually particularly good at motivating us towards our goals necessarily and sometimes what's more useful is to actually visualize what it would look and feel like to fail at one of your goals the literature talks about how if you over visualize the success of achieving a goal repeatedly every time you want to motivate yourself to do it you actually receive a dopamine hit each time you visualize that success and that actually reduces how much you're willing to strive towards the goal on the other hand if you visualize how it would feel if you didn't actually achieve the goal and you didn't put the work in towards the goal that can be much more motivating I know this could come across as a little bit Doom and Gloom but actually it's not about beating yourself up with the images of failure repeatedly but it's just about thinking about okay what if I actually didn't put in the work towards this goal am I happy with that outcome how would I feel about that and the reason why this works is because it activates a part of the brain called the amygdala which is responsible for regulating emotions like fear and in a way a little bit of healthy fear of disappointing yourself or letting yourself down can be helpful principle number six is to not overwhelm yourself add in a little bit of buffer time in your schedules and don't try to overload your schedule with too many goals and too many things to do because ultimately that may just paralyze you and then if something comes up in life and things get busy then your goals immediately get thrown out the window so this is combining both of the principles number one and two by being realistic and having a moderate and meaningful goal and combining that with focusing on just a couple of goals that you can really take care of and really make them happen I've got a bunch of other tips for how to maximize success and actually pursuing a goal but I think I'll save that for another video otherwise this one might get a bit too long so now for the bit that you've all been waiting for the intentional goal setting framework without incorporates these evidence-based techniques and principles into one little seven step framework these seven steps comprise of three pairs of questions plus one extra Sprint breakdown at the end this is a system that I came up with over time synthesizing the principles I talked about earlier and I hope that you'll find it helpful and effective your own goal setting too I'm not going to touch on exactly which goals you should choose to focus on or how to choose those goals I'll leave that down to you because it's a very personal decision I'll just talk about the framework that you can use for actually setting and fleshing out those goals with Milestones that you can work towards and also input goals and habits that you can build into your daily routines so I use notion to organize my goals and I also use my bullet Journal as well I sort of write down my goals at the front of my bullet Journal each year and I also update to specific Pages for specific goals that I have I also create a little habit tracker in my bullet Journal where I track all of the little like micro goals and daily habits that I want to work towards each year and I update that every single month in addition I also use notion and I also have a notion template which I will pop in the description below in case you want to use that for your own goals the first thing we want to ask is why what is our motivation what are the things that learning this new skill or achieving this goal will unlock for us what will we discover in the process of working towards it and I know earlier I said that we shouldn't Focus too much on the big success and we shouldn't visualize that too much but the one time when it's actually relevant is when you're actually setting the goal at the initial outset and it's okay to visualize now and to really picture why you want to achieve this and what this means to you just avoid repeatedly visualizing the big success and what that would feel like over and over again every time you want to work towards the goal because that's actually counterproductive in many cases so this is my goal setting for 2023 and I've plonked my little goals down the left hand side here and actually I have a fair few goals this year and I've numbered them because the first goal is take care of my health and well-being which is a very broad umbrella goal which has lots of sub goals underneath it and like habits underneath it that are like minor goals so I would just number them one a one B Etc so let's take the example of me wanting to improve my Chinese both my Mandarin and Cantonese this year this would open up opportunities for traveling to China or chinese-speaking countries it would open up opportunities to speak to my Chinese speaking relatives specifically Cantonese speaking as I'm half Chinese but I have sort of lost touch with the language and culture on that side of my family a little bit it would be amazing to be able to reconnect with them I'd also love to watch some Chinese TV and be able to engage with all of that side of the culture and cheesy TV and and music and all that kind of thing so that's how I'd feel meaningful to me and that's why I want to achieve it the next thing you want to ask yourself is the flip side of that is what will happen if I actually don't work towards the school and if I don't achieve it this links into the negative visualization that we talked about earlier how actually imagining if I don't work on my Chinese what will I lose so again for this one visualize exactly how it would feel and what it would look like in a few different cases if you didn't manage to work towards this goal for me I will never truly be able to speak Chinese fluently and I will deny myself the opportunities to connect with native speakers and also my relatives I will probably always regret this and feel unfulfilled in some way as I probably recognize deep down that if I work towards this I can achieve it I know it's actually a realistic goal maybe I won't sound native maybe I won't sound XYZ but at least I could have a conversation with someone in Chinese I know that I have that potential within me and so then it would feel disappointing in some way and I'd feel like I had denied myself this opportunity this first pair of questions is really important to balance up the Two Worlds where we either achieve our goal or we don't achieve our goal and how we feel and what the world looks like in each of those instances so that we can really see the difference and see how it's meaningful to work towards this thing because any goal that is is truly meaningful will be a challenge and it will take effort and time and energy and we need to feel the motivation to actually be able to put that in the next question to ask yourself is what could hinder me from achieving my goal this is really important because identifying obstacles to achieving something in advance can help us to more easily know what to do when these obstacles actually arise it gives us an opportunity ahead of time in order to plan how we can mitigate and also then compensate for any of these hurdles and problems that may arise so I've titled this hindrances what could hinder me so for me for Chinese it is feeling too busy with other things I have a full-time job I also do YouTube sometimes I like to hang out with friends and family along with going to the gym and doing yoga and meditation and journaling and all of this can feel like a bit too much so often in the past I've actually failed to achieve my Chinese learning goals because I've had so much other stuff going on and in the past I've often de-prioritized my Chinese learning compared to these other goals that I wanted to work on and that's completely fine and it's just a part of life really but it's just understanding that is actually a potential hurdle that I will need to get over another issue is not making time for it feeling tired or not having a good environment for working on it so often when I learn Chinese I like to say the Chinese words out loud to practice that muscle memory but I also don't like it to be a noisy environment because then I won't be able to focus and I also won't be able to clearly hear any audio of a native speaker pronouncing the sentence so in a way I need a quiet environment where I'm on my own in order to study Chinese once we've identified the hurdles we can tackle them by figuring out what can actually help us things that could help us are in terms of people that could encourage us accountability buddies ways that we can make it fun ways that we can schedule it in and ways that we can feel a sense of power and ownership over a certain goal so for Chinese for me I've put that I can block out time in the calendar for intensive sessions schedule speaking sessions in advance and then let me add a couple of more here so I'm also going to have it stack podcast listening with my morning routine and do Anki flash cards on the tube and I'm also going to try to get an accountability value for this so maybe my sister because she's also hoping to learn Chinese as well in the New Year this pair of questions helps us to identify both the obstacles and also the things that can support us in achieving our goals so we can clearly identify these and then just be aware of them by writing these down at the start we actually consciously think of them and then are subconsciously attuned to noticing them in our environments when they crop up next we want to ask ourselves what our input goal will be so an input goal is essentially what you have complete control over one reason why I find goal setting sometimes a little bit intimidating is because often we set output goals for example last year at the start of the Year during a milliseconds apart podcast episode which is a podcast that I sometimes do with my two friends Matt and Rory Rory set the goal for me to hit 50 000 subscribers by the end of 2022. I unexpectedly exceeded this with around 180 or 190 000 subscribers by the end of 2022 but at the time at the start of 2022 I thought this was a unattainable in my mind and B was also a goal that I didn't really have much control over because it was almost an outcome rather than an input that I could do so an input goal is essentially something that you should have complete control over so an input goal would for example be spending two hours working on a YouTube video and that is something I have complete control over I know I can sit down and I can work on making a YouTube video however a certain number of subscribers by the end of the year is not something that's directly in my control sure I can try to make good videos that maybe bring value to people and then more people like to watch the videos but ultimately it's something that's beyond my control and that's a little bit scary to tie a goal to so I like to separate it into input goals and output goals that we can track and for me personally the way I view it is if I've achieved my input goal then I'm happy with what I've done and in my eyes I've done all that I can to achieve my goal the output goals more help with a direction or they're kind of a benchmark that I can work towards something to strive for because attaching my emotional state and how I feel about whether I've achieved the goal or not or succeeded or not to an outcome can be quite unhelpful so my input goal for Chinese is that every single day I'll listen to an episode of a Chinese podcast and also do my Anki flashcards the second part is that every single week I will do either two chapters of the hsk 5 textbook or one chapter of this textbook and one module of the Kanto to Mando blueprint course which is essentially a course that helps you sort of convert between Mandarin and Cantonese I personally have a Cantonese background however my Cantonese is really bad as I haven't spoken it since I was literally four years old and since I've been studying Mandarin and more intensively my Mandarin is actually better than my Cantonese so I'll be using the course almost in Reverse to learn Cantonese from Mandarin but you can sort of use it either way if you're interested in checking out the course then I'll leave a link down below you can use a code Izzy Sealy for a five percent discount and finally every single week I'll do one hour speaking practice along with an input goal you can add an implementation intention which is essentially a way that you visualize exactly how you're going to achieve that goal and actually do the input so for me for Chinese I set the intention that every single morning I will implement this plan by listening to my daily Chinese podcast while I do my morning routine so brushing my teeth and doing my skincare Etc and by habit stacking that helps me make this implementation intention where I know exactly when and where I'm going to do this certain activity that leads towards my goal Building Systems like this as a default is almost a great backup in the cases where we're tired or busy and we can just fall back to our defaults and actually our defaults are still taking us in the right direction the next thing is the output goal for me this is achieving a certain level of proficiency and for me I've set hsk 5 as The Benchmark to hopefully achieve by approximately September I've also put in a little optional goal of maybe traveling to China if possible depending on covered restrictions etc for me I don't always set an output goal for everything so for example for some of my health goals over here at the top I actually haven't set an output goal for them because actually it's more important that I build up the habit and the systems to actually maintain my health in these ways rather than actually aiming for any measurable goal that can be Quantified in any specific way this is why I find smart goals not particularly helpful you might have heard of smart goals as another framework for goal setting but those are only useful in really specific circumstances where there's a very quantifiable outcome that you actually want so for example sleeping or nutrition or meditation journaling that aren't actually specific quantifiable goals that I want as an output things like yoga as well there aren't really but I just sort of made up some that's why I've put the output goals are kind of optional at least to me because I find the input goals are much more impactful on the day-to-day which is where the progress really gets made this input output method can help you to identify two ways of looking at your goal and encourages you to be very specific about your goals which is again one of the key principles in effect active goal setting finally bringing it all together is a column I like to call the breakdown which is essentially where you break down your goal into Sprints where you can achieve a small mini sub goal or like a little chunk of the goal in a shorter amount of time so this is usually something that will take between a few days or maybe one day to maximum maybe a month and so I'll set myself a few of these little goals just so that every single week or every single month I can check in on whether or not I'm achieving these sub goals and making progress towards the overall goal so that's my complete system for evidence-based goal setting I hope you found this video useful or entertaining in some kind of way if you enjoyed this video I think you might like this video over here where I talk about other systems that we can put into place to help us live our best lives let me know in the comments below what goals you have and if you found any other goal setting techniques useful or helpful thank you so much for watching take care of yourself and remember that the journey is the destination I'll see you in the next video bye oops I just banged my hand on my laptop ow

Channel: Dr. Izzy Sealey

Views: 206,649

Keywords: cambridge university, university of cambridge, cambridge medical student, doctor, izzy sealey, issy sealey, izzy sealy, learn mandarin, learn chinese, goal setting

Id: z_1UlprAcJg

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2023