We often get told about goal setting principles - look anywhere and you’ll be told to create goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. And that’s all good advice, but applying it in real life is not always easy. It takes knowing exactly what you want and what you can achieve in what timeline. Quite frankly, having to do all that before I even get started is a bit of a motivation killer for me. I’m motivated by results, so I would like to offer a different perspective. This is the story of how I started setting myself goals in real life.
My background in sports
I grew up in Portugal, where football is king, so most of our PE classes were spent running in near-freezing temperatures, followed by an hour and a half of football. Most of my class mates were avid football players - some even made a career out of it! They trained multiple times a week, played in junior championships, and were so skilled that people like me barely touched the ball. I was that kid you see in movies always being picked last when they’re picking teams! Football games for me meant running up and down the field without much participation.
As if that wasn’t enough, I would also be forced to take part in cross-country competitions and, even after all that running up and down the field, still come very close to last.
I hated it.
Outside of PE, I played basketball with my friends daily and competed in 3x3 basketball school tournaments at a national level. I also spent a lot of time cycling and going on long walks with friends and family, but the PE experience was so negative that it completely overshadowed my personal experience and I was convinced that I didn’t like - and wasn’t good at - sports. At this point, I didn’t yet know that my PE experience of nearly 12 years didn’t define me. For a long time, I let that experience shape how I viewed myself not only in sports, but in general - as someone who wasn’t good enough and who would never win anything. A voice in my head always asked: ”Why even try if I already know I’m not good enough?”.
But looking back, it’s crystal clear that:
- In PE, I was forced to do something I didn’t enjoy. Outside PE, I was doing something I loved doing for fun - and the fitness benefits were just a happy side effect.
- In PE, I didn’t feel psychologically safe. I was picked last, excluded, and constantly compared myself to others. I felt inferior, and like I was never going to be good enough. Outside PE, I was amongst friends who cared about teamwork and inclusion. In basketball everyone got a turn; on bike rides we cycled together or waited for each other - I wasn’t perfect but I also never felt like I had to be.
That “Why even try?” mindset followed me into adulthood. I started cutting back on sports, tried joining a university handball team and, yet again, kept running up and down the field with close to no involvement. I kept comparing myself to others, felt inadequate and dropped out.
With prolonged lengths of time sitting while I was studying, and close to no exercise, various pains and aches started to appear on my back, neck and knees. These pains made me want to exercise even less.
When I moved to the UK to finish university and start working things got worse. My diet slipped, and taking a 9-to-5 job meant longer hours at my desk. Exercise became extremely inconsistent, with periods of excessive working out that my body wasn’t conditioned to handle, only to injure myself and fall back into inactivity. The pains got worse. Simply walking made my knees and hips hurt. Standing for too long made my lower back hurt so badly that I wouldn’t be able to walk myself to bed at night. My stomach lining was so inflamed that I would have episodes of extreme pain and on several occasions almost fainted on my way to work.
I hit 70kg with ~33% body fat.
I believed that my muscular pains could only be solved with massages, and that my stomach issues would clear up with medicine, but they both kept returning.
I was stuck in two loops. A loop of setting myself fitness goals that were too high for my capabilities and feeling out of place or injuring myself and going back to inactivity, and a loop of treating the symptoms of my poor habits rather than addressing the root causes.
The turning point
In a random conversation about doughnuts, my friends asked me to guess how many calories a doughnut had. 1,000 calories seemed like a good guess (for reference, your average glazed doughnut has ~200kcal) - to this day, they still make fun of me for it. That’s when I realised just how clueless I was about nutrition.
On the 1st January 2020, sitting in a coffee shop in Copenhagen and thinking about my overdue weight loss New Year’s resolution, I stumbled upon an inspirational story about a woman who went on a journey to lose weight and work on her mental well-being. She advocated for small changes and achievable goals that kept her motivated throughout her journey. And she wasn’t trying to be like anyone else; she was simply working to be a better version of herself. Something clicked.
These ideas of small sustainable changes/habits, bettering ourselves and thinking about cumulative long-term growth gave me a whole new perspective and made me, for the first time, feel that I had been doing it all wrong and that this time I was equipped with the right mindset to turn my life around.
A new chapter
I started counting calories, which gradually helped me build an awareness of how many calories were in food and allowed me to make more intentional choices. I made small sustainable changes in the kitchen that helped me decrease my calorie intake - like swapping cooking fats for lower calorie alternatives, snacking on fruit instead of sugary snacks, and upping my protein intake.
I continued to enjoy foods I loved that were more calorie dense, but I had them in smaller portions. Not being extreme and completely cutting things out of my diet made the change smaller and sustainable. I had chocolate every day, so I didn’t miss having it, but I would only have half or a quarter rather than having the whole thing. I would have a few fries from my boyfriend’s portion (with permission!) but I wouldn’t order my own and I would have a bite of his dessert so I could still try it without having a full portion. I became aware of how many calories alcohol had and started swapping it for sugar-free sodas. Over time, alcohol became “not worth the calories” and is now a rarity in my life, even when I go out.
I lost 14kg.
To my surprise, my stomach pains disappeared, and my energy levels improved. The goal was to lose weight, but this new-found mindset showed me that many other benefits would follow if I made small and gradual changes and I focused on me rather than comparing myself to others.
Along the way, I reintroduced low-impact and low-volume (but consistent) exercise: cycling and shoulder physio (for an injury acquired in my past life of inconsistent over-training).
As I settled into these new sustainable habits, and started achieving my goals, I felt unstoppable. I started creating more goals and more habits, and started becoming more aware of my body and how it worked - what made it ache and what made it feel healthier. With the help of my physiotherapist, I started realising that majority of my pains were due to muscles that were overcompensating for other weak muscles and getting too tight, so I started stretching - stretching was life changing! No more knee pains, no more incapacitating back pain, and a whole new skill unlocked that allowed me to work on strengthening the weak muscles without injuring the surrounding areas.
With the pains going away, a balanced sustainable diet and a healthy mindset, I started increasing exercise gradually and got my passion for cycling back on track with a bigger focus on improving my performance.
Small sustainable changes
In 2020, I didn’t set out to lose 14kg - I started with a goal to lose 5kg (with no timeline attached to it!). When I hit that goal, it felt incredible, so I decided to set another.
In 2021, I didn’t try to do 100km bike rides. I stayed consistent and slowly increased the load and followed a structured plan. 4 years later, I have increased my FTP by ~70% and have done several events above 100km.
4 years later, following the same mental model, I’m much fitter, have a much more balanced diet, took my driving license and navigated a few different job roles at work.
I want to explore what else my body can do and I’m in awe of people who do triathlons, but if I were to pick up a generic triathlon plan and start today, in no time I would either feel inadequate or injure myself and go back to square one. Instead, I’m focusing on me - why would I feel inadequate or why would I injure myself? There are several answers but one really jumps out: my swimming is atrocious - until a month ago, I couldn’t even hold my breath under water! So my current goal is to improve my swimming technique. In the space of two weeks, I not only learned to hold my breath under water, but also to swim breaststroke with the correct breathing technique. Three weeks in, I managed to do something that resembled front crawl. I always thought not being able to hold my breath under water defined me and would be a constant in my life, but I keep being amazed by what I can achieve when I break down goals into small sustainable habits and stay consistent.
Comparing me to myself
When change is sustainable, progress can often be hard to see, because it comes in small increments and you only get to see it when you intentionally look back at where you started and notice how far you’ve come. I was warned about this, so I kept track of things that would make it easier for me to see my progress and stay motivated. I kept a log of my weight and body composition, took progress pictures, tracked how much weight I was using on each weight lifting set, and kept track of my FTP. I was finally comparing me to myself.
Our levels of energy oscillate, our body weight changes drastically from one day to the next, and our mental energy is not always there. Some days, my 100% didn’t look as strong as the week before, but I was measuring trends and I could see them improve - that’s all that mattered. It was about consistency over time. I learned that sustainable habits - not perfection - create long-term results. If you’ve built healthy sustainable habits that you’re able to be consistent with, having an unhealthy meal or skipping one workout is not failure - it’s an exception. One unhealthy meal won’t make you overweight, but a habit of eating an unhealthy diet and not exercising will. And similarly, one healthy meal won’t make you healthy and lean, but a habit of eating healthy and exercising most likely will. In the picture below, you can see a collage of my weight tracking from January to October 2020. It’s easy to see that in July, during my summer holiday, my routine was disrupted and I indulged in many tasty treats abroad, but I wasn’t worried because I knew that once I got back home, I would quickly come back to my sustainable routine and get back on track.
How this applied to my career
When asked in 2018 about my career ambitions, I said my goal was to be a C-level, but I had no idea how to get there. I didn’t know where to start and neither did people around me - I was stuck with no direction. People, with the best intentions, kept telling me “Look at the people you really admire and try to be more like them. Find your role model.” So I kept looking up to people I admired, who were on a completely different level from mine, and the gap was so big that I kept feeling inadequate and not knowing how to be like them.
Thankfully, I crossed paths with great mentors - leaders who I really admire and from whom I have learnt an incredible amount. They have created a safe space for me to evaluate my strengths and weaknesses, and they helped guide me on the journey to become a better version of myself rather than someone else. When I started focusing on me and the things I enjoyed doing, my career took a turn.
I understood what made me happy (solving problems and helping others) and I realised that by doing what I loved, my growth - both personal and professional - started to flourish naturally.
I applied the same principles from my fitness life to my work life - made small changes, tried different things and kept getting motivated by the results of my actions. Once I stopped obsessing about a level well above mine and I started focusing on me and on what made me happy, my career started to organically be filled with growth and motivation - even when the job title wasn’t changing.
Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing. Every failure, every twist, and every moment of self-doubt has turned me into who I am today. I’m no longer sitting and waiting for someone else to pick me for their team; I’m picking myself and building my own path and, as a consequence, growing and being picked by people who believe in me.