Systems over Goals: Set Yourself Up for Success
“A goal should scare you a little and excite you a lot.”
Joe Vitale
In 2019, I said my goals loud and proud for all of the internet to read – some of you all did too. In 2020, I am making some tweaks to and trying to re-frame the goal making process. Here are some actionable tips to help you examine the way you have (or have not) been making goals, your resolutions, and the overall quality of your follow through on the commitments you make to yourself.
With that, here are some new perspectives you can apply to your climbing goals in the coming year.
What Kind of Person are You?
Perhaps you have failed at sticking to your commitments in the past and you want to do better this time. In the past, you may have said “this is the year I will actually follow a training program”. And then life got in the way. Then you gave up. Now you are still climbing the same grades that you were two years ago and you are frustrated that you can’t follow through with commitments you make to yourself.
Maybe you have plenty of the motivation, but you don’t seem to understand how you can get yourself follow through. Might I suggest an eight question quiz to help determine your own tendencies around behavior modification? It will help you learn a bit about what makes you tick and help you to set yourself up for success. Perhaps it is not that you don’t have the motivation or the ability to achieve what you want to, maybe you simply have not designed your systems to your own unique habit-changing specifications. So take the quiz, find out how you work, and proceed from there.
Further Reading: Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin
On Keeping Your Goals to Yourself
In addition to understanding how you work in the context of achieving goals and altering your habits, another interesting idea that I am pondering is the usefulness of sharing my goals with other people.
Though I have given a select few a glimpse into what I want to tackle next year, I plan to keep the spray about what I want to achieve in 2020 to a minimum. Though I will still be sharing in the process, I am keeping the end goal to myself this year? Here is why.
Though some people need added external pressure, I find that with my sometimes overwhelming fear of failure, letting the world know about what I plan to achieve does not really help me at all.
However, if you are the sort of person that lacks intrinsic motivation and has found that external accountability helps you to succeed, then godspeed. But make sure that you don’t phrase the discussion of your goals in a way that makes you feel less accountable for putting in the work to achieve them.
The next topic I want to address is the idea of focusing on our systems and habits more than the goals themselves.
Related: How to Set Quality Goals
Habits, not Goals
Though having big objectives is important, having a framework for what habits or systems you want to build is critical to achieving them.
If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.
James Clear, Atomic Habits
Practically everyone has the goal of climbing harder in their next climbing season. Whether or not you succeed has little to do with the goal you set and a lot more to do with the plan you have in place to do so.
You may not have any big goals, but setting up habits like “I will do fifteen minutes of footwork drills at the beginning of my climbing sessions” will lead to improvements without being attached with some grand, long-term objective.
Personally, I like having big goals. However, making a goal is the easy part. Formulating a plan to execute is what takes effort.
Related Reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear
Simplifying for Success
Plans to reach our goals can vary in terms of complexity. If you are not participating in a training program right now, the odds that you are going to handle your training complexity going from zero to one hundred are statistically extremely low.
For those that have never followed a training plan before, you can likely get something out of making simple tweaks to your time in the gym. Here are a few ideas to get you started. Note that whether or not these suit you specifically, is up to you to determine.
- Add movement drills to your climbing warm-up
- Do the same hangboard session once a week for 8 weeks
- Go to the climbing gym three times per week
- Try any boulder that you do not flash at least five times
The list could go on forever. The point is, getting better at climbing doesn’t have to be complicated. If you know that you have failed at sticking to training plans before, then resolve to make small adjustments to your training, stick to them, and make changes once you stop seeing results.
This is not to say that getting better at climbing is easy. And eventually, your goals will necessitate increases in training complexity beyond the small tweaks to your sessions that are discussed above. That being said, if you don’t feel comfortable going big with a full-fledged training program. Start with small, manageable bites.
Please Start Measuring Something
Making small tweaks to your climbing session is a great way to get yourself headed in the right direction. However, if you don’t measure your progress, you really will not know if what you are doing is helping and when your progress is leveling off.
The first step in knowing that you want something in your climbing to change is to have a grasp on what your climbing consists of now. But if you have no idea how strong you are, what you consistently send, or how much climbing you have actually been doing, it is really difficult to do that.
Perhaps you are very new to climbing and all you need to do is go to the gym more to get better. However, you might be a veteran that truly needs to take a hard look at some serious finger training to break into the next grade.
Whatever your situation, some measurement will go a long way.
Depending on your current habits, maybe it is unrealistic to expect that you will become a detailed note taker that logs their training sessions like I do. If that’s you, fine. Meet yourself where you’re at, but please track something. Here are a few ideas for baby steps you can take to become a better tracker of your climbing and training sessions.
- Record every time you go climbing or train for climbing. Keep a tally. Bonus points if you separate days inside vs. days outside.
- Write one sentence about what you did, how it went, for how long, and the date for every time you train or climb in a notebook or excel sheet.
- Give every session a rating of perceived exertion (how tough the session was) on a scale of 1 to 10.
Once you get in the habit of recording something for each of your training sessions, get more detailed. If you really care about getting better at climbing, you need to keep track of what you are doing.
Related: Comprehensive Guide to Tracking your Climbing and Training
Shut Up and Crush It
So now, please go forward. Spray about it or don’t, but use the above to shift your mindset and crush next year. I am really excited for you and all the dreams you have. So please go make them a reality. See you at the gym.
Do you enjoy making goals? Is training something you are trying to be more disciplined about next year – leave a comment below and let’s discuss!
If you’d like to gain some insight into your strengths and weaknesses as a climber, check out my climbing theme song quiz! While it’s definitely a good time, it shines a light onto the aspects of your training and climbing that might be holding you back and keeping you in a plateau. And once you get your result, I’ll also send you some tips and tricks to help your training and climbing more effective and efficient!