2023 is underway now and most of us have probably already given up on our goals for the New Year! You are not alone though, a study in 2021 found that two-thirds of us give up our New Year’s Resolutions within a month!
There can be many reasons for this, but in my experience, it more often than not is down to unrealistic and unachievable goal setting. “I’m going to go to the gym every day”. “I’m going to practice my scales for an hour every day”. “I’m going to do 10,000 steps every day” etc etc etc.
In all of those cases, the goal is crazy, unless you are already doing something similar. Take 10,000 steps a day. You get a FitBit for Christmas (I did) and you set your goal to 10,000 steps a day (as seems to be recommended). After the first week, you are only managing 5,000 steps. After 2 weeks, still 5,000 steps. After three, you just get disheartened because you realise your lifestyle means (in your mind) that you can’t even do 10,000 a day, it’s impossible.
Of course, it isn’t impossible, it is just unrealistic. You are naturally taking 5,000 steps a day, it is not likely that just because you got a step counter you will be able to double that amount overnight. You need to plan that kind of change and you need to set yourself incremental goals that are more achievable!
That is where AMP may be able to help.
What the heck is AMP?
Well, glad you asked. AMP stands for Achievable, Measurable Progressible. Yes, progressible is a word… in some dictionaries!
To explain this, I will just break each one down and then go back to how this would work with the 10,000 step goal.
Achievable
The first thing to do when setting goals is to decide if it is possible. Sounds daft, but if your goal is to walk on the moon and you are a 45-year-old, overweight computer geek – is that really realistic and achievable?? No, probably not! I was going to add realism to the start of this little acronym, but I already have a RAMP framework 😉
Once you have decided that your goal can be achieved, you must figure out how to break down the macro goal into smaller micro-goals, each of which should be incrementally achievable. This means that as we increment our micro goals targets, they remain achievable.
Measurable
So how do we decide if a goal is incrementally achievable? Well, first we need to be able to measure something! In the case of steps per day, we can do that with a step counter. Next, we need to decide what our starting point is. With your steps, take an average number of steps you are taking per day. Day one is 5000, day 2: 5500, day 3: 5200 etc. The average is your starting point, in our case we will say 5,000 steps a day.
Progressible
And this is where progressible comes in. Take a look at the variance. What is the most you have naturally done? In this case, it may be 5,500, so our variance is 500. So we set our first micro goal as half of this – 5250 steps – because we know that can be achieved (you already did it), but it is not too much. 5,500 may have been an odd freak incident that is currently impractical to replicate straight away.
Now we kick in our incremental/progressible goals. So the first week has a goal of 5,250 daily steps. Our next goal should be incrementally and achievably larger than this. 5,500 (as again, we know this is possible). The week after that, 5,750, then 6,000 and so on – until we hit the macro goal of 10,000. Of course, we don’t have to stop there – we could then make a new goal of 20,000 and create larger jumps of 500 steps to get there. Of course, there are other practical limits to this, but you get what I mean.
In a Nut Shell
So put simply, we break our macro goal into achievable micro goals. We ensure that we have measured our baseline and have a way to measure our progress. We create progressible goals, each of which can be measured and achieved. We smash our goals and move on to become an astronaut!
Bosh!
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