21 January 2024

“I will go to the gym 5 times a week” we have all proclaimed at one point or another in our lives, yet in 99% of cases, these words end up like farts in the wind…

I want, after all, to be the kind of person who maintains their cognitive and physical health. But going to the gym is but one metric of whether you are that kind of person. There are other ways to get there…

Setting yourself the gym-going goal is like treating the symptoms, instead of the disease. We want to be the kind of person who maintains their health, rather than being a gym-goer per se.

Therefore, a wiser approach is to ask ourselves: what would a person who embodies the value of maintaining their health do? Would they prefer lying on the couch instead of going for a walk? Would they prefer a short, HIIT workout at home over watching the telly? Questions like these form the basis for a reflective approach to embodying your values.

There are two advantages of this reflective approach.

First, it does not assume that you know the perfect metric for you to embody the value of maintaining health. Finding the perfect metric, if you are not the kind of person who deeply expresses that value, can be near-impossible, but on a small scale, it’s much easier to make that call. For instance, while it might be unclear what the best diet is for you to follow for the next 3 months to maintain health, it is much clearer whether you should replace your daily pizza with some whole foods. With such finer-grained approach, you can see how the value fits in your life and express it more authentically.

Second, the reflection can cause cognitive dissonance – you say you are the kind of person who is maintaining their health but your behaviours tell a different story – which can be motivating.

Maybe after hundreds of hours of reflection and experience, then you can set yourself goals. But, at that point, you are probably already the kind of person who embodies that value. And at that point, of what use is setting a goal to do something to get you to express a value, if the behaviours downstream of that value are already the default ones?