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College TNT
Helping students and families navigate to and through college!
College TNT
Effective Goal Setting: How "Doing the Reps" and Planning Your Goals is the Secret Sauce Part 2
In part 2 of effective goal setting, you will unlock the secrets to achieving your personal and academic goals with more ease and consistency. Imagine having a proven strategy that elevates your success rate to a whopping 91%. Join me, Jen, on College TNT as I guide you through the transformative power of "doing the reps" and setting implementation intentions (fancy words for planning!). This technique involves planning your actions with specifics on time and location to supercharge your goal attainment. Our conversation also delves into embracing challenges head-on and nurturing a mindset that finds joy in the journey, not just the destination.
Embark on a metaphorical mountain climb with me, as we explore how to celebrate and appreciate the small victories that pave your way to bigger successes. This episode is your roadmap to not just starting the new year strong but finishing it with a sense of accomplishment across academics, relationships, and teamwork. With practical tips and heartfelt encouragement, I am here to support your ascent toward your personal peaks. Connect with me on Instagram and Facebook to share your progress and insights—let's celebrate each step together!
For more about me - my experience and my speaking, check out the links below.
You can reach me at jen@firstgenfm.com.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenschoen/
https://www.firstgenfm.com/speaker-high-school-educators-students-parents
Hello and welcome back, or welcome to College TNT, a podcast and YouTube video series that is designed to get you to and through college. That's what the TNT stands for. My job as Jennifer Schoen call me Jen is to help prepare you for college, help you navigate the college admissions process and then make a smooth transition through your first year of college. So that's what I'm here to talk about today and every day. Hey, I'm Jen with College TNT and I'm back with some tips of part two, which is the formula for accomplishing your goals in the new year. So we had talked about writing down your goals and making them goals that you can measure, so that you have a time on them and that you know what it will look like when you achieve them will look like when you achieve them. But I want to talk about probably one of the most important steps, which is the least exciting step, but it is the most important. It is called doing the reps, like doing what you need to over and over. It is tedious, it is not fun, it is boring, but it's really important to getting done. What it is you want to get done, so it's necessary. It's the secret sauce let's say Secret sauce for success. I like that. Say that three times fast in meeting your goals, and what it is is it's the small gains that you're going to do each day, every day, each week, each month, depending on what your goals are, to get you to that ultimate goal. So one strategy that I've read about, I've learned about, I've listened to podcasts about, is called setting an implementation intention, and you know that's the research right Implementation intention. It sounds like super serious, but basically what it is. It's making a plan, okay, and it's writing down your plan and this, like I said, this is research backed, and the beautiful thing about implementation intention is that it's very simple and I'm going to look at my notes here to make sure I get this right. You want to write down those small steps that are going to help you set your goals and you want to do it in this way. I will insert the rep at this time in this place. So, let's say, I want to drink more water. I will drink more water every morning at 8 am in the kitchen by the coffee maker. There you have it. That's everything. You're going to put that up there so you could do it, and it just simplifies it and sets up a plan. It could be for you. I'm going to study my math. I'm going to do my math homework every evening at 8 pm for 30 minutes at my desk or at the kitchen table or at the library, wherever that might be. But set up those intentions. That helps you plan and you may say, well, really write this down. I have to write it that way.
Speaker 1:Again, this research says that when people were given options of either just learning about why it was important to do this, like why is math important, why, why should you need to be a good writer in order to communicate well with other people or they just had to track when they were doing certain things yes, I, I studied today at this time and then I studied the next day that that worked. You know, about 45 50 percent of people accomplished their goals. But when people did this implementation intention I'm talking about 91 percent of the folks who wrote it that way reached their goals and I think that's pretty amazing. Like I'm going to go with the 91 percent of the folks who are doing the reps, who are writing it down and are following basically what the research says to find success. So, doing the reps, like I said, it is not boring. Nobody goes, you know, to the gym and says, oh, I can't wait to do like three sets of five reps with this, you know, 20 pound weight. Nobody gets really excited about that, or maybe I should say, not a lot of people get really excited about it, because there are people who will be like, yeah, I'm going to the gym, but for a lot of other people especially if you as a student or as a parent, if you're watching your students do this, they're working on something. It's going to be hard work, and so this is where it really pays off. Anybody that's successful is probably doing these reps, but you're not seeing it. You may be seeing the gains and the big leaps, but they're doing these small steps in the background.
Speaker 1:The other thing I think is important is that we're hardwired to kind of run away from pain, which makes a lot of sense in how we evolved. And so when you're going into doing this and you're about to sit down and do something that's hard, say to yourself I know this is hard, I know this might not be a really fun time for me, but I'm going to do it anyway. And again, research has shown that actually lowers your resistance level a bit once you acknowledge that you're going in to do something that's a little hard. So, whether it's math or writing, or building relationships or having conversations with your students or students having conversations with your parents, do the reps and that is what's going to get you to whatever those goals are that you set. That we talked about the last episode, so the next step of the six so I talked about three in the previous one four is doing the reps.
Speaker 1:Five is making it as easy and fun as you can. Sometimes you know it's going to be just showing up and that's a big deal. You should reward yourself, appreciate yourself for just showing up, especially if you're doing something that's hard for you and for everybody that's different. So don't compare yourself to your hard, to someone else's hard, because we all have different levels of difficulty that you know stress us out or make things harder for us. So do not compare. Just think about yourself and do what you need to do to reach your goals. So make it as easy as possible, make it fun if you can.
Speaker 1:You've probably heard this before If you want to exercise first thing in the morning, then lay out your exercise clothes. That way you don't have to make any decision. It's right there, you put them on, you go, it's done for you, and anything you can do to help yourself not have to make a decision when things are hard is really helpful. I don't know that that makes a lot of sense. Let me try to explain that. So, laying out the clothes, you don't have to make a decision. If you have your book open for the next chapter you want to read, all you have to do is sit down. Really easy, it's like it's right there for you. If you're going to have to write a paper the night before, put your research notes right there, or have the tab open on your computer with the space that you're going to look at, the website that you're going to look at, or have your computer open and just ready to go with the blank page so you can just sit down and write, take away some of the steps and set yourself up for success For you.
Speaker 1:It might be, you know, putting a post-it note to remind you to do something, so then it's out of your head, but it's right there where you can see it. It may be that just you set reminders. I use my watch all the time. I'm always telling it like set a reminder to you know, have lunch at this time after this meeting, or, you know, set a reminder to send an email about this event that you make sure you want to go to. So, whatever works for you, those are the things that you want to work on, and you may not know what that is yet.
Speaker 1:But try different strategies. Try post-it notes, try reminders. If you're a planner person, put it in your planner. If you can set things up, set up your area, your desk, your space that you're just all ready to go, your bag, whatever that may be. Set that up. So when it's time for you to get the hard work done, you've done some of the steps ahead of time. So it's much easier for you to dive in and remember, just tell yourself this is hard, but I'm going to do it anyway, and that really does help lower the resistance. So make it easy wherever you can when you're doing the reps.
Speaker 1:And then, lastly, is just don't quit. Don't quit. If you have someplace a goal that you want to reach and you're putting in the reps. It may be a while before you see any success. You know, I played field hockey and lacrosse. I played a musical instrument and you don't just sit down and be like I am a virtuoso, now I will play this beautiful piece of music, you know. Or now I will play this song that I've always wanted to play on the French horn. Or I want to be a great athlete, so I just run out in the field and suddenly I'm great. No, you're winded. You're trying to learn new skills. Give yourself the chance to learn them and don't quit when it gets hard. Keep going, Even a 1% increase. If you do that consistently over time, that's going to build and build and build and suddenly you'll be like wow, I'm good at this, or I'm so much better at this.
Speaker 1:I always encourage you look back down the mountain that you're climbing. Your goal is up here. That's you climbing the mountain, you're going, you're going, you're going to climb the mountain. Right, don't forget to turn around sometimes to see where you came from and appreciate that even though the steps are small, when you add them together, you're they are very powerful in getting you to where you want to go. So that's the rest of it.
Speaker 1:That's part two of my steps for success, my formula for reaching your goals in the new year as a student, to get the grades you want to grade, to talk with the people, build the relationships you want to build, do well on any teams that you're part of, organizations you're in, and if you do these things, if you follow this formula, I know that you will find success. I have total faith in you. So thanks for joining me today and, as always, you can follow me on college underscore TNT at Instagram or at college TNT on Facebook, and I would love to have you connect with me and tell me more about what it is you want to hear about. Thanks again for joining me today. Bye now, thank you.