Last Updated on April 12, 2017 by Michael Brockbank
Confidence can be a powerful tool in any situation. Whether you’re trying to lose weight or want to excel at your career, it’s all about how you feel about yourself. Unfortunately, many of us have problems developing that sense of confidence. I know I still battle with it for certain things in my life. However, I’ve been slowly reclaiming it through micro goals. Here is how these work.
What Are Micro Goals?
Micro Goals are small, easily achievable objectives you set for yourself that feed into a main end result. For instance, a micro goal would be to decrease your caloric intake everyday to meet the primary objective of losing 80 pounds. Instead of focusing on the main point, your attention is focused on the smaller and easier to achieve aspect.
This doesn’t just work for losing weight or being healthy, either. In fact, micro goals can help you build confidence in just about anything in life. It’s simply a way to take a seemingly overwhelming task and break it up to something that is more manageable.
How Do Micro Goals Improve Confidence?
Setting a micro goal doesn’t mean that you’re avoiding the end result as a whole. It gives you several smaller pieces to the puzzle that fit together easier than trying to do the whole thing all at once.
For example, I still need to lose 56 pounds to reach my goal weight. Instead of trying to blast through all that fat, I break it down to what I need to achieve for today. This is done through keeping my calories in the green on MyFitnessPal and making sure I get a certain amount of activity for the day.
How does this improve your level of confidence?
Pat-on-the-Back Syndrome
People thrive on recognition, even if it’s just from themselves. It’s a good feeling when you achieve a goal that you set. And it’s this feeling that you need to focus on. Any micro goal, no matter how small, can seem like an incredible boost to your self-esteem.
It’s all about the sense of pride you get when you know you’ve accomplished something. Like I try to teach my children, any victory is still a victory. And every one of your micro goals is a completed piece to a much larger objective.
Once you get into the habit of feeling good about your accomplishments, you’ll find them much easier to come by. You’ll start working that much harder to achieve the next, then the next, until eventually you reach your end game.
While it’s good to get a pat on the back from those around you, sometimes doing it yourself through personal victory is more effective at boosting your morale and confidence.
Visual Progress of the End Result
When you break down a larger goal into smaller pieces and start accomplishing those tasks, you can start to see an impact in the larger picture. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by an incredibly large objective, dents begin to form.
Because you can see progress, you continue that “good feeling” I mentioned earlier. You have to hold onto that. Even though you don’t think you’re making progress, you actually are as long as you stick to your micro goals.
For instance, I could wallow in self-pity that I don’t look like Captain America yet because I haven’t lost enough weight. Or, I could relish in the thought that I’ve lost more than 50 pounds since I nearly had a heart attack climbing a slight hill while camping. Now, I can’t wear a 38-waist pair of pants without a belt.
Every bit of effort you put into your micro goals feeds into the success of the final objective…no matter how small.
Motivation to Continue
One of the biggest reasons why micro goals are great for boosting confidence is because they don’t set you up for failure. Instead of having an anxiety attack over the primary focus, you get a sense of accomplishment each time you complete a task. This fuels motivation to continue.
Motivation is one of the biggest problems many people have when it comes to virtually any job that needs done. If there isn’t some form of instant gratification attached, a lot of us will simply move on. Unfortunately, I am one of those kind of people.
For example, I haven’t worked on my novella on Wattpad for quite some time because I simply don’t have the audience to enforce my drive. As of this post, however, I will dedicate to writing at least one page per day as my micro goal.
This point is all about getting the snowball rolling down the hill. Once you start completing the smaller parts, everything else seems to pack into place. The hardest part is knowing where to start.
How to Set Micro Goals
Setting micro goals is dependent on how small you want to go. How easy do you want to make your daily tasks? Just remember, there is a trade-off by making goals easier. The more you break down goals, the longer it will take you to achieve them. However, time is often a better alternative than setting yourself up for failure.
- Write out your end objective.
- Create smaller segments of what need to be done to meet that objective.
- Break each objective even further to create a task you are honestly capable of doing.
It’s OK to set up micro goals that require pushing you to your limits. Just make sure you’re setting something you are capable of achieving.
For example, let’s say that you wanted to lose 80 pounds. You know this is going to require reducing your intake while increasing your activity. So, what are some micro goals to set? For one thing, any activity beyond your normal routine is going to be beneficial. You could have a micro goal that simply increases the number of steps you take in a week.
Even if the number of steps you take improves by 200, it’s still an accomplishment to be proud of. You could then reduce that and figure out how many steps you would need to take in a day.
Do you see the pattern? Instead of focusing on the whole 80 pounds, I already have you thinking about what smaller adjustments you need to make in your daily activity.
If you really want to get techy and advanced with your goals, you can try setting them up using apps like Mindomo. It’s a free mind-mapping application that lets you set tasks and gives you a visualization of what you need to accomplish.
I’ll probably do a tutorial on how to use Mindomo for health in the future.
Getting More Out of Life
By meeting your micro goals, it’s easier to be pleased by the results. This fuels how you view the rest of the task at hand. Once you start feeling good about yourself, everything else regarding the situation becomes easier to manage. It’s almost like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Don’t give up what you’re trying to do…simply change your micro goals to address the problem.
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