How to Look At Your Goals for 2025

Jerred: All right. Let's talk about setting goals for 2025, or at least a different way to start thinking about this and looking at it as we round out 2024 and we are going into a new year. This is the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. I'm Jerred Moon, and I want to talk about this because this is where I start thinking about the next year. We're here at the beginning of December, and that's really when, in all honesty, I start to slow down a little bit. I'm normally trying to be super productive. But a couple of years ago, I started to really slow down in the month of December, try to assess what went well, what didn't go well over the course of the year.

So for 2024, looking back at what happened, and then trying to project forward. What do I want to do? What do I want to accomplish? And the more I've done this, when I'm putting this in the lens of personal development, fitness, and health specifically, those areas, I'm really just trying to get better.

I don't really put these big goals on the calendar anymore, like an event. This past year, I did an ultra marathon here in 2024. If you got the most recent update, I had signed up for a HYROX. We weren't able to complete it, but say I want to put HYROX on the calendar for 2025.

When I used to sit down and set goals, that's what I would do. I'd be like, okay, here's what's going on in 2025. I'm going to run this ultra, I'm going to do this Spartan race. And it would always be some big event on the calendar. But while I'm doing those things, that's not typically how I'm really setting goals anymore, specifically when it comes to health and fitness, because it's just so much of a process. And then there are the outcome goals, the specific things, like I want to back squat this amount. But the real win, the real victory, is in the process. If you can dedicate yourself to the process, that's why we did the Daily Over Decades challenge back in 2023, just because if you can commit to the process, you are going to be far better off.

And so I want to give a lens through which to think about that and how to analyze where you're currently at. One thing that you can do, just an example I like to use, is if you have an iPhone or an Android, you could zoom in with it. You could pinch zoom as far as you possibly can. And what you'll see when you zoom in, at its max zoom, it's very hard to keep whatever image it is in frame. I'll use an example of my son playing soccer. I want to film him in soccer, but sometimes I'll be so far away I have to really zoom in. I have a very small margin of error when I'm that zoomed in to keep him in frame with what he's doing.

If I want to really focus in on him specifically on the field and I'm far away, even though my actual hand movements might only be moving an inch up or down, in relation to how far away I am and him being on the field, if I move an inch too far up, I'm looking at the sky. Now I'm nowhere close to having my son in frame. Or if I move an inch down, I'm staring at the ground or the opposing team's cleats. I'm not looking at him anymore. It's the fractional movements. It's just a little up, a little down. It's not anything like these big gestures.

And it's because it's so far away. You have these small micro changes that can change the trajectory, the outcome of what's in frame. Now, given that example, think about that in your life, because it's the small time decisions that are going to dictate where you end up. And I always like to remind people that change happens slow. It's painful, but change happens very slow, and change happens slow in both directions. Good change happens slow and bad change happens slow. They both happen so slow that you don't even feel it. You don't know that you're losing weight. You don't know that you're gaining weight. You don't really know in the moment you're getting stronger. You don't know if you're getting weaker, faster, or slower.

With all the micro decisions, all we have is today. Yesterday's gone. Tomorrow's not guaranteed. All we have is today, right now. So if you can fall in love with the monotony of small little things that need to happen each and every single day, you're going to be better off. That's why I love looking at process goals.

So now, in relation to analyzing what you're doing, what your habits are like, just start to look at yourself, try to do some sort of audit when it comes to health and fitness. And this audit can be over the last 24 hours, over the last seven days. Start to look at your schedule, start to write things down. What are you actually doing each and every single day? For me personally, doing an audit is pretty easy because I live and die by my Google Calendar. I put everything in there. When I'm working out, it goes on the calendar. What I'm doing at work goes on the calendar. It's almost like a journal for me. So I can even look back and see what's happening or what's not happening.

And so I urge you to do the same thing. If I asked you, hey, how often are you eating fast food? You might be like, oh, realistically maybe twice per month. But if we actually looked at it, maybe you have some sort of new routine and you're busier and you need to get food more frequently and faster. And so you've actually increased that to several times per week and you don't realize it. And that's okay right now, because change happens slow. You might be like, oh, I've been eating this fast food for two weeks and I don't really see any change. Maybe it's fine. It's not fine, because change happens slow. And so when you compound that action over time, where are you going to end up? If you continue down this path, where are you 10 years from now?

And you can do this in good and bad directions. So that's what I urge everyone to do: look back over the last week, over the last month, and just assess yourself. How are you doing? Compounded over, daily over decades as we like to say, where are you going to end up? And this could be super micro. If you have a lot of great habits and you don't have a ton of bad habits and you're like, yeah, what am I supposed to do? Maybe look specifically at your training. Is something being missed? Are you not doing enough strength? Are you not doing enough zone two work? Is there something, if we were to compound this out over 10 years, that would happen? What would you be missing? What could you forecast? And that's just if you have everything really dialed in. Same with your diet. What does that look like if you keep doing the same thing for the next 10 years?

But that's not going to be most people who just have everything figured out and everything's dialed in. Where are you missing? Are you starting to skip workouts? Were you consistent? That's why I love tracking how many workouts I do every single week, because that's something that can slip. If you went from doing five to six workouts a week, every week for a year, and then you get busy, something happens, life changes, and now you're doing four or five, it doesn't seem like that big of a difference. But that's a significant difference when we compound it over time. So while you're still getting in the workouts and you're still fit and healthy, and you're still doing a lot of great things, something's going to change.

If you go from six to five per week to four per week, and you compound that over a couple of years, something will change. Fitness is going to change. Body composition is going to change. Something will change, but it won't change right away, because the margin of error, as they start to separate, is small, but compounded over time it gets larger and larger.

So hopefully that's making sense. When you make these small micro changes, you've got to see, okay, where's this going to end up over the next decade? So that's what I want to urge every Garage Gym Athlete out there to do. Go introspective before you set any goals. Just review your last year. If you're like me and you have a Garmin, and you track every workout you do on there, or a Whoop or whatever, if you use a wearable, I'll look back and I'll be like, hey, how many times did you actually train? You think you train six days per week. Does the math add up? How many times did you actually train per week? How many things came up where you skipped a workout and something didn't happen? So I'm going to look back at that and I'm like, oh, wow, 2023 I worked out this many times, 2024 I worked out this many times. Maybe I'm good with that. Maybe I'm not. And so I need to make that adjustment going into 2025 about consistency.

So now it's not, oh, I want to run this race, I want to do Spartan, I want to do HYROX. It's nothing like that. It goes back to that Daily Over Decades challenge. It's, no, I need to make sure I'm just hitting these six workouts per week, no matter what they are. I'm going to hit these six workouts per week. Same with your diet. Now, we don't all log everything that we have in our diet, but are there any new habits you picked up, something you're doing that you weren't doing before? Is that going to compound over time in a negative or positive way? Just looking at all these things and setting the process goal.

So when you get to 2025, you can have some of those bigger goals, yeah, I want to run this race, I want to do this thing, I want to do a 5K, I want to run a marathon, all that. Those things are good to have. They keep you motivated. They keep you engaged in the training and looking forward to something. There's nothing wrong with those things at all. I think they're great for people to sign up for an event because it holds your feet to the fire for getting the training done and showing up for the event and doing it. Ultimately, how you're going to win at life is going to be the process goal.

So what are you doing each and every single day? What are you doing today? What's the monotony, the boring thing that you can fall in love with and do day after day to really see the most progress? So look back at your year, analyze it, see what you're doing and not doing, and then start to set that process goal for the next year.

And if you're like, hey, I love this idea of training more consistently or whatever, we're not necessarily doing this challenge again right now, but if you go to dailyoverdecades.com, it's just going to redirect you to a Garage Gym Athlete page where I fully explain the Daily Over Decades project from 2023. So, like I said, this is not an active challenge, but all the rules and how we utilize it are there on that page. So go to dailyoverdecades.com and you will see how that challenge works. And maybe it's something that you want to implement going into 2025. I think it's a phenomenal challenge. I think it can change your life.

If you're looking for something to push you that's not a specific event, it's really focused on the process, definitely go check that out. But that's it for this one. Thank you everyone for being a part of Garage Gym Athlete throughout 2024. And as you look to 2025, I hope we can help you crush your health and fitness goals. If you are one of our athletes, again, thank you. If you're not, head over to garagegymathlete.com, sign up for a free trial, and we would love to have you. That's it for this one. Remember, if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.