Valorie Burton explains why framing goals as short-term experiments works better than rigid rules. She tried eating vegetarian and pescatarian for a period, which stuck, and recommends setting ranges instead of absolutes so you can refine what actually works for you.
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So one of my favorite tools is extra experiments. And so all this means is a lot of times your clients are and this happens with us as individuals as well. So I first started using this with myself probably around 2003. I experimented with what I was eating. I was intrigued by the idea of a vegetarian diet, but I do love meat, I love seafood, I love, you know, I love my protein. I love my protein that's been living, I'll be honest with you. And so the idea that I would just declare that this is what. Felt a bit overwhelming. So I said, well, you know what, I'm going to experiment with this for a weekend. I'm going to see how this goes. I experimented with it for a weekend and then a weekend went pretty well and a weekend turned into about five weeks. I got to five weeks and I want to say a friend brought over some wings or something that was really good and I fell off the experiment. Now the experiment really was supposed to only be for those two days, but what came out of the experiment is that it changed what I desired to eat. While I didn't become a full fledged vegetarian for the most part, I kind of embarked on a pescatarian diet and I really cut out a lot of red meat. I mean, it wasn't that I would never eat red meat, but it was like every few months, maybe if I went to a restaurant and there was something or I went to dinner with somebody. If the goal, if my goal really was improving my eating habits and my health, I achieved that goal from doing experiment. The long term goal did not become being a vegetarian, although I have great respect for the discipline and what goes into being a vegetarian. But it gave me a different perspective and I didn't commit to something that I wasn't going to be able to keep up. And that's what often happens. Our clients or even ourselves, we're setting goals and we're declaring we're going to do something without recognizing, as the research shows, that the bigger the goal, the bigger the commitment that we make, the more resources that we need in order to achieve the goal. And oftentimes we underestimate what that is going to look like. So you can get your clients to just simply experiment or yourself, Right? So maybe you haven't really been exercising at all. I'm going to exercise six times a week for an hour, and I'm doing this for the rest of my life. Now, this is often how we set goals. And then when we fall short, we feel guilty, we beat ourselves up. We might even give up on the goal because now we doubt that we can even achieve it. But if you experiment with it, you could say, I'm going to try that for a week, and let's see how that goes. What happens is, at the end of the experiment, you say, what worked? What could I do more of what didn't work for me that I would like to tweak? And that's what I did with my eating experiment, right? What worked? I actually feel a lot more energy when I'm not having to digest stuff that takes so long to digest. I really like that. I kind of started to cut out sugar because I feel better when I do that. And so my approach was more moderate. It came from the experiment. So I think, really asking your clients, especially when they're setting big goals, that could trip them up, what experiment could you have over the next week? Or what could you experiment with over this coming month? Right. And see what works. You want to change your schedule? How about experimenting with changing your schedule? You want to change your eating plan? How about experimenting with that? You're thinking about even, you know, moving how you do your work, like your office space. Well, could you find a way to experiment with that? Another element of experimenting can be giving yourself a range of reaching the goal where you still get to give yourself credit for reaching it. Exercise is a great, great one for that. When I have a client saying, I'm going to exercise six days a week, I'll say, well, what's the minimum amount you could exercise and still get credit for this goal? So they might go, well, gosh, I'm not really doing much now. If I do it four times this week and I get in at least 30 minutes of cardio, I'd feel really good about that. But if I do six days at an hour, that's good too. So now if they did four days at 30 minutes, they still get to feel good about it, and they still achieve something that's meaningful without going, I only worked out four days this week. So having a range is also kind of a variation on experimenting, where we give ourselves some leeway and it motivates us more because we're set up for success rather than being set up for failure.
I love that. The idea of running experiments and using the language of experiments, how could you experiment with that? What's an experiment you could run for a month and there's this, there's this softening and this like curiosity that's almost invited in there. As you shared what worked, awesome. Do more of that. What didn't work, awesome. Change that. But relax. The need to have it be always and forever. This is how it's going to be. I'm going to experiment with this for now, knowing that my ultimate goal is actually not to eat a certain way or to move a certain amount per week, but it's actually to feel better or to be healthier, et cetera. So what can I explore? What can I experiment with in pursuit of that goal that I'm going after?
Absolutely. And it feels good. And the other thing about experiments is it sounds fun. I mean, every time I've ever mentioned experiment to a person, they light up. Oh, it's like the creativity kicks in. What could I do? There's not this long term commitment to it. So it doesn't feel daunting. And it acknowledges something that we know from research, which is goal setting is not, we all know it's not an A to Z. It really is taking action and learning from that action. And so making it fun and experimenting is a part of it. Even when we don't call it experiment. That's basically what happens when we go for something and it doesn't quite work and we tweak it, but we don't call it an experiment. Experiment's a whole lot more fun. And you're not acknowledging up front, I don't know how this is going to go. I don't know if the plan I've come up with is actually going to work. Experimenting is saying, I think I have a plan that will work. Let me try it out and see. And at a certain point in the future, I'll look back at what happened and I'll decide what elements of it worked and what elements didn't. And now I'm going to experiment with a new variation on the experiment so it makes reaching your goals and figuring it out more fun.
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