I’ve been thinking much about existential counseling theory and personal training. What, you might ask, could those two things have to do with each other?
Existential Psychotherapy
Existential counseling theory concerns itself with four major themes:
- How we feel about our mortality
- How we deal with being fundamentally separate from others
- How we handle the randomness in the world
- How we feel about our agency
Therapy and Personal Fitness Goals
As an example of how these ideas can affect your health and wellness efforts, consider mortality and the “R” in SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. When I was a young trainer, I was taught to ask a prospective client when they were last in the physical shape they’d like to achieve now. Most people point to a time when they were in their twenties to early thirties. That’s not surprising, because in those years many of us were more active and, more importantly, very young. Our bodies were robust and resilient, and we used them quite a bit.
If you keep the above in mind, it’s seems no coincidence that many of us start wanting to commit more energy to our health and fitness when we hit middle age. It is then that we start truly noticing the aging process. We might see the first grays, notice the thinning hair, or maybe even have some type of health scare. All of this is high motivation for getting into shape, which is great. At the same time, it also gets us thinking, consciously and unconsciously, about our mortality. Part of what we are really wishing for is to return to that twenty or thirty-year-old that we used to be. We want to stay young.
How To Set Smarter Rs In Your SMART Goals
Wanting to stay young is certainly no sin. It’s a universal desire. However, it could also set you up for demotivation. That’s because the farther you are from those “good old days”, the more difficult they will be to achieve. In fact, if you take your current age, and the age your were last in the shape you’d like to be in, and subtract them, and that number is greater than ten, it could be pretty challenging to get there. In short, your “R” in SMART is not very realistic.
What can you do instead? This is where mortality has an upside. Since time is limited, focus on what you can do now, rather than what used to be. Think about an exciting version of yourself that you can become. Maybe you’d like to be a very active eighty or ninety-year-old. Maybe you would like to have fewer aches and pains so you can keep up with the grandkids. Maybe you’d like to keep your stamina so you can go on amazing hikes or visit new, far-flung places. Look forward and set goals that make sense for who you will be, rather than who you were.