I’ve had numerous conversations about fitness goals lately. Some have been with individuals who are new to TNT (and even fitness, in general) while others have been with veteran members who have recently accomplished objectives they’ve been working toward for awhile.
During these and prior goal-related discussions a specific theme emerges so frequently that it’s almost cliché, although it sounds slightly different based on the individual’s prior training experience.
People who are just starting to become more active tend to have a general goal—weight loss, for example—but often struggle to define specific targets or (often “and”) explain why achieving it is important to them. Alternatively, people who have just accomplished a specific goal often feel driftless and indecisive about “what’s next”.
Both cases can be summed up into the idea that people often feel unsure about what is potentially both achievable and meaningful to them. And that uncertainty typically leads to either not deciding upon any goal or “goal-hopping” because whatever is chosen ends up not truly being important to that person.
Yesterday as I was contemplating this during my post-dinner stroll through the neighborhood, I thought of an exercise I completed about a year ago that could help if you’ve experienced a similar challenge.
100 Questions
In How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Gelb offers “A Hundred Questions” exercise (plus a few follow-up exercises) as a way to cultivate your sense of curiosity.
Here’s an amalgamation of guidelines from the exercises that I found to be helpful:
- Create a list of 100 questions. Any question can be included as long as it’s something you consider significant. Don’t worry about writing similar questions using different words, and don’t try to answer any of them… yet.
- Sort the list into groups of similar themes.
- Choose the top 10 questions you think are the most significant, and rank order them. The questions can come from any single or multiple themes.
- On a different day, choose one of those questions (or themes), perhaps in your chosen order of significance, and write about it for at least ten minutes. Aim to write continuously, simply recording your thoughts as they occur, without editing or judging.
- Take a break.
- Review what you wrote, again looking for more themes and questions.
As Gelb points out (and I found to be accurate): “Why a hundred questions? The first twenty or so will be ‘off the top of your head’. In the next thirty or forty, themes often begin to emerge. And in the latter part of the second half of the list you are likely to discover unexpected but profound material.”
In my observation and experience, those themes and “profound material” are exactly what we’re looking for in any realm of life, certainly including fitness, because they indicate what each of us finds truly important. And understanding that can help us to choose goals that we find meaningful and to accept and consistently exert the effort required to achieve them.
Leaning on the ideas of another author (Warren Berger, in A More Beautiful Question), the quality of our outcomes depend upon the quality of the questions we ask. So although you can expect the 100 Questions exercise to take more than a couple hours to complete, the insights you’ll gain are likely to save you a ton of time in the long run.
Because I’m sure you’ll come up with more meaningful questions than simply: “What should I do first/next?”
Putting it into practice
For our current purpose of setting important-to-you fitness goals, I’ll offer two options for the week.
In the first case, you could complete the 100 Questions exercise as described above. Yes, you’ll be creating questions that are unrelated to fitness. But interweaving questions about fitness (which you’ll inevitably create during the process) with questions about other areas of life has the possibility of sending you in an unexpected direction which you’d have otherwise overlooked.
In the second case, you could create a list of, say, 50 questions, all of which relate more directly to fitness (e.g. sports, types of exercise, nutrition, body composition, physical capabilities, aging). You’re perhaps less likely to have unexpected insights, but you’ll save some time and be a bit more to the point.
Since it’s been a year that I completed the 100 Questions exercise, I might actually do both. Let me know if you’d like to compare notes. Sharing insights will make us both better!