Episode 112: Managing Priorities: Navigating Trade-Offs for Successful Goal Setting

What if achieving your goals meant sacrificing your weekends or rethinking your daily routines? In this episode of Giving Your Best Life, Stephanie and Zach tackle the often-overlooked concept of trade-offs in goal setting. From the substantial time commitments needed for marathon training to the potential strains on personal relationships, we shed light on the intricate balancing act required to pursue significant goals without disrupting the other facets of your life. Listen as Zach shares his personal journey of contemplating a triathlon sprint, illustrating the importance of thoughtful planning and realistic expectations to mitigate the risk of failure.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey friends, it's Stephanie here with Giving your Best Life podcast with my friend Zach.

Speaker 2: 0:05

Lloyd sustainable anti-diet coach.

Speaker 1: 0:08

Awesome. So I come in every Monday, zach, and I have our accountability. And today I said, zach, what do you want to talk about?

Speaker 2: 0:14

And you said trade-offs, so jump right into it so decision-making, trade-offs, procrastination kind of as a subject a lot of this goes in there, but when you're making a decision to Go after a goal, let's say, instead of thinking about the goal and the outcome you're gonna get, so we're just talking about a marathon would be a good example.

Speaker 2: 0:35

I'm gonna go run a marathon, and then the outcome is you know, I'm super fit, I achieved something that a lot of people don't achieve. Whatever that looks like for you, instead of thinking about the outcome being, what happens is think about, before you make the decision to run the marathon, what are the trade-offs of running the marathon in the first place, and then that can help you set up one a better goal and craft a better goal around it, but also maybe potentially changing the goal depending on what the trade-offs are. And then you also miss failure most of the time, because a lot of us will pick goals and then we'll kind of like start them a little bit but not really be serious or traction, and then all of a sudden we fail and we feel worse about ourselves.

Speaker 1: 1:21

I like that. Well, I've never thought about that is like at the beginning of your goal setting, thinking about the trade off in that period of time. So I've run a marathon and I never thought about the trade off. It was like signed up and then I was like, well, you'll figure it out, right. But at least for the marathon is like, a big trade-off is your time, and it's big chunks of time on weekends or that's when I would do my long run. So I love that idea because it helps you plan and go. Well, do I have a big chunk of time to, especially later on in the training, to go out and run two, three, four. Well, I was slow, so four hours or whatever.

Speaker 2: 2:09

Hey you did a very long. Most people can't say that yeah, so that's really interesting.

Speaker 1: 2:15

I never thought about what are some of the trade-offs, so I said time. So time is one of the trade-offs. Yeah, um, I think people in your life that you spend that time with so like, for me it was my husband and then sometimes they have to have a trade-off.

Speaker 2: 2:33

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:33

So not only even thinking about yourself like there was some days where, especially if I was doing a long run, I would have my husband would have to be within a proximity, like one day it started lightning storming so my husband had to come get me. Well, you know what I mean, like, whatever you're doing, is somebody else going to have to have a trade-off within that time period of you're working on your goal? What else, like, do you have to think about in in terms of trade-off?

Speaker 2: 3:01

Yeah, it's usually the, the unknowns, and then there's unknown, unknowns. This is not, that's a tough one to have. Think about that one for a little bit. But, like, for instance, a lot of people will be like, hey, I'm gonna lose weight before summer, okay, great. And then they're like all right, I'm gonna do that. And that means that I'm gonna like restrict my eating and I'm gonna work out or move more, and then boom, I'm gonna get what I want, okay, fine.

Speaker 2: 3:25

But instead of missing, like, okay, what, what are those actual trade-offs with, like you said, workouts? But like, what about nutrition? Like what are the trade-offs there? And it's like, well, what am I doing now that I'm not going to be able to do as much of, I'll have to do less of, or it's like you know, like you said, time's a huge one.

Speaker 2: 3:44

And really, though, I think the time if you decide like time and you decide when you're going to train, the trade-offs there there's, like you said, there's a linkage there that goes with the time. There's other things you could be doing with that time, right, and so deciding how you're going to spend that time well, is huge. So, for instance, I know, like right now, um, I was thinking about doing a uh, um, uh triathlon sprint this summer. A triathlon sprint this summer and I've never done one of those before and I'm not a very big cardio person in the slightest, which is kind of why I want to do it, because it's something that I don't really want to do and it's very uncomfortable uncomfortable for me to do because I know I won't be very successful, right and, like, I'll finish but it's about being successful.

Speaker 2: 4:31

It really bothers me that I'm not going to be like above average. That bothers me. So now I want to do it. But I was thinking about, okay, trade-offs, time-wise where in my day can I actually train for it, like you're saying? And then all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, if I train later at night, after my kids go to sleep, and let's say, like you said, people, is my wife cool with that? Okay, great, probably, yeah, good, but then what are the trade-offs there? I go to bed later a little bit, oh, okay.

Speaker 2: 4:56

But maybe that's 30 minutes, maybe that's not a big deal. But there's this other thing that I know about myself is if I work out two to three hours before bedtime, I cannot go to sleep for like five hours, right. And that's something I've tried and true and it's just true about how so therefore okay, I can't train for my triathlon sprint that way, or your trade-off is sleep.

Speaker 2: 5:17

Right, or my trade-off is sleep, and then it's like okay, is that wise in this certain scenario? And so for me that's that's what I was kind of debating, back and forth.

Speaker 1: 5:26

Yeah, that's good. Um, so I like that is your time, your family, so other people that are involved. It might be your sleep. So I know, whenever I tell people like, if you look at like writing a book or starting a morning routine, sometimes the solution is getting up 30 minutes or an hour earlier. Some people have that time to do that and just are choosing not to Other people. People it really is a sacrifice and a trade-off of, okay, I'm gonna have to give up that hour asleep. I also think it could be money that's a trade-off. So you talked about like, hey, I want to get fit by summer. Well, if you look at, you know like how you're eating. Maybe you're eating out. Yeah, so that could go back to time, but it also could be money of you know buying healthier things. Sometimes you might save money, though if you're not, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 6:22

That's what I found when my husband and I went to. Most of our meals now are at home, even though we're buying, you know, like healthier products yes we're saving money because we're not going out to eat.

Speaker 1: 6:33

So, yeah, I like that. The idea of like, what are you having to trade off? I think too and this popped into my head when you were talking is like interviewing somebody or having a conversation, because you talked about the unknowns, yeah, and those will pop up. But if you talk to somebody who's done that, like, go, okay, you did a marathon, what were some of the trade-offs that you had to make?

Speaker 1: 6:58

and so now you're, as you're setting your goal, you're a little bit more informed than, um, than if you're just like, oh, I'm just gonna go run a marathon and I would say that was one of the biggest things when I was training for a marathon was your time and your like nutrition that people talk about, that you're going to have to change. So, yeah, anything else you want to add On?

Speaker 2: 7:21

the movement piece. I think there's huge tradeoffs that people don't consider with working out, and I think that's kind of this proliferation of workouts and they always have to be hard. And bodybuilding is like where a lot of this stuff comes from, and it's to move well in life, like you don't have to follow a bodybuilding routine and, if anything, there's a huge trade off there where you might follow this routine that potentially puts more muscle on your body, but is the goal? Is the muscles the goal where there's this trade-off of you're probably not going to move as well, right, if you go past a threshold of muscle. So that's not thought about a lot.

Speaker 2: 8:02

Yeah, and that's something I see a lot with a lot of clients where they have pain and it's it's pain that came from this training that they thought they were supposed to do to get the muscle, and it's like, well, there's other ways you can train too. But there's also a trade off of you start lifting a certain amount of weight and you keep pushing that weight and all of a sudden you're really working on like your absolute strength, and what we know about working on your absolute strength is you actually limit your movement capacity over time and so you're not going to rotate and walk as well, and sometimes that leads to pain, whether it's knee pain, back pain or whatever, and I don't think that's something that's talked about enough. So I just like bringing that up, because that's a trade off is the training you decide to go with, and so that's something to think about.

Speaker 1: 8:46

I think, too, that you mentioned is I've seen this, especially as you get older, and you can correct me if I'm wrong like, is this true or false? Is depending on what you're focusing on, and let's just say, with your fitness and your health is higher risk of injury. So that's the potential of a trade-off. Like for me, like running a marathon or lifting more weights or trying different things, like my goal is to play tennis, even, or something like that is there might be a trade-off of a higher injury rate of that. I don't know, do you see that? But that's what I was thinking.

Speaker 2: 9:26

I think that kind of plays into exactly what I just mentioned and people aren't just aren't aware of it because we're not taught it. Honestly, there's not a lot of people in the main spectrum that really talk about this, because I don't think they fully understand it. It's like a lot of physical therapists um might get a change and then you go home, but then after a week or so you get the same pain again, even after doing the exercises.

Speaker 2: 9:53

That happens a lot, and it's not like the physical therapist is bad, it's just this lack of understanding that there's trade-offs in movement right and so like, for instance, this, this, uh, this sprint triathlon that I've been thinking about doing because I have not trained in these longer distance sports before. My body's more adapt at sprinting and putting out a lot of force really fast over a short amount of time in weightlifting and sprinting because that's basketball is basically sprinting, long story short. And so therefore, now I know that I'm gonna have to put in extra time to warm up and change the way my body moves a little bit to run longer without getting the pain that we're kind of talking about, and I think that's part of it. As we get older, this pain arises not because, like necessarily getting older in itself and it is inherently going to cause the pain it's the fact that more time under load, in whatever load it is, whether, like you've been a long distance walker for your entire life, you will make adaptations to your body and you will move differently.

Speaker 2: 10:59

And there's a reason where, if you look at Olympic sprint or, sorry, olympic long distance runners and then an olympic shot putter, their bodies will look very, very different, and that's just. That's a good example of seeing the biases between movement, where a shot putter is not going to be able to run long distances very well because of their actual structure and if you think they look like a, like a, basically like a really big uh cylinder piston, right, and I won't go down too much on this road, but I think basically all of us are just worms, like humans, are just worms, we move like worms and we're these big funnels and then you have a big funnel for the shot putter and then for the long distance runner you have a really slender cylinder or funnel and you will move very differently and then, as we get older, gravity's been working on us longer and so that's what kind of a lot of this stuff comes from, especially in the pain realm.

Speaker 1: 12:00

Yeah I think, too, another trade-off uh, financially is because you said something like for me to be able to do the marathon. You talked about physical therapy. Like I had a doctor that I had to bring on my team. You guys might have heard me talk about dr Demko, but I had not been able to get past a certain mileage and I knew to get past a certain mileage, I was gonna have to work with somebody else.

Speaker 1: 12:23

So, like you have people that if they want to set their goal is, they'll come and they'll work with you, they have to pay. There's a cost to bringing you on my team and putting that team together and so deciding hey, if I'm really going to and that was my thing is, if I'm going to run the marathon, I want to finish the marathon, but there's a cost to doing that, and am I willing to do that Instead of going well, maybe I might finish the marathon. But then you're like you're kind of how do I want to say this? It's like either do it or don't do it Because you're already trading costs with your time.

Speaker 1: 13:00

You want to make sure, like hey, thinking about it, of going. If I do it, I want to do it well and I do want to accomplish it, and it doesn't have to worry about time. You can define success, however, but thinking about who do you need on your team and is there a trade-off with having to pay somebody to come on that team for that time? That's a great example so what else?

Speaker 2: 13:22

anything else, I think that sums up.

Speaker 1: 13:24

Okay, wonderful well, this is another great topic. Trade-offs is another way that you can get to giving your best life.