If you’ve been following along the last couple months, you’ve probably learned a thing or two about your health and the length of your food chain. Maybe you were even motivated to make some changes, and if you did, great! If you had the motivation, but weren’t sure about what to do or where to go from there, don’t worry, you’re not alone. This month, we’re going to break down the steps to successful behavior change for our own health, the health of our community, and the health of the planet.
Alright, when I say motivation, I’m defining it as the drive to pursue or to continue pursuing something. Contrary to what many of us believe, myself included before this, motivation is not a fleeting emotion and is actually strongest AFTER we make progress towards what we were temporarily motivated to do. By completing a task, you experience the joy of accomplishment and get more motivated to continue. There are also different kinds of motivation, the two big ones being extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is the motivation we get from outside sources, like receiving a trophy after winning a soccer tournament. It may feel motivating when we’re playing the game, but once we have the trophy it doesn’t usually make us any happier. Chasing extrinsic motivators rarely brings us lasting satisfaction. On the other hand, intrinsic motivation comes from within, like the joy of playing soccer on a sunny day with friends. The intrinsically motivated player will have a good time whether his team wins the trophy or not, while the extrinsically motivated player will be upset if their team doesn’t win the trophy.
We all have a personal set of values that we live by and they often vary widely between individuals. Our values will change over the course of our lives and that’s completely normal. After all, a 19 year-old is going to have very different priorities from a 40 year-old. To find out where your values lie currently, check out this activity that helps you narrow down what’s important to you until you get to your 5 core values. My values, for example, are:
Family
Pleasure
Autonomy
Belonging
Flexibility
Your values may look completely different from mine, and that’s okay! Checking in with your values is a great way to start your behavior change journey. When your goals reflect your values, you will more easily be able to accomplish your goals.
Now that you have an idea of a goal that reflects your values, let’s make that goal SMART…
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
This way of writing goals will help you know when you’ve met your goal. For example, saying, “I want to know where my food comes from” can be a tough goal to meet if you wait for opportunities to come to you. To turn that into a SMART goal, you could say, “Starting this Saturday, I’m going to go to my local Farmer’s Market once a month and talk to one vendor about the food they’ve produced.”
Image courtesy of The Coaching Tools Company
In a lot of cases, our motivations are too big to have just one goal, and we need to create smaller goals to sustain that motivation. If you have a goal to be able to grow enough food in your garden to feed your family all year, you’re going to need to break that down into smaller parts to truly understand how you’ll accomplish this. A great way to organize everything that needs to happen to achieve your goal is by making a list of objectives for your goal in the order you need to complete them, kind of like a to-do list. For example:
Goal: Grow enough food in my backyard to feed my family of 4 year-round.
Objectives:
Make a list of foods your family loves and incorporate them into your garden
Research gardening techniques, garden designs, and which plants grow well together, as needed.
Dedicate space in your backyard to a garden.
Create a map of your growing space and where you’ll plant each seed.
This is a big goal; I could go on all day, and if this is your goal, you should!
Each objective should be kept small and achievable within a day or a week before you focus on larger objectives. One of the toughest parts of goal and objective setting can decide how difficult they may be. They can be too hard and you may become discouraged, or too easy and you won’t be challenged and become bored. If you start noticing either of these feelings, you may want to edit your plan, which you can do at any time, because it’s YOUR plan.
Image Courtesy of Pixabay
Once your road map is done, it’s time to start! I know what I’ve proposed may be totally foreign to you, and it may be uncomfortable to choose your core values or see which changes come from extrinsic or intrinsic goals. Behavior change is hard. If you’re unsuccessful the first time you try to change a behavior, don’t give up! Take a break until you can look back at where you started and the progress, however small, you made and then try again. Rest when you need to and forgive yourself for not being perfect when trying new things. No one is!
To recap the steps to successful behavior change:
Identify your core values.
Make sure the change aligns with your values.
Set a goal, and make it SMART.
Break the goal down into smaller objectives.
If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again!
Happy soul searching,
Neena
It's almost time for No Mow May! No Mow May is a wonderful city wide effort to help pollinators early in the season when they need the dandelions in your yard the most. HOWEVER, the city requires that if you plan to participate, you register online to recieve a sign to put in your yard so your neighbors and the city know that your yard is a statement, not negligence. Registration opens April 19th and you must be registered by May 6 to avoid potential fines. Please help make our city's ecosystem as healthy as can bee by standing with your local pollinators. :)
Upcoming Events:
April 18, 11-2PM Adaptive Gardening Workshop
Ticket Price: FREE
Location: starts at Aging and Disability Resource Center, 1519 Water Street, ends at Farmshed, 1220 Briggs Court, Stevens Point
Call the ADRC at 715-346-1401 to register and learn more!
May 6, 6-10PM Pasture to Plates Dinner
Ticket Price: $70
Location: Pfiffner Building in Pfiffner Park, 401 Franklin St., Stevens Point
Register here!
May 7, 10-5PM Local Food Fair
Ticket Price: FREE, no registration needed. Come join us for a day of fun and a chance to meet and support your local food producers.
Location: Pfiffner Park, Stevens Point
May 14, Move Some Earth Day
Volunteer Opportunity with MREA
To register and learn more about MREA's volunteer opportunities, click here.
If you have enjoyed this article and are interested in information about Farmshed and our volunteer opportunities, sign up for our newsletters!
General Information Newsletter- sign up found at the bottom of page.