The Missing Link: How to Align Your Values with Your Fitness Goals

When you align your values with your fitness goals, you find a deeper, innate sense of purpose and motivation. Your goals become intrinsically tied to what you believe about yourself and what is important in life. The result? Greater success, satisfaction and growth across all areas of your life.

Have you heard of cognitive dissonance? Cognitive dissonance is the mental conflict that arises when your actions don’t align with your values or what you know to be true. Like when you know working out will make you healthier and stronger which are traits you value, but you skip the workout.

Human beings naturally strive for cognitive consistency. But even the smartest, most well-intentioned people can experience the opposite. That’s because, well, life is complicated.

What if I told you that cognitive consistency might be the missing link between having goals and achieving them? This article is a dive into the idea that if you can align your values with your fitness goals, and if you can start taking action based on those values, you can not only reach your full potential in the gym, but use those values across all aspects of life.

A Common Misconception

As a fitness coach, cognitive dissonance is something I get ample opportunity to think about. My clients have big goals that mean a lot to them – from how good they feel moving through the day to how confident they feel in their clothes. They know that their transformation is going to require them to change certain behaviors. But it sometimes feels nearly impossible to stick with that change.

There’s a common misconception not just in fitness but across all areas of life. Most people think that how we feel matters most. We wait to feel motivated to workout. If we feel stressed, we give ourselves permission to overindulge.

But relying on feeling is like relying on a sand castle: it’s satisfying and magical when it’s there, but there’s no denying that it won’t last forever.

Feelings are constantly and sometimes uncontrollably affected by external forces. Sometimes the input positively influences the output: someone gives you a compliment, you hit a PR at the gym, you nail a presentation at work. But other times, the input isn’t quite as uplifting: tight work deadlines, traffic jams when you’re already late *cue Alannis*, an argument with a friend. And just like that, the motivation to stay committed is in jeopardy.

This kind of thinking is backwards. When you rely on emotion, you give away your power as the sentient being. You hand over your ability to make the decision based not on external factors, but on intrinsic values and goals.

The reality is: your actions shape your behavior. And actions are emotionless.

An Action-First Approach

The reality of health transformations is intensely personal for me.

A Snippet of My Story…

I wa diagnosed with anorexia in my early 20s. Statistically speaking, it was a late development and diagnosis for this kind of disease. I’d spent the formative years of my life in a healthy relationship with my body and with food. But because of trauma that was happening in my personal life in my late teens and into my 20s, I used food and exercise as a source of control and steadiness.

I didn’t struggle on my own very long before my parents realized that something was very wrong and stepped in to help me recover. Part of that recovery was a trial-and-error style building of a support system. I saw a doctor and nutritionist frequently; they were instrumental in giving me knowledge and boosting my morale.

But nothing changed from those sessions. I’d get excited about recovery in the office, ensuring them I felt enlightened and that I knew I could do this, and then I’d step outside onto the city street and immediately feel that assuredness melt away.

Ironically, it was my therapist who encouraged me not just to take action, but taught me how.

Time to Take ACTION

Here’s what she told me:

IDENTIFY yourself as someone who can make change. Imagine the person you want to be, and visualize your showing up as that person.
DETERMINE exactly what you are going to do, when you are going to do it, and how you are going to make it happen.
CHOOSE to seperate yourself from the voice that is adamantly saying “you shouldn’t/you can’t/this is not what you do”.
COMMIT to making that change for 1 day. Then 1 week. If it absolutely sucks, she told me, you don’t ever have to do it again.

Damn.

This process is not passive. Just the opposite: it is about taking ACTION. That’s why each step starts with a verb: identify, determine, choose, commit. Every small, seemingly insignificant step gradually reshapes our behaviors and in turn, our identity.

It took me years to fully recover. But the moment I took action, the gears began turning. One day turned into two turned into seven. What felt impossible at first soon just felt hard. Soon what felt hard felt…less hard. Eventually that small action felt like routine and I had the mental capacity and energy – literally and figuratively – to make the next change.

A Framework for Change: How to Align Your Values with Your Fitness Goals

It might not surprise you that I have an aversion to “quick fixes” when it comes to fitness and health. Things like detox diets and fat loss drugs. Maybe they work. Maybe they don’t. Either way, they are a bandaid. They don’t fix the foundational misalignment of values and actions. They don’t teach us anything.

And if we don’t learn anything from “the solution”, what happens when “the solution” isn’t there anymore?

Lasting change, personal development and sustainable fitness and health comes from aligning your values with your fitness goals. Aligning your values with your fitness goals requires changing from the outside in, and the inside out.

That’s the key.

And this step-by-step guide can help you in pursuit.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness, the ability to see ourselves clearly, is a core life skill. It’s also the first step on the ladder to aligning your values with your fitness goals.

Research suggests that as we develop self-awareness we work harder, make better decisions, communicate more effectively and build stronger relationships with the people and world around us. Self awareness (internal) is far more impactful than perceived (external) awareness. Meaning: what you know about your own strengths, weaknesses, aspirations, abilities and passions is far more important than how you perceive others see you.

Quite simply: “What other people think about you doesn’t matter. So don’t waste another minute trying to change someone else’s opinion of you, and focus on what does matter: what you think about yourself”. – Mell Robbins

There’s more than one way to cultivate self awareness:

Introspection. If I had to sum up introspection in a single word, it would be “Why?“. “Why does this craving feel so out of control?”. “Why can I not seem to get into a routine at the gym?”.

This is arguably the most difficult process because it is the most subjective and because it is the most influenced by external cues and the dominant ideologies of mainstream culture and media. According to feminist media scholar Jean Kilbourne, 92% of how we process the above influences is unconscious but manifests itself prominently in how we view ourselves.
Data Analysis. This is the “What” of self awareness. Data analysis is objective and answers questions that play a major role in reaching your fitness goals with numbers. This sounds less emotionally involved, but that’s not always necessarily the case.

Scale weight. Girth measurements. Weight lifted. Workouts completed. Steps walked. Hours slept. Macros eaten. Lab data.

There’s no denying that these are just numbers. But they aren’t completely emotionally void.

Self-awareness is challenging, but as your cultivate it you gain a growing sense of empowerment and ownership that is vital for aligning your actions with your goals, and your goals with your values.

Ownership

Ownership is about taking responsibility. It means acknowledging and accepting accountability for your actions, decisions, and their consequences. Positive or negative. This requires honesty and a willingness to respond to the outcome whether positive or negative.

Ownership is not about blame or guilt or shame. It’s about acknowledging yourself as a sentient, causal being in the choices you make. For example, food does not have a moral compass. It is not innately good, or bad. It’s just food. But it’s quite common to label foods as good and bad, and then blame the food for overindulgence: “I can’t help myself around chocolate chip cookies.”. Realizing that you actually can (the cookie is just a mix of flour, sugar and butter after all), puts the onus of responsibility back in your hands. There’s power to be had there.

There are some key factors in taking ownership and developing a sense of responsibility:

Acknowledge that reaching your fitness goals is your responsibility.
Be proactive. Initiate change rather than wait to be forced.
Learn from your past. Take the challenges and obstacles that you have faced and use them to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
Communicate when you need change and exactly how others can help you.
Zoom out and take a long-term perspective on your goals.
Be resilient. Setbacks are only failures if you allow them to stop you. Bounce back and persevere.

Self-Discipline

“The first and best victory is to conquer self.” – Plato

Knowledge is power. But aligning your values with your fitness goals only creates change if you take action. Discipline is “the practice of”. Meaning it’s less about what you know, and more about what you do.

Self-discipline requires conscious decision making. It means consistently doing “the thing” – completing the workout, going for the walk, choosing the healthier meal – even when you don’t want to. It sounds a lot like giving up things that are relaxing and easy for choices that are

The best way to build self-discipline is through repetition. The more often you repeat a practice, the faster it becomes simply who you are and what you do.

To build self-discipline, try this:

Set clear goals. Understand what success means to you. Create a specific, measurable goal so that you know which way you are going.
Know your strengths and weaknesses. We all have both. It’s important to know what activities/thought processes/situations we are already good at, and where we will need to call on a bit more focus and effort.
Create a supportive environment. Your environment – both the physical time and place and the people who fill it – impact your ability to succeed. Surround yourself with people and things that support your success.
Practice consistency. To master a skill you must repeat it frequently. Repeated tasks become habits.
Challenge yourself regularly. This goes back to step 2. Just because something feels like a weakness, does not mean that you should ignore it. Especially is it contributes to your success and adheres with your values. This doesn’t always have to be in the gym, although a tough workout is a great way to build confidence. This could be challenging yourself to go to bed an hour earlier, or to forgo dessert when out to eat.

How to Stick to Your Diet and Exercise Program: 12 Highly Effective Strategies

Self-Belief

Self belief, or self efficacy, is the belief that you have the ability to complete a task and reach a goal. It’s not about ego, but rather a tangent and growing realization that you are capable and worthy.

Self belief often requires proof, which is why I put it here as Pillar 4 instead of up at the top. How do you get proof?

You set goals, create a plan and do what’s in your power to follow the plan.
You can visualize yourself achieving your goals.
You learn to use logic instead of emotion to make decisions.
You follow through with that you say you will do.

Self-belief is a driving force. It is a powerful motivator to reach your goals and preserver through challenges. As you learn to align your values with your fitness goals, self-belief grows right along side that skill.

Motivation & Mindset

The Missing Link: How to Align Your Values with Your Fitness Goals

A Common Misconception