The Why Behind the What: A Goal-Setting Framework That Actually Holds
I used to think a goal was the finish line. Pick a number, point yourself at it, grind until you get there. Lose 50 pounds. Hit master of sport. Build the business. Simple.
It isn't simple, and the reason it isn't is the part almost everybody skips.
You're at a party. Someone hands you a margarita. You wanted that drink the second you walked in, and you also have this goal of dropping weight. In that exact moment, the goal does nothing for you. The number on the scale doesn't reach across the room and slap the glass out of your hand. What decides the outcome isn't the goal. It's whether you know WHY you set it. Motivation by itself is fleeting; it evaporates the instant something better-tasting shows up. The why is what's left standing when the motivation walks out.
So that's where I start. Not with the goal. With everything underneath it.
Start by Looking Inward
Grab a piece of paper, or open a blank document. Before you write a single goal, answer some honest questions about your own life.
What excites you? Not what should excite you. What would you do for free, in your spare time, with nobody paying or watching? For me it's kettlebells, and I keep asking why until I hit something real: the objective measurables, the perfectionism the sport demands, the way the world goes quiet mid-set because you can only think about your breathing and the next rep. That's the answer. Not "I like working out."
Who do you actually want to be around? Separate the people you have to be around from the people you choose to be around (and pray there's heavy overlap with your spouse and your kids). Who energizes you? Who drains the battery? The people in your orbit shape your mindset, your mental health, your achievement, more than you give them credit for. Surround yourself with the content and the mediocre, and you drift mediocre. Eliminating negative influence and cultivating positive influence is not optional.
Then keep going. What do you want to learn? What do you want to accomplish, the kind of thing that shows up in an obituary? What virtues do you want said about you at your own eulogy? It's a morbid frame, I know, and it cuts straight to the truth. What's the unique value only you can bring? I'm five-foot-nothing of NBA potential; that's not where my value lives, so I don't aim there. And how do you actually want to spend your time? Describe your perfect day, hour by hour. Then a perfect month. A perfect year. We all get the same number of minutes and none of us knows the count. How you spend them is the whole game.
Find Your Drivers
Now pull out the words that keep resonating. Mine: passion, recognition, independence, growth, impact, creativity, security. Pick five to seven and interrogate each one. Why would you put in the work? What does it actually get you?
Money is the easiest place to see this, because almost nobody wants money. They want what they've decided money means. I don't value money much at all. What I value is freedom; the ability to choose where I go, what I focus on, who I am, without a balance sheet dictating it. Someone else looks at the same dollars and sees security, because they grew up without it. Someone else sees recognition. The paper is a social construct worth nothing on its own. We assign it meaning, and the meaning is the real target.
Those whys are your DRIVERS. They're the engine. Everything you build sits on top of them.
Map Drivers Onto the Pillars That Hold Your Life
Next, name the pillars of importance, the actual arenas where you spend your life and express those drivers. Mine, roughly in order: family, health, career, athletics, coaching, finances.
Here's where it gets useful. Make a matrix. Drivers down the side, pillars across the top. Then fill in how each pillar lets you express each driver. Passion shows up in my marriage, in coaching, in competing, in a career I finally believe in. Some boxes fill instantly. Some stay blank (I still can't make "independence" and "family" coexist cleanly, because family is built on being depended on, and that's fine).
The blanks aren't failures. The overlaps are the prize. The more places your drivers stack on top of each other, the better and happier the life. My kids picked up kettlebells because they wanted time with me; now family, athletics, and coaching overlap in one garage session. Design for that on purpose.
And before you trust your own answers, track your time for a week. Log it. Then look at where it actually went versus where you said it matters. Data brings awareness where there was none. If five hours of Netflix brings you nothing and one hour with your kids is the best hour of your day, that's not a hard trade; you just had to see it written down.
Build the Goals: Outcome, Performance, Process
Only now do you set goals, and you work backward.
The OUTCOME is what you're chasing. Lose 50 pounds in five months. Master of sport in long cycle. The PERFORMANCE goals are the mid-level chunks that get you there: lose 10 pounds a month, hit rank one this year. The PROCESS goals are the daily, weekly actions that make it move: three kettlebell sessions a week, macros on 90% of meals, half a gallon of water a day, eight hours of sleep. Then track your compliance, because skip the process and the outcome never lands.
Make them SMART, and write every one as a WILL statement. Not "I want to lose 50 pounds." I WILL lose 50 pounds. Specific, measurable, achievable (audacious is great; delusional isn't), relevant, time-bound. Relevant is the one people fudge: if a goal doesn't touch the pillars that matter to you, there's no why under it and it dies quietly. I could decide to learn guitar, but it touches nothing I care about, so it won't survive a busy week. That's not weakness. That's a goal with no fuel.
Then Be Ruthless
Last comes the nitty-gritty: prioritization and elimination. Your time is finite. Your energy is finite. Your battery is finite. Accept it, then get fucking ruthless, because not everything on your list carries equal weight, and pretending it does means nothing gets finished.
One thing that saved me real guilt: don't confuse eliminating something with choosing against it. If you work 50 hours to provide, you didn't choose work over your family; you chose providing for your family. Choosing your health over an evening isn't selfish; it's buying more years to spend with the people you're worried about neglecting. My grandfather died of a heart attack, and my family tree is heavy with disease, so when I don't feel like training, that's the why I come back to. Taking care of myself IS taking care of them.
Be ruthless with the choices. Be gentle with yourself about them. Both, at once.
That's the framework. The why under the what. Most people set the goal and quit before they ever find the engine. Find your engine first, and the goal stops being a finish line you hope to reach and becomes the obvious next move.
A lot of the bones of this come from Chris Duffin at Kabuki Strength, with my own additions stacked on top. Credit where it's due.
This came out of episode 9 of the Platform Podcast, way back in 2020. Listen to the full conversation here.
If you want help turning this into an actual training plan, with the pillars and the process goals built around your life instead of someone else's, that's exactly what I do. Apply to work with me here and we'll find your why together.
Vokse eller dø. — Coach Jordan