Have you ever set a New Year’s resolution, only to drop it in just a few weeks? If you have, you’re not alone. Today we’re talking about setting goals that we care about and that we can reach. We peel back the layers of motivation and look at how shifting our drive from fear to love can create a sustainable path to success. We also talk about the concept of tiered goal setting, a compassionate approach that accommodates the ebb and flow of life. We explore the balance of ideal, realistic, and survival goals, ensuring that even amidst challenges, our actions remain rooted in what we value. This episode isn’t just about setting goals; it’s about embracing growth and finding joy in our progress!
What you will learn on this episode:
– The importance of resilient goal setting that aligns with personal core values.
– The difference between fear-based and love-based motivation and how to shift from fear to love to sustain drive towards goals.
– Learning about compassionate tiered goal-setting consisting of ideal, realistic, and survival goals.
TRANSCRIPT
*This transcription below was provided for you or your convenience; please excuse any mistakes that the automated service made in translation.
00:54
It is January and we’re at the beginning of another new year. It seems like everywhere I go, there is discussion or a post or a challenge to set New Year’s resolutions. New Year’s is probably one of our more optimistic holidays, where we look forward and think about where we want to be going in the coming year and ultimately set goals to do that. So, just for fun, I looked up some statistics on New Year’s resolutions and I read that approximately 38% of us make New Year’s resolutions each year, but only 9% of people stick to them all year long. The average resolution lasts just three and a half months before almost 90% of people drop the goals altogether. Because of this, there’s actually some unofficial dates that have cropped up in kind of a funny way. Officially, the second Friday in January is known as Quitter’s Day, and I was dismayed to learn that January 17th is known as Ditch New Year’s Resolutions Day, which is my wedding anniversary. So on that day I’m usually actually looking for ways to renew and commit again rather than ditch our goals. But the timing is interesting, isn’t it About two weeks and most of us are looking at walking away or forgetting our resolutions, and I think sometimes it helps to identify what a resolution is, because when we talk about our resolutions as goals, I think it can really help us identify that thing we’re trying to do at the beginning of the year, which is really to kind of look forward and make a plan and kind of be hopeful about where we want our lives to go. So, even though we do tend to have this vision and then drop it a few weeks later, I think the thing I love most about us as human beings is that we keep coming back around and setting more goals. When we fall down, the beauty is that we get up and we try again. This is the definition of resilience, right? So I thought maybe it would be helpful to talk about setting goals as we look to getting back to our lives after the holidays.
03:04
So what kind of goals are swimming around in your head at the beginning of this year? We often set goals around things we think will make us happy. I call these achievement goals hitting a target weight, making a certain amount of money, running or walking a certain number of miles a day, getting high grades or performance reviews, even reading a certain number of books. They’re what we would consider an end goal, and I’m sure you’ve heard of SMART goals. You know goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound, and I think SMART goals are a great pattern to use to help you follow through on the goals that you’ve set. But I think we need to go deeper before we set our goals, to make sure we know why we’re setting the goal in the first place, because the problem I find is that often we’re on that path of achievement, pushing to get the outcomes without having an understanding of the formula. That kind of comes with setting that outcome. And I’m going to bring you back to that formula of how we work, that cognitive, behavioral formula, where thoughts create feelings and feelings inspire us to act and when we act over time we get those outcomes. This really is the underpinnings and the under formula of how goals are met. But part of what makes it so hard to stay committed to these goals, as the research points out, is because we may be only focused on the outcome and we haven’t focused enough on the thoughts and feelings that are beneath that goal.
04:39
I’ve done this so many times. I’ve set a goal that sounds great and I kind of fantasize about what that would look like to be at the end and say I’ve accomplished that goal. But deep inside I’ve not really connected to it. And how do I know this? Well, sometimes it’s because of the resistance. I feel Like I say I want to do it, but inside I’m kind of dreading it or dragging my feet about doing it. Maybe I even feel resentful that I have to do it. I don’t know. I think I can kind of say one thing I want, but beneath it I’ve got some doubt about it. Sometimes I find I set a goal and it overwhelms me, and once again it sounded great, but in real life I don’t have the time to do what it takes. It wasn’t realistic enough, and sometimes I set a goal that just isn’t based in what matters most to me. Maybe it’s based on what I think should matter to me, or based on someone else’s idea of what I should be doing. In other words, my goals aren’t always connected to what matters most to me. And when I say that phrase what matters most to you I hope you’ve started to notice that that means I’m talking about our values.
05:47
In the last few years, I’ve changed how I set my goals. I’m much more connected to them and they are so much easier and joyful to work on. I actually achieve them way more than I used to. So today I’d like to expand goal setting for us to include some deeper preparation work.
06:05
Before we start on that smart goal path, I invite you to consider looking at setting what we call resilient goals. Resilient goals are, number one, value-based. They’re based on your why what matters the most to you. Number two they’re based on love rather than fear as your motivation, on creating things rather than eliminating things. And number three they’re focused on the process more than a specific outcome, and inherently more flexible rather than rigid. So let’s talk about these three aspects of setting resilient goals and why using them this year is such a better idea than our traditional New Year’s resolutions.
06:47
Number one resilient goals are based upon your why. They’re connected to the values that you hold. Remember how we define values. They’re principles and ideas that form your personal guidebook, or that kind of internal compass that gives meaning to your life. They’re foundational of what you deeply care about and they help you make choices about what you do and how you do it, and they’re usually what you use to measure your life and decide if your life is turning out as you think it should.
07:17
So values are always influencing us, but we aren’t always aware of them and often we’ll set goals without really thinking about our deeper values. Well, maybe we feel pressure from other people, maybe wanting their approval or want to be like them. We often hear about things that should matter to us, so it’s easy to be setting goals where we think we should be setting goals without that underlying connection, and this happens to all of us. It’s more normal than not normal, but I think it’s one of the reasons why we struggle so much with achieving our goals, because sometimes they’re just not really deeply ours. So that’s something we need to check out.
07:56
What is it that really matters to you Not to someone else, but to you and how can you choose goals that align with what matters to you? An important question to ask, because your values are your navigation system. They’re your North Star. In the days long before electronic instruments, travelers would plot their course by the stars, particularly by the North Star. They would look up into the sky to get oriented and make their next steps based upon that orientation. So values are like that North Star that guides us in the direction we want to go, and goals are the things that help us get there. So if you were a ship headed to a destination, you’d use your values to know what that destination was, the direction that you’re going to go, and you’d use your goals like a rudder or a sail to take you there. So your goals aren’t your destination. Your values are the things that are guiding you there. It’s your goals that you’re using to get there.
09:00
For instance, you may have the value of connection and want to have a close connection with your child. That’s your value. Your goal may be to spend 10 minutes each day talking with your teenager as a way to act on that value. It’s just one option, one way to get to that place of connection with your child. How many other ways are there to act on that value and go in that direction? Probably too many to identify. There’s a few. You could set a goal to read a book with a child each day, look them in the eye and tell them you love them twice a day, text them or spend one-on-one time with them once a week, ask them how their day went every evening. You can start to hear the specifics of a goal and the ability that we have to kind of dial it down to how we might achieve that outcome we’re going for. But hopefully you can see the value of connection is the foundational root and all the like. If it were a plant, that would be the root and all the little shoots that can come up from that root are the different goals you might have or choose to get you living deeper into your value. So goals are the specific ways you’re choosing to live out those values. When connected to your values, your goals have a source and that source is something that is yours and if you keep it at the forefront of your mind, you’re much more likely to stay focused and committed to those goals, and this is why I like to focus on value-based goal setting when you understand your why and it links up to what you really care about.
10:36
I had a session with a woman recently who has the goal of losing weight. She said she’s had the same goal for the past five years and every year she fails at it. She was so discouraged and down about it and, rather than launch into a strategy to get her to be successful, this year we took a different approach. We really looked at putting a resilient spin on her goal setting. We started with looking at her values, focusing on the things that were deeply, deeply important to her, and, as always happens when we do this, she discovered a very cool list of things that mattered to her. This was some of the things on her list health, connection, acceptance, being physically active, learning, growing, honesty, kindness, loyalty and the list went on. And then we looked at kind of what currently took up her time and her focus and her life and how that was connected to the things that mattered to her. So we did this little value inventory and it helped us start with a bigger picture that went quite deep to the things that she cared the most about, and we did this before we even said the word weight, which was what she had originally identified as her goal.
11:50
We started with a whole landscape of what mattered most to her and then we looked at where her desire to lose weight fit in. What was her value beneath that goal of losing I think it was like 15 or 20 pounds? She took a few minutes looking at that list of things that she deeply valued and she identified a few of those values that seemed important to her that might be related to that goal of losing weight. And these are the values that came up for her feeling accepted and connected to others. Those two were the ones that kept coming up kind of at the top of her list. And health was there and I think staying physically active was there. So even more than the health and the activity was that feeling accepted and connected to others.
12:44
And what she discovered was that she was feeling quite disconnected from her body. She thought it wasn’t acceptable. She was having a hard time loving and accepting where she was at in her body right now, and so she felt most driven to lose weight so that she would feel more acceptable. Now, this is really interesting information, because when we value feeling loved and feeling accepted and who doesn’t value that is losing weight really going to provide that? And here’s a way to kind of test that. Would you believe that for someone else? Would you teach your children look, honey, to be accepted, you need to weigh between this and this, or else you just aren’t worthy, you’re not acceptable. We would never teach that explicitly and hopefully not implicitly to our daughters, our children. We’d help them see that there are other ways, deeper and more value based ways, to experience that feeling of being acceptable, and we’ve talked about that that.
13:44
I really believe we need to have our home base be that understanding that we can’t do things to make ourselves more or less acceptable. That’s our birthright. You are born whole, valuable and wise. So no matter what you weigh if you think you weigh too much or you don’t think you weigh enough, or if you think you weigh just the perfect, right amount of weight none of that is going to make you more or less valuable, worthy and wise, and I know this because I work with women all the time, and weight isn’t the measurement for that. I work with women who are at their ideal weight and they still don’t feel acceptable, and I work with women who are not at their ideal weight and they do feel acceptable. I think the best news ever is that none of that is linked to our weight, although I think we believe it is.
14:37
A lot of times, weight is the wrong measurement of this value and probably then, therefore, the wrong goal to choose. It’s not going to give us the connection or worth that we’re looking for, even when we achieve it, when we can evaluate all of our goals with this in mind, all of those goals concerning money, status, the house we live in, where we travel or what our kids accomplish. We want to make sure that those goals are linked to what’s most important to us. Please don’t think I’m saying that there are some goals that are okay and some goals that aren’t. There is nothing wrong with any of those goals that I listed. Goals are neutral. They’re not good or they’re not bad. We just want to clarify as to why we’re pursuing them, because we’re a lot less likely to stick with a goal when, deep inside, we have a hunch. We have a belief that it’s not going to give us what we really, really want, and I’ve seen that mismatch happen with others and with myself. You know this is a self-awareness exercise where we’re really paying attention to the why beneath the goal that we’re seeking. I find I’m a lot less likely to stick with the goal when deep inside I’m not well connected to it.
15:54
Even after reaching the goal I set, I often end up still longing for the thing that caused me to set the goal in the first place, because the goal wasn’t connected appropriately to the value I cared about. So I try to clean it up. I’m trying to be more thoughtful and honest with myself so I can really be working on the things I care about for the right reasons. Every time I look at losing weight I have to ask myself what’s underneath that goal? What am I really trying to live out from my values? If losing weight feels like I’ll get more acceptance, more approval, more attention, then maybe what I’m really longing for is connection and loving relationships. Maybe weight loss is never going to give that to me. I may still decide I want to lose weight, but it’s with a more powerful understanding of my why. Because if what I’m going for is feeling more valuable to myself and to others because I’m skinnier it’s not going to work. It’s a mismatched goal. So if we choose to hit a specific target weight, we keep using this as an example. But if we go with that, our specific target weight is the goal.
17:01
When you see how much easier it might be to stick to a plan to reach that goal when it’s just a number on the scale you’re trying to achieve, that’s going to help you with your health rather than a way to feel good enough or worthy enough to get connection with others, it’s like we’ve chosen the right vehicle to get to the place we want to go. So can we have goals? Yes, really any goal we want. But check in to make sure what’s really behind the goal. Let’s match it up well with what we care about, because you want goals that are deeply you-based rather than other-based, and as I’ve worked with women over the past few years, I’ve seen the need to separate out the drive to meet others’ expectations. So when we set a goal from a should I should be this way or do this thing, it’s often a trap where we think we’re going after something that we want, but without the underlying support that really matters to us, it undermines our efforts. So goal setting is not usually a feel-good experience unless it’s connected to you, to your values, and that’s where we want to set our goals. When a goal lacks the value behind it, then the only measure of success becomes its achievement and we end up trying to serve our goals rather than our goals serving us. And we want that reversed Goals exist to help us get where we most deeply desire to be. This is the best way to navigate our lives best way because it’s full of purpose and the right kind of motivation, which brings us to number two in setting resilient goals.
18:35
When we look at motivation, there are basically two kinds. We could be motivated by fear or motivated by love. Fear is highly motivating. Triggers are fight-or-flight systems gets us moving. Fear of death is the greatest motivator of all, gets people running from wild animals and external threats, but also from that internal feeling of not being acceptable or lovable. That can cause a lot of fear and brings us super human strength for a very short time. But it’s not sustainable. Your fight-or-flight mode can’t stay on forever or it will cause more of the same problem, more threat that your body is trying to avoid. So when we’re motivated by fear fear of not being acceptable, not fitting in, fear of being left alone, fear of not being enough we’re running and running, and the truth is we can’t keep running all the time.
19:29
The research on resolution and goal setting really shows up here After a few weeks or months of chasing a goal out of fear, we are going to stop. It’s too hard, it costs too much, it makes us narrow our focus and lose sight of the big picture. And then, of course, we get judgmental and critical of ourselves. So I would much rather let go of a goal that is beating me up, and I do. That’s when I drop my goals. I’m like, yeah, I feel too awful about this, I’m done, forget it, drop it. Quitter’s Day, january, whatever, hopefully not on my anniversary.
20:01
But we can be motivated by love. Love is a totally different animal. It creates a different experience for us, even in our bodies, how it feels. When we’re motivated by love. It means we’re looking to run towards something rather than away from it, and I want to do that. I want to set a goal of feeding my body healthy and delicious food, rather than running away and saying I can’t eat sugar. That feels awful. I much rather get up during the day every morning and say today I’m excited about food that is going to feed and nourish my body, rather than today I wake up and I can’t have anything tasty and sweet and delicious. That, I think, is wonderful. What an awful feeling to start my day with. Am I going to drop that goal? Absolutely it feels awful, but if I can have a goal to look forward to things that are going to really help me feel healthier and maybe even start to get curious about finding the things that I enjoy, that are going to replace the things that I think are not serving me, I’m much more motivated and I will stay with that goal much longer than if I’m in fear. Your body and mind feels good in creation mode. Creating is life, elimination it’s death figuratively, of course, but it helps to see this dramatic picture because once you do, it’ll help you approach your goal setting with a much clearer and more powerful mindset. I always want you to be in the mindset of empowerment plenty rather than scarcity.
21:34
I’ve really been working on this over the last few years, you guys, since I came to understand the concept of replacement, or creation rather than elimination. The theory behind this follows the same theory that we use when working with our thoughts. We know that when we have thoughts that are difficult, that causes pain or don’t service, that trying to eliminate them just doesn’t work, because thoughts they follow the principle of attention, that wherever we put our attention, that’s where we will be. So, as we try to focus on elimination of thoughts, guess where our attention goes? Yep, it goes right on the very thought we don’t want to have. So instead we look at holding thoughts loosely, without judgment, because judgment actually starts to feed the thought and puts way more of our attention on it and then becomes stronger and takes up more space in our thinking. So instead we just notice the thought, we let it bop around in our head like it’s a cloud in the sky and it’s there and we get to decide how much attention to put on it. And the great thing about attention is that we can learn to direct it. And that’s what we do. When we have a thought that isn’t serving us, we direct our attention to a thought that does service. So that’s that replacement concept. And remember, wherever we put our attention, that’s where we are. So that’s how we make the shift in our thinking. So we use the same approach with what we’re doing in our life around how we set goals.
23:01
So think about what you do want rather than what you don’t want. Your negativity bias is trained to notice the things you don’t want, so you can start with that. But when you make your goals, you want to flip the coin over to the other side of what’s on the other side of that negative. So I want to feel good in my body and feel healthy, rather than I have to lose weight. I want to feel peace and calm in my home rather than I have to get rid of this clutter. I want to feel closer and more connected to my kids rather than I have to stop yelling.
23:36
Take any goal you have and make sure it’s structured for the positive that it’s speaking, the value it’s connected to, and this opens up way more options as far as how you can go about getting what you want. It shows you the path to where you want to go, rather than on where you don’t want to go. So your focus isn’t on stop yelling. Like what is that supposed to look? Like A picture of myself yelling with a big red X over it, like my brain doesn’t know how to get there. The goal is clearer when you’re focused on what you do want. What am I going to practice in my life so I can feel calm and connected to my child during stressful times? Now I’m seeing a vision of myself standing there, calm when maybe my child’s frustrated or having a meltdown. What goal helps you get there? I did this with a client recently.
24:26
Her goals started out I’m not going to yell at my kids so much. Hmm, hard to identify the steps in that right, so just stop doing it. Well, we know that doesn’t work. That’s why we dropped that goal in January. So she and I identified the flip side of her desire to stop yelling. What would that look like? So we got to work. What would she need to do to stay calm and connected to her kids? Well, she identified she needed more sleep, more time to practice being calm in her body throughout the day, more support to get that restorative time. So these became her goals for the year and weirdly, they had like on paper. They looked like they had little to do with those tense moments when she was getting mad and yelling at her kids. And this is actually a much better approach to her goal, because she’ll never be able to control those moments, if they happen, when they happen. But she can control how she trains for staying calm and connected in her body, coming from her values and coming from love. She was able to seriously change the outcome and get what she wanted less yelling at her kids, not because she just white-knuckled herself to hold in her anger. Rather because she taught herself how to get what she needed so she could manage her emotions. She landed on the right goals to live her deepest values.
25:47
This wasn’t linear One or two, three steps. It takes time and adjustment because life is messy and out of our control most of the time. So we set goals and when our plans get interrupted we go to step number three. In resilient goals setting, we focus on the bigger picture. So resilient goals are focused on the process rather than the outcome. And you may hear the language of growth mindset here. And that’s because we have tons of research showing us that when we focus on the process of our goals as opposed to the outcome, we’re building the skill set, building the muscles to actually achieve those goals.
26:29
Achieving goals has more to do with our perseverance, our creativity and our willingness to be flexible rather than rigid. This might be the place where we come at odds a little bit with the smart goal formula, and I want you to be able to have all of these tools in your toolkit for setting goals. What I’m telling you is that sometimes it’s great to have very specific, monitored and tracked goals that you adhere to, and sometimes it’s important to not be so specific and be focused on the general process of what you’re trying to achieve, because how often do you set a goal that is pretty intense and then find that life happens and you can’t get it done every day or in as big a way as you laid it out? This happens to me all the time. What we have to remember is that there’s more than one way to live out our values and address the things that we care about. There needs to be more than one way.
27:24
Researchers study companies, athletes, musicians and even normal folks like us how they accomplish their goals, and what they found is that people who tend to accomplish goals are resilient. The most successful goal achievers get knocked down a lot. They just get back up a lot and then they revise, reiterate and get creative. Their scoreboard looks different. Yes, they count those steps to achievement, but they also count the progress and the process. They count everything the big numbers and the intentions and how closely they’re connected to their values, and they substitute curiosity for criticism and they practice self-compassion when they fall short or think they messed up. This is actually the key to dealing with that drop in New Year’s resolutions.
28:18
No one can keep goal pursued perfectly, so when we inevitably fall down or fall short, most of us stop pursuing the goal and resilience helps us lovingly reconnect to our values which is going to be very motivating and get back up and try again. This may be the most important thing for us to remember as moms, because our best laid plans get disrupted all the time with sick kids or kids schedules or kids, unregulated emotions, and our goals feel like they get kicked to the curb. And why make a goal when we’re getting sabotaged all the time? Just feels too big, too overwhelming. So this is why we need to be focused on the process and be flexible in adjusting our goals when we face roadblocks, rather than give up, we give ourselves room to adjust. Maybe we try the same thing again, same goal, or maybe we iterate, pick a different goal that fits better or is better matched to our season in life. We don’t have to give it up altogether. We can pick another option. Remember, if values are a plant and goals are the shoots that come up from that plant, we have plenty of options that come from the same thing. We care about the same route, even if we run into roadblocks for achieving our specifically identified goal that was originally our goal. As long as we take action on something that we care about, we are going to increase our success. We’re going to be training for the ability to follow process and follow through on goals, and we’re going to be building a life of purpose and meaning, which, by the way, is the ultimate definition of happiness. That’s why we’re studying together in this podcast.
29:55
I love the idea of tiering your goals. This is a model that comes from self compassionate goal setting, where we give ourselves a wide road from which to choose actions that express our values and support the things we care about. So when we talk about tiers, I want you to think kind of of like a three-tiered cake, like a wedding cake. Three levels there’s an ideal version of our goals, a realistic version and a survival version, and all of these tiers represent something that you care about in your values, so the ideal version of your goal. You may start out with an ideal and call it, and maybe even an aggressive version of our goal. I think this is that thing that we set out on January 1st and say this is what I’m going to do, this is my big ideal goal.
30:46
I have a client who told me she had a goal to go to the gym five days a week. She identified her underlying value to be health, so she had an internal, deeper drive to stay active and take care of her body. She was well linked to her value and felt really good about this ideal goal. Now here’s where real life comes in. She has three kids and a husband who often travels and has some seasons in her year that are sometimes busier than others, particularly with her kids schedules. So getting to the gym five days a week has always been a problem for her because she has other values that she’s also focusing on, like caring for her children and getting sleep and keeping the household running and sometimes doing all of that by herself when her husband is gone. So once she understood this process of tiering goals, we also worked together to have her set realistic goals.
31:39
That’s the second tier. She also has a realistic version of her goal, an alternate form that allows her a few other options to take care of her health, because, remember, the value behind her goal is her health. So sometimes going to the gym just isn’t going to be possible because of child care, or she’s been sick or kids are sick. So her realistic version of her goal might mean that she puts her child in the stroller and takes a walk around the neighborhood or does an online yoga routine in her living room, or just stretches her body on the floor before she goes to bed, because that was the only time she had available for herself during her entire day. This was her realistic version and sometimes, and maybe more often than we like, she might need to drop into her survival version of her goals. It might mean she goes straight to bed one day and gets sleep and completely bags the idea of any kind of exercise. Is this giving up on her goals? Well, can sleep help you with your exercise goals? Absolutely. She’d be operating off the value of loving and caring for her body and sometimes working out when you haven’t had enough sleep actually works against you.
32:50
The purpose of this approach to tier goals is to hang on to the value beneath our goals and be flexible, be adaptable and ultimately allow us to be successful over the long game. Because let me tell you what usually happens we have an ideal goal based upon something we care about, and then something happens life and we don’t accomplish our goal. And then we get super discouraged and often critical and get trapped in that all or nothing thinking. Look, I can’t reach this goal, so I just give up. Many times if you said I’m only going to eat healthy food or I’m only going to speak calmly and kindly to my children, and then you eat that bag of chips or yell at the kids and then say, ah, I blew it, I can’t do this and sink lower, eat more junk that day, feel worse, more irritable, yell more and kind of lose your whole confidence that you can’t do this thing. This is what black and white thinking does. It’s just a negative cycle and a trap for our minds, and we can get out of it. That’s why I love the concept of value based goals.
33:45
You can always go home to your values to understand why you’re disappointed and from there, pick something off your tiered menu that will work for you today, right now, in your specific circumstance. Let’s you find some kind of success every single time, because you’re not measuring your output as much as you’re measuring your process. You’re holding your goals loosely enough to actually hang on to them rather than throw them away when you can’t do them perfectly. Look, a goal is replaceable, interchangeable, fixable, flexible. Let’s use that flexibility to keep our focus on the bigger picture, on what really matters to you People who stay connected to their values and committed to the process that we’re talking about here. Well, they win. In the end. They’re the ones that move forward, even if it’s in small increments. Especially because it’s in small increments, it just moves the needle. It reminds me of the story of the tortoise and the hare that little turtle just keeps going, maybe at a slow pace, maybe sometimes when it doesn’t feel like it’s making any progress, and in the end it wins.
34:58
So I want you to take your goal and tear it kind of, expand it to include those three levels an ideal goal, make it aggressive, make it difficult, make it fantastic, and then have a realistic version of it and then a survival option. Another way to look at this is hard, moderate and easy. You’re creating a menu of choices in which you can’t fail On any given day. You can do at least one thing in one of the levels to stay on course. When storms come in life, you injure your Achilles or the kids get sick, or Thanksgiving rolls around with all the traditions and pies you want to make and you can’t get to the ideal, you have a plan. You don’t have to let go of everything.
35:43
I get challenged on this sometimes from people who have found great success by pushing through, gritting their teeth, getting it done, and they say this approach is too soft, too flexible. It’s rigidity that makes things happen Do or die. Well, I take care of a lot of people and a lot of those people have achieved great success. They have the do part down and then they often feel like they can’t keep going. So they think they have to experience the die in the do or die. And they don’t. They just don’t.
36:13
You can push hard and you can set a goal and push really hard. Nothing wrong with that. Just do it. In context of the bigger sea of knowledge we have. It will actually help you be more successful and it will help you take on even bigger, more wild, wonderful goals. When you strengthen your resilience, you’re putting in the foundational pieces of your life that hold you and protect you, and how? How do they protect you? When you feel assured of your own worth and self-acceptance, that self-awareness, you’ll be much more likely to set those big, hard and wild goals, the ones that are so big that you may actually have to fail a couple of times before you reach them. You’ll understand that those goals aren’t connected to your value and worth. You’re not failing as a person, you just didn’t reach that goal at that time.
37:00
You can have goals that are linked to your sense of adventure, your sense of challenge to create or accomplish. They can still be value-based, but you’re so clear on them that you don’t have to fear losing yourself, your wellness, your worth, your value in the process. They become less scary. We want you free of the pressure to live off of others’ goals. We want you to own them for yourself with clarity and base them in love, so your body doesn’t feel threatened like that fear as motivation, and you’ll be able to use all your resources because your mind won’t be so busy trying to protect you. It’ll be more creative, more bold. You’ll have more freedom in achieving these goals. This is how we make big strides as well.
37:43
Well, we could talk forever about goals and how to stay on track, but for today, I hope you can take away the general sense of hope and excitement about this coming year and the very real possibility that you’re going to find success in getting closer to the things that matter the most to you. Check in with yourself about where you want to put your attention this year. Remember you get to adjust your goals, maybe even every week. Read the writing on the wall. If your ideal goal of running the Boston Marathon isn’t going to happen this year because it’s already November, you haven’t been able to train regularly, you live in the snow and you just had a baby. Look to see what’s underneath that goal of running the Boston Marathon and pick something you can do right now that will help you build your skills to eventually get there. Maybe even when you’re in a different season of life or another year, after the baby is weaned and the snow is melted, you can still train, still set goals that are achievable.
38:39
Now we’re looking at building a life of resilience and power and confidence, and the truth is, goals aren’t going to work for us unless we feel like we can kind of win at them. So I want you to remember the three elements of resilient goal setting that are going to help us feel successful and powerful. One, choose goals that stem from your values. Two, use love rather than fear to motivate. And three, let’s focus on process and flexibility so that we’re constantly on our side, moving forward in the things that we really care about. I think when we do these things, we are going to really love setting goals.
39:21
Well, thank you for your time today. I’m so excited for what the new year is going to bring for us here at Leadership Parenting. I’m so glad you’re here to join us as we face this year of learning and growing together. I’m wishing you all a happy new year and I will see you next week. Take good care. The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness or disease. It’s also not intended to be legal, medical or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.