Ep. 348: Struggling with your Goals? Here's what to do.
Ep. Episode 348
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In this episode of Lessons from a Quitter, we revisit goal-setting—because let’s be honest, by March, most of us have forgotten those ambitious January resolutions. But instead of shame, this episode is about course correction. Whether you’ve made progress or fallen off track, now is the perfect time to reflect, reset, and create a 90-day plan to move forward. You’ll learn why goals aren’t about perfection but growth, how to overcome all-or-nothing thinking, and why consistency—not motivation—is key. Tune in for practical strategies to recommit to your goals and make real progress in Q2!

 
Show Transcript
Hey, welcome to Lessons from A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.

Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. I wanna talk to you about goal setting. Again. I know that's like end of March. What are we doing? That's exactly why I wanna bring up this topic. Again, if you've been around here for a while, I think at the beginning of the year I did a series on goal setting and I talked to you a lot about why you should only pick one goal and how to really like look at short-term versus long-term goals. And I, there's a lot of like really good information on how to set goals. So you can go back and listen to those episodes if this one resonates or if you're really thinking about goals. But the reason I wanted to do this episode specifically as we are nearing April, is because I want you to take time and reflect right now whenever you're listening to this, even if it's later.
And I want you to think about what happened to your goal, what happened in the last three months or what, six months or whenever you're listening to that January goal that you set. I don't say this in any way to shame you or to make you feel bad or anything. I want you to actually just get in the habit of rechecking in every quarter because this is the only way that you're actually gonna ever stick to your goal. One of the biggest mistakes we make, and we all know this kind of cycle, is we get super excited in January for resolutions or we get a lot of messaging, like we should have resolutions, we should have some people pick a word of what they want their year to look like or whatnot. There's a lot of different ways where it's like this intention and it makes sense.
There's like the beginning of the new year, it seems like a clean slate. And so we have this motivation and then inevitably life catches up to us. You get sick like me, you end up getting slammed at work, whatever happens, you end up not doing it. And then by the time March rolls round, which is when this episode's coming out, you've completely forgotten about it. Like we completely put it on the black burner and sometime around like November this year, but in, in like six months, we'll be like, oh my God, I I never even did anything for my goal. And then we'll heap on the shame and the guilt and we'll feel terrible. And I want you to stop that. Okay? So I want you to know that right now is the perfect time to revisit what that goal is. And if you never set a goal, perfect, this is the perfect time to set it.
I actually think that like January is kind of a really rough time to set goals. I know that it aligns with kind of the calendar that we follow, but it's the middle of winter. It's dark out and naturally your body is more tired. You are kind of operating in a more slow manner just like everything else in nature because that is what the season requires. Unless you're like in Australia, in which case maybe it's a great time to set goals 'cause it's summer, but you catch my drift. If you're in America and it is the dead of winter, maybe not the best time to set the goal to start training for a marathon, right? And so now that we're coming to the end of March, which is also the end of quarter one, and we're going into quarter two and we're going to spring and it's light out later and it's becoming warmer and you naturally will start having a little bit more energy, it is the perfect time to start thinking about, okay, what is the goal I wanna have, if you didn't start, then start now.
And if you did start, then great. Take this moment to look back and think about what worked and what didn't work in the last three months, not forever ago. And this isn't an opportunity to just beat yourself up. I want you to like really sort of become curious and become the observer of your life, right? Instead of doing it from a lens of like, I'm the worst. I never stick to things. I'm not consistent, I hate myself, whatever. We're gonna shelve that and we wanna look at like if some outside observer came in and looked and said like, okay, what did it work? Well, maybe I didn't have accountability. I just can't get myself motivated enough. Maybe I need a partner in order to do this. Or maybe I took on too much and I thought I was gonna work out five days a week and that's just wholly unlikely.
And so maybe I need to create a smaller goal. Um, maybe it was that I didn't really plan it out. I didn't really, um, have a plan. I just sort of had this pipe dream or you know, my plan wasn't as well thought out and I didn't take into consideration these things. Okay, great. Now I know if I look back and see like this is what is not working, this is what's getting in my way, then I can come up with a better way to tackle the next quarter. And I really do want you to think about like, you can think about long-term what the long-term goal for the year is gonna be. And you only get one goal, what the one goal is, but I want you more to think about what is it gonna be for the next quarter? So what's the next three months?
What is this 90 day sprint, right? If you're watching in real time like in in March, then it's perfect time like April, may, June, what am I gonna accomplish in that? Stop creating something where like you have to sort of think about the entire rest of the year. You can look at where do I wanna be at the end of the year, but what do I need to focus on? Can I zoom myself back in? Can I put on the blinders and really think about what are the three things I'm gonna do in order to get to my goal in these three months, right? What is the, the reasonable work that I can get to in order to make sure that I actually make some progress? Okay? So I want you to start there. I want you to like figure out like what it is that you're gonna focus on right now and what are like no more than three, no more than three activities that you're gonna focus on for the next three months.
And then I want you to also set an alarm on your calendar and your reminders. I want you to go into your reminders and I want you to pick a date three months from now that you're gonna revisit this. Hey, put the link to this YouTube video in that calendar reminder, and then have this video come up again and you can listen to it again in that quarter and go through the same exact process. One of the things that I think we really misunderstand about goal setting is for whatever reason, I think a lot of us believe that we're gonna just be perfect at it. We're gonna pick this thing, we're gonna always have motivation. Nothing's gonna get in our way. We're gonna hit it exactly the way it should. And when we get derailed, which we inevitably will because life is gonna happen, we give up, it becomes all or nothing.
Like, well I didn't do it for a couple weeks. So it's completely over. Like the biggest thing you can do in order to learn how to hit your goals is get outta that thinking is just train yourself to see that it's not over, right? And that comes with reps, right? But you're gonna try like to say like, okay, maybe this quarter was a wash. Maybe I didn't do as much as I wanted to. I still have three quarters left of the year. How does it make sense to just completely give up? Let me try again. Let me do another at bat, right? Let me go up and see like, what else can I do? And when you get into that mindset, then your goals become inevitable because yes, there will be hiccups. Yes, you will get sick or tragedy will strike, or work will get super busy or whatever will happen that will stop you from being able to do it right then.
But then you just, you know yourself and you know, like, okay, I'm gonna get back into it. I don't have to keep recycling this pattern where I completely give up and then I wait till the next year and then we start over it again, right? One example I will give you, when I started this one goal project where like I, I limited myself to one goal. The first goal I picked it was in 2020 I had just started my coaching business and I had set a goal to make a hundred thousand dollars in that first year. And I set the goal in January and Covid happened that March, right? And by July, July or August, I had made like, I wanna say 5,000, maybe $10,000. I clearly was nowhere close to a hundred thousand. I was nowhere even in the ballpark. And if I had just taken that and said like, okay, it's not gonna happen.
I already tried this. I was trying to sell coaching, it wasn't working the way that I wanted, there's no way I'm gonna do this. I wouldn't have made $93,000 that year. And I did because in July or August I remember reevaluating and really thinking like, okay, well now I have to make 90,000 in six months. Like I wanted to make a hundred thousand a year and that didn't work. And I've been trying different things. It wasn't as if I wasn't doing stuff, but I clearly wasn't getting the results. And I kept trying different things. And I remember reevaluating and going into Q3 and thinking, okay, I have to try something different or I wanna, um, I wanted to do different things with, uh, my audience. And I ended up selling a group program and making like $80,000 between September and October, which was mind blowing in and of itself.
Like it really shifted so much of my consciousness because of so much that I didn't think was possible happened. But it also fundamentally shifted how I thought about goals because I really thought like, huh, I could have given up, I could have decided like, all right, you know what? We'll get it next year. There's no way I'm gonna make a hundred thousand dollars. There's no way I'm gonna make anything close, so I might as well just like give up on this goal. And that's only comes from a place of like, I think I have to protect myself. 'cause if I fail, it feels so bad that I'm just gonna say I'm not gonna do this goal, right? Because the worst thing that was happening has already happened. I, you know, hadn't made a hundred thousand dollars already. So like if I gave up on it and I didn't make a hundred thousand at the end, I would be exactly where I was in July.
I hadn't made it then either. But the harder part was that like I'd had to face the fact that I was a quote unquote failure or I, I actually tried. I actually put myself out there and it didn't work. And I really had to sit with like, well, can I sit with that? Of course I can, right? Most of it was just embarrassment. Like I didn't want other people to see me try and fail. I didn't want other people to see that maybe I'm not good at this or maybe I'm not actually a coach or this is so embarrassing or whatnot. And so I had the inclination to hide, which is what I think a lot of us do. It's like this inclination of like, well, if I never actually put my effort out, then I can't confirm this insecurity that I have that like maybe I'm not good enough.
Maybe I'll never be good enough, or whatever the insecurity is. And I started realizing that that was just a lie. My brain was telling me to try to keep me safe, to try to keep me from trying new things. And I was like, you know what? I would rather try and fail. I would rather go full out and to myself like have this goal and see that I failed at it and actually grow and learn and practice and figure out why I am failing and deal with all of the negative emotions and get over this embarrassment and at least grow in that journey then to never try and still never make a hundred thousand dollars. Like at the end of the year, maybe I won't have anything, but I will have learned a lot. I will have tried a lot, I will have at least like been in the arena fighting, right?
Instead of like sitting on the stands, always hoping for things. And so I made a decision like we're going all out and I had been trying to go all out that first half of the year it wasn't working and then something clicked. And the offer that I put out in that like September or October was one of my biggest launches at the time, obviously. And I ended up making, you know, with everything else, like by the end of the year I didn't hit the a hundred thousand, but who cares? I hit 93,000 and fundamentally changed the way that I think I had fundamentally changed what I thought was possible. I had to reevaluate like how much more was available to me if I was willing to just try and like go after things. And so I want you to really think about this in a different way than maybe you've thought about goals.
The point of goals is not to be perfect. The point of goals is not to be some kind of a robot where you're consistent all the time. The point of a goal is to push you to try things to grow. It's to push you to beyond the capacity that you have, beyond the comfort zone that you're used to, to get uncomfortable and figure out what you're made of, to see what you're capable of, to see what other things you can try in your life. And that's gonna come with a lot of failure. And the only way that that matters is if you use that failure to give up. Otherwise, if you just use it to learn, or if you use it to like re-pivot yourself or to figure out what is actually important. Like there's oftentimes where I'll have goals and I'll do it and I'm like, I actually don't care about this.
I picked this because I thought I should because everybody else said it and I'll change the goal after one quarter, right? I'll do it for 90 days. And I'm like, you know what? Not really feeling this. That's okay too. It's not to say that like you always have to have this success with it, but I think that when you approach it in that way, not only does it become so much more manageable, because now we're not thinking about the whole year. We're thinking about the next 90 days we're thinking about this sprint. What do I have to do just to get past this? And then I can pivot, I can evaluate and see what I need to do. But it also becomes like the point is the goal is the journey. The point is not reaching some destination, it's not achieving something. 'cause when I do that, I'm just gonna make another goal.
I'm just gonna go to the next thing. It's simply like what am I gonna learn in these 90 days when I put myself out there, when I start making the tiktoks, when I sell this offer, when I show up at the gym and work on keeping my word to myself and being consistent, who does that make me? And the person you become is the point of all of it. It's not the things you're gonna get, it's not the results. All that stuff's great, but becoming the person that pushes themselves, that isn't afraid of failure, that isn't living their life based on what everyone else thinks that can be consistent, that does keep their word to themselves, that does accomplish things that blows their own mind, is worth all of the discomfort that you might have to endure in order to go after the goal. So it's just my reminder to you that if you haven't set a goal or you have one that has gone by the wayside, now is the time to re-pick that up.
Now is the time to sit back and evaluate what worked, what didn't. What am I gonna do differently this next 90 days? Pick three things you're gonna work on to get closer to that goal. Plan it out, right? Set a schedule of like when you're gonna work on it. 'cause hope is not a strategy if you're just hoping you're gonna get to it. You're hoping that someday you're gonna work on it. It's never gonna happen. Sit down and actually plan. Like, if I can only do two hours a week, great. What two hours every week am I gonna work on this? Make that plan. Start over in April and see where the next 90 days gets you. And then go from there and pivot and evaluate and keep doing the same thing. I promise you, your goals become inevitable. It becomes so much easier to actually hit any goal when you break it down into these 90 day sprints when you stop letting your all or nothing thinking stop you and you actually get after it. So pick up that goal again. Get into Q2 and let me know what you come up with by the end of these 90 days. All right, my friends, I hope that was helpful and I will be back next week for another episode.

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