My friends. Welcome to another episode of lessons from a quitter. I'm so excited to have you here before we jump in. I just wanted to let you know that I am going to run a four-week goal setting workshop the first week of January kicking off 2021. Right? Here's the thing I have realized that most people either don't set goals and we have this like joke about new year's goals. And I want to let you know that the problem is not setting goals. The problem is not knowing how to properly set goals and not following through. And I've learned a lot of techniques that have really changed my life and through coaching. I've just learned the right way of going after my dreams and changing, you know, really reaching any goal I want to reach. And now I have such a confidence about the goals that I set.

It's just a given. I know I'm going to reach it because I know how to do it. Um, and that's what I want to give to you. So I'm putting on this workshop in January. It's four weeks, every week, we're going to get together and talk about a different part of this process. And there's going to be a lot of coaching to help you with the kind of the self-sabotage stuff that happens with goal setting. So procrastination not feeling the motivation to do it, giving up all of that stuff. If you want to know more about it and who doesn't want to learn how to properly set and reach a goal, I don't know, go to www.quitterclub.com/goals and sign up to be notified. I'll put the link in the show notes. If you can't write it down, but it's www.quitterclub.com/goals, plural, and I hope to see you there.

I will open up doors in December and we will kick it off in the new year. Okay. It actually ties into this episode because today we're going to talk about vision and why it's so important to have a vision for your life. Do you have one, have you thought about this? It's amazing that so many of us have literally no direction, no clear vision of what we want, uh, what we would love to accomplish or experience of what we define success. As of what fulfills us, we are just kind of going through the motions every day. And I'm going to talk about first, why we don't set a vision and second, why it's so important to have one. And I hope that I can convince you by the end of this episode to really get going on, figuring out what is that vision for your life that you want to have.

But before we get into why it's important to have one, let's talk about why we don't. The short answer of it is self-preservation, right? We're trying to protect ourselves. We think like, I'll just take my small piece of the pie, right? Like I don't want to be greedy. I'm grateful. I want to be a grateful person. I have a good life. Like I won't ask for too much as if like, if I have more of a full life or if I have more fill in the blank, whatever money, time, flexibility, whatever, as if you're taking it away from somebody else, which I don't have to tell you, that's not how that works, but we have this belief that you shouldn't be greedy. Right. And we've constantly all heard phrases, like work. Isn't supposed to be fun and life is not all fun and games and whatever on and on.
Right. Things that have been kind of programmed into us. And so we've accepted that. And so we don't even want too much, right. Like we're trying to be reasonable. It's like, I don't even want that much. I just want a little, I just want to be happy when I go to work. Like, I don't want to cry at my desk. Like, that's all I'm asking for. Right. And so that's why those, so many people just look for the very next step. Right? They are just looking at like, if I can fix this problem, like, I don't like my boss or I don't like this office. And so if I could just find a place where maybe it wasn't so toxic, or maybe if I had just a little more flexibility like I promised I'd be happy. Right. And then we jump to the very next step that we think we can attain.
And then we wonder why we're still not motivated. Why we're still not happy. Right. If it seems as happy all the time with people that like jumped from one kind of work, like let's say they're a certain type of lawyer. And then they think, well, maybe if I changed my practice area without actually looking at the root cause of like, what's making them unhappy or what they actually want in their life. And then they're like maybe not surprised, but I guess disappointed to find out once they jump that, Oh, that's also not going to make me happy. You know? It's like, what's the same putting lipstick on a pig. I feel like a lot of times we're just trying to change little things and think that that will make us happy. But one we're not looking at the root of what is saying is unhappy. And two, we're not looking at what we actually want for our life. Like, what is the thing that's going to make me happy? What is the thing that is going to make me feel fulfilled?
And even though we have this kind of self-preservation, and even though we've kind of accepted like I don't need that much to be happy. I, you know, I'll be fine with just my slice of the pie. There is this like little inkling, there is this little voice inside that is telling you that there has to be something more that there is another way to live, right? Like you see other people doing it, you know, it's possible, you know, there's another way. And there are other people that seem to be happy and be doing what they love. And so that's the nagging feeling of like, there has to be more, what am I missing? Right. And I think about this a lot with this podcast, I think about the past guests that we've had on. And honestly, one of the reasons, the main reason I wanted to have all these guests on is because I do think it's inspiring to see people who have gone after these big dreams.
We had Emily given on the show, she was a lawyer and she quit to pursue a love of writing. You know she had fears just like everybody else. There is no guarantee that that next career is going to take off or be what you want it to be. She had every reason to not do it. She actually, the first manuscript she wrote while she was a lawyer got rejected by everybody. Most people take that as a sign of like, I'm not cut out to do this. Maybe I just shouldn't do this. That's not what Emily did. She decided that her vision for her life was to be an author. And so she was going to quit and try it. And she is now a 10 times, New York Times best-selling author. Her book has gone on to be made into a big motion picture with Kate Hudson.
She's had incredible success, right? Or I look at my friend Pedrosa who was an accountant and had no idea what he was going to do. And just knew that he hated accounting and wanted a different life and wanted to have his own company and quit his job without an idea. I mean, they had built another business and it didn't work out. And in that process, he ended up picking up a camera and learning photography for one of their clients. And that led him on this journey of becoming a wedding photographer. And he now has one of the top wedding photography studios in the world. It's a multi-million dollar a year business. He goes around the world training and teaching photographers. You know, I think about this, like there has to be something that is driving you that is bigger than your fear, right? What is the difference between these people and the 77% of the population, Gallup reports, you know, that are unhappy in their jobs. And they're just going every single day and sticking with it. And they've just adopted this idea that work isn't fun. This is just the way it is. Right. There has to be some kind of a belief that there is something else out there that you are willing to go through that fear and that uncertainty to go after this big dream. I think for so many of us, we know that that is possible, but because we don't have that vision because we don't know the thing that we want, our fear ends up being bigger than that vision.
And so it keeps us stuck. The other reason is that we don't want to feel bad about where we are, right. Having a vision that seems impossible or really grand or really difficult to get to oftentimes will make people sad because they compared to where they are. It seems almost impossible. I think this is for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons that I think we get sad when we think about that is because I've talked about this a lot on the podcast about how we have this like distorted idea that when we get there, everything will be great.
And I've talked about how it's not better there. You have access to being happy in both places. You're not going to be any better or any greater, but once you do get there, you have removed the obstacles that are blocking you from knowing how great you are. You have learned more about yourself. You have gotten in touch with your own North star to understand who you are. You've done things to blow your own mind. You've stopped attaching stories to why you can and can't do certain. Yeah.
And so it's just different there, whether you're happier is a different story. But I think because we think that we would be so much happier and we are not, now that we get sad for ourselves. I think that's part of, kind of faulty reasoning that we have. I think the other reason that we feel bad is that we don't know the, how, right? Like we have this grand vision and our brain as soon as we come up with a goal or a dream is flooded with fear and doubt and shame for even thinking it. Right?
The thing is that we don't know that that is normal. That happens to everybody. That's not like a sign that something has gone wrong. That is a sign that your brain is functioning as a normal human brain, trying to keep you safe. And obviously, you don't know how to get there, right? Because if you knew how you would have done it already... Nobody knows how to get to that dream before they do it because everybody's journey looks different, right? Like I could tell you how I built a business with a podcast, but it doesn't mean that your situation is going to be the same as it was mine.
And I learned from other people who were unsure - They gave me hacks and tips, but my journey didn't turn out anywhere close to what theirs did. And so nobody can tell you the exact how, and you're not supposed to know it honestly. Like it doesn't even matter. Because you will figure it out. You will take a step, you will fail. You'll get it.
And you try it again. Pivot. You'll do other things. If you're not attaching stories to that failure, if you're not making it mean something about your ability or whatnot, it's all part of the process, right? Like there's nobody that goes after a dream and never has a setback, just like everything works out in lines up and they never have a problem.
And so when we stop searching for that type of a plan and we start realizing like, okay, I don't know the, how I just need to figure out the best next step. It becomes more doable. And lastly, I think the reason that we don't do it is because so many of us are just in survival mode right now. We are just surviving our lives, right? Day to day. And we do what we need to do to make it through. I think about the fact that like as children, we were taught to really dream big and we were very future-focused right. There were so many things to look forward to. And at every stage in your life, it was like the next milestone. And so you dreamt about whether it was a graduation or like going to college or starting a career or getting married or having children.
And so when we stop searching for that type of a plan and we start realizing like, okay, I don't know the, how I just need to figure out the best next step. It becomes more doable. And lastly, I think the reason that we don't do it is because so many of us are just in survival mode right now. We are just surviving our lives, right? day to day. And we do what we need to do to make it through. I think about the fact that like as children, we were taught to really dream big and we were very future-focused right. There were so many things to look forward to. And at every stage in your life, it was like the next milestone. And so you dreamt about whether it was a graduation or like going to college or starting a career or getting married or having children.
So what we had just have nothing to look forward to anymore. It's just retirement, that's it? Like, that's the only like end game, I guess. And so, so many of us wonder why we're so restless because we're just going through the motion every single day. And it seems like, you know, it's just like Groundhog's day, Robin Sharma has a quote that says don't live the same year, 75 times and call it a life. And yet that's what most of us are doing. Right?
She's like get through it, get to the weekend and then get through the next week. And a lot of times I catch myself where I want certain things to be easier, quote-unquote, or I want certain things to be done. And I catch myself thinking, why am I wishing away my life? Why am I rushing through this life? Like, what do I think is going to happen? You know, once this year is done and yet I find like, that's what most of us do. And here's the thing outside of like what we've been programmed by society to believe our brains don't stop needing growth, change and learning, right?
Like that is where most people find fulfillment and happiness is through the process of growing in some way, learning something like that is the way the human brain is wired is created. And it starts with childhood and it doesn't stop. Like once we become an adult and I mean like the brain growth stops instantly. But if you notice why you might have loved the job and then you stopped liking it, oftentimes it's because it becomes repetitive. It becomes the same thing. You're not pushing yourself anymore. You're not growing. Like have you noticed when you are in times of like deep concentration and doing things that require mental energy, whether it's just a puzzle or something more rigorous, that's the time that you tend to find more satisfaction, learning a new skill, whatever that thing might be.
And we know this, even as adults, that this is what we need. And yet, because our society is not built that way because we have to work in order to pay bills. And a lot of times it just becomes the same repetitive task we end up doing and then not realizing why we are so restless, why we are so frustrated. And I think part of this is because we don't have a different vision for our life now, a vision doesn't necessarily mean just for your career. It doesn't mean a vision just for like what your career growth is going to be. Or, you know what you're going to quote unquote success.
It just means like, what do you want your life to be like, what do you want to have in your life? What do you want to experience? What do you want to look back on and say like, these are like the five words that I want my life, 10 body. So that's why we don't do it. But here's why I think it's so crucial to have a vision. And I've talked about this when I, um, I did a book review of Martha, Beck's finding your own North star, but I think it's so important to have a vision, a long-term vision, because I think you need to have a North star.
Like how do you know what success is going to be? If you haven't defined success for yourself. So many of us are quote unquote successful, right? In the jobs that we've picked by society standards. And yet we were miserable, right? So many of us had climbed this ladder and then we realized it was against the wrong building. And so in order to not do that again, you have to get quiet with yourself and really understand like, what do I consider success? What do I consider fulfillment? Right.
How do I get back to a truer sense of who I am, of what I want when I'm not trying to do what everybody else wants me to do, and really getting clear on like, what is that going to look like for my life? And am I doing any of that stuff right now in my life? Am I incorporating it in any way? I can't tell you how many clients I have that I work with, who will say that, like they want their lives to have adventure or spontaneity or something like that. And there is zero of that in their life, right? There is nothing that they're doing on a weekend. Like even on a small scale, once you realize like, this is what is important to me, it becomes easier to fold it into your life now and not wait for that someday. Right?
There's going to be some finish line that we get to. And then we get to enjoy our life. And we've sort of been programmed by with retirement. Like we think like you just have to work really hard to get there. And now we all see that that's sort of BS because most of us don't even get to retirement. I mean, people are working well into their eighties. And even then it's like, why are we wasting the best years of our lives waiting to be happy 20 years down the line. Right?
The other thing I think having a North star just makes decision making easier, right? Once you have a better sense of who you are and where you want to go, then making that short term decision is easier because you can compare it against the vision that you have for your life. So many people right now are like rudderless ships and like, they don't have any clarity in what they want to do. And that's because they don't even know where they want to go. I know for me, when I first started my photo with company and what was that first after a couple of years, I had kind of grown it and I was doing it as like a side hustle and I was doing it, you know, from my laptop at home, renting it out for events.
And I, I think I've told this story on the podcast, but I had an investor that was interested in investing in the company. I was very involved in like the tech scene in orange County. So I was around a lot of people that were like trying to raise money in the startup scene. And so I would meet with different areas.
Anyways, she was interested in investing and helping me grow the company to like a national brand, um, and putting all of the booths kind of in an, in major cities. And it sounded very exciting and you can get really swept up in that excitement, right? You can get really kind of lost in that glitz and glamor of like someone wanting to give you money. And then it sounds great and you don't have to do it alone and there's going to be advisors and there's going to be people that are going to help you build a team. And, um, it sounds really wonderful.
The only problem was I was four months pregnant with my second child. And my entire goal of leaving the law was to have a lifestyle that I didn't work as much. And I had more time to be with my young children while they were still young and they had more of a balance and that was my vision. It wasn't like it's not a right or wrong. Right.
It was just... And so while I definitely thought about that proposal for a long time, and I talked a lot about it with my husband, I realized like at the end of the day, that's not the life I wanted. Right. I did not want to have investors that I was beholden to. I didn't want to have to work 15 hour days to build up this startup, even if it could be exciting, even if it could mean a lot of money down the line, like that's not the life I wanted. And so I turned down that opportunity and I felt really good about turning it down because like I knew very clearly why I had made this really incredibly difficult decision to leave the law. And I didn't want to get sucked in to the next exciting thing.
And I think oftentimes people don't have any idea why they're doing the things they're doing or what they actually want. And so it really makes making that next decision difficult. Another reason, obviously you need a vision is your constant need to grow. Right? We just talked about this, that like children have this, right. They don't have all the excuses, but they don't care. They go after the thing, they don't just stop and like, not walk because they don't have the muscle tone or because they keep falling or because like, I, you know, I should be grateful I'm I can sit. This is fine for me. Right? Like, it's like, no, like they're going to keep going because the point of it is to literally push every boundary and keep growing. And we don't just change when we grow up. And I think that knowing that we need growth, knowing that we get bored, knowing that like so many people that retire, or even people that sell their companies and come into a lot of money, there's a reason people there's like all these studies of how they become depressed, because most people don't want to just sit around doing nothing.
Like we want to be challenged. We want to be working on things that we find interesting and that push us. And so constantly understanding that like, you're going to have a desire to evolve and strive. And once you can hack into that and look at like, where do I want to use that desire to grow myself? And what are the things that I want to be learning or to be experiencing in my life. It can help you use that desire to grow, to get towards your dreams. The other thing I think we need it for is because we need focus. And it's why I think goal setting is so important and why I think you should join the workshop in January because our minds are unmanaged. Mind is literally like a toddler and you're going to get results either way. A lot of people like we talked about in the last couple of episodes too, we think like, if you don't make a decision, if you just kind of are going through the motions, but you're still getting a result, it's just a result you may not want.
So you might as well do it on purpose, right. You're either going for the goal. And then you're going to like learn all this stuff about yourself and do all these amazing things and get, you know, somewhere else in your life. Or you're going to sit down and make the decision to not go after it because you're scared and you don't want to face, you know, judgment or whatever the thing is. And you're still getting a result. So like decide the result that you want to get and then put your mind to work at that result. I always find it funny where, um, I'm not saying that manifestation doesn't work. I don't know much about manifestation, but people talk about manifesting a lot. And oftentimes I just think that it's focusing your mind on the thing that you want, right? So our brain, and we'll find evidence of whatever we tell it is true. And whatever we focus on, we've all had this experience. You've seen when, like you're going to buy a car or you're going to buy something new. All of a sudden you see that thing everywhere, right? That thing was already there. Your brain just has to filter out the insane amount of information we take in every day.
For the most part, your subconscious is just deleting a ton of information. That's not important to you. And it's only looking for the things that you have told your brain are important, or for whatever reason. And you know, you have an interest in. And so you start seeing that you'll start seeing evidence for that everywhere. And so when you have a vision, when you have something that you're focused on, it's amazing how, you know, people say like, Oh, it's like the universe, you know, is listening or like, has my back. Or it's just, all these doors are opening, but it's, it's just that you're paying attention.
There was this study done on people who think they are lucky versus people who think they're unlucky and the study required them to go through a magazine and count the number of pictures that were in the magazine. On the third page, there was basically a half page in writing. So it wasn't a picture, but it said, you can stop looking. There are 97 pictures in this magazine.
Like you can turn this in or something. And overwhelmingly the group that thought they were lucky and saw that advertisement and the group that thought they were unlucky didn't whether it was there or not. It was always there. It's just like what their brain is focused on. If your brain is telling you that you are unlucky and it's just not for you and life is just hard and it's not going to be easy. Like that is what you are going to see.
You're going to delete and like overlook everything that is going right in your life. You're going to delete an overlook, everything that you could possibly do. I cannot express this enough that the quote, whether you believe you can, or you believe you can't you're right. I mean, really it is just the truth of every one of our lives. Everything that you have done, started from just a thought, a thought that you could do that, right? A thought that, Hey, maybe I should go to college. Maybe I should major in this thing, whatever it is. It all started from a thought.
And if you've constantly told yourself that you can't do things like that's just too hard, it's too hard to start over. It's too hard to, you know, whatever. You will see evidence of why it's too hard when you focus your brain on what you actually want versus what you don't want. You'll start finding ways. You'll start figuring out that, how, what you want again, the next thing with the focus, I mean, I already mentioned it, but like fear is big and your vision has to be bigger than that fear, right? Your fear is never going to go.
And if you don't have a clear why your fear will beat you every time. The other reason I like vision having kind of a grand vision for your life is that oftentimes it's easier to let yourself dream about a long-term timeline because there's less pressure to figure out the how right now. Right? So, you know that saying like we overestimate, we can do in a year and we underestimate what we can do in 10 years. Your entire life can be different in 10 years. And for a lot of you, you know, it's like you have another 30 or 40 years to work. So when you're thinking like literally in five or 10 years, your life can be completely different than what you see now. And so if you can let yourself dream about kind of a longer vision, as opposed to what are you going to do in 2021, it's easier to let yourself go there.
It's easier to let yourself think about like, what do I want for the next 10 years when I look back in 10 years, what do I want to have had experience in? Or what do I want to change again, like I think noticing that you have a lot of time noticing that for most of us, we still have 20 or 30 years of working. And hopefully we have, you know, even more years of living. And so like, what do I want the next four years? Like, I don't want my next 40 years to just be me waking up each day and just going through the motions every day and trying to get to the weekend. Like I want to put on that grand vision, like things that I want to experience and I want to accomplish. And I want to look back and see how full my life is.
And I don't want it to just happen. Accidentally. Marianne Williamson has a quote that I love. That's says our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous, actually, who are you not to be? So my friends, I hope that you take some time to think about the vision that you want to have for your life. I hope you sit down and write out what success means to you. What fulfillment means to you write a list of things that you want to experience in your life. Write a list of things that you want to learn in your life. Figure out when you look back at 75 or 85 or 95, what are the five words that you want your life to embody and then ask yourself, are you incorporating those words into your life now?
And if you're not start changing that I hope this episode was helpful. If you want help working on that vision and starting to craft it in 2021, I want you to join the goal setting workshop. You can sign up to be the first notified when the doors open at www.quitterclub.com/goals. And I will see you next week for another episode. Thank you so much for listening. I can't tell you how much it means to me. If you liked the podcast, please rate and review us on iTunes. It'll help other people find the show. If you want to connect or reach out, follow along on Instagram and Facebook at lessons from a quitter and on Twitter at Twitter podcasts, I would love to hear from you guys and I'll see you on the next episode.