In this episode of Lessons from a Quitter, we kick off a series on goal setting with a refreshing and practical perspective. As the year winds down, many feel pressure to set goals or New Year’s resolutions, often leading to burnout or shame spirals when life inevitably gets in the way. We explore the common misconceptions about goal setting, like tying self-worth to achievements or pursuing goals we don’t truly want. Instead, I emphasize the power of intentional decision-making, accepting inconsistency, and reframing challenges as expected parts of growth. Tune in to rethink your approach and design a life aligned with your true values.
Ep. 332: What people get wrong about goal setting
Ep. 332
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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'm gonna start a series focused on goal setting because we are getting to the end of the year. If you're watching this when it comes out, we're at the end of November of 2024. And I know as we creep towards, you know, the end of the year and the new year, you're gonna get all the messaging about goals and goal setting. And most of it is trash.
Most of it is. And I think that a lot of people have given up on setting goals, which is a mistake because they haven't been taught the right way to set goals. And I think that we have, we just think about goals in the wrong way and it makes us feel like crap about ourselves. And you know, we've all experienced where we set a goal, we go hard for two weeks, life gets in the way we give up and then we beat ourselves up and we go on these shame spirals and then we think like, I just can't set goals, I'm just not consistent, I'm blah blah blah. And then we don't set goals and I don't want that to happen to you. And so I feel really adamant about this because I also used to hate goal setting and I also used to think it was silly and I hated New Year's resolutions.
And I think for so many of us, we end up kind of then not really having any direction in our life, not really making any intentional decisions. Every year feels the same. Every year just seems to fly by. And I know that for a lot of us, we don't want that. Like we want growth and we want change and we want to achieve goals. And so I want you to think about it in a different way. And so I'm gonna do a couple things. I'm gonna do a couple of podcast episodes on certain things I want you to reframe and I want you to think about differently and I want you to approach goal setting in a different way. So I'll teach you those on the podcast. I'm also doing a full day workshop called Goals That Stick that will teach you literally everything you need to know about how to think about big goals so that you can have more of a vision in your life, how you can break that down into yearly goals, how you can break that even down to 90 day goals, how to schedule things so that you have the time to work on it, how to deal with all the procrastination and self-sabotage and the inconsistency, all of that in one day.
Spend one day with me and have the rest of your year set and really fundamentally change how you think about goal setting. So if you're interested in joining me in that workshop, you can go to quitter club.com/goals. It'll be on December 8th. So I hope to see you there. But I wanted to start the series today on goal setting on what I think people get wrong about goal setting. All the things that you are thinking that are not true, that are incorrect and that sabotage your goals and you even setting goals. And so I want us to start rethinking how we think about goals. So here's what I think people get wrong and there's obviously this isn't an exhaustive list. There's a lot of things we get wrong and I don't wanna make like a four hour podcast. So we're gonna talk about like the top things that I see that trips people up in picking and setting the right goals.
Okay? The first thing is if you have like an aversion to the word goal setting or like you just wanna like, ugh, it's not for me, I want you to really even think about like even if you don't call it goals, you don't have to call it goals, it's simply you are making decisions about your life, you're always making decisions, you're always making decisions about what you're gonna do or what you're not gonna do. Both of those are decisions. I just want you to make them consciously, intentionally. I think for a lot of us, we make decisions unintentionally. We just don't do things, we don't work out or we don't go after the job or we don't start the business. That is still a decision in your life that is going to set your life on a certain course. And so I think that the first thing that people get wrong is that they think like goals are a certain thing.
They think it's like some big target or some push for major change, but it is simply just a decision to do something different in your life and or to change course a little bit or to pivot a little bit or to figure out what's not working and add that into your life. It could be like you want more joy, more creativity, more rest, more spontaneity, more connection. All of those things can be turned into quote unquote goals. You don't have to think of goal setting in this way of like some random target that you have to hit like I need to lose 20 pounds or I need to make a hundred thousand dollars. Those aren't the only types of goals. And so I want you to really think about this in a different way. It's like, can I slow down to take some time for 2025 or any year you're listening to this and think intentionally about what maybe is not working in my life or what do I want more of or what do I want to change and focus on that, right?
And make a decision intentionally about that. That is all goal setting is, right? So I think for people that are listening to this and maybe already have, you know, dismiss this episode or thought about like I'm not gonna set goals, okay, but what if we don't call them goals? What if we just think about like if you want at the end of next year to get there and not think nothing has changed is it was just a repeat of every other year. If you want to find places where maybe you don't feel so great in your life and you wanna change some things so that you can find more growth, think about it in that way. Think about how you would make decisions differently about goals If it wasn't some huge push that required a lot of work that is going to be, you know, I don't know, really painful to get to and that you need in order to prove something that other people, like.
If it was simply making an intentional decision about your life, what would, how would you approach it then? Because that's all, it's the second thing that I really want you to, to hear me when I say this is that goal setting is not a means to get you to love yourself. I'm gonna say that again, goal setting or setting goals is not a way for you to get to love yourself. If that's what you're using it for, you are doing it wrong and you may not realize you are using it for that. But that is what most people actually are using it for. Most of us have terrible thoughts about ourselves that we've been programmed with to think that we're not good enough in some way, right? We're not good enough the way that we are. And so we have to change something about ourselves in order to be deemed acceptable, in order to be deemed lovable, in order to accept ourselves.
And so we set goals thinking once I get there then I can feel good about myself Once I lose the weight, once I make X amount of money, once I have this job, once I buy the house, whatever it might be, then I can feel like I am a, I don't know, worthy member of society. I don't, we don't, we don't really finish that sentence. But I think we think once I get there then I will be a different person that is then lovable. Most of us are using goal setting to change the person that we are because we think that what I am right now is not okay, is not acceptable and I have to change in order to then feel okay with myself. That is a terrible reason to set goals. It is very painful, it is a lot of pressure and it usually doesn't turn out well.
I can't tell you how many people I know who have set goals like that and then get there and they're like, I'm the same person, right? Like I may be in a smaller body, I may have a little bit more in my bank account. I may have like one thing that I, you know, I'm proud of. It's not to say like I did get some growth, but if I'm waiting to get there to love myself, I'm gonna get there and I'm still gonna find reasons not to love myself. You don't need to change at all. You don't need to set goals, you don't need to add anything. You don't need to become a perfect human. You're never going to be, you don't need to like not snooze your alarm clock and have a 10 step morning routine and meditate every day and journal at night and have a gratitude practice and lose 10 pounds and make a hundred thousand dollars in order to be able to love yourself.
You can love yourself exactly as you are right now. You don't need anything else. And if you are picking goals because of that, you are likely setting yourself up for failure because you are likely picking goals that maybe you don't even want or that are maybe really painful, that are really tied into like if you have an idea that like me at this weight can't be lovable and so I have to lose weight in order to love myself, that is a very painful thing to work through, right? It is a very painful thing when I don't work out that day. It doesn't have anything to do with just that day and working out my whole self worth rides on it. And that is a very heavy thing to put on a goal of like let's say working out. And so I want you to really catch yourself like do I think I need to become a different person?
Do I want this goal? Because I think if I hit this goal then I can finally think I'm good enough. You need to work on thinking that you're good enough now you need to work on loving yourself now, not setting another goal, not killing yourself and driving yourself to a point where you can finally be quote unquote acceptable. Okay? So make sure that that's not what you're doing. Make sure that's not the reason you're picking a goal. Because the only reason that you should pick a goal is simply because you want growth. You wanna grow in that area, you wanna see what you're capable of, maybe it'll benefit you. It's not to say like I can decide that I want a health goal because it's a way to love my body. It's a way to put my health so that I'm not suffering so that I can live longer so I can be there for my kids.
Those are all great reasons, but I can love myself regardless of where I'm at. And so you wanna just make sure you know the reason behind why you're picking the goal. A close counterpart to that, like a corollary to that is that make sure that you want your goals. I think for so many people we may not actually want the goal that we choose. We choose it because we think we should. 'cause society has told us we should or our family has or our spouse has or you know, whatever it might be. I should lose weight, I should make more money, I should have a better job. I should meditate in the morning, I should whatever the should is. If that's what you're picking a goal, you're not gonna stick to it. That's the problem is that you will lose that motivation. Motivation wanes for everybody.
And if there isn't a stronger reason behind why you're doing it, other than everybody in society has told you that this is something you should want, you likely will drop that goal and then feel terrible about yourself. But it was simply because you chose the wrong goal. You should pick a goal that you actually want that excites you. A lot of us are using our goals to beat ourselves up instead of motivate us instead of being something that gets me to want to keep working on this, I'm using this as like a yardstick of which to see how I'm failing, right? And so I want you to really make sure like is this a goal society told me I should have or that I've heard from somewhere or that I think I should want, but I don't actually want, I actually think a lot of people do that with health goals.
Like I should eat cleaner, I should eat organic, I should make food more at home. Make sure that's something you want. Why should I do that? Do I really want to do that? Why is it bad what I'm doing? Is this something that I'm willing to like really fully go all in on? Because if it's not, I'm just setting myself up for failure. Okay? So I wanna make sure that it's something that you think that you should do. The fourth thing that I want you all to realize is that you're going to be inconsistent. So I think the mistake people make is that they think they're gonna pick a goal and they might be excited about the goal. You know you, you kind of have that motivation going in first two weeks you're gonna go hard. And then we're all surprised that like life got in the way and I lost some of the motivation and maybe I got sick and maybe the deadline at work became too hard and I sort of fell off on what I was supposed to do.
And I think for a lot of us, we take that to mean that like there's something wrong with me. I'm not disciplined enough, I'm not consistent enough, I don't have enough motivation, I don't have enough willpower. I knew I was gonna do this, I always do this. And then we just spend the time beating ourselves up instead of just getting back to it. You will be inconsistent. Let's just not be surprised by that. Let's know going in that when I pick this thing some weeks I'm gonna feel a lot of motivation and some weeks I'm not because I'm not a robot. It's not like an automatic thing. And so if I know that, then I don't have to be surprised by it. More dreams get killed. Not because you are inconsistent but because you think because I was inconsistent, that means it's completely over now I can't get back to it.
It's this all or nothing thinking that derails you once you have taken a day off or a week off. As opposed to knowing that the, the whole point of it or the whole name of the game is not can I be the most consistent? It's can I be the person that keeps coming back even when I'm inconsistent can I see myself like, okay, this month was a really hard month, there was a lot going on. I had these deadlines, I caught that cold that my kid was sick, I didn't do it. Okay, can I come back next month? The more you can teach yourself that like it's not all or nothing, that even a little bit is fine. That coming back to it is fine. You'll change your life. You will stick to so many more things because a lot of these goals are not something that's going to be accomplished within a month.
It's something that you need to consistently either do for the rest of your life, like if you're gonna do a health goal or something or you're gonna do for a lot of years. And so if you could be okay with the fact that you're gonna be inconsistent, if you can just know and expect it, like of course I'm gonna be inconsistent at certain times. That's not to say to let yourself off the hook. You really do wanna work on the like keeping your word to yourself and doing things even when you don't feel like it, even when it doesn't feel great. But it is simply like not being surprised that you have a human brain. And that of course sometimes your motivation's gonna wane, you're not gonna feel like it, you're gonna talk yourself out of it, whatever. And then you're gonna get back on that horse and then you're gonna keep coming back over and over and over again.
And the more you do that, the longer you will stick to something, right? Like if I look back and I look back at my goals, I look back at like this podcast, there's definitely times where I wasn't consistent or didn't do it as full out. And yet when you pull back it's like, okay, I did it for five years though I've done it for five years 'cause I keep coming back to it because I keep making it a priority because I, I'll find myself waning and only doing the bare minimum and then I'll bring myself back and that over time will create something bigger. And so whether it's a business, whether it's like I said, a health goal, whether it's like, like you wanna date more, I don't care what the goal is, like know that there's gonna be kind of ups and downs. There's gonna be times where you realize like I'm not gonna do as much and that's okay, that is human and then we're gonna come back to it.
And I think an additional thing that goes along those same lines is don't be surprised that it's hard. I know this seems like obvious one I think for a lot of us of course we think like of course the goal I picked is hard, but I don't think it's so obvious to us. I think a lot of people pick a goal and then expect themselves to be perfect at it and expect to do it without having a ton of discomfort. But like if you could do it easily, you wouldn't need to set a goal for that thing. That thing would just be something that you naturally do, right? Like I have a brother-in-Law who is naturally very energetic and very athletic, has always been, and he is just a machine when it comes to like working out. The guy loves it, loves working out multiple times a day.
Like does different types of, is like surfing in the morning and then running and then going to the gym and he is just a ball of energy. I know nothing about that. But that's how he is. He doesn't have to set a goal about working out, right? Like he doesn't have to keep himself accountable. It's like it just comes naturally to him. It's not hard for him. His brain is just onboard. Okay, me on the other hand, I am not that person. I am someone who just likes to lay and never likes to work out. So like for me, I have to come up with like, hey, this is what I wanna stick to. This is what I wanna hold myself to. I have to know it's gonna be hard for me. My brain is gonna try to fight it. It's going to have to deal with feelings of stress and frustration and boredom and just not wanting to.
And you know, being unmotivated, that is a natural part of this goal for me because it is a hard goal. And so I think for a lot of us, like we kind of have that motivation. So it seems easy in the beginning a little bit easier. And then when the motivation wanes and we find that it's hard, we think there's something wrong with us and we think like see I knew like I couldn't do this and we just give up as opposed to just expecting it. Of course this is hard. Of course it's gonna be hard 'cause this is something that I am not good at yet. I have not created the self-concept around this. It's not something that naturally comes to me. It's something that I consciously have to work on. And so I want you to know that of course if you are picking a goal about something, it's not something that is your strength, it's going to be hard.
Nothing has gone wrong here. Of course it's gonna be hard. And in fact I want you to like really figure out what am I gonna have to feel when you're setting your goal. I want you to think about what are the feelings I'm gonna have to feel in order to go through with this goal. Like do I have to feel stressed? Do I have to feel inadequate? Do I have to feel anxiety, sadness, frustration, boredom, physical pain? You know, like what am I gonna have to endure in order to keep doing this thing so that when like my brain comes, it's like ugh, this is hard. You're gonna be like, yeah, I know. We knew it was gonna be hard. We knew nothing has gone wrong. It's not like, oh this is gonna be hard. Yeah, let's give up. No, we knew this was gonna be hard.
This is the hour where I do something hard. This is where I show myself that I can do hard things, right? So I want you to like not be surprised by that. Like no going in that this is gonna be something that's not gonna be rainbows and butterflies. If it was you would have done it by now. You would not need to set a goal for it. You don't need to set goals for like watching Netflix, . You don't need to set goals for how long you can, you know, like to scroll more on your phone 'cause that stuff you don't have a lot of resistance to, 'cause it gives you a lot of dopamine. So you're like, all right, I'm all in. You do have to have goals for things that are gonna deprive you of stuff for things that have a lot of negative emotion. So just be aware of it. That's all I want. I want you to just know that like it's gonna happen and that's okay. All right, it's, so those are the five things that I want you to think about when you're going into like this goal setting season. Whether you do the goal setting workshop with me or not, I want you to really think about like even if I don't call it goals, like I do wanna spend some time thinking intentionally about what direction I wanna go in.
I cannot use goals to find ways to love myself. That is not the point of goals. Those are not the type of goals I should be picking. I wanna make sure that I actually want the goals that I'm picking, that it's me that want them and not that I just think I should do them. Like what is actually exciting me towards change? What is exciting me to kind of work towards what do I want more in my life? I'm gonna know that I'm gonna be in the consistent and that is not a problem. I'm gonna keep coming back to it as many times as I need to. And I'm gonna know that it's gonna be hard. Like I'm gonna anticipate the hardness and what parts are gonna be hard and how it's gonna be hard so that I'm not surprised by it so that I'm not derailed by it.
And I think if you can even reframe just those and really approach goal setting from a place of like making an intentional decision about something that you want to change in your life for the better. Not because you need to love yourself and you kind of give yourself the grace of doing something hard and doing it inconsistently. You can make so many changes in your life and create so much more. And so that's what I want for you. If you want help and you want like a step-by-step action guide with like a 18 page PDF on like how to do long-term goals, how to dream bigger, how to do short-term goals, how to get out all, all this self-sabotage, spend one day with me and learn how to do it. And then spend the rest of the year and the rest of your life knowing how to properly set goals.
So you can go to quitter club.com/goals and join me for that workshop. And if not, I'll see you next week for another episode.
Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitter club and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.
Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. I'm gonna start a series focused on goal setting because we are getting to the end of the year. If you're watching this when it comes out, we're at the end of November of 2024. And I know as we creep towards, you know, the end of the year and the new year, you're gonna get all the messaging about goals and goal setting. And most of it is trash.
Most of it is. And I think that a lot of people have given up on setting goals, which is a mistake because they haven't been taught the right way to set goals. And I think that we have, we just think about goals in the wrong way and it makes us feel like crap about ourselves. And you know, we've all experienced where we set a goal, we go hard for two weeks, life gets in the way we give up and then we beat ourselves up and we go on these shame spirals and then we think like, I just can't set goals, I'm just not consistent, I'm blah blah blah. And then we don't set goals and I don't want that to happen to you. And so I feel really adamant about this because I also used to hate goal setting and I also used to think it was silly and I hated New Year's resolutions.
And I think for so many of us, we end up kind of then not really having any direction in our life, not really making any intentional decisions. Every year feels the same. Every year just seems to fly by. And I know that for a lot of us, we don't want that. Like we want growth and we want change and we want to achieve goals. And so I want you to think about it in a different way. And so I'm gonna do a couple things. I'm gonna do a couple of podcast episodes on certain things I want you to reframe and I want you to think about differently and I want you to approach goal setting in a different way. So I'll teach you those on the podcast. I'm also doing a full day workshop called Goals That Stick that will teach you literally everything you need to know about how to think about big goals so that you can have more of a vision in your life, how you can break that down into yearly goals, how you can break that even down to 90 day goals, how to schedule things so that you have the time to work on it, how to deal with all the procrastination and self-sabotage and the inconsistency, all of that in one day.
Spend one day with me and have the rest of your year set and really fundamentally change how you think about goal setting. So if you're interested in joining me in that workshop, you can go to quitter club.com/goals. It'll be on December 8th. So I hope to see you there. But I wanted to start the series today on goal setting on what I think people get wrong about goal setting. All the things that you are thinking that are not true, that are incorrect and that sabotage your goals and you even setting goals. And so I want us to start rethinking how we think about goals. So here's what I think people get wrong and there's obviously this isn't an exhaustive list. There's a lot of things we get wrong and I don't wanna make like a four hour podcast. So we're gonna talk about like the top things that I see that trips people up in picking and setting the right goals.
Okay? The first thing is if you have like an aversion to the word goal setting or like you just wanna like, ugh, it's not for me, I want you to really even think about like even if you don't call it goals, you don't have to call it goals, it's simply you are making decisions about your life, you're always making decisions, you're always making decisions about what you're gonna do or what you're not gonna do. Both of those are decisions. I just want you to make them consciously, intentionally. I think for a lot of us, we make decisions unintentionally. We just don't do things, we don't work out or we don't go after the job or we don't start the business. That is still a decision in your life that is going to set your life on a certain course. And so I think that the first thing that people get wrong is that they think like goals are a certain thing.
They think it's like some big target or some push for major change, but it is simply just a decision to do something different in your life and or to change course a little bit or to pivot a little bit or to figure out what's not working and add that into your life. It could be like you want more joy, more creativity, more rest, more spontaneity, more connection. All of those things can be turned into quote unquote goals. You don't have to think of goal setting in this way of like some random target that you have to hit like I need to lose 20 pounds or I need to make a hundred thousand dollars. Those aren't the only types of goals. And so I want you to really think about this in a different way. It's like, can I slow down to take some time for 2025 or any year you're listening to this and think intentionally about what maybe is not working in my life or what do I want more of or what do I want to change and focus on that, right?
And make a decision intentionally about that. That is all goal setting is, right? So I think for people that are listening to this and maybe already have, you know, dismiss this episode or thought about like I'm not gonna set goals, okay, but what if we don't call them goals? What if we just think about like if you want at the end of next year to get there and not think nothing has changed is it was just a repeat of every other year. If you want to find places where maybe you don't feel so great in your life and you wanna change some things so that you can find more growth, think about it in that way. Think about how you would make decisions differently about goals If it wasn't some huge push that required a lot of work that is going to be, you know, I don't know, really painful to get to and that you need in order to prove something that other people, like.
If it was simply making an intentional decision about your life, what would, how would you approach it then? Because that's all, it's the second thing that I really want you to, to hear me when I say this is that goal setting is not a means to get you to love yourself. I'm gonna say that again, goal setting or setting goals is not a way for you to get to love yourself. If that's what you're using it for, you are doing it wrong and you may not realize you are using it for that. But that is what most people actually are using it for. Most of us have terrible thoughts about ourselves that we've been programmed with to think that we're not good enough in some way, right? We're not good enough the way that we are. And so we have to change something about ourselves in order to be deemed acceptable, in order to be deemed lovable, in order to accept ourselves.
And so we set goals thinking once I get there then I can feel good about myself Once I lose the weight, once I make X amount of money, once I have this job, once I buy the house, whatever it might be, then I can feel like I am a, I don't know, worthy member of society. I don't, we don't, we don't really finish that sentence. But I think we think once I get there then I will be a different person that is then lovable. Most of us are using goal setting to change the person that we are because we think that what I am right now is not okay, is not acceptable and I have to change in order to then feel okay with myself. That is a terrible reason to set goals. It is very painful, it is a lot of pressure and it usually doesn't turn out well.
I can't tell you how many people I know who have set goals like that and then get there and they're like, I'm the same person, right? Like I may be in a smaller body, I may have a little bit more in my bank account. I may have like one thing that I, you know, I'm proud of. It's not to say like I did get some growth, but if I'm waiting to get there to love myself, I'm gonna get there and I'm still gonna find reasons not to love myself. You don't need to change at all. You don't need to set goals, you don't need to add anything. You don't need to become a perfect human. You're never going to be, you don't need to like not snooze your alarm clock and have a 10 step morning routine and meditate every day and journal at night and have a gratitude practice and lose 10 pounds and make a hundred thousand dollars in order to be able to love yourself.
You can love yourself exactly as you are right now. You don't need anything else. And if you are picking goals because of that, you are likely setting yourself up for failure because you are likely picking goals that maybe you don't even want or that are maybe really painful, that are really tied into like if you have an idea that like me at this weight can't be lovable and so I have to lose weight in order to love myself, that is a very painful thing to work through, right? It is a very painful thing when I don't work out that day. It doesn't have anything to do with just that day and working out my whole self worth rides on it. And that is a very heavy thing to put on a goal of like let's say working out. And so I want you to really catch yourself like do I think I need to become a different person?
Do I want this goal? Because I think if I hit this goal then I can finally think I'm good enough. You need to work on thinking that you're good enough now you need to work on loving yourself now, not setting another goal, not killing yourself and driving yourself to a point where you can finally be quote unquote acceptable. Okay? So make sure that that's not what you're doing. Make sure that's not the reason you're picking a goal. Because the only reason that you should pick a goal is simply because you want growth. You wanna grow in that area, you wanna see what you're capable of, maybe it'll benefit you. It's not to say like I can decide that I want a health goal because it's a way to love my body. It's a way to put my health so that I'm not suffering so that I can live longer so I can be there for my kids.
Those are all great reasons, but I can love myself regardless of where I'm at. And so you wanna just make sure you know the reason behind why you're picking the goal. A close counterpart to that, like a corollary to that is that make sure that you want your goals. I think for so many people we may not actually want the goal that we choose. We choose it because we think we should. 'cause society has told us we should or our family has or our spouse has or you know, whatever it might be. I should lose weight, I should make more money, I should have a better job. I should meditate in the morning, I should whatever the should is. If that's what you're picking a goal, you're not gonna stick to it. That's the problem is that you will lose that motivation. Motivation wanes for everybody.
And if there isn't a stronger reason behind why you're doing it, other than everybody in society has told you that this is something you should want, you likely will drop that goal and then feel terrible about yourself. But it was simply because you chose the wrong goal. You should pick a goal that you actually want that excites you. A lot of us are using our goals to beat ourselves up instead of motivate us instead of being something that gets me to want to keep working on this, I'm using this as like a yardstick of which to see how I'm failing, right? And so I want you to really make sure like is this a goal society told me I should have or that I've heard from somewhere or that I think I should want, but I don't actually want, I actually think a lot of people do that with health goals.
Like I should eat cleaner, I should eat organic, I should make food more at home. Make sure that's something you want. Why should I do that? Do I really want to do that? Why is it bad what I'm doing? Is this something that I'm willing to like really fully go all in on? Because if it's not, I'm just setting myself up for failure. Okay? So I wanna make sure that it's something that you think that you should do. The fourth thing that I want you all to realize is that you're going to be inconsistent. So I think the mistake people make is that they think they're gonna pick a goal and they might be excited about the goal. You know you, you kind of have that motivation going in first two weeks you're gonna go hard. And then we're all surprised that like life got in the way and I lost some of the motivation and maybe I got sick and maybe the deadline at work became too hard and I sort of fell off on what I was supposed to do.
And I think for a lot of us, we take that to mean that like there's something wrong with me. I'm not disciplined enough, I'm not consistent enough, I don't have enough motivation, I don't have enough willpower. I knew I was gonna do this, I always do this. And then we just spend the time beating ourselves up instead of just getting back to it. You will be inconsistent. Let's just not be surprised by that. Let's know going in that when I pick this thing some weeks I'm gonna feel a lot of motivation and some weeks I'm not because I'm not a robot. It's not like an automatic thing. And so if I know that, then I don't have to be surprised by it. More dreams get killed. Not because you are inconsistent but because you think because I was inconsistent, that means it's completely over now I can't get back to it.
It's this all or nothing thinking that derails you once you have taken a day off or a week off. As opposed to knowing that the, the whole point of it or the whole name of the game is not can I be the most consistent? It's can I be the person that keeps coming back even when I'm inconsistent can I see myself like, okay, this month was a really hard month, there was a lot going on. I had these deadlines, I caught that cold that my kid was sick, I didn't do it. Okay, can I come back next month? The more you can teach yourself that like it's not all or nothing, that even a little bit is fine. That coming back to it is fine. You'll change your life. You will stick to so many more things because a lot of these goals are not something that's going to be accomplished within a month.
It's something that you need to consistently either do for the rest of your life, like if you're gonna do a health goal or something or you're gonna do for a lot of years. And so if you could be okay with the fact that you're gonna be inconsistent, if you can just know and expect it, like of course I'm gonna be inconsistent at certain times. That's not to say to let yourself off the hook. You really do wanna work on the like keeping your word to yourself and doing things even when you don't feel like it, even when it doesn't feel great. But it is simply like not being surprised that you have a human brain. And that of course sometimes your motivation's gonna wane, you're not gonna feel like it, you're gonna talk yourself out of it, whatever. And then you're gonna get back on that horse and then you're gonna keep coming back over and over and over again.
And the more you do that, the longer you will stick to something, right? Like if I look back and I look back at my goals, I look back at like this podcast, there's definitely times where I wasn't consistent or didn't do it as full out. And yet when you pull back it's like, okay, I did it for five years though I've done it for five years 'cause I keep coming back to it because I keep making it a priority because I, I'll find myself waning and only doing the bare minimum and then I'll bring myself back and that over time will create something bigger. And so whether it's a business, whether it's like I said, a health goal, whether it's like, like you wanna date more, I don't care what the goal is, like know that there's gonna be kind of ups and downs. There's gonna be times where you realize like I'm not gonna do as much and that's okay, that is human and then we're gonna come back to it.
And I think an additional thing that goes along those same lines is don't be surprised that it's hard. I know this seems like obvious one I think for a lot of us of course we think like of course the goal I picked is hard, but I don't think it's so obvious to us. I think a lot of people pick a goal and then expect themselves to be perfect at it and expect to do it without having a ton of discomfort. But like if you could do it easily, you wouldn't need to set a goal for that thing. That thing would just be something that you naturally do, right? Like I have a brother-in-Law who is naturally very energetic and very athletic, has always been, and he is just a machine when it comes to like working out. The guy loves it, loves working out multiple times a day.
Like does different types of, is like surfing in the morning and then running and then going to the gym and he is just a ball of energy. I know nothing about that. But that's how he is. He doesn't have to set a goal about working out, right? Like he doesn't have to keep himself accountable. It's like it just comes naturally to him. It's not hard for him. His brain is just onboard. Okay, me on the other hand, I am not that person. I am someone who just likes to lay and never likes to work out. So like for me, I have to come up with like, hey, this is what I wanna stick to. This is what I wanna hold myself to. I have to know it's gonna be hard for me. My brain is gonna try to fight it. It's going to have to deal with feelings of stress and frustration and boredom and just not wanting to.
And you know, being unmotivated, that is a natural part of this goal for me because it is a hard goal. And so I think for a lot of us, like we kind of have that motivation. So it seems easy in the beginning a little bit easier. And then when the motivation wanes and we find that it's hard, we think there's something wrong with us and we think like see I knew like I couldn't do this and we just give up as opposed to just expecting it. Of course this is hard. Of course it's gonna be hard 'cause this is something that I am not good at yet. I have not created the self-concept around this. It's not something that naturally comes to me. It's something that I consciously have to work on. And so I want you to know that of course if you are picking a goal about something, it's not something that is your strength, it's going to be hard.
Nothing has gone wrong here. Of course it's gonna be hard. And in fact I want you to like really figure out what am I gonna have to feel when you're setting your goal. I want you to think about what are the feelings I'm gonna have to feel in order to go through with this goal. Like do I have to feel stressed? Do I have to feel inadequate? Do I have to feel anxiety, sadness, frustration, boredom, physical pain? You know, like what am I gonna have to endure in order to keep doing this thing so that when like my brain comes, it's like ugh, this is hard. You're gonna be like, yeah, I know. We knew it was gonna be hard. We knew nothing has gone wrong. It's not like, oh this is gonna be hard. Yeah, let's give up. No, we knew this was gonna be hard.
This is the hour where I do something hard. This is where I show myself that I can do hard things, right? So I want you to like not be surprised by that. Like no going in that this is gonna be something that's not gonna be rainbows and butterflies. If it was you would have done it by now. You would not need to set a goal for it. You don't need to set goals for like watching Netflix, . You don't need to set goals for how long you can, you know, like to scroll more on your phone 'cause that stuff you don't have a lot of resistance to, 'cause it gives you a lot of dopamine. So you're like, all right, I'm all in. You do have to have goals for things that are gonna deprive you of stuff for things that have a lot of negative emotion. So just be aware of it. That's all I want. I want you to just know that like it's gonna happen and that's okay. All right, it's, so those are the five things that I want you to think about when you're going into like this goal setting season. Whether you do the goal setting workshop with me or not, I want you to really think about like even if I don't call it goals, like I do wanna spend some time thinking intentionally about what direction I wanna go in.
I cannot use goals to find ways to love myself. That is not the point of goals. Those are not the type of goals I should be picking. I wanna make sure that I actually want the goals that I'm picking, that it's me that want them and not that I just think I should do them. Like what is actually exciting me towards change? What is exciting me to kind of work towards what do I want more in my life? I'm gonna know that I'm gonna be in the consistent and that is not a problem. I'm gonna keep coming back to it as many times as I need to. And I'm gonna know that it's gonna be hard. Like I'm gonna anticipate the hardness and what parts are gonna be hard and how it's gonna be hard so that I'm not surprised by it so that I'm not derailed by it.
And I think if you can even reframe just those and really approach goal setting from a place of like making an intentional decision about something that you want to change in your life for the better. Not because you need to love yourself and you kind of give yourself the grace of doing something hard and doing it inconsistently. You can make so many changes in your life and create so much more. And so that's what I want for you. If you want help and you want like a step-by-step action guide with like a 18 page PDF on like how to do long-term goals, how to dream bigger, how to do short-term goals, how to get out all, all this self-sabotage, spend one day with me and learn how to do it. And then spend the rest of the year and the rest of your life knowing how to properly set goals.
So you can go to quitter club.com/goals and join me for that workshop. And if not, I'll see you next week for another episode.
Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitter club and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.
