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Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. I started a little series a miniseries of three episodes that I'm gonna do on goal setting because I think that the way that we approach goal setting is wrong and trash and is why so many people have a hard time sticking to their goals. And I think that actually having goals and getting to them is a really important part of our experience and growth and creating the life that you want.
And so I want you to set better goals and actually reach them. So I am doing a couple episodes I started last week and I'll be doing another one next week on how to properly set goals. And this is just a continuation of that. Before I dive into this, if you want to set your goals for the next year and the next couple years, if you want to learn the proper way to think about goals fundamentally differently than you've been taught, I'm doing a full day workshop called Goals That Stick. You can go to quitterclub.com/goals. I will be doing it on December 8th and I would love to have you in that workshop. So go there, check out all the information, and let's jump into today's episode. I wanna talk about the important reason that I make my students limit their goals to one goal a year. And I get a lot of pushback for this, and I wanna explain on this episode why I think it's so important to only pick one, one goal.
Most people when they hear that get sort of like panicked because they think, but I wanna change so many things in my life. I wanna change things in my business and in my personal life and in my relationships and with my marriage and my weight and all of these things. And so for a lot of us, what happens is we go through the laundry list of everything. We wanna change everything that we want to be different. And when someone tells us like, you have to pick one, it sounds absurd because like there's a lot of areas in my life that I want improvement. And I'm gonna tell you why I've developed this like concept of only picking one goal and why I see that it works so much for my own clients and for myself. I'm not saying that you can't work on anything else.
I'm not saying that you're gonna pick one goal. Like if you pick, let's say a health goal, you're not gonna work for the next year or you're not gonna like try to have a good relationship with your spouse or you're not going to try to make more friends or whatever the goal might be for you. It's not to say that you can't also try to improve in other ways. It is simply to say that your focus and your priority is one thing for every year. And here's why. Because for most of us, if we even do goals, you know, even if we take the new year to set new goals, we create a laundry list of things that we think need to change in our life. And unfortunately for a lot of us, I think we think that it needs to change in order for me to love my life, in order for me to love myself, which is not the right way to set goals.
If you listen back to the last episode where I talked about what people get wrong with goal setting, one of the things is that we think I need to change as a human being and I need to change all these things about me in order for me to be able to accept myself, in order for me to be able to love myself. And so I think a lot of us get panicked when we say one goal. 'cause you're like, I need to change a lot of things about me. But the thing is, is that you don't need to change anything about you to love yourself. So if that's what you're doing, you're doing it wrong. That's not the point of goals. A point of goal is to simply like create more growth in your life is to take a certain area and try to expand it is try to improve it, try to see what you're capable of.
It's try, try to blow your own mind, but not because you need that to change in order to feel a certain way about yourself, right? And so if that's what you're doing, if you're trying to sort of beat yourself into this new mold of a person who is healthy and weighs a certain amount and meditates and is calmer and never yells at their kids and wakes up on time and doesn't smooth their alarm in order to feel like you're a good person or that you deserve love and acceptance, my friend, work on your thoughts about yourself. Don't worry about goal setting. Let's work on learning how to accept who we are exactly the way that we are. And then we'll worry about changing things. But I think that if you get to the point where you're like, okay, I want to just expand what's possible for me, I want to grow, what happens is that we go through a laundry list of things that could change in our lives.
And yes, we all have areas that we can improve, areas that we can grow in. And we start thinking, okay, I want to, you know, work out more and I want to eat healthier and I wanna go on dates with my husband and I want to do more fun things every month with my kids. And I want to be on my phone less. And I want to start that side hustle. You get it? There's just like a laundry list of things that we could do. Let's say that it's January 1st and you write down all those things that you could do, you should do. And then you, you know, go into a month and you're working on some of that stuff. And let's say you're killing it at your health goals. You're working out, you've been working out three days a week and you've been eating healthy and you've been sticking to that and that's been a priority.
And let's say you are trying to do some more fun things with your kids, but you didn't make it on a date night with your husband again and you didn't start that side hustle yet 'cause you haven't had the time and you know you're, you haven't started meditating whatever else you had on your list. Okay, let's say that's what happens at the end of month one. Where do you think your brain is gonna go? Your thoughts? I want you to think like what is the narrative that's gonna be playing in your head around those goals? Do you think that your brain is gonna be like you are killing it way to get on these health goals. You are really taking the time to do the workouts and to make healthy meals for yourself. We should really be proud of ourselves. We are really doing this.
Or do you think your brain's gonna be like, yeah, but you didn't get started with that business you wanted to do? Remember you wanted to do the side hustle? Remember you were supposed to go on a date night and spend one month and you still haven't even done it, you're never gonna stick to these, right? Unfortunately for us, the way that our brain has been trained is that we only look at things that we fail at. We can look at a hundred things that we do right in a day and none of us see it. We constantly see it how we're wasting time, how we didn't do enough, how we didn't get enough done, how we yelled at our kid that one time or whatever. We're not looking at the mountains of evidence of other things that we do correctly. And the reason that I started realizing for myself was like I would have a laundry list of goals that I wanted to complete and every year I would complete some of them.
I would get to the end of the year and I would have done some of it, but my mind would always go back to like, but you didn't do reading. Remember you were supposed to read every month and remember you were supposed to meditate and remember you and you didn't do any of that stuff. You only did like 20% of this and I would feel like a failure. And so I would give up and I would think like, you know what, I'm never gonna stick to these goals. It was really hard for me to be consistent at five, 10 different things. And so I started really thinking like, okay, if I can only focus on one thing for the year where this is my priority, if I get this, if I work on this, that is really all I have to get done. That is where I'm gonna have like kind of the self integrity.
That is where I'm gonna keep my word to myself. That is where I'm gonna show up and try to be consistent. That is where I'm gonna coach myself. And then anything else I do is just, you know, a cherry on top, right? It's just the icing on the cake. Like I'm still gonna work out, I'm gonna try to like have more date nights. Those are just like nice to haves. There are definitely things that are on my radar that like I would like to, they're just like todos, but this is the thing that I have to do this year, right? This is the thing that the end of the year when I look back, I'm gonna want to have made progress on. I'm going to regret if I don't do it. Okay? And I started picking goals like that. And I remember the first year I did it was I was thinking about my business and I was like, you know what?
I really wanted to do a health goal too. I wanted to work out. And I was like, you know what? For me right now, the business is the most important thing and I really wanna get this business off the ground. So like for what if for one year my goal is simply like a revenue goal for my business and is to get to that and that's where I pour all of my energy in. And yes, I'm gonna try to work out and I'm still gonna try to read and I'm still gonna try to go on date nights and I'm gonna try to do all these other things, but my priority is this. So when push comes to shove, when I have to make a decision about recording podcasts or going to the gym or when I have to, you know, go to bed at night and read, or I have to like spend some time organizing the next podcast outline that I'm gonna do, I know where my priority lies.
I know that this is my one goal for this year. And when I started doing that, it fundamentally shifted everything in how I approached my life. So many things became easier. That goal became easier because I knew very clearly like what the priority was. I knew like me keeping my word to myself means working on this goal. Now even that, it didn't mean that it was like all I worked on eight hours a day. One of my goals for one of the years was a health goal of working out three days a week. That's just three hours a week. That's one hour, you know, at a time for three days. So that didn't mean that I didn't have tons of other time to do other things I did and I still worked on my business and I still worked on, you know, my reading goals and I did all these other things, but I knew that come hell or high water, I was gonna work out those three times a week.
Like that was my goal. My goal was to focus on my health, was to figure out what was going on with my health was to like follow up and really get that squared away. And what I started realizing was like if I give myself a year to do this, if I give myself one year to focus just on this, I will create such a foundation. Like I will create these habits, I will create this self-concept of someone that works out every week, three days a week, that the next year I can set a different goal and I will still keep this habit. I'm just now stacking habits, right? I've given myself the time to create this foundation, to stick to my word, to be consistent, to not overwhelm myself, to not try to do all the things for all the people. To really say like, this is my one important thing.
Not that I need to change everything in order to be happy with myself, but just because like I want this to become a habit that I have and then the next year I can focus on something else and I keep building my life year after year. One of the things that I really want you to understand is that you have time for a lot of you, I want you to really think about how many years you have left in life, right? For me, I'm 42 right now. I have hopefully 35, 40 years, maybe more 50 years. Like that is an insane amount of time. If I think back, you know, I have just as much life to live as I've lived now and I've done so many things in my life, I feel like it's been forever that I've been alive, right? So if I think about that and I think I don't have to change everything this next year, the next year does not have to be my end all be all.
It is simply one more brick in this kind of foundation that I'm building for myself. That's all it is. And if that's the case, then what is the most important thing to me? And I will tell you this, like once I started doing this and my clients too, I can't tell you how many of my clients I've seen where they pick their goal and because they picked one thing to focus on, they actually kind of accomplished it faster or it became more of a habit faster and then they started focusing on other things. They were like, all right, I did this the first half of the year and it's already become a habit and it's really not taking much out of me. So now I'm gonna focus on this other stuff and I'm gonna do other things instead of I'm gonna overwhelm myself with so many goals and so many things that need to change and so much stuff that I think has to get done right now.
And then when I get overwhelmed, I don't do anything. I procrastinate, I freeze, I bury my head, head in the sand, I get frustrated with myself, I beat myself up and nothing gets done. I have this conversation all the time in my community in the critter club because people try to argue like, well, can I have two goals? And I'm like, listen, you can have as many as you want. You don't have to do it the way I say, but you think what I'm telling you is like the difference between having one goal and having like eight goals, and of course eight sounds more exciting. Eight, eight sounds great, right? What I am saying is the difference between reaching one goal and reaching zero goals, which one sounds better than, because for a lot of you, I want you to just be really honest with yourself. How many of your goals have you actually reached when you set a bunch of new resolutions every year? How many of you been like, alright, I nailed that. And how, how many of you felt good about doing it? You might have nailed one and then also beat yourself up all year because you didn't do the other seven, so it felt like crap the whole time.
My wish for you is to simply pick one so that you can feel good as you're doing it while getting other things done as well, and actually take it off, right? Not have to go back to it next year, you can pick something else next year. Slow yourself down enough that you give yourself the time to actually achieve it, and you actually get to get to a place where it becomes a reality and then you open up space for doing other things. The reason so many people are against this again, is because they think they need to change all of these things in order to feel good about themselves and their lives. And that is just the wrong place to start goal setting from anyways. Even if it was just one goal, if you think I have to get this done in the next three months, I have to lose 10 pounds in the next three months to feel good about myself, you're already setting yourself up for failure.
That's not the reason why you should lose weight or you want to lose weight. And if you think you're gonna like push yourself and kill yourself to get something in order to feel a certain way, you're gonna do that thing and then you're still not gonna feel it because you're still gonna tell yourself, well, that wasn't enough. You're still gonna have thoughts of like, well, I still don't look exactly the way I wanna look, or I still don't feel the way I wanna feel, or I still have the same thoughts that I always had. I'm still the same person and so I have to do something else. A really good sign is like if you're in a rush to change it, if you're like, I need to change this in the next six months, I don't even wanna wait a year. I wanna meet this goal in the next three months, I want you to slow down and ask yourself, what is the rush for?
What do you think you're gonna feel when you get there? Can you give yourself ample amount of time to get there? And if not, why not? Because that's typically what the problem is because when you slow down, you're like, Hey, I know I can love myself where I'm at. I'm good where I'm at. I just want this stuff for extra growth. There isn't as much of a rush to cram as many goals as possible to make it as fast as possible. It's simply like, how can I actually set myself up for success? How long will I really need to create this into a habit? How can I create this in a way that it becomes not overwhelming? And so that's what I want you to think about as you think about goals in the next year, is what's one thing I wanna work on so that when I get done with that, like let's say, like I said, if it was three days a week, you're working out okay.
Yeah, I also started reading a lot, you know, that became a hobby for me, but that was never the goal. That was never something that like if I didn't read for that week, I didn't beat myself up. I was like, all right, I, I didn't get to it this week, but you know what? I did get to my working out three days a week. You will be amazed at how much more you can accomplish when you slow down, when you take off a lot of the pressure and the overwhelm that gets you to kind of freeze and not do anything. It's almost like having a minimum baseline. Like if I hit this minimum baseline, then I can feel like I accomplished what I needed to accomplish and I can feel good about myself and I can pat myself on the back and I can feel proud of myself.
And then that fuels me to do more and more and more and more instead of tearing myself down. So if you have set tons of goals all year long and you hit every one of them, you don't need to be listening to this, that's fine. Go ahead and do what you wanna do. But for most of us, for most people that tell me this, I'm always like, well, how did it work out when you had a bunch of goals? And it's always like, well, I sucked to maybe one, but I didn't do the others. And I'm like, okay, let's just do it in a way where we know we're gonna be successful. Where every year you can look back and think like, all right, I hit that goal, I did it. Now I'm gonna move on to the next one. And I'm gonna keep stacking those wins and I'm gonna change my self concept because I'm gonna start looking at myself as someone who does stick to their goals.
And so much more becomes possible when I have that narrative rather than the narrative of I never stick to things, I always do this. I knew I was gonna give this up. How many times have I stopped myself from doing something because that was my narrative? I don't want that for you. So I want you to not overwhelm yourself. I want you to like go into this next year knowing that you don't have to change everything in order to be happy. You don't have to change everything in your life, but you can change one thing to make significant progress on. So you can see that you are someone that sticks to things. You are someone that can accomplish goals. You are someone that can change their life. And when you see that, honestly, it can change so much for you. So if you want help with your goals, if you want to like have someone that actually helps you break down what your long-term goals are, what you wanna do over the next five years, what you wanna do in the next year, how you break that down into like 90 day goals, how you deal with all the self-sabotage, join me for this workshop.
You're gonna put one day of work in and you are going to have the rest of your year figured out. You can go to quitterclub.com/goals. I hope to see you there. And if not, I will 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 lessons from a quitter.com/quitter club and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.