Dont rush through your life
[00:00:00] Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. I am getting ready to go on a sabbatical. I talked about this a little bit. I briefly alluded to it and I will do a whole episode talking about the sabbatical, why I decided to do it, how long I've been planning it, what I plan to do, what's next.
I'll go really in depth, but I have gotten a couple questions I just wanted to address at the outset of this episode. 'cause some people were asking me what was gonna happen with the podcast, and so I just wanted to kind of give you a little. Preview so that you know what to expect right now is, I think like mid-December, summer ninth or something when this episode comes out.
I will do new episodes until the end of December, but people asked if the podcast is going away. The old podcast episodes will still be there. You can go to the podcast feed, you can go to the, to YouTube. YouTube. I, I've only done, you know, the past probably six months or a year, but if you go to the podcast feed, I'm on episode, I think, you know, [00:01:00] 385, something like that.
So there's. All the previous ones are on, whether it's Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to them, you can listen to the past episodes moving forward. I will be taking a break from the podcast and like I said, I will talk about it more. But I've been doing it now for seven years, which is wild to think about.
I started in 2018, and so this is the first real break I'm gonna be giving myself, and so I will not be producing new episodes. In the beginning of 2026, I'm not sure how long that's gonna last. I'm not setting like a date. I'm assuming somewhere between three to six months. And so that's what I'm planning for.
I will put replays. So if you go to the podcast feed there likely will be a new episode every week, not a new episode, a replay of an episode. And it's likely one you haven't heard. So it's new to you and it will still be really relevant information that can help you. And even if you have heard it, I promise you, these are concepts that you have to listen to over and over again.
It's not as though you [00:02:00] hear it once and then you just start implementing. And so. If you have been listening to the podcast for a while, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It will be there in some form. You can still come back to the feed. It's not gonna be completely gone, but there won't be new episodes coming out after 2025 for the first half of 2026 at least.
Um, and then we'll figure out what we're gonna do from there. Okay? So I just wanted to give you that brief. Update before we jump into this week's episode, which originally I was planning on doing some kind of episode about goal setting. We're getting to the end of the year and everyone's kind of thinking about.
The new year, and this is where we start seeing a lot of January 1st content and people start talking a lot about habits and goals and the new year and new you and what do you wanna do. And so I was going to do an episode around my philosophy about goal setting, which I will talk about, but I wanted to do something a little bit [00:03:00] different and I wanted to do something that was a little bit more.
In line with my own work and my philosophies and a little bit deeper on the topic of goal setting. And I really wanted to get to the bottom of why we even feel the need to create goals. And so the concept I wanna talk about is something that I really had to learn very deeply and intimately, and it's something I coach a lot of people on, and it's this idea of.
Rushing through our lives, right? And not learning to not rush through our lives. And I'll explain what, how those two things are connected, but, so just bear with me. But one of the things that I have been trying to advocate for the last couple of years, if you've been around me, is that I have a very strict goal in my communities.
I mean, a strict rule, sorry, not goal, that you only get one goal every year. You cannot pick multiple goals and. Every year. Yeah. I [00:04:00] have trouble convincing people, but I usually do, uh, because people want all the goals and we've all experienced this. We, January 1st comes and we have all this motivation and we're gonna become a new person next year.
And we have, you know, goals for our health and we have goals for finances. Maybe a job promotion and how we want our relationships to be. Maybe we wanna have like a date night with our spouse and we're going to have more girls nights, or we're gonna create that book club we wanted or whatever. We just add a bunch of goals and you already know how it goes, right?
We all know we've all done it. We've all seen the statistics. Two weeks in. Life gets in the way. Life gets busy, we're exhausted. You're in the dead of winter. People have seasonal depression. Lots are ha things that are happening, and we just kind of give up. We give up on those goals and we become overwhelmed.
And [00:05:00] one of the things I found for myself, the way that I came upon this philosophy is that I saw how it worked in my own life. And so I wanted to bring it. What I found was like I. Felt like shit about myself every year I would just be like, oh God, I didn't get to three fourths of the goals that I had set for myself.
A lot of times that would then manifest itself in a lot of shame and a lot of beating up and a lot of, you know, talking bad about myself. 'cause it would be thoughts like, I knew you were gonna do this. You never stick to anything. You will never be different. You'll never have the things that you want.
Why can't you just be more motivated? Why can't you just do what you say you're gonna do? And on and on and on. And I was so. Tired of hearing that voice. I was so tired of wrestling with that voice all year long that I just decided, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing it anymore. And I really thought for a while, like, I'm just not gonna have a goal.
And I do hear a lot of people say that, like make fun of like, [00:06:00] oh, new Year's resolutions. And so they just don't set any goals, which I also don't think is the solution. And so I just decided like, I'm gonna pick one goal. That's it. And it was in 2020, I just decided I wanted to. Build a business and I wanted to make a hundred thousand dollars and that was gonna be my goal.
Everything else be damned. And I really just let myself be like, you know what? And I, I know for certain I'm not gonna work out this year. I'm just not gonna do it. I hadn't been working out. I was like, this is not the year we're going to pick it up. And every year I had shamed myself like, we need to, we need to get healthy, blah, blah, blah.
And I sort of let myself off the hook. I was like, you know what, goalie, you gotta get outta jail free card for a year. You don't have to work out, we're not gonna work out. And again, you can also do other things, but it for it, it can just not be a goal. It can be like, Hey, when I get to working out, it's great and if I don't get to it, it's fine.
But my goal, my focus, everything is gonna be on, like for me, was a business goal that year. And [00:07:00] that one thing kind of changed really a lot in my life because I ended up hitting that goal or getting very close to it. And I really saw the power of like. Focusing on one thing and allowing without guilt to let go of other stuff.
And then the year after that, I picked another one year goal and the year after that I picked another one year goal. And over the last five years I have done some really incredible things. I did start working out regularly, but that was be not until two years after that. Initial, you know, experiment for me.
So I had to be okay with like, can I put it off without having to change everything all at once. And then it allowed me to start kind of building these foundations. And so that is the work that I do with a lot of my clients is constraint. Because what happens for people is. When you pick five goals, and let's say you have a week where you're killing it, you're doing great, you are motivated, you are showing up, [00:08:00] you are, let's say, like doing your, your work.
Let's say one of your goals is to work on your business. You are doing the things that you put on your calendar. You are showing up and doing the work that you need to do. But let's say you also had a goal to work out and that week you, you know, instead of working out three days, you. It worked out one day.
What do you think your brain's gonna do? Your brain immediately will go to, oh God, you didn't work out again. You said you were gonna work out and you didn't. Again, you're so lazy. Why can't you just get it together? It's not gonna be like, you know what? You killed it in business this week. Let's just give ourselves a break.
We did good. We got a lot off our to-do list. No, it will go to the thing that you didn't do. And so it's almost like managing your own expectations. If you have expectations that you're gonna become all of a sudden this perfect person that has unlimited willpower and unlimited motivation and is gonna change every area of their lives when you've never done that before.
'cause you're a human being and you have a million other things going on in your life. [00:09:00] You are giving yourself more ammunition to beat yourself up. When you constrain and you're like, you know what? This is the only focus for this year is this one goal. Everything else, if it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
It's great. It's not to say that like, I'm not gonna do anything else. Of course. I will. 'cause usually our goals don't take that much time, but it's not my goal. It's not my focus. It helps you start eliminating the shame and the blame and the constant needing to, you know, push five boulders up a hill instead of pushing one boulder uphill.
Right. So that's the concept behind goal setting, my goal setting philosophy. But underneath that, the more. The deeper work and the more sinister reasoning that lies behind why people need so many goals is what I wanted to do this podcast episode about. When you pick the reason, [00:10:00] so many people feel so threatened when I tell 'em they can only have one goal, or the reason people are so resistant to it and the reason so many people want five goals, even though they fail at them, even though it doesn't work.
Is because you have this false belief that you have to change all these things about you in order to become quote unquote better in order to love yourself, in order to get to some place where you think you're gonna be happier. And you think like, well, until I'm in good shape, or I've lost this weight and I'm making good money and I have good relationships and I have someone that loves me and.
You know, I am hosting these weekly girls nights and I have a community. Like I can't be happy, right? I can't love myself, I can't think I'm doing a great job. So I need all of these things to change. And once they do, once I get there, it's gonna be fantastic, right? And so we have this false belief that like once I get to this magical place where I'm a different [00:11:00] human with a different brain and I act a different way, and I have all of these things that I want, then I can kick up my feet and.
I can be happy. Now, we already know that's not true. We've all experienced this. You've all had a goal that you've wanted to reach, that you thought when you got there, it would be different. Whether it was the career you wanted, the degree, some job, an amount of money. You bought a house, you got married, you had kids, whatever it was, at some point in your life, you got, when I get married, when I have kids, when I make a hundred thousand dollars when I own this house, oh my God, my life's gonna be, I'm gonna be sewed together.
I'm gonna have it all. And then you got there. And you're the same person, the same brain, same set of stresses, right? Not much has changed. Now you just have some shiny new thing, which is great, and that does add some happiness, but it also adds new stress, right? When you get married, there's a lot of happiness that comes with it, but there's a lot of stress when kids, same thing, right?
New job promotion, more money, same thing. And so you, you, [00:12:00] instead of realizing that instead of being like, huh. This didn't work the way I thought it was gonna work. We double down and we're like, no, no, no. Then that just means I need to change something else. I need to change something else. And one of the things that I've realized for myself, a trick, kind of a mental hack that has helped me is I realized that I think it's gonna be better there.
And so I think I just have to get to there. I have to do whatever I need to do. I have to, and it's so funny 'cause we think when we pick these goals, it's like I just have to be miserable through this process until I get to there. Which just as an aside, is a telltale sign that you're picking the wrong goal.
If you think you're gonna have to hate every step of the way, that is not a goal. You wanna pick that. Why would you wanna do that? Because I'm telling you, when you get to that destination, it's not gonna be that different. But so we think if I can just force myself to hate this whole process, right? If I can work out, even though I hate it, if I can work [00:13:00] 80 hours a week to make this money, 'cause then I'm gonna get there and I'm gonna feel happy.
What we are doing in essence, is wasting for less lack of a better word. Our life right now until we get there, we think if I can just endure and if I can get through this, then it will be good. Okay? And in that process, we miss out on our whole life. Your life is happening right now. Okay. It's not happening at the end of 2026 when you reach some goal, it's happening for the year of 2026.
Right? It's happening right now. It's happening at the end of 2025. This is your life, and when you're constantly putting it off of like, well, I will be happy when I get there, when I have these goals, when I get to this place you are. Wasting the time that you actually have to find [00:14:00] some joy, to find some pleasure, to get some rest, to make connections, to have fun, to you know, whatever it is that you want, because you think that.
Once you have a different body or a different bank account or a different partner, then that somehow is going to lead to rainbows and butterflies and it's not. And so the reminder I always have for myself, and the reason I wanted to like talk about this as the topic of the podcast, is I always catch myself when I'm thinking, oh, once I get there, once I have this goal, once I accomplish this, once I have a business that makes this much.
I always ask my question, what's my rush to get there? It's always, always, always that I think it's gonna be better there. And I, I already know, I've already learned this lesson many a times in many hard ways, that it is not better there. It is different. It's a different 50 50. Some of it's better, some of it's worse.
And so I asked myself. [00:15:00] For me, this has just become kind of a I don't know what the term is, but like it's just a little mental hack, like a trick where this question now, like immediately kind of has me understand this concept. I just ask myself like, what's my rush? Why am I rushing to get through my life?
Right now, this is it. Why do I need to get there? Why am I trying to skip this whole part to get to that thinking It's gonna be better when I know it's not. So one way I do this, I was actually realizing this, like this happens with everything and you'll start noticing it more and more. But we do this a lot with our kids.
So I notice like when my kids were a lot younger, when they were like toddler, baby, toddler age, I kept thinking. Oh my God. Once they get a little bit older, like once I'm outta diapers and you know, I don't have to hover over them, I don't have to physically be involved. It's gonna be so much easier. And it is in some ways, and it is a lot harder than others, right?
And I think about that and I'm like, why was I rushing through that so much? I mean, I enjoyed a lot of it. And [00:16:00] this isn't to say you have to enjoy every single second. It's not possible. It is physically exhausting, but. I did this at every stage, and I notice this now, it's like my kids, I'm in a really sweet spot with kids age, like I'm at, my kids are eight and 12, so we're kind of out of the.
Little kid era where you really have to be on top of them all the time, like they're self-sufficient now. They can kind of get themselves ready, take care of themselves, you know, in that sense. But I see on the horizon that we have a lot of the like teenage issues coming up and right now I don't have to deal with that.
And that's a lot more of the emotional issues we're already starting, but it's like a lot of the hormonal stuff, a lot of the more deeper. Actually like much more traumatizing scarring issues, right? With friends and bullies and relationships and sex and all this other drugs and all these other things, right?
And I think about that and I'm like, goalie, slow down. Enjoy this. But I notice even here, it's like when I get caught in the day to day of soccer practice and chaing them from [00:17:00] this, you know, gymnastics to soccer, and then you have, you know, they're off half the day and you have parent teacher conferences, I'm always like, Ugh.
God, six more years, you know, eight more years, and my son's in college and I have to catch myself. And I'm like, what are you do? Why are you wishing for your life to be over? Why are you wishing for the skipping over of years of years of, of joy and fun and laughter and memories? Why are you looking forward to something that will be fraught with its own stresses?
That won't be some utopia, that will not be a time that you're kicking your feet up. In fact, as I've noticed with most of my friends who have high school and college age children, it is the exact opposite of that. So, I mean, I just noticed that my brain is tricking me with like, this is hard. We can't wait till we get there.
It's gonna be so much better. And I have to bring myself back and be like, no, it's not. Stop rushing. Slow [00:18:00] down. What is great about here? What is great about this age? What is wonderful about this mess, about this chaos, about this exhaustion, right? What is wonderful about chauffeuring them around, about having that time in the car when you're chatting with them about being a part of every part of their lives, when in a couple years, they're not gonna wanna have to do anything with you, right?
They're never gonna, they're not even gonna wanna be around me like I notice now. That my kids like still let me hug and kiss them all the time. And I'm like, God, my 12-year-old is getting awfully close to the age where he's not gonna allow, allow this anymore. Where it's gonna be like, stop. Like stop.
What are you doing? You know? And I notice, like notice the beauty in that Slow down enough. And that was really the reason I wanted to do this episode. As I, we go into the new year, I kept thinking, well, I should do a goal setting work episode, and. I, I don't mean to say that I don't want you to set goals for next year.
You absolutely can. I'm gonna have my one goal for the year. Right. I think that our brain, I did just did an episode about the fact that like, your [00:19:00] brain needs a problem to solve, and I think it's a good thing to focus on, like, what do I wanna work on this year? Not because when I get there, it's gonna be better.
Or at the end of 2026, all of a sudden it's gonna be better. But just simply like. What I, what muscle do I want to flex this year? What do I want to practice? What do I wanna get stronger at? How do I wanna transform as a person? What if there's a goal that helps me be more present, that helps me be more in my body, that helps me be more in my life instead of a goal that is, how can I get out of this life into something else?
Because this is the only life I got. This is the only brain I got. This is the only body I got, and so what if it didn't have to be perfect for me to enjoy it? Me to love it or for me to feel at home in it, or for me to wanna experience it. And so I want you to ask yourself this question, what is my rush to get through my life?
What is the rush to get there? [00:20:00] And every time you ask that question, I want you to answer and tell yourself that like it is not better there than it is here. Now, I'm not saying some. I know a lot of times people have a problem with that in the sense of like, I'm not saying that some things can't be better.
Like if your goal is to make money and you're not making money right now, of course making money, canto solve some problems and can make life more pleasurable in some ways, for sure. I'm not saying that it doesn't solve any problems, but it will just create. Some more problems, you will then just have to deal with whatever those problems are.
And it's not to say that that can't be more pleasurable or that can't be more exciting. It can, but then you'll have to deal with it there and that will be your life and that will be great. But how can it be great here? Like I talked to a lot of my co students that I coach when, let's say they're building a business.
And they just can't wait to get to the [00:21:00] point where it is established and they're making a certain amount of money, and that is a goal to work towards. But I always tell them like. What are you gonna miss about this? There is a lot you're gonna miss. You're gonna miss the fact, like even you're gonna look back with nostalgia of like, I'm so proud of me for figuring it out, for trying different things, for seeing what worked, for putting myself out there when I didn't know what was gonna happen.
For trusting that something bigger than I could see was gonna be there, right? Like it was an exciting time. Where I was just building and nobody was really paying attention to me. And I, you know, the first, I know every entrepreneur I talk to is like that first, uh, income that I made it, it's not the a hundred thousand, it was the first 5,000.
Like for me too. It was like, I think it was like the first thousand I made, it was like, what someone's willing to pay me for this. It was the most like electric feeling. Right? And I look back. There's so much beauty, like I think about this podcast [00:22:00] and how much fun that first year was doing interviews and all this stuff.
And yeah, in the, when I was doing it, I was mired in insecurity and doubt and where's this going? And I just can't wait to get to this place where it's established and I got there and now I want a sabbatical from it. Right? Like it's, it isn't this thing that you think you're gonna get to and it's gonna be just.
I am riding a high, it's gonna be something else. And so what are you gonna miss about this? Think about that now. So you can enjoy it. So you can look at like, Hey, this stage in my life, like this is a chapter. Right? The point isn't to like get through all the chapters to get to the end. What's the point of that you wanna get to the end of your life for what?
You get this one ride? What's the rush? What have I got to enjoy right here, right now with everything that I have? What would that look like? How do I enjoy that while I build? How do I enjoy [00:23:00] that while I have a goal? And I think when you understand this concept, it becomes a lot easier to have just one goal, because the goal, the point then doesn't become, I need a bunch of goals in order to change who I am so that I can finally be happy.
It becomes like, what's one thing that I can add to my life? What's one thing that I can strengthen while I enjoy where I'm at, while I get really more present to this chapter while I, uh, find what enjoyment is here. Yeah, then I don't have a rush as much. Like I think a lot about my life over the past five years, and I feel like I have reached a lot of goals because I slowed down and I look at the next five years, and part of it is I'm gonna be a different person in five years from now.
What are small things every year slowly that I can build on, that I can put like brick by brick instead of I need to change everything in order to be happy right now. It's just like, what, what, what do I need in this moment? What is one thing I wanna work on because it seems fun or because [00:24:00] it keeps me more present, or whatever it is, not because I need to do all the things all at once in order to get somewhere in order to change me so I can finally enjoy myself.
And so I, I leave you with this question of like, what is your rush to get through your life? Like, what if you didn't have to have all the goals and all the answers and know exactly what was gonna happen? What if you got to pick something next year? Just 'cause it's fun? Not even because it's like morally better.
I feel like so many of us pick goals that we hate. Again, another telltale sign when you hate the whole process is you're likely picking something just because other people think you should do it. Like I should get healthy. I should get in better shape. I should have a clean house. Like I should organize my house.
I should. Um. Join a community and have a group of friends. Do I want that? Maybe I'm more of a solo person. I have one good friend, and that's really all I need. Maybe I'm not in a place where right now my life is so chaotic that like working out [00:25:00] like, yes, of course I wanna be healthy, but if it's not gonna be a reality of my life right now, why am I adding to my own shame, to my own suffering?
Why can I not accept that? I work 80 hours a week and um, I have kids and I come home and I don't have the time and I'm too exhausted. And so we're just gonna take it off the table. It's not gonna be a goal that I think about this year. That's not the chapter that I'm in. That's not the season I'm in. And so I want you all to really think about this question of like, why am I rushing through my life?
It is like such a, I dunno, paradox. I think for a lot of us, a lot of people have a really hard time getting older. I find it really common amongst my friends, amongst my family, of people being really sad on their birthdays. And yet we're always rushing, we're always trying to get to the next thing the next year when our kids are older, when we're more established, when we made partner, when we've, you know, m.[00:26:00]
Saved a certain amount of money. It's like, yeah, but what if the climb could be fun? What if that journey could be really pleasurable? What if you could enjoy the struggle? What if there's stuff about this chapter that could be just as great and you don't have to get to the place where it's the quote unquote peak?
'cause then you're just gonna come back down and go up another peak. That's just all life is. And so when you can slow that down and enjoy here, what would you work on? What's the one goal? I want you to pick your one goal. From there, I want you to think about your life. If you could enjoy right here, what would you do from here?
And then pick it, and then work on one thing and let everything else fall by the wayside. And know that you can pick the next thing in 2027 or 2028, or 2029 or 2030. There's so much time. Do keep adding to your skills and your habits and all that stuff. It doesn't all have to happen this year, I promise you.[00:27:00]
So that's what I have for you, my friends. Go out and enjoy this life right now. Today. When you have it, tomorrow will come and you'll figure that out. You don't need to get there any faster. You don't need to be any better to get there. You just need to learn how to like figure out how to inject a little bit more joy, a little bit more patience, a little bit more pleasure, a little bit more rest exactly where you are.
Maybe that could be your goal for the year. That's probably the best goal to have. I hope this was helpful. I know it was a little bit all over the place, but I hope that the concept sticks with you because I think that it is, it has been one that has really helped me slow down a lot and give myself time to not need to be more, or make more or do more, or all the mores that, that hustle culture tends to demand of us.
Um, and that is my wish for you. All right, my friends, that's what I have for you this week. I'll be back next week with another episode.