A new approach to goal setting

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At work, high achieving women are amazing at meeting goals, but when it comes to their personal life, they get stuck. Goals like balance, happiness and health feel almost unattainable. I've identified three reasons why high achieving women struggle to attain personal goals and in this episode I will speak about each of them and then offer a different way to approach personal goals so that you can create an action plan that actually works.

Topics in this episode:

  • 3 reasons high achievers don’t attain personal goals

  • The importance of knowing the goal behind the goal

  • Why you should stop focusing on doing more to attain goals

  • The difference between an action plan that works and one that doesn’t

  • How our culture has indoctrinated us with the wrong goals

Show Notes:

  • Want to make work-life balance your personal goal in 2022? Check out the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective, a program that teaches a simple 5 step process to creating a balanced life. Check it out at: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective.

  • Don’t forget to leave a rating and review to help spread this resource to other working moms!

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Transcript

All right, working moms, let's get down to business in this episode. I really want to talk today about goal setting because it's the new year, and it's that time that we start to reflect on what it is that we really want to achieve in the upcoming year. We spent a lot of time reflecting on our last year or letting go of our last year and looking ahead; and I really want to talk about why setting traditional goals is really challenging for high achievers, and kind of give you a different approach that's going to help you actually achieve whatever it is you're setting out to achieve this year.

Now, ambitious women have a really high capacity to achieve.

They're doers, they're get 'er done, cross it off the list, make it happen kind of people. And so when it comes to goals, the most natural thing for an ambitious person to do is to set external goals -  goals that focus on achieving, on doing something, losing weight, not working late, not feeling so tethered to your phone, writing a book, not drinking so much getting to bed at a reasonable time, prioritizing more time for yourself, achieving something. In the American culture, this is kind of essentially what we've been taught - from a very early age it's about getting good grades, practicing hard, getting a good job, making it into a good school, making good money, buying a nice house, getting promoted, moving up and up and up.

This is the dream that we're kind of indoctrinated with; and that is ultimately most rewarded in our culture.

So, I speak with a lot of working moms that feel very confused about why they can seem to achieve lots of things, but when it comes to something like balance, or health or exercising or working less - something that's very personal to them - it's much harder to do. You achieve in so many areas of your life, but why do some of these goals seem to be very elusive?

So, for example, work life balance has probably been on your list of goals for some time now. And probably not just since having kids, you probably knew that you overworked before you had kids. And then it just got exacerbated once they came around. But you can't really seem to figure out how to get to that place of feeling balanced.

Or maybe your goal is weight loss - you know what it takes to lose weight. It's some form of controlling the way you eat and exercising. I know that that's really oversimplifying it because I know a lot of weight loss coaches out there - there's a mindset component to weight loss, there's a nutritional focus to weight loss and so forth, but generally speaking, losing weight is simply about food and movement.

So as a high achiever, why can't you seem to achieve the weight that you want to achieve? Why can't you prioritize your health? Or maybe you have a goal this year to prioritize you - you want to wake up earlier, you want to go to bed sooner, you want to be okay leaving your partner to watch the kids for half a day on a weekend without any guilt.

The steps to this feel very simple - just decide when you're going to go to bed, set an alarm to get up, schedule that half daytime for yourself and tell your partner and then follow through.

But of course, it is so much harder than that.

For me this year, I have a goal of having my first multi six figure year in my business - so that's like a $200,000 business. Now I know a lot of how to make that happen. Actually, I just took a pause because as I said that it's pretty funny because I've been battling in my brain over the last couple of weeks, maybe even a month or so, I've been battling, how am I going to achieve this goal? And then of course, I just said, I know how to achieve it, because I do actually know a lot about how to achieve this goal. I need to serve my current clients, my current community well.

I need to think hard about how to solve their problems faster and easier, and then I just need to consistently put myself out there offering my services in many different ways, and continue to fail, until it clicks.

Serve authentically and fail a lot. From a high level - that's really all it takes.

And yet my brain keeps getting stuck on 'Yeah, but how?' What do I really need to do every single day? What is the step-by-step process that I need to go through, that's going to get me from here to this goal - that's what my brain wants as an achiever.

There's nothing more frustrating to a high achiever than to want something, and on some level, even know what they need to do in order to have it, but then not be able to make it happen. Now, if you're like me, the way of coping with these types of goals that you have that feel very elusive, is to kind of just not make them at all - to avoid them altogether.

And that is a lot of what I've done. I have been somebody that makes a lot of goals in my life, but I don't make them within a very specific timeframe, because that's a lot easier on my brain to handle failure. Or when I can't figure something out is to say, 'well, I'm going to achieve this, I just don't know when' and I just put it out there into as far into the future as possible.

So, I kind of do put it out, but I don't actually constrain it, which means that it's not really a goal, if I'm not putting a timeframe on it, I can't really call it a goal. And I do that because I just want to feel better about not being able to achieve the things that seem to be very elusive to me.

Now, here is why a lot of ambitious women struggle when they set goals for themselves. So, a lot of ambitious women are really good at meeting goals and achieving them on behalf of other people. When other people are involved, that's for sure, when they're going to step up, they're not going to fail anybody else. They have a huge capacity to show up for their company, for their boss, for their families, for their kids, for their friends, for their neighborhoods, for the communities; but to set a goal, that's just for them - that is so much harder to do.

Focusing on you feels selfish. So, we focus on ourselves only when it's convenient.

And you're likely never going to achieve a goal if you're only going to go after it when it is convenient to you, because you're not putting in your best time and energy and effort and mental capacity into it.

The second reason why a lot of ambitious women struggle to set goals for themselves - or achieve goals for themselves - is because setting a goal to achieve something that you've never achieved, or at least certainly haven't achieved under your current circumstances in life, is likely not about doing more. So let me say that again, setting a goal to achieve something you've never achieved, is likely not about doing more.

If it really was that simple, you would have already achieved it. If all it took was putting an exercise in your calendar and then showing up to the gym at that time, then, of course, you would have done it by now.

High achievers are not lazy.

It's not like you have oodles of time and all you need to do is just add it in your calendar to make the goal happen. It's not really about doing more, but instead it's about curating the way you spend your time and your energy. It's actually about restraint. Say 'no' to something or many things in order to make something happen.

To achieve something you haven't already achieved, it requires you to say no a lot, to say no to other wonderful things, other things that you do, in fact, want to achieve some at some point in your life, you're going to have to say no to those, because they're going to take up too much time and energy. And you're going to have to say no to people that you love, and they're likely going to feel disappointed.

And all of that is very challenging for a high achiever that focuses so much more on doing and doing more and has a high capacity to do more. And what it's going to require to set these goals for yourself and achieve them is likely to constrain and restrain yourself from that doing.

Now the third reason that ambitious women really struggle to set and attain goals for themselves is because every goal that we as achievers - and most people really tend to set in their life - it's really less about achieving that thing., and instead, it's about feeling something differently in their life. So, you say this year you want better work life balance, which means that you likely need to stop overworking. You need to not work in the evenings, or the weekends and you need to spend more time with your family or more time yourself, more time with your partner.

And while that is all true on the outside, that is what it's going to take in order to do that - what a balanced kife would really look like. And while that is true on the outside, that is what a balanced life would look like.

What you're really chasing is an internal experience.

You want to feel balanced. And when we're talking about creating a balanced life, we're talking about shifting the way your life feels, so that you're no longer feeling frantic, and like you're always supposed to be doing something, so that you're not feeling like a failure when you decide not to continue to work past five o'clock.

So, you're able to rest when you're with your families and not feel this constant puller, this constant draw to your computer or to your phone or whatnot, so that you're actually able to be present and slow down your brain so that you can focus on the person or the task that's in front of you. That is a balanced life.

That is a life that feels sufficient, it feels complete, it feels enough.

So let me be clear, though, it's not that of course, you don't want more in your life. Of course, you want to achieve more, you have big goals in your life that you want. But in a balanced life, there's a tension between going after more while at the same time feeling very content and satisfied with what you have.

So let me give you another example of this. If the goal is weight loss this year, yes, of course, you want your body to literally look different on the outside, you want to shed some of the weight off of you, you want to lose weight. But really what it is that you want is a feeling. You want to look in the mirror and feel good about what you see, you want to feel unashamed about your body. You want to feel sexy. You want to feel desirable. You want to feel like you can play with your kids and pick them up without any effort.

This is something that a lot of high achievers miss when they start setting goals - is they focus too much on attaining something externally, instead of recognizing that what they really want is to shift something inside of them.

And you can't really do anything externally to change something that's going on inside of you. If you want to change the internal experience, if you want to feel something different, you have to focus on the inside in order to do that. And this becomes the crux of the issue with traditional goals and New Year's resolutions.

You don't need more time, you don't need to achieve more, you don't need the right job, you don't need to get promoted, you don't need more money, you don't need more time with your family, you don't need to be a certain weight in order to be happy and calm and satisfied and have the balanced life that you want.

Because it's never your circumstances that make you happy or make you feel good. Achieving more or getting your circumstances just right that isn't going to do it. It is your thoughts about you and your life, what you believe about you and your life and your future - this is what creates that feeling of happiness, of calm, of satisfaction, of balance.

So, here's what I want to offer to you - don't set traditional goals this year, think instead about what you want to feel this year. What do you want the internal experience of this year to be? And then make that your goal. Now this is going to take a little bit of digging, because it's not really about doing something as much as it's about being something.

Now don't get me wrong, you're going to of course have to do some things to achieve whatever goal it is that you set out to achieve. It's not just going to magically happen for you, if you just set the intention out in the world, but don't really take any action to go make it attainable. But it's going to look very different if the goal is to feel sufficient and satisfied in your everyday versus stopping working late.

So, if you want to feel sufficient and satisfied in your everyday, I'm calling that balance. That's a balanced life - is when you feel very sufficient and satisfied in your everyday. That's going to require you to stop and look at everything that you've achieved and look at everything that you have on a very regular basis, and take a very deep breath and say, 'it's enough - it's good'.

It's going to require you to slow down, to celebrate what you achieve every single day.

But likely, if your goal is to just stop working late - to stop overworking - what you're going to do is you're just going to put a reminder in your calendar, maybe try to take on less so that there isn't as much to do. And then by sheer willpower alone, you're going to try to get your butt out of your chair at five o'clock or whenever it is that you want to go home so that you don't overwork that day.

You see the difference here?

One is really focusing in on creating the feeling, the experience that you actually want, and one is just trying to handle the symptoms of the issue.

If your goal is to lose 20 pounds this next year, how would you feel after you have achieved that? How would you feel in your body? What would you think about yourself? Maybe it's desirable. Let's just use that as an example. If that was your goal, you might actually spend time thinking about what makes you desirable right now What makes your partner desire you? What do you desire in yourself, what makes you desirable outside of the way that you look? You see, you push your brain to start thinking about yourself differently, which in turn is going to bring about a very different set of motivation when it comes to actually exercising and losing weight. I don't want you to drop the external goal.

So, I want you to hear me say that that's not what we're doing here, we're not dropping the external goal. I just want you to see there is a higher goal beyond the external - I want you to start focusing in on that. So that as you go about making a plan to achieve whatever goal you set out to achieve, you'll commit to actions that are going to focus on actually achieving the higher goal, the internal feeling, which is really what you want in the first place.

So, as I mentioned earlier, my goal this year in my business is to create my first multiple six figure business. Now that's my external goal.

What do I really want?

I want to feel sufficient and adequate.

Now, those are two words that I've really had to pull out through some journaling, and through some soul searching, through some coaching over this past year. If I had a multiple six figure business, what would I feel? These are the words that came to me - I want to feel sufficient, if I make the money, great, and if I don't, that's fine, too. Because no matter how much I make, it is enough, no matter what.

That's really the heart of sufficiency. And because sufficiency and feeling adequate, these are the bigger truer goals that I have - part of my action plan for this year, in achieving this goal is to increase the amount of time that I spend evaluating the things that I do, being amazed, and wowed by whatever it is I achieve.

And then allowing all of the good feedback in the comments, and the evaluations that I get from my clients, and from my community - really allowing all of that to really sink in, to celebrate each and every person that I touch and every milestone every client has.

Yesterday, I sat down, and I tried to flesh out my plan for the year on how I was going to achieve this financial goal. And at one point, I found myself - my heart racing. And I felt totally overwhelmed, because I realized I was trying to do too much in the year, I literally had to stop myself because I could feel this immense amount of pressure building up and I would say this is not the year that I want. I can't do all of these things.

I don't need to prove myself - I need to instead tap into sufficiency and adequacy right now and make a plan from that place.

So literally I pulled back - I pulled back in that moment - I recenter myself to my goal of what I really wanted to feel, and then I restrained my action plan to a place where I knew that if I took that action, and I did it really well that that would be enough. That would be good. That would be adequate, it would be sufficient.

It was less about doing and more about kind of experiencing all that I'm creating.

And I was really only able to do that though because I knew that the goal really wasn't money. It was about sufficiency and adequacy. It was about a feeling that I was chasing, that I can cultivate this entire year no matter how much money I make.

So, what do you want to achieve this year? How would you feel if you achieved it? Those are the two questions you need to be asking yourself, and maybe you already have some goals for this year. And that's great. You can go back and ask the second question about how would you feel if you were to achieve that. And really make sure you're digging in dee - it's not that you just feel good. Or you just feel healthy? Or you'd feel successful? Like what would all of that really mean to you? What would be different about the way you feel about life then versus now - after you've achieved that goal.

So really spend some time in both of those questions, and then make a plan for how you're going to go about attaining that higher goal, and not just the external goal.

Now, I just want to close with this - as ambitious women, I think we need to hear this message over and over and over again. I know I sure do.

You are a human being. You are not a human doer.

You don't have to achieve anything this year.

You don't have to do anything more in your life, to be loved to be good, to be adequate, to be worthy to be enough - You already are.

You don't need to prove yourself to anyone or to yourself or to God.

Give yourself permission instead to just do less and feel more.

And if you're really ready to stop the endless chatter in your brain that is telling you that you need to do more -  if it is relentless, achieve cross things off your list, go bigger, do more - and instead you want a calm inner voice that's telling you that you are enough that you are doing enough and you are good enough that I invite you to join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom’s collective where I walk you through five steps. It's just a five-step process to achieving that internal balance to that calm and quiet space inside of you, so that you can be in control of your time, energy, happiness and achieve all the goals you want from here on out. Alright working moms. Let's get to it.

I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you're looking to create a life where your career and your home life never feel at odds, where you're working less, but achieving at the same level of life without regret, where you know you are doing exactly what you want to be doing, then join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom’s collective.

This is a group of ambitious working moms who believe that work life balance is possible for them and are committed to creating it. The program includes 30 short videos and workbooks that teach you how to create the building blocks of a balanced life, as well as weekly group coaching and in-depth support within a private working moms' community. Oh, and did I mention that when you join the community you get lifetime access. That means you have access to coaching and material to help support your balanced life in every season.

You can find out more information and sign up for the collective on my website at: www.RebeccaOlsonCoaching.com/collective

Rebecca Olson