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The most common time to set goals is at the beginning of a new year. But yet, almost 25% will quit on their goals before the end of January. I don’t want this for you! I want you to achieve everything you want this year and in your life, so today in the podcast, I am sharing with you exactly you need to do in order to expedite your results and almost guarantee them (ok, it’s only 95% guaranteed, but that’s pretty close!) In this episode I will break down the 6 steps to expediting your goals and give examples of how some of my clients have tackled these steps so that you feel like success is inevitable. Grab a paper and pen, you might need it for this one.
Topics in this episode:
The power of declaring your goals
What to do when you don’t feel motivated anymore
A well-known, but rarely used, tactic to (almost) guaranteeing you reach your goals
Unpaid vs paid accountability – which is better?
The actual roadblock to reaching your goals and how to overcome it
Show Notes & References:
Give yourself a 95% chance of reaching your goals by working with me in 2023. Click here to schedule a free coaching call and expedite the process: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
Working moms, I cannot wait to share this podcast episode with you. It's the beginning of a new year, a time when most of us set goals, reflect on where we've been and where we want to go. We set New Year's resolutions, we pick words of the year, all these things that we want to do to set ourselves up for the best possible year ahead.
And I started thinking about how I could best support you in the process of reaching your goals for this upcoming year. And I decided to share with you a six step process that I use with my clients to help them expedite reaching their desired goals and dare I say, almost guarantee them.
I'm going to break down the six steps and give you examples of how some of my clients have tackled these steps so that you know exactly what you need to do to expedite what you want this upcoming year. You're definitely going to want to give yourself some space to go through this podcast, stop and start it, and do the exercises along the way.
But if you don't have time for that, listen to it now, come back to it later, whatever you need to do. This is the secret to expediting exactly what you want in this upcoming year. I can't wait to share it. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Happy New Year working moms! I hope you had such an amazing and wonderful holiday season with your family and friends. I wanted to intentionally have this podcast episode come out right after the new year, even though I wrote this back in early December, because I know that the new year is the most common time for people to set goals and reflect on the past year and where they're headed and what it is they want.
And I wanted to share some thoughts with you, not necessarily about setting goals, so we're going to talk a little bit about that, but about expediting the achievement of them. I want to talk about what it takes to guarantee that you reach your goals and your desired outcomes for this year.
Now, the most common goals that I see from amazing, ambitious working moms are usually health, which can be broken down into exercising more, eating better, or even just self care. Another big goal I see a lot from ambitious working moms is work-life balance, which can be broken down into working less or being on your phone less or being more present. And then the third one that I often see is something to do with your career. It's about being happier in your career, which for many people means changing companies or asking for a promotion or taking steps towards a dream of some kind, like a business or consulting. And if you felt stuck in your career, then this is probably a big goal for you in 2023.
Choose a goal for yourself for 2023.
Now, you may or may not have decided any of your specific goals for the year, but for the sake of this podcast, I really want you to bring to mind something that you want to be different over the course of this year, a goal for yourself. So even if you haven't 100% determined it, I'm sure there is something that you already know that you want to be working toward.
And so I want you to be bringing that to mind as we talk about expediting your results or guaranteeing that you reach those goals. It's going to make this podcast even that much more useful to you if you bring to mind something really specific.
Wishy washy commitment creates wishy washy results.
So over the course of this episode, I'm going to be walking you through six steps to expediting the achievement of your goals. Clarity around what your goal is, is, in fact, the first step. It's literally saying, I want this. Not in a, like, oh, that would be nice sort of a way, or not even in a complaining way. But a, I really wish that I could have sort of way, but in a way that you feel really committed to. Because wishy washy commitment creates wishy washy results. We don't want wishy washy results. We want results to feel guaranteed, which is what we're going to talk about in this podcast today.
“We tend to dream about wanting something without ever really declaring it.”
And so step number one is getting really clear around what that goal is. And for some of you, that might seem kind of silly because if we're talking about goals, if you don't really ever name your goals and how would you ever reach your goals? But for so many of us, we tend to dream about wanting something without ever really declaring it. We never say, I'm committed to this. I want this. I'm going after this. And if you don't have that level of commitment in your mind and in your body, then you're not really probably ever going to set yourself up for success in achieving it, right? It's kind of leaving it up to chance and whether it happens or not.
But for a lot of us, that tends to be the way we think. It's like, oh, it would just be really nice if I could work out every day, or It would be really nice if I lost 10lbs. Or wouldn't it be nice if I could get home and shut down my work brain? At the end of the day, we talk about it as if it would be a nice thing, not in a way that feels controllable to us.
Declare what it is you want.
So step one, declare. Declare what it is you want. Put it out there into the world, into the universe, what's the goal? What's the result that you're looking for? So after you've then declared your goal, the next question is going to be, what do I need to do to achieve it?
Action plan to achieve your goal.
And to be honest, most people usually know the answer to this question. If you want to lose weight, the action plan, the things you need to do are, probably exercise, lessening desserts or snacks. It might involve drinking less or getting a gym membership or buying a Peloton.
If your goal is to work less or prioritize work less and find more balance, your action plan probably includes leaving work at 5pm every day or whatever time it is that you want to leave work. It probably includes spending less time on your phone and learning how to be less available to people, which means you probably have to say no more.
If your goal is to change jobs or go after a dream of some kind in your career, your action plan might be to get clear on exactly what it is and what it is you want and why. To update your resume. To update your LinkedIn profile. To reach out to a recruiter or start networking.
Taking intentional time to write down our goals and steps to get there.
For most of us, when we just take an intentional moment to sit down and write out what will be required of us in order to achieve our goals, most of us could come up with a pretty good list.
Now if you struggle with this step and it feels like you really don't know what to do in order to reach that goal, I want you to write down your hunch. What do you think you need to do? What are the things you know at least 100% that you need to do? What are some of the things you know just 50% of what you need to do? You might not know everything, but for sure you know some things. You might not have specificity in your action plan yet, and that's okay, but you might have something more general. I know it's going to require clarity or I know it's going to require some level of exercise. Keeping it general is okay. If you can get more specific, that would be even better.
So step two is writing down an action plan. What do you need to be doing in order to achieve this goal? What are the steps involved? If you have time right now, I encourage you to pause the podcast, get out a pen and paper or your notes in your phone and write down, here's my goal, here's what I know I need to do in order to reach it, here's my action plan. Take a moment and do that right now if you can. If you can't, make a commitment to yourself to come back to this particular podcast and follow along with me doing the steps as I talk about them.
Roadblocks to success.
So, first step, declare the goal. Second step, create an action plan on how to achieve that goal based on what you know right now. And the third step to expediting your goals and making them happen faster is to look at your action plan and think what's going to get in the way of me being able to follow through with these actions? I call these your roadblocks.
So if you're looking at your action plan to lose weight and it has exercise three times a week on it, your roadblock might be that you're going to not want to wake up and do it. Or it might be a lack of self control when everybody is asleep and it's late at night and you want to eat ice cream.
My mom actually used to do that. She has funny stories about having these ice cream cravings in the middle of the night where she would wake up at like one in the morning and she would just crave ice cream and it would be so quiet and she would just sneak to the freezer and she would eat ice cream. I didn't find out about this until way later in life, but it just makes me laugh. But maybe that's something that you already know is going to be a problem because you really like that late night sweet treat.
Or if you have a goal to prioritize working less and find more work-life balance in your action plan, you might have written, I need to leave work at 5pm every day. And the roadblock might be that the rest of your team doesn't leave that early and you feel guilty because of that. Or it might be that there's a lot of people on your team that have left recently, like in the great resignation, and there is just, objectively speaking, more work to do. And so right now, it just feels like a really busy season.
And so in your action plan, you have putting down your phone and being less available and being more present. But the roadblock might be that you're constantly getting messages on your email or from your team, on your apps or whatever. And it's just hard to turn off your work brain when you're constantly being notified because the season right now is just super busy.
Thinking through the roadblocks to your action plan.
This step, step three, is really thinking through the roadblocks to your action plan. This is a step that most people miss when they're setting their goals, and it's a crucial one if you want to start meeting your goals as quickly as possible.
Here's an insight into roadblocks, and identifying them. I want to be clear - roadblocks are not circumstantial or physical, they are internal. There is always a feeling that comes up that gets in the way of you being able to follow through with your action plan.
It's a feeling of being behind that comes up when you leave 20 things on your to-do list and stick to your commitment of getting home at 5pm.
It's the guilt that comes up when you decide to be unavailable to your boss or your team at night.
It's the inadequacy and the disappointment that comes up when you decide that you're going to work out at noon because that's the best time for you to fit it in, and the only date and time your team can meet one day to discuss a project or a deliverable of some kind is during that time slot and you decide you still can't go to that meeting and everyone else is going to either have to meet without you or find a different time that is less convenient.
It is an emotion of depravity that comes up when you decide not to satisfy your desire for sweets tonight.
And each of these emotions that come up, they come with a set of thoughts. Thoughts like, I should have gotten more done today. Thoughts like, I'm letting them down. Thoughts like, this is selfish. Thoughts of false pride. Like, I'm deserving of this. I'd have a really hard day today. I need this.
Our emotions and our thoughts are tied together.
Remember, our emotions and our thoughts are tied together. And while you might think that the challenge is trying to figure out how to get it on your calendar because you're really busy, that really isn't the challenge at all. That's just simply a decision. It's the emotions that come up when you start to implement your decisions, when you have to start trading off one thing for another, when you start deprioritizing something that has been a priority in the past. All of that comes with a whole bunch of emotions. That is your roadblock ultimately, to following through with your action plan.
So step three to expediting your results is to think ahead of time about what these emotional and thought roadblocks might be so that you can make a plan on how you want to handle them.
When it comes to forming new habits or changing rhythms, whether that's working out or leaving work at a particular time or learning how to be less attached to your phone, whatever it may be - studies show that when we start, our motivation feels really high. Our commitment is high and our motivation is high. But then over time, sometimes as little as a couple of hours, our commitment and our motivation wane.
Motivation doesn’t last.
Has that ever happened to you before like it's happened to me? For sure I'm going to get up tomorrow and I'm going to work out. And you feel super resolute about it. You feel really committed. You set your alarm the night before, and then at 5am, when you wake up the next morning, you have no desire to do it. Commitment, motivation, super low. All that's gone by is like 8 hours of time that you slept has transpired and your motivation and commitment has completely waned.
This happens to me all the time, particularly as I continue to work at learning how to shut down my work brain on demand. As my end of workday is approaching, I'll say to myself, I'm not going to log on later. I've got enough done for the day. I'm going to be work-free tonight. I'm going to focus on my kids. And then my whole family gets home and it's somewhat chaotic. And then my brain automatically starts thinking about some of the conversations that I had today or the interactions and the things I did and the things I didn't quite get done, the email I didn't quite get to.
And I find myself literally inching back towards my computer just like, check on a few things real quick. I could be so committed and motivated at 4pm towards the end of my work day. And then by 5pm, commitment and motivation are out the window and I'm sitting on my computer checking my email, right? It's literally like a matter of hours or minutes that have gone by and my commitment and my motivation wane.
Now for New Year's resolutions, for some people, they can feel really committed to them for weeks, months at a time. But by February 1st, all of a sudden something happens or circumstances change and whatnot and motivation and commitment go way down, studies show this is super common.
This is the human experience when it comes to changing habits or reaching goals. There comes a point sometime within minutes, hours, days, weeks, months where our commitment and our motivation just seem to magically disappear and it feels really hard to follow through. This is the moment that we really want to be accounting for. This is the moment that our roadblock occurs.
Get prepared for the moment when motivation wanes.
One way is to literally ask yourself this…’at what point is my motivation and my commitment to this going to end?’ You know, what's a circumstance that might come up that might trigger me to want to work late even though I have this commitment? What's a circumstance that might come up that might get in the way of me following through with my workout today even though I've committed to that? What's the circumstance that's going to get in the way of me pursuing a job change, even though I know this is exactly what I want? That's the moment you're trying to think through.
Sometimes these moments happen on a daily basis. If you have something consistent in your action plan, like working out or something like that, or leaving work at 5pm, sometimes it's a bit more big picture. It's like certain seasons are harder than others. So you want to be thinking through these roadblocks. You can think through them on a circumstantial level. That's going to be helpful for you to kind of get the full picture.
But I also want you to be accounting for the emotions that come up when that happens. You can be thinking about both if that is useful to you. So step three is to identify the roadblock. The thing that's going to literally get in the way of you making progress on the road, toward you meeting this goal.
And I want you to right now, stop this podcast and write whatever comes to mind right now. That might be an excuse of time and energy, or work is really busy right now, or you don't have a clue on how to navigate a job change right now. Or it could be the economy or it could be that your kids are at a certain age, or it could be just the flu season and so everybody seems to be getting sick - whatever circumstances come to mind that feel like it is going to make it hard for you to follow through with your motivation and commitment.
And then I also, again, want you to be thinking right now about the emotion and the thoughts that come along with that roadblock and write both of those things down. Pause, do that exercise if you can. Otherwise come back to it as you are committed to using this as a tool to help you expedite your results this year.
Create a plan for what you're going to do when roadblocks come up.
So step four in expediting the results of your goals is to create a plan for what you're going to do when those emotions and thoughts and roadblocks come up. Your plan needs to be very specific. I want to give you some examples of this.
I have a client that has a goal to leave her current position to do something that is more fulfilling, but she's somewhat unclear on what that is or she kind of has a bunch of options and she's trying to narrow it down and hence why she hired me as a coach. This is something that we are working through together.
And so we recently were creating a plan for how she was going to take some really specific steps towards researching and then some other career search tasks. And she said that her roadblock was going to be that the holidays are really busy and she's got family coming into town and birthdays and things like that and her schedule just isn't going to be really consistent.
And so we started to talk about the emotions that were going to come up when her family is in the other room, out in the living room, hanging out and she is going to spend an hour in her office while somebody else is watching her kids.
Following through with her commitment to these tasks of changing her career, she also was able to identify that a roadblock for her would just be not really having a specific plan for what to do in the middle of those times that she sets aside to do this career search work.
And so we talked really specifically about what those tasks would be because the emotion that she thought would come up would be confusion. So we wanted to make a plan for how to deal with the confusion.
So in thinking through her roadblocks and what it was going to take for her to follow through with her action plan, we got very specific on exactly when in her calendar she was going to be doing these career search tasks.
We got really specific on exactly what she was going to do during those times so there would be no confusion. We talked about the mindset that she was going to have to have in order to prioritize these tasks, instead of being with her family that may just be in the other room having fun and hanging out.
And what she decided is that she needed to keep this goal really front and center in her mind. And so she wrote down this post-it note with a very specific phrase on it and she posted it on her computer so that she would remember why she was going towards this goal and the importance of doing it. And that was going to be a helpful motivator for her as she saw that sticky note while she was sitting in front of her computer and doing all of these different tasks.
Create a really specific plan to stay on track.
Notice how the plan is really specific. We literally broke down each thing that she needed to do in this case over the next month or so. We talked about the roadblocks that were going to come up, the challenges that were going to derail her from that plan, the emotional ones, the physical ones. And then we made a very specific plan, that's step four. What we're talking about here is how to handle that.
Let me give you another example. I have another client that has a goal of prioritizing herself. She no longer wants to be the last on the priority list. Very specifically, she wants time in her schedule that is specific to her goals and her tasks. And in her home life, she wants the same thing. She wants hobbies, she wants time for herself, she wants to be a priority.
So the plan specifically was to carve out time every single day in her work calendar, like an hour a day for tasks that are just hers and based on her own goals. Then there was time in her calendar scheduled on some weekday nights and weekends for just herself, where she could do a hobby, read a book, whatever she wanted to do that would be something fun and energizing for her - that's the plan. She needs to put these things on the calendar and then she needs to follow through with them.
Now the roadblock to following through with that action plan - there was a couple of them, but specifically at work, it was this sense of urgency that her team and herself and just the company culture has around meeting client deadlines. Clients are on the top of the priority list, even above what seems to be like employees. And they put client needs first above all else. So everybody has this sense of urgency around client needs and client communication.
And the problem is that their clients and their clients timelines and deadlines and emotions, they seem to always come before hers. And so what she found would happen is that she would plan this time in her calendar, or she thought this is what would happen, and she would have this time in her calendar in the middle of her work day.
But inevitably, somebody would come knocking on her door or pinging or whatever, like a client needed something from her. And then she would feel this sense of urgency and false commitment towards her client and she would just drop everything and give them what they needed and be pulled into meetings or pulled into pivoting tasks in order to take care of whatever the client wanted.
And what that meant was that she was never really going to get time for herself and her tasks and her own goals and so forth. And so this was going to be a really big roadblock for her, this false sense of urgency that she has and her company has.
Letting people down.
And then the emotion that comes up is this deep fear of letting people down and disappointing others. If she were to truly hold onto this hour that she wants to set aside for herself, she fears that if somebody needs her during that time and she isn't available to them, that they're going to be frustrated and disappointed in her and they're going to feel let down, and so we talked all about that.
Then we started talking about what she really wanted to do when this happened, what was going to be her plan when this roadblock took place, because it was for sure guaranteed. How did she want to handle the big emotions and the fears that came up.
So first it started with deciding exactly when she wanted to calendar this time, so that it was really clear and carved out in her schedule. This was the time she was going to be spending for herself on her goals and her tasks and her administrative work that she needed to get done.
Keeping the commitment to yourself.
And then one of the things that she did is in that time in her calendar, rather than just like time, block it and put this generic label to it, like work on tasks or my time or something really specific like that. She wrote out, this time is blocked for me and my goals and my initiatives so that I can show up as the best manager and employee that I could possibly be, or something like that - I'm sort of making it up right now. But there was this phrase that she came up with that when she saw the hour in her calendar and she read that it was so focused on the goal that she had and why it was important to her that it felt different to her to uphold that time and keep that commitment to herself than if it just said, like, block off time for myself. Right?
Just being able to reframe it in that way just started to remind her brain that this time wasn't selfish, but it was set aside for really specific purposes that were important to her. And, she knew all of the reasons why. So that was one thing that we did that we came up with.
And then another thing we did was come up with a quick 32 second, maybe up to two minute centering practice that she could do that would calm down her body when it would start to freak out because somebody else needed something from her and that she wasn't going to be getting back to them until after this hour was up.
But of course, when she did that, her body was going to be sort of freaking out. There would be a whole lot of anxiety and her heart would start beating faster and she would start worrying and there'd be like this little bit of panic, right?
These are all the emotions that were going to come up the roadblocks.
And so we came up with just a really quick little protocol for when that emotion comes up, how she wanted to handle it. Stopping breathing, taking a moment with her body, connecting with how fast her heart was beating, taking some of those really deep, good belly breaths, and just reminding her body that she's okay and that it's okay to prioritize herself. And that, of course, it's going to feel bad at first and all of these different things.
We came up with something really specific to her that felt really calming and centering to her. So we came up with that protocol as well, to really handle the emotion that was going to come up during that time.
Can you see how specific I get with my clients when I create plans with them about how to overcome these roadblocks? What specifically are you going to do when you go to follow through with your action plan and there's an unwanted emotion or thought that gets in the way? That is what this step is all about.
Now, if you get stuck on this step, it's usually because you're thinking there's a right way to do it when there's really not. I would start by just making a list of things you could do during that time and go back through this podcast and listen to some of the examples I just gave you and let those jog your memory or let them help you ideate about what some of these possibilities are.
Because for some people, this might take a little trial and error. You might find that the protocol you come up with for yourself doesn't quite work and you might need to tweak it. Or you might find that the time that you put in your calendar just really wasn't the most ideal time. You thought the end of day would be perfect, but really it's not, because of all of the things that come up during the day, and then you feel really behind. So really it needs to be at the beginning of your day.
Be intentional.
So it's okay that you're going to probably have some trial and error and you're going to have to pivot, but the point is to be really intentional with how you want to handle this. And then, of course, if it doesn't work, time to change the plan, to learn from it, not be obstinate, and instead learn from the plan and create a new one. So that was step number four.
Building accountability.
Step number five to expediting your goals in ensuring that you reach them is to build in accountability. I know you know this. I know that you know how important accountability is. Studies show that your chance of completing a goal increases by 65% if you tell someone about your commitment to do it. And even more impressive than that, those odds are raised to 95% if you have a specific meeting with your accountability partner. 95% working moms, that's a lot.
I want you to take a moment and imagine giving yourself a 95% chance of actually attaining whatever goal you have in mind.
I want you to visualize yourself having already achieved it, whatever it is you want. If your goal is to lose 10 lbs, I want you to imagine that weight already off and how you look at yourself differently in the mirror because you've lost that weight and how your clothes feel different. I want you to imagine going out and buying a whole new set of clothes that fit your body better because you've lost that weight. I want you to imagine what intimacy feels like with your partner because you feel sexier in your body. I want you to go there.
Visualize what life would be like if you already achieved the balance that you desire.
I want you to imagine what life would be like if you had already achieved the balance that you desire. How you would walk into your house. And instead of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, you feel like you have energy to actually be with your kids and your family.
I want you to imagine having the mental space and energy to engage in conversations with your partner at the end of a workday that don't just center around family logistics.
I want you to imagine sitting on a couch or taking a bath and reading the latest book of your favorite author.
Feel the experience of having already attained your goal.
I want you to feel the experience of having already attained your goal in your body right now. It should feel like a visceral experience. It should feel like your brain and your body are literally engaged in the experience of achieving this.
Because if you decide to engage in some form of accountability, your goals are as good as done.
Now, if your brain is sort of like mine, it's probably saying, well, there's like a 5% chance that they still wouldn't happen. And that's true. You might happen to be the one out of 20 where accountability doesn't work for you and you don't, in fact, reach your goals, even though you do everything you're supposed to do in order to meet them.
But then the chances are when you re-engage and create another plan next year or whenever to start going after those goals, you're not going to be that one in 20 because statistically speaking, you will have learned from what didn't work before and what failed, and you're going to grow from that. You're going to create a new plan that's based on what actually has and has not worked for you.
One of the things I have thought a lot about is how our culture and society has really changed from being one that values community and sort of has a communal approach to life to being more of what I would now call individualistic.
Let me tell you a little bit by what I mean on this, because it's Christmas. I'm writing this during the Christmas season. I have watched four versions of A Christmas Carol recently. I watched the Bill Murray version called Scrooge. I watched the Mickey Mouse Christmas Carol, which is like 30 minutes, and it's animated. I watched the newer Disney version of A Christmas Carol, which actually came out in like 2009 or 2010, but I had never seen it before. And it was amazing, but it was super terrifying at the same time. So I highly would not recommend watching that necessarily with your really young kids. And then I went to go see a professional production with my mom and my daughter in San Francisco.
Now, not all of these versions had this moment in it, and I can't even remember which one did. But there is a moment in the original story where Bob Cratchett comes home on Christmas Eve and he gets the whole day off the next day, right? Because it's Christmas Day and he has this short dialogue with his oldest son where he shares with him that Fred Scrooge's nephew that we had kind of seen way earlier in the show, right, or in the movie in the story. Fred comes in really early in the story and invites Scrooge to come to Christmas dinner with him. And it's a bah humbug and all that kind of stuff.
But there's this scene where Fred actually approaches Bob Cratchett and invites his oldest son to come and be an apprentice. And so in this scene, Bob Krachett is speaking to his oldest son about the fact that he has found him an apprenticeship, which is, generally speaking, how this worked back then. If you wanted to learn a trade, if you wanted to learn a very specific skill set, if you wanted to get a job in a specific industry, if you essentially wanted to achieve a very specific goal in your work life, you became an apprentice of someone that knew how to do it and they would teach you everything that they knew.
That's not how people learn things today. We value learning things on our own, not needing anyone to tell us how to do it. We value autonomy, resourcefulness, individualism. You know, the DIY industry is massive. The self help section of a bookstore is huge. You don't need anybody to help you. You can do this on your own and there's a sense of pride with that.
And look, I know you're amazing and that you in fact could achieve and do anything that you ever wanted to in your life. You have solid skills, you have a good work ethic, you have determination. You're a go getter. I believe that you could attain your goals on your own, but guaranteed it would take you longer if you were even able to do it. And because it would take longer, you're going to suffer more failure. You're going to suffer a whole lot more negative emotion that's going to come up with that. And you may not reach the full potential of that goal.
You need accountability to reach your goals.
For example, you might learn how to leave your office at the time you want, but not really learn how to shut down. You might figure out how to lose £10, but you can't really figure out how to lose the final ten. You might be able to do it on your own. But if you want to expedite your results and give yourself an almost guaranteed chance of achieving them, you're going to need accountability.
The best form of accountability is someone that knows what you're going through and how hard it is to meet your goal. And even better, it's because they have already been through it and they have figured out how to overcome the challenges of meeting that goal. That's why an apprentice goes to a master. The master has figured out the trade, they have figured out how to do whatever it is they need to do. And the apprentice is learning from them. That's the best form of accountability. It's the best way that you're going to get to your goal.
It's the difference between sharing with your friend who could empathize with you on how difficult it is to really shut down your work brain. And they could be your cheerleader to keep going, or a friend who used to struggle with that but now doesn't, and has a whole lot of insight for you on how to actually walk in the door and shut down your work brain. It's more useful for you to be consistently talking with someone and having someone keep you accountable. That has been where you are and has figured out how to overcome it.
Now, accountability can be a friend, it could be a mentor, it could be a wise old woman that lives on your street that probably has a whole lot of life experience to share with you. That would all be like free forms of accountability. Or you could hire someone, you could literally invest in giving yourself that 95% chance of reaching your goal by hiring a personal trainer. If it's about losing weight or a career coach, if it's about getting a new job or a life coach like me, if it's about creating balance and happiness and showing up as the best possible version of you always.
Now, I'm curious if this statistic wasn't 95%. It was 100%. 100% guaranteed. You'd spend more time with your kids, feel more connected and present. When you're giving them a bath, you're not trying to multitask and do five things at the same time, or when you're playing with Legos with them, you're not secretly trying to check all your text messages at the same time.
Or if you hired a personal trainer to help you lose weight and learn how to exercise and eat right, you would be 100% guaranteed to lose that weight and keep it off forever.
If the investment for that level of expertise and accountability would guarantee you reach your goal, would you do it? Now, if your answer is not yes, I would be very curious why? And let me just say, the answer is never because you can't afford it.
Do you believe you are worth your goal?
Ambitious women are the most resourceful people I have ever met on the planet. And I know that if you needed to figure out how to make time or money happen, you could do it. So it might feel uncomfortable to do, but I know that you can do it. It's not about the money or time almost always. It's never that. It's that you don't believe the result is worth it or that you are worth it. It's usually one of those two things.
So I want to add a 6th step here, a step that focuses on why this goal is so worth it and why you are worthy of attaining it. Because whether you choose to ask for accountability in a friend or pay for accountability in a coach or a mentor of some kind, that's a really vulnerable thing to do because it says, I don't know how to do it on my own. And remember, we live in a culture that values that individual nature, right? And for ambitious women who do in fact want that autonomy and they value their own personal resourcefulness and their ability to get it all done, it's not easy to say, I don't know how to do this, but it's going to be required in order for you to seek accountability and expedite your results and 95% guarantee them.
So let's review the six steps that are required for you to expedite an almost 95% chance of guaranteeing you reach your goals.
6 Step Recap
Declare your goal. Shout it out into the world. Decide to be committed to it.
Write down an action plan. What do you need to do to attain it?
Identify your roadblocks. What's going to get in the way of you achieving it?
Create a plan for how to handle any of those roadblocks, when and if they occur. Remember, the roadblocks are mostly emotional, so you're going to have to have something in your plan to deal with your emotions in the midst of that.
Invest in accountability. Whether that's free accountability or paid accountability, but make sure it's not just sharing it with someone. Like there's an actual meeting on the books on the regular to hold you accountable to actually attaining your goal.
Focus your brain on why this goal is so important to you and why it's worth investing your time and money and energy and resources in, and why you are worthy of investing your time and energy and resources in.
So here's the last thing I want to offer to you. I am a life coach for working moms.
Working with me in 2023 is going to give you the greatest chance of reaching your goals.
I am an expert at helping you end all of the perfectionism and people pleasing and procrastination which has you prioritizing work instead of your family. So I'm an expert at helping you find balance.
And lastly, I'm an expert at helping women feel confident and powerful so they stop second guessing themselves and their value and they can make a big impact in our world.
If you want to give yourself the greatest opportunity of having the working mom life that you want, I encourage you take me up on a free coaching call. I call this a breakthrough call.
This is where the entire accountability process starts.
This call in and of itself is a game changer because you will walk away with clarity on what it is you want and why and an exact plan on how to achieve it with an opportunity to guarantee that you get it by working with me in coaching.
I know I can help. I would love to work with you.
You can schedule that call by going to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book. And of course it's always in the show notes. So you can go there to find out more information about this call and about the coaching work that I do.
All right working moms. This is going to be the most amazing year. I can feel it. I want you to go out. I want you to guarantee your results this year. Follow these six steps and working moms. Let's get to it.
