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Motivation becomes almost non-existent by February for new year’s resolutions and goals. If you are like many working moms, you probably want a “redo” or to start fresh this month or perhaps you’re even ready to quit. But here’s the thing, quitting or even starting over is one of the worst things you can do.
There’s a reason why you didn’t make progress towards your goals in January and you need to know exactly what didn’t work and why, so you can fix it moving forward. But if you decide to start again, you’re likely not going to evaluate your failed attempts. In fact, avoiding thinking about failure is probably one of the reasons why you want to start over to begin with.
In this episode I make a case for why you should keep going toward your goals instead of start fresh, take a “redo” or even quit. Additionally, I will offer 3 insights into why that is the better direction to take, especially if you find yourself already off track for the year.
Topics in this episode:
What you miss out on if you try to start again toward your goals
The importance of failure and building a failure tolerance
The role emotions play in you making progress toward your goals (or not)
You have 2 options right now, when it comes to your new year’s resolutions or goals – here is how each of them will play out
Show Notes & References:
Prioritize yourself and your goals this year by working with a coach. Learn more about how coaching works and next steps: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com
Want ongoing support as a working mom? Sign up for the free 19-day audio series: How to be a present and connected mom. Each day you will receive an email with a downloadable audio of 5 minutes or less that will teach you a tool or strategy for being more present and in the moment. Click here to sign up and receive the first audio: https://www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/be-present-optin
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Transcript
Intro
Okay, so it's February, and let's be honest, likely your motivation has sort of waned for those New Year's resolutions and goals that you set at the beginning of the year.
Now, I know most of you probably want a little bit of a do over or a redo.
Things in January just didn't go the way you had hoped they would go. There was just a little bit more stress or a little bit more emotion, or your kids were a little bit more of a handful than usual, or maybe your whole family got sick.
Yep, totally get it.
There's likely a part of you that really just feels like quitting on your goals or just simply starting new. Just starting over. It's a new month. But here's the thing.
Quitting or even starting over again is one of the worst things you can do right now. Because if you start over, you quit. You don't learn from your failure.
There's a reason why you didn't make progress toward your goals in the way that you wanted to in January. You don't want that reason to be a mystery. You want to know exactly what didn't work and why so you can fix it moving forward.
But if your mindset is that you’re just going to simply start again, you’re likely not going to evaluate all of that failure. In fact, you're going to avoid thinking about that failure. And that's probably one of the reasons why you want to start over to begin with.
In this episode, I want to make a case for why you should keep going, and I will offer three insights into why that is the better direction to take if you find yourself already off track for the year.
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.
Hello, working moms. It is right around February 1st when you're listening to this podcast and I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens in the first month of the year,. Because there's two things that we know for sure.
Number one is that we love new beginnings. The beginning of the new year is a time when most people feel resolute on making changes. Lots of people commit to goals and New Year's resolutions and words of the year that really help set the tone for the year ahead.
People are more committed to weight loss, which makes up about 90% of people's New Year's resolutions, or at least some form of a health related goal, makes up 90% of New Year's resolutions. Gym memberships soar in the month of January.
Beginnings are magical. Or are they?
But this surge of energy towards goals and making changes in life doesn't just happen at the beginning of the year. It happens in new seasons of life. Each season of the year.
Maybe it's the beginning of the school year. Maybe it's a big transition year, or you've changed decades. You're a little bit older, or maybe you've bought a new house. Like my family just bought a new house.
Literally last weekend, we moved houses just around the corner, only half of a mile away from where we were at. And my husband and I are just ready to go for it. We're excited about the projects and creating new rhythms for our family. There's all this kind of motivation to get things done and to make things happen as we start this new season in our new house.
There’s just something sort of magical about the beginning of something, right? Where there's a lot of positive energy around making something happen, a lot of motivation. I know I just said the word magical, and we're kind of talking about it like that, but it's not really, right?
Our brains actually crave closing one chapter in our life and then beginning another one. Our brains really like closure. Our brains like rhythm and structure. And the beginning of something tends to be a time where we are able to put a lot of effort into thinking about and planning for that change.
New beginnings are a time when we sort of reorganize life, both kind of on the external, but then also on the internal. We organize our mind a bit more.
Remember, our brains like to optimize. Its primary function is to keep you alive and optimizing for what's not working and brainstorming solutions and then creating structures and plans. It makes sense why our brains really love new beginnings. And there's a lot of motivation at the beginning of the year and at the beginning of various seasons and new beginnings in our life.
About 25% of people give up on New Year's resolutions within first week.
So that's the first thing we know. The second is that at the first or really the second or third sign of how hard it's going to be to make that change happen, we give up.
I've actually never heard this before, but I think it's January 12th, it's called “quitter day.” I think it's January 12th, and it's the day that most people quit on their New Year's resolutions or on their goals for the year. Right? Just twelve days in.
There's a ton of research and polls that have been done around New Year's resolutions. Generally, all of them say something similar, which is about 25% of people give up on their New Year's resolutions within the first week of the year. And then by the end of January, kind of depending on the research, that number jumps up to like 50, 75, 80% of people have stopped going after their New Year's resolutions or their goals for the year by the end of January.
And then ultimately only about 9% say they actually achieve the goal that they set out to achieve in the beginning of the year. And there isn't anything magical about this either.
Our brains thrive in comfort, and the most comfortable thing to do is to keep doing what you've been doing. Don't change anything, even if it's in your best interest.
Don't get fit. Don't get into a new exercise routine. Don't change your eatings or your drinking habits. Don't change your scrolling or Netflix habit. Don't connect to your partner more, or reach out to your friends more, or have more date nights or me time.
Your brain hates the effort that is involved in making change happen.
So whether that's a month or twelve days, or, heck, even just a few days into January, your brain is already starting to offer to you that maybe you really don't need to make any changes this year. Maybe you really don't need to lose that weight or change those habits.
It's just easier not to.
So our brains love new beginnings. There's tons of motivation around setting goals at the beginning of something, particularly the beginning of the year and it loves quitting on them.
Isn't that crazy? I like to say that our brains are always working on our behalf. They're always on our side. So the moment you're dissatisfied with the way you fit into your clothes, the moment that you feel guilty for spending too much time on your phone or working too many hours and not enough time with your kids, and you think to yourself, “I really need to fix this. I know. I'm going to make this my new year's resolution. I'm going to make this my goal. I'm going to change this habit,” your brain gets on board with that and is like, “Yes, you really should do that. It would make life so much better. You'd be such a better mom. You'd feel so much better in your clothes. You'd show up in the world in a completely different way.”
And your brain sends all these really good reasons for setting your goals and making changes. And you feel in that moment, this kind of surge of energy or motivation and determination.Your brain and your body are on board with one another. But then you start. You start to actually wake up early. You start to put your phone down to spend more time with your kids. You start to leave work early to be home on time for dinner.
And it feels hard. Your to-do list gets longer. You don't maybe know what to do with your time if you're not working. You don't want to get out of bed in the morning. And your brain, in this moment, it starts working on your behalf as well.
And it says, “Oh, yeah, don't get out of bed today. You deserve to rest. The kids are exhausting right now. You didn't get a good night's sleep. You kept waking up. Work is exhausting right now. This is a super busy time at work. Oh, sleep is really important. Rest is really important. Everybody says so.”
Or maybe it justifies how busy things are right now. “This is a really challenging time at work. Lots of people are needing things from me, are waiting on me. I got to put in a little bit more effort now. I don't want anyone to kind of be disappointed in me. Yep, I'm just going to put in a little bit more time now.”
And it sounds super logical and justifiable, doesn't it? Your brain is working on your behalf helping to convince you that you should not follow through with the changes and the goals that you've set for yourself.
But here's the kicker, because this is likely what your brain offers you in this moment. And it's such a compelling thought. It's so compelling we're going to spend the rest of this episode talking about it because it’s in this instant and with so much ease, you're able to let go of your goals and your New Year's resolutions with a whole lot less guilt.
Here's the thought your brain likely offers to you in this moment. “I'll just get up early tomorrow. I’ll start working on that after this big project is done, after this busy season is done, after I'm done with this client. You know what? I'm just going to try again next week, start over again on Monday. Forget this ever happened.”
Putting it off means putting it aside.
It sounds compelling, doesn't it? And it sort of feels good, right? To let go of the commitment today and to defer it to another time later. To essentially quit, but promise yourself you're going to do better next time.
You're going to start again, then try again at another time, tomorrow, next month. That's when you're really going to start to get up early next month, right? That's when you're going to get into this rhythm of going to the gym three times a week. It's next month, right, when things are really going to get settled down at work and you'll be sure to start getting home on time and not logging on.
It feels good to defer. It sort of feels like a compromise on some level. Like, “I'm not really giving up on this goal, I'm just going to defer it to later.” Your brain is just trying to help you. It doesn't want people to be disappointed. It doesn't want the long to-do list that's causing stress and overwhelm. It doesn't want you to be an underperformer. And it doesn't want to put a bunch of energy into a new goal and making change.
Isn't that sweet of it? Deferring your goals when done in this sort of way, meaning it's not done with a lot of conscious strategic thinking. You're doing it from a place of comfort and emotional safety.
You're deferring because it feels good, not because it's the best thing, the most strategic thing, that's in alignment with your goals. That would be a, sort of deferring of your goals.
I mean, it's okay to reset goals, change goals, evaluate, decide to do something different, but not in this way. I just want to make sure we're clear on that. Because, for sure, goals can change. There could be lots of good reasons that feel really aligned with yourself and your future self and your goals and so forth.
But that's not what we're talking about here. When you defer your goals in the way we're talking about just out of comfort and because it's hard and because you don't want to do it and because motivation is waning and all that stuff, you're essentially quitting.
You're kind of quitting with a half commitment to start again tomorrow or the next month or the next year, for that matter. And I've had a few of my clients - this is kind of actually where this podcast originated from, this idea at least, - because I've had a few clients say to me recently, “I just want to start this year over again. I just want like a do over.”
But starting over again isn't the best way because it sort of says, “I’m going to stop putting effort in now because things aren't going my way, because I can't seem to pull it together, because I can't seem to do it today. I'm going to stop putting in effort.“
In other words, I'm going to quit, in hopes that there'll be some resurgence of energy or, like, things will stack in your favor later.
Here's the thing. I don't want you to wait ’til tomorrow to have the life that you want today, tomorrow, next month, next year. Next season is never a better time to put effort towards your goals, towards the life that you want as a working mom. You're just simply deferring the results of those goals: your happiness; looking in the mirror and being in your clothes and feeling amazing; the time with your kids; the connection with your spouse; that feeling of peace or rest or balance in your body. You're just deferring those results. The things that you want ’til tomorrow or the next day or the next season.
That's not what we're about here in this ambitious and balanced working mom community. It's not what we're working towards. We don't defer things we want. We move towards them today.
Failure is the secret sauce.
And another reason why deferring or sort of restarting your goals here in February or in the next season doesn't really serve you is one of the most crucial aspects of setting and attaining goals. This is the secret sauce to being someone that sets goals and achieve goals. That's able to follow through and stay committed, even when you don't want to, even when it gets hard, even when people are disappointed in you, even when you're leaving your to-do list a mile long. There's a secret to being able to do that. And if you have the mentality that you're just going to start over another time or you're going to kind of do a re-do, you're going to miss it.
The secret sauce: it's failure. And more accurately, it's learning from your failure. When you have the mentality that you’ll do better tomorrow or next month, what your brain is sort of doing is, it's glossing over all of the failure that's happened you don't want to face.
It doesn't feel good, right? To say that you haven't been able to get yourself up in the morning, or you haven't been able to leave work on time, or you haven't been able to make yourself or your family or your marriage a priority. It feels terrible.
And so when you say, I'll just do better tomorrow or the next day or the next season or whenever. You sort of gloss over everything that hasn't been working for you in the past week, days, months, or year. You sort of gloss over it and you don't learn from it.
Not taking the time to normalize and learn from your failure is a problem.
Really, the lesson, the takeaway that I want for you on this podcast is this. Are you ready? You are always going to fail. There was always going to be a time of trial and error. There was always going to be a time when you made a decision to get up early and you slept in instead. There was always going to be a time when something came up, right? It comes up last minute, your boss needs something from you. You just can't say no. There was always going to be a time when your kids woke up earlier than they usually do, and they don’t allow you to journal or take your time in the morning with your cup of coffee for yourself. There was just always going to be this time.
It was inevitable. Failing isn't a problem. Not taking the time to normalize and learn from your failure, that is a really big issue.
I want you to think about it this way. Let's say you have a New Year’s resolution, a, goal to work less this year, to get home on time, to not log back on after the kids go to sleep. So let's just say January did not go so well, right? It was busier than you expected. Harder than you expected to say no or to defer the deadlines or do whatever you need to do not to log back on. It was just more difficult than expected. And you weren't able to do it, like maybe ever, through the whole month of January. So, you have two choices now.
You could chalk all that up to being a busy season or being unexpected demands or just higher than usual emotions from your kids. Say, “You know, oh well, I'll do better in February. I'm hoping things will settle down by then. It'll be a little bit easier.” In this scenario, you just simply keep doing what you're doing in the way that you're doing it. Working long hours. Not prioritizing yourself or your family. Walking in the door after work feeling exhausted every day. Barely making it to bed at night and then waking up in the wee hours of the morning with your mind racing.
All that stays the same. And now it's February, and you haven’t really decided to do anything different because you sort of gave up in January with the idea that you were going to start again, but you didn't learn from anything you did in January because you gave up. You didn't learn why you couldn't stay offline and why you couldn't get home on time and why your mind is racing a million times a minute when you get home. So you have the same resolution not to work as many hours, but without any new plan or new knowledge.
So you've essentially just set yourself up for failure once again.
Now, your second option is to not chalk all that failure up to circumstances and being busy or a difficult time, but to say “Yes. Well, that didn't work out. I wonder why. Why wasn't I able to hold myself back from logging in at night? Who did I have a really hard time saying no to? What was I afraid of if I would say no? Why am I not feeling motivated in the most difficult moments to hold to this goal, this resolution? What do I want to do differently this next month to get closer to this goal of leaving work on time and not logging back on and deprioritizing work?”
Notice how different this scenario is. You didn't give up. You've kept going. You've acknowledged things haven't been working, but now you're evaluating and coming up with a new plan, because the whole plan doesn't seem to be working. So now you have new knowledge about what went wrong and a new plan for how to fix it.
In this scenario, there's still failure, but a little less. Instead of logging back on maybe four nights a week, maybe you start to log on only three, and you feel the small surge of energy and determination to get better. You've sort of reclaimed one night for yourself, and your brain says, “I wonder if we can reclaim another. Let's keep doing this. Let's keep learning about what we can do and what isn't working for us and shift it.”
When you give up or you defer your goals till later, what you're really doing is trying to mitigate failure. When you keep going, you start building a failure tolerance. You see failure as a way of life, a way of learning, and it's okay. You stop fearing it. Giving up has you deferring any of your successes, any of your results that you're looking for in your goals to another day.
And when you keep going, you start to taste the fruit of your labor. You start to experience, even in a little way, the results of what you want. Giving up has you succumbing to all of your emotions, leaving you feeling guilty, inadequate, ashamed, incapable, just bad, with sort of a half commitment to get better.
And when you keep going, you learn how to ride the emotional waves of motivation, of commitment, of failure and success.
The only thing that stands between you and your goal is an emotion.
I want to pause here in this last point in this episode to talk about emotion, because I say this a lot on the podcast, but it's super relevant to this topic right here. The only thing that ever stands between you and your goal, or just making steps towards your goal, is an emotion that you are unwilling to feel.
The challenges are not our circumstances. They are not our kids. It is not our bosses. It is not our jobs or our spouses, or our long to-do list, or there only being 24 hours in a day, right? The challenge is an emotional one.
Now, we've spent some time talking about failure here in this episode, and failure, it's an action. It's us not doing something that we said we were going to do or just not meeting our desired result. But we also experience failure as if it's an emotion.
We don't like people feeling disappointed in us. We feel like we're not a team player. We're not good enough. We're inadequate in some way. When people are disappointed or when we've perceived that we might let someone down. Notice all of these emotions in that.
The trade offs that are required in order for you to figure out how to fit a workout in several times a week and how to schedule time for yourself. These commitments in our schedule require a trade off. Trading off sleep time or time with our family, or time that we might otherwise spend checking one more thing off our list.
Oftentimes, that trade off that we have to make, it comes with guilt. It comes with feeling selfish or just tired. Tiredness is a physical state, but it’s also an emotional state.
And when we go about setting goals and making progress towards those goals - and rearranging our life in order to have the energy, the time, the money for those goals - a whole host of negative, or what I like to call icky feeling emotions come up.
Nobody likes the way these emotions feel. And so the most common thing for us to do is to avoid them, to avoid the commitment, to avoid the action or the new way of doing things that's going to get us closer to our goals, in order to not feel these experiences in our body, these emotions. The only thing that is ever getting in the way between you and your goals is an emotion that feels bad.
Now, a lot of people would say, “Oh, I just need to learn how to push through that emotion, to have more resiliency towards it, to just be okay with letting people be disappointed or feeling a little selfish or a little guilty,” but I find that pushing through that emotion, we can only do that for so long.
The better, more efficient way is to learn how to feel those emotions, to not tell yourself stories like, “Oh, I'm such a bad mom,” or “I should be better at time management,” or “I shouldn't even be in this position in the first place,” or “I shouldn’t be needing to lose all this weight,” or “I’m not a team player if I don't stay late and work with everyone else.” We like to tell ourselves these stories when there's big emotion.
We don't want to do any of that. The best thing to do is to simply learn how to feel and let our emotions be. Not label them, not personalize them, not tell yourself stories about why you're feeling them. It's just to feel the emotions and to let them go.
I like to tell my clients, and my potential clients, that this is sort of where the rubber hits the road. As your coach, I'm going to help you get crystal clear in exactly what your ambitious, balanced life looks like, where you want to take your career, where you want to go long term. We're going to get clear on actual priorities and commitments you need to let go of, mindsets or emotional spirals that you need to fix. We're going to get clear on all of that.
But just because you're clear, just because you know what you want and what you need to do to get it, doesn't mean that you're actually going to follow through. Most of us know how to do a lot of these things. For example, most of us know how to lose weight, right? It's just a combination of exercise and diet, and yet most of us want to lose a few pounds.
But it's not because we don't know what to do. It's just because there's a whole host of emotions that are getting in the way of us changing our habits and following through with the eating and exercising plan that we know we need to be doing in order to meet that goal. It's where the rubber hits the road, learning how to feel your emotions and let them go.
One of the things I give my clients - I call it a toolkit, - and it's for learning how to process your emotions and learning how to get your mind to the place where it needs to be. So it's not always focused on the negative and not always focused on the not enoughness or the lack.
And I give that to you both in kind of a written form and you get it digitally as well, but it comes in a workbook. I literally send it to you in the mail. And then we talk about these tools over the course of our six months of coaching together. These tools tell you exactly what you need to be doing in this moment. When you're struggling to put down your phone, when you find your mind wandering and you want to be present, when you realize your brain is focusing on all the things that you haven't done and you're having a hard time letting it go. When you've committed to going to a yoga class today, but you really don’t want to and you have to find the motivation.
These are the key moments. These are the moments where you're going to decide to follow through or not. It's where the rubber hits the road. It's when you actually choose to do the thing or you don't.
In coaching, I help you implement tools that are necessary to help you feel the big feelings that come up in. That moment and shift your mindset in the moment. So you follow through. You become, a follow through-er.
Don't give up on your 2024 New Year's resolutions or goals.
As I like to say, working moms. Don't give up on your 2024 New Year's resolutions or goals. Even if you feel like you've taken no steps toward your goals, I want you to still think about it as if you are making progress. You are on the path toward those goals.
Even if you feel like it would be easier to start over again or do a do-over, don’t. Tell your brain it was all part of the process. Sit down, evaluate what's worked for you, what hasn't worked, and come up with a new plan for how to make progress towards your goals.
Remember, failure was always inevitable. It was an inevitable part of this process. Remember that learning from your mistakes and your failures is actually the most important thing you can do.
So you come up with a better plan. And remember that big emotions are always going to come up as you learn how to prioritize your new goals. Rather than run away from them or feel paralyzed by them or carry them around like they're a heavy weight on your shoulders, do the thing you're meant to do with your feelings and feel them so you can let them go.
You've got this working mom.
And as always, if you want to learn more about this toolkit that I spoke of here - If you want that workbook and you want to start implementing new habits, learning how to follow through with your commitments to yourself, get out of the stuckness or that negative emotional spiral that you've been in - that’s my area of expertise as a working mom coach, so I encourage you to schedule your free call with me.
This is a chance for us to discuss your 2024 goals and beyond and talk about how we will meet them together in coaching. I have a very specific plan I will offer to you and we'll talk all about that on that call.
I'm here for you. You can get more information about coaching with me and schedule that call at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com until next week. Let's get to it.
Do you want to take your commitment to yourself a step further?
Schedule a free breakthrough call today!
Hey, before you go, I want to take a moment and tell you about an opportunity to speak with me directly. If you've been listening to this podcast and still feel like you need help balancing a fulfilling career with motherhood, then I encourage you to schedule a free breakthrough call.
On this call, we will get crystal clear on exactly what it is you want out of your career and how you want to balance that with motherhood. And then we'll craft next steps for you to start moving toward a more calm and fulfilling working mom life.
Head over to www.rebeccaolsencoaching.com/book to apply for this free call. ‘Til next week. Working moms, let's get to it.
