Episode 35: Rethink Your Goal Setting

We all have goals and things we want to accomplish in our lives.  But sometimes our instincts and the traditional ways we've been taught to think about goals is actually getting in our way, and making accomplishing and achieving our goals harder.

In this episode of the podcast, I invite you to rethink your goals setting by

1.  Knowing that we don't become better when we achieve goals,

2. Understanding that achieving our goals won't make us happy,

3.  Accepting that our goals are hard and we want them to be,

4.  And, realizing that our thoughts about our goals are more important than the actions we take.

Instead of setting goals like you always have, consider looking at your goals in a completely different way so that accomplishing them becomes inevitable.  Anything you want is available to you...and that my friends is 100% awesome!

Your Goals Won't Make You Better

The point of goals is not worthiness. Goal setting is totally optional. You don’t have to set goals to be a good person or to be valuable or worthy in some way. You don’t have to achieve anything and not achieving your goals doesn’t make you bad or unworthy or broken.

Do you want to change? Awesome! But don’t do it from shame and pain. Do it because you want certain life experiences. Do it to see what’s possible for you. Do it to grow in knowledge and capacity and your ability to be uncomfortable…but never to grow in worthiness.

Every goal we have is arbitrary and optional and they don’t have anytnign to do with your worthiness as a human. You are already 100% worthy, whole and lovable as you are. Goals just allow you new opportunities to grow and manage your brain, which is what we came to do on earth.  We came how to learn to be the boss of our humanness and choose for ourselves over the objections of our lower, human brain. Setting and working towards goals allow you to do just that.

Your Goals Can't Make You Happy

We think, incorrectly, that our achievement and our accomplishment will allow us to feel better.

We think if we lose weight we can feel confident. Or we think if we can finish our book we can feel proud. Or we think if we can save $10,000 we will feel secure.

We think that if we get a result, then we can feel a certain way. This is completely backwards. How we feel is never created by our results.  How we feel is created by our thoughts.  You can feel any feeling you want by generating a thought for it.

This is powerful to know when it comes to goal setting because thinking something will allow you to feel something, which will fuel all the actions you need to take towards your goal. 

So, think of the goal you have for 2020.   Then ask yourself, "What would I be feeling if I had accomplished it already?"

Whatever you think you will feel, you will feel because you will be thinking a new thought. 

You can think that thought any time you want.  Right now–before you reach your goal.  And this will drive  your best action toward your goal. 

If you find yourself stuck or stopping or giving up on your goal its because you aren’t accessing the feeling you will have when you get it.  You are waiting to feel the feeling you want.   You just have to manage your own mind by thinking the thoughts that will produce the powerful  feelings you need to get to work.

You Want Your Goals to Be Hard

Instead of wanting your goals to be easy, embrace that they are hard.  And actually you want them to be hard.  And here's why:

Your lower brain doesn't want to do hard things. It will try to give you excuses to get you to give up on your goals.  But you don’t need your brain's buy-in.  You don’t need it to agree with your goals and support your goals and be all in on feeling pain and spending energy and getting less pleasure. Your brain can complain.  And you can still keep going.

Your brain is going to have really good reasons why you should stop this year, and why you should give up.  This is because the lower brain can’t act for itself. It has to talk us into stopping.  

And the more often you can not give in to this cajoling and fall for your brain's excuses, and just get to work anyway, the more you become the boss of your life. 

This is why we want it to be hard.  Doing that hard thing and not giving in to the needling of your brain, helps you become the person you want to be and that is so much more important than the goal itself. 

Goals are Achieved in the "T" Line, Not the "A" Line

When it comes to goals we often focus on our actions, when where we need to put our concentration is on our thoughts.

What do you think about your goal? What do you believe about your ability to achieve the result you want? If you really want to achieve your goal, nurturing your belief by managing your thoughts will make all the difference.

Because it's really hard to sustain effort and be uncomfortable when we don’t really believe in the goal.

The reason most of us don’t practice believing in our goals and dreams is because we're scared we won’t be able to achieve them. A good exercise is to go to the place in your mind where you have already achieved the goal, and ask yourself what you believe about yourself now that you didn’t believe before.  In other words, once the goal is accomplished, what do you believe about your ability to achieve it?  Whatever that belief is, that's the one you need to practice believing today.

The future is just T’s. And you get to believe whatever you want!

Mentioned in the podcast:

• Unqualified Success by Rachel Stewart
• The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle
• Bo Eason - Youtube video

To read or download a written transcript of the entire episode, simply click the link below.