Setting Better Goals
Ep. 133
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    I am in the thick of my goal setting workshop and I love it. It has gotten me into the groove of talking about goals, so let’s keep doing it. We talked last week about not dreaming big enough, not having big enough goals, and really not going after that vision that you want in your life.
    This week, I want to teach you how to really evaluate whether you’re setting the right type of goals. Are the goals you’re setting motivating and exciting you? Are they pushing you to grow? Are you having fun while you’re doing them? Or are they making you miserable? Are they requiring you to suffer through every action until you reach that final finish line? Let’s talk about whether you’re setting destination goals or journey goals and why it’s so important to know the difference in order to actually accomplish them.

Show Transcript
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. I am in the thick of my goal setting workshop and I love it. I, if you're in it, I hope you are getting a lot out of it. It's been super fun. Maybe I'll do another one. Mid-year who knows, but it has gotten me into the groove of talking about goals. So let's keep doing it. We talked last week about not dreaming, big enough, not having big enough goals, and really not going after that vision that you want in your life. And today I want to talk to you about destination goals versus journey goals, and I'll explain what that means. And this is all a way to try to get you to set better goals for yourself, to really understand why you have fallen into the trap. That so many of us fall on setting goals, not really executing sabotaging and procrastinating, and then never really getting there and stopping the whole cycle and not even setting any more goals after that.

So that's my goal with this. That's my goal with goals. Okay. So what does a destination goal? A destination goal is one that you have picked because you think that once you get to some destination, once you make it quote-unquote there, then you're going to be happy or all of your problems that are going to go away, or it's going to be perfect in some sense. Okay. You're thinking just about that end result. And I want you to think about it right now. Think about a goal that you've set before. And I want you to think about what you thought you would be like when you get to that end goal, right? What you imagined it would be if let's say, I don't know, you lost 20 pounds, or you made a hundred thousand dollars a year, or, you know, you worked out three days a week, whatever the goal was when you picked it, what were you imagining?

Because we have these ridiculous notions that all of a sudden our life is going to be incredible. If I'm thin, then all of a sudden I have no, my hair looks perfect. I smell good. I mean, just things that aren't even related, right? You think, I won't yell at my kids anymore when I'm thin and I'll just feel loved and secure all the time. Right? Just ridiculous things that we attach to it. But we just have this perfectionist idea of what happens. And I just need to get there. If I could just get there, everything would be so much better than what it is here. And this type of thinking, what it is rooted in is you think you need something else you need to get to somewhere in order to feel worthy. And that worthiness may come in different ways.

It may be like, then you can love yourself. Maybe you have learned hate yourself in the body that you're in. Or maybe you have a lot of shame about the amount of money you make, or you want to, whatever you want to be approved by your mother, or you want your spouse to love you more. Whatever the thing is, you are thinking, I will be good enough for my mother or my husband. I will be attractive enough to potential partners. You're trying to get to a place where you will feel better about yourself. And here's the thing you're a hundred percent worthy right now as is problems and all. Okay. I know that's hard for some of you to accept and I want you to just take my word for it. Even if you don't want to believe it, there is nothing that you need to do in order to be more lovable or more enough or more worthy or whatever the word is that you want to use.

You don't need to lose weight. You don't need to make more money. You don't need to, I don't know, be more social. You don't need to be funnier or smarter or more creative or anything. I want you to think about children. You would never look at a child and think or say, you know, if you were a little taller, you'd be more lovable. If you just maybe lost a couple pounds or if your hair wasn't that color, or if you just played in a more constructive way, then people could love you. But they can't like this. You know? I mean, it sounds ludicrous because every child, every human by way of being born is equally as worthy. And yet, along the way, because of the way that we are programmed in our society, we begin to attach self-worth to things like the standard of beauty or markers of success, or the amount of money we make.

And so we start internalizing that and thinking that somehow I would be better if I had that thing. Now, I'm not saying you can't want that thing. You can want to make a hundred thousand dollars. That's fine. The problem is when you attach yourself worth to that, where you think you need that in order to love yourself or be happy or whatever. And I just want you to understand that you don't. That if that's what you are doing, then you need to not be setting goals and you need to be working on loving yourself right now as is because here's the thing you will get there and you will get the thing and you will still not love yourself. Right? We've all had this experience. We have all thought once I get that degree, once I become a lawyer or a teacher or an engineer or whatever your career is, once I have this marker of success, then I will feel so secure and you know, powerful.
And I will have so much pride. And maybe you do for a little bit, but we all know what happens. We move the goalpost, right? You will bring your human mind with you to whatever destination you're going. So once you lose that weight at 20 pounds, then you're going to start stressing about the fact that your skin is saggy or that 20 pounds really wasn't enough and you need another 10 or that now you're, you know, not as toned as you should be or whatever. The next thing you're going to focus on. If you want to make a hundred thousand dollars and you do, then it's going to be like, well, that wasn't really enough. Cause I did end up paying so much in taxes and you know, maybe I need a little bit more, or what if this doesn't last? I got it this year, but maybe I can't rap replicate it next year.

What if it goes away? What if I lose it? I'm not good at money. It doesn't matter. It's on and on because we have human brains and we're going to have stress and anxiety and all these thoughts. And you know, the more we learn to manage our brains, the more we can learn to manage that. But it doesn't mean that it just ever goes away. And so what I want you to understand is you're setting yourself up for failure first. Even if you work up the motivation and the willpower to get to that destination, you're going to get to that destination. And you're going to realize, Oh, I'm still a human with a human brain, maybe in a slightly smaller body, maybe with a little bit more money. And I still have all the same problems. And then you're going to feel even more hopeless.

This is what happens all the time with a lot of people that try to hustle their way to self-love. They try to hustle, like if I could just get this business and then they get the business and they make the money and they're like, Oh, I still hate myself. And then they're more hopeless because they're like, that's what I thought I needed. That's what I thought was going to get me across this finish line where I could finally start loving myself. And I just want you to know that you will never hate yourself into a version of yourself that you love. Okay? You can never hate yourself enough where it's like, I'm going to just crack the whip. And I'm going to tell myself to get up and work out every day. And I'm going to keep training my brain to tell me how ugly I am every day and to talk about, about me every single day.

And then all of a sudden I'm gonna wake up one day and be like, Oh my God, I'm so great. I love myself so much. You know, it sounds ridiculous when you say it, but that's what a lot of us think is going to happen. And the bad news is that it won't, but it's also good news because like, you don't need that goal. You can start that today right now. And that's what you should be doing is cultivating self-love and understanding that you don't need to accomplish anything in order to feel worthy in order to feel loved in order to feel that you deserve rest and respect and everything else that everybody else is entitled to. Right? And so here's a test when you're setting a goal to see if you're doing this. If you are anticipating, hating the entire journey to get to that goal, to that destination, you're doing it.

Wrong goals are supposed to be fun. You're supposed to enjoy them. You're not going to be motivated. The reason so many of us aren't motivated is because you don't actually want that goal. You want the feeling you think you're going to have when you get there. You just want that thing because you think that it's going to make you love yourself. And so you're gonna kill yourself through this process. You're going to make yourself work out and do horrible workouts that your body hates. You're gonna make yourself get up every morning and work on a business that you don't actually want to work on just because you want to make more money. And then you're going to stop because nobody wants to live like that. So if you are bracing yourself and trying to figure out how do I muster up more willpower?

How do I create more motivation to constantly push myself to do something that I don't want to be doing? Because I think I should get there so I can feel better. I hate to break it to you, but you're doing it wrong. Now when I say goals should be fun. I'm not saying that they're not hard work and that there still, aren't going to be times where your brain doesn't want to do it. And there are still things where it's like, I have to sit in discomfort and be okay with being uncomfortable. That absolutely is going to happen. But if you hate all of it and if you can't enjoy any part of that process, then you've picked the wrong goal. And what I want you to start focusing on is picking journey goals, which I'm assuming that you can understand our guests where that's going in comparison to a destination goal, right?

The point of a goal is to push yourself to transform throughout that journey. Okay? You are trying to evolve yourself and grow yourself. That does not mean you need to grow in order to love yourself more. It means that when you've accepted that you are perfectly fine and that you can truly love yourself. And actually like, think that you're a pretty bad-ass person that you enjoy being around. You get to just blow your own mind. You get to see what else am I capable of? I just want to see what else I can do. Right? And you can pick a goal that helps you evolve into the highest version of yourself. And when you do that, the destination doesn't actually matter. That's what I talked about in the last couple of episodes. When I talk about an impossible goal and my impossible goal of having a million-dollar business, I am not under some delusion that once I get a million dollars or a billion-dollar business, that somehow my life will be perfect and I won't have any stress.

And all of a sudden I'm going to be sipping daiquiris on the beach all day and everything is going to be so glorious. Right. I actually understand that it will likely have a lot more stress. I will have employee problems. I will have customer problems. I will have marketing problems. I will have to learn a whole new host of skills. There's a ton that is going to be just a sucky there. And so the question becomes, why would you want it then? Right. And it really is truly just to see how I can evolve into the best version of myself. How can I be the best entrepreneur? How can I start leaning into a leadership role? People are born knowing leadership or born as leaders, right? So if I want to learn, how do I lead a team? How can I have difficult conversations and really be able to do it comfortably?

And from a place of compassion, all of these things are just things I'm interested in learning, and yeah. Making some money at school too. I'm not saying that I don't want the destination, but again, I don't actually care if I hit a million dollars. I really don't. I mean, I can hit it next year. That'd be awesome. I can hit in five years. That'd be great. I can not hit it. I can decide in five years that, Oh, my goals have now changed because I want to change in a different way. I want to evolve different parts of me. I also know that my personality is multifaceted. So this is a goal that I'm focusing on this year because the last couple of years I've been focused on this business. And I know for certain that in over the next couple of years, maybe 10 years, I will shift that focus because it's just the way that we are, right?

Once I've kind of pushed myself to evolve to the place that I'm not that I can't evolve more, but I maybe I'm happy. And I'm sure that I will want to push myself in another arena. Maybe it will be in health. Maybe it will be as a mother or a wife. Maybe it'll be, you know, my creativity, whatever that is. I will choose that then and decide, how do I push myself to evolve in that arena? And so when you start getting to a place where you're not picking something because you have to get there in order to, I don't know, feel accomplished or whatever, but you're peaking it because you want to see what you are capable of. And you're going to enjoy that journey, right? The reason the destination doesn't matter is because you're already having fun. You're already liking what you're learning or doing.

If you're picking a fitness goal and you're not picking something that you're going to enjoy doing, most days, you're not going to want to stick with it. If you can't find a way to enjoy that thing or really want to incorporate it into your life, there's not enough willpower to make you want to do it now again, I don't mean to say that it's not going to be hard and that there, aren't going to be times where your monkey mind is going to say, well, I'd rather sit and watch Netflix. Of course, that is going to happen. And we'll talk about that on another episode about how to deal with that type of procrastination. But if all you're using as well, power, if you're like, I literally hate bootcamps, but I'm signing up for a bootcamp every single day, because I think I need to lose 20 pounds.

You're not going to stick with it. If instead you decide, I actually love dancing. And so I'm just going to make a goal to dance for 30 minutes in my room, by myself every day, you're much more likely to stick to that. And the destination might be the same, but what you're doing is creating something where you don't have a rush to get to that destination where we get in trouble is when we've decided, I just have to push through and grit my teeth and bear it until I can get to this place where all of a sudden it's going to be rainbows and butterflies, as opposed to, it doesn't matter when I get there because I'm having fun and I'm growing and I'm learning, and this is the whole point of it. And if I get there, great, I'll probably just move the goalpost again, because we are constantly seeking to evolve and grow as humans.

So it's not like once I get there, then I'm done. It's like, now, what else can I do? And if I don't get there, that's fine too. I'll just keep evolving. I'll keep growing. I'll keep trying to figure out what the next thing is for me. So my wish for you all is to start looking at your goals and pick one where you are going to enjoy the journey. Stop picking destination goals. You are already worthy. You are a hundred percent lovable. Hope you see that. If you don't come find me and I will help you see it. I hope you start picking goals that allow you to have fun and explore and push yourself and stop using them to beat yourself up.

Take care of yourselves and I will see you on the next episode. Thank you so much for listening. I can't tell you how much it means to me. If you liked the podcast, please rate and review us on iTunes. It'll help other people find the show. If you want to connect or reach out, follow along on Instagram and Facebook at lessons from a quitter and on Twitter at Twitter podcasts, I would love to hear from you guys and I'll see you on the next episode.