Click Play To Listen

Welcome back to another episode of the Mom-entum podcast.  The show dedicated to inspiring, uplifting, and empowering women on their journey through motherhood.  I’m your host, Tanya Valentine, and I thank you so much for being here.

 

Today I’m going to talk about a hot topic this time a year and that is GOALS.  What are your thoughts on goals?  Do you like them? Hate them? Are you indifferent?  If you are someone who hears the word goals and runs the other way (and I’m guessing you are not this person if you happened to be listen to a podcast episode with the title “Goals” you must have somewhat of an interest) however if I’m wrong and you hate the idea of goals then it is my “goal” for this podcast episode to sell you on them?  And why do I want to do this?  Because I believe in the power of goals so much.  I believe in the power of a goal to take you out of a bout of depression.  I believe in the power of a goal to give us purpose in life.  I believe in the power of a goal to breathe life back into us.  Goals give us direction, they are the destination.  If you don’t know where you are going then you are lost.  Having no goals is the equivalent of hopping in your car and driving around aimlessly.  But we wouldn’t do that would we? No we are moms, we don’t have time to just hop in the car for a joy ride.  We always need to know where we are going.  So why don’t we do this in life?  Well, some people don’t set goals because maybe they have in the past and they believe it’s a complete waste of time because they never follow through, or maybe they do follow through but inevitably they break the consistency, the momentum wears off and they fall back into old habits.  Some don’t make goals because they are afraid of or want to avoid the feeling of failure, so then what they end up doing is they just fail ahead of time.  Becuase they don’t even bother trying, they don’t even put themselves into the ring.  The odds of you winning the lottery are much higher if you actually play am I right?  If you don’t even play then you have completely eliminated any chances of winning at all.  And that’s essentially what you are doing when you don’t set goals.  You are just floating through life, in a constant state of reaction becuase you are just reacting to whatever life throws at you.

 

But there is another way.  Goals give you a vision, they give you something to work towards.  It’s that light at the end of the tunnel.  And with goals its not so much of getting to that end goal as it is about the person that you become in the process of working towards achieving that goal.

 

If you have been feeling lost, depressed, or confused, I can tell you with certainty that the cure is setting yourself a goal.  Goals have a funny way  of breathing the life back into you because they give you something else to focus on rather than focus on all of the negative influences of the world or battling all of the negative thoughts that we tend to fall victim to.  What you focus on you create more of.  You can choose your thoughts.  You can choose what to focus on, and I implore you to set a goal for the new year, something that you can focus on that will make you a better person, an improved version of yourself on your quest to attaining it.

 

Now I dont want to overwhelm you.  Overwhelm will stop you dead in your tracks.   Setting goals does not have to be overwhelming and in fact that is what I’m hoping to do in this episode is to take the overwhelm out of goal setting by giving you a step by step process that will guarantee your success.

 

And I just want to say, too, that the goal that you set doesn’t necessarily have to be a big goal, like losing 20 lbs or starting a business, no.  If goal setting is something that is brand new to you and you are just getting your feet wet here then I encourage you to start small.  For example, say maybe the big picture goal for you is that you want to improve your health and lose some weight.  Say you have this habit of eating late at night, like after the kids go to bed.  Maybe your goal is that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays you do not allow yourself to eat after 7 pm.  And eventually you can build from there, but to start, we are taking baby steps and the goal is no food after 7 pm on mondays wednesdays and fridays for a whole month. And every time you do this successfully you take a red sharpie and you mark an X on the days that you did not eat after 7pm.And then, once you have reached the end of the month and you look at your calendar and you see that you’ve accomplished your goal, you see all of those red X’s, now you have that amazing feeling of accomplishment, of success, of pride that you did what you said you were going to do.  And hey, you might even have lost a little bit of weight in the process. But ultimately that doesn’t matter, the point is getting better at doing what you say you are going to do.  Because once you get good at that, that’s the magic.  Imagine what your life would be like if you always did what you said you were going to do?  What would your body look like?  More importantly how would you FEEL? Would you feel light? Energetic? Proud? Accomplished? Confident?  This is all possible when we can work our follow through muscle by setting goals, developing a plan to get there, and then executing this plan.  And it doesn’t have to be hard or overwhelming and I’m gonna show you how.

 

So get out your paper and a pen and let’s get to work.

 

1.For right now I want you pause the podcast and set a timer for 5 minutes and write down everything that you want to accomplish this year.  Now if you aren’t in a place where you are able to write, maybe you are listening in your car, that’s fine you can always come back to this later but you can still just take some time to think about and brainstorm all of the things that you would like to accomplish in 2024. Ok, start now.

 

2.  Ok now that you have brainstormed all of the things that you want to do, I want you to review this list and pick out 1 thing, 1 thing that you can focus on for 30 days.  Feel free to pause the podcast if you need to and I want you to write down the one thing that you are going to focus on for 30 days.

 

3.  Ok now that you have constrained your focus to one thing, I want you to write it out in the SMART goal format.  If youre not familiar with the smart goal format its this.  The S stands for Specific, the M stands for Measurable, the A stands for Achievable, R stands for Relevant, and T stands for time bound.

 

So an example of this would be that I am going to lose 4 pounds in 30 days.  Is it specific? Yes, is it measurable? Yes I can measure my progress using a scale.  Is it achievable? Yes it isn’t some out there pie in the sky goal, its not like saying I want to be an olympic athlete in 30 days, that would not be ahcievable. But losing 4 lbs in 30 days, totally achievable.  Is it relevant? Relevant just means that it’s relevant to the direction you want your life to take?  And losing 4 pounds would lead me down the path of better health so yes it is relevant. And finally T, is it time bound, yes because I declared an end date, a deadline.  That by the end of 30 days I will have achieved this goal.  

 

To make this as simple as possible, you must know by when you want to achieve your goal, so you can even write down the exact date and time if you want to so maybe you say by February 1,2024 at 8am I wil achieved this goal?  And the other piece of this is how will you know how you have achieved this?  For this goal specifically it would be as simple as getting on the scale and looking at the number on the scale.  But with that first goal I mentioned of not eating after 7pm on Mondays wednesdays and fridays for 30 days, a way I could know that I accomplished that goal is by marking each day that was a success with a red X on the calendar, and then at the end of the month I know I’ve completed my goal when I see all of the red Xs on every Monday Wednesday and Friday.

 

4.  Ok, moving on. Now that you have your SMART goal written out. Now I want you to pause the podcast again, set the timer for 5 minutes, and write down everything that you need to do in order to accomplish this goal.  Everything that you can think of.  For example, maybe its meal planning.  Maybe you write down exactly what you are going to eat the night before.  Maybe you meal prep.  Maybe you create an exercise plan you decide exactly what days and hours of the day you will be working out.  Maybe you hire a coach or a trainor.  Maybe you find an accountability partner.  Write down everything you can think of that will help you achieve your goal in the time frame that you have given yourself.

 

5.  Alright so take a deep breath.  You’re doing great.  That took some mental strength and effort to do that and I want to congratulate you, you are almost at the finish line here.  So this next step I want you to do is take everything on that list and I want you to calendar it.  Go ahead and schedule it on the calendar.  Because once it goes on the calendar, it’s real.  The simple act of doing this is going to make a world of a difference for you.  Because once you see it’s scheduled on the calendar, it’s just a matter of you now following through.  The hardest part it done, it’s all of the planning everything that we are doing now.  So go ahead and schedule on a Sunday at 8 am you are going to sit down and write out what you will be eating for the week.  If this sounds too overwhelming then maybe just write down what you will eat on Monday.  Then schedule on your calendar time to prep your meals.  Decide ahead of time what days of the week you will be working out and at what time of the day, put this on the calendar.  I suggest using a digital calendar like google calendar for this.  It’s completely free and its going to save you a lot of time because there is a feature on there where you can put things that you are going to do more than once on repeat.  So what I mean by this is say you are going to meal prep once a week on Sundays.  You can put “meal prep” in a time block at 10 am on a Sunday and set it up to repeat weekly on Sundays.  You can even program it for certain days of the week.  So say you wanted to work out only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, you can set this up to repeat every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. 

 

6.  Ok so the next step is following through.  It’s executing what you have scheduled on your calendar.  It’s obeying your calendar, knowing that when you do this, that the end of 30 days you will have achieved your goal.  Remind yourself that you don’t have to feel like doing it.  The hardest part is just getting started.  And you have already done much of the heavy lifting by creating a plan and then scheduling it, the easiest part is just following the plan, think of it as you are just following the instructions to putting together a piece of furniture.  Well following your calendar is the instructions to achieving your goal.  Remind yourself why you are doing this and imagine how good it will feel at the end of 30 days when you have accomplished your goal, or at least when you know you put in the work to getting there, when you did everything that you said you were going to do.

 

7.  The last step is the best step!  Celebrate!  At the end of 30 days celebrate yourself for putting in the effort.  Even if you didn’t reach your goal, I want you to celebrate yourself for following through, for putting in the work.  At the end of the 30 days, as long as you put in the effort, you will be a changed person.  Evaluate what went well?  What worked?  What didn’t work?  What obstacles came up along the way?  What strategies could you put in place for next month to overcome each of those obstacles? And what goal do you want to work on next month?

 

Congratulations for getting to the end of this podcast episode, and if you did the work with me I applaud you!  Know that you get out what you put in.  And if you put in the effort, and implement what I’ve taught here I promise you that you are on your way to a better life, a better year, a better you!

 

And if goals scare you or maybe you feel resistance towards them let me encourage you to do something different.  You can’t get different results if you keep doing the same things you have always done.  I will repeat the quote that Albert Einstein that you will hear me often refer to because it’s one of my favorites
 

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result”

 

And if you feel resistance towards this, I want to leave you with this quote by Steven Pressfield he says,

 

“The more important a call to action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel about answering it. But to yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.”

 

And he talks about resistance as being this negative force that tells you to do something else, that prevents us from achieving our dreams.  He gives this analogy that if a dream is like a tree, then resistance is the shadow.  So with every dream, every goal you aspire to achieve, with it comes this resistance.  So it’s normal to have this resistance.  And what you need to to is work to overcome it, and when you do thats what sets your soul on fire, thats what helps you breakthrough, that’s when you uplevel.

 

Alright, that’s a wrap for today’s episode of the Mom-entum podcast! We’ve just navigated the incredible world of goal setting together.

 

Quick recap: We started by brainstorming everything we want to achieve this year, then picked one goal to focus on for 30 days. Next up, we made that goal SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. After that, we mapped out every step needed to reach our goal and scheduled them in our calendar. Finally, it’s all about execution and celebrating our efforts, no matter the outcome.

 

Now, here’s the fun part! If you’ve enjoyed this journey and are as pumped as I am about setting and smashing those goals, don’t forget to hit that ‘Subscribe’ button! Oh, and while you’re at it, why not drop a rating and leave a review? It’ll totally make my day and help spread the Mom-entum love to other awesome moms out there.

 

So, until our next episode, keep hustling towards those goals and remember, you’ve got this! I’ll catch you soon for more empowering conversations. Take care, and let’s keep the Mom-entum going!