Entre-Talk: Goal Heaviness

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy Entre-Talk: Goal Heaviness.

This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.

Hey there, everybody. Welcome to an Entre-Talk episode for my entrepreneur friends. I want to talk to you today about goal heaviness. But before we do, I’ve had so many of you reach out to me over the last year saying, “When is your business coaching program going to be open again? I want to work with you. I want to get help with my business.” And good news, it is open now.

Doors are open and I did a webinar last week where I described exactly how that program will work. I’m so excited about it. I’m going to be helping you do the work, my coaches and I, right alongside you this year. We’ve totally changed everything up from how we did it last year. So if you want more details about that, head over to jodymoore.com/businessschool.

But in order for us to be able to work a little more closely with you, it means that we’ve had to limit how many people we can take in this program. We will not be able to take as many as we have taken in years past. So make sure you check it out soon, sooner than later because it will sell out. Check it out, jodymoore.com/businessschool.

Okay, so I want to talk to you about goal heaviness today. This comes up a lot when I coach people about their business goals. They’ll tell me their goal. And, by the way, I think that whatever goal you want to set is great.

You want to go from 100k to 300k? Great. You want to stay where you are revenue wise, but you want to work fewer hours? Great. You want to make some kind of a change in your business that just changes your role, for example, hiring other coaches and teachers so that you’re less involved in that or hiring somebody to do marketing and back end stuff so that you can just be more involved in the teaching and coaching? Great.

Whatever goal you want to set, this is not about the goal itself, okay? You have to check in with yourself and decide, do I get excited about that goal? Does it put me a little bit into the realm of like, that’s scary. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do that. But at the same time, I’m excited and it kind of makes me want to get out of bed in the morning and see what’s possible? Then we have the right goal.

But a lot of times people will tell me their goal and if it sounds like a reasonable goal that could create excitement, like I want for people. But then I say why? Tell me why? Why do you want to, let’s say, make $300,000 in your business, if that’s your goal?

And they will say things like, I just want to make my dad proud finally. I just know that he would be so proud of me if I did. And he’s always believed in me and supported me, but he’s also just not sure about what I’m doing. And I just want to make him proud.

I’m like, wow, that’s pretty heavy. If we have to make your dad proud, we’ve got some daddy issues here. We’ve got issues from your childhood that we’re putting on this goal. We’ve got another person’s opinion, which we can’t actually control in the end. This feels heavy. And I can tell by the way they say it, whether or not it’s heavy, right?

I don’t want you to have a heavy reason for your goal. Now I know that sometimes in the world of coaching we talk about having a compelling reason. If you have a compelling reason, you’re going to be more likely to work through the difficulties. But I think people interpret that as meaning you need a heavy reason. And I don’t think that heavy reasons are compelling. I think that heavy reasons are just heavy, okay?

So when you have a lot of heaviness on your goal, here’s the problem with it. Maybe you’ll achieve your goal and that will be great. But along the way, as you work to achieve your goal, odds are you’re going to have some things that don’t work. You’re going to have some setbacks, some failures, some disappointments. And if the reason we’re trying to achieve the goal is this big, heavy reason, then those setbacks and disappointments become very heavy as well.

And that heaviness will slow you down. It will frustrate you. It will defeat you. And from defeat and frustration and disappointment, heavy disappointment, we tend to do less. We tend to want to just take a nap if possible. Or if not, we just kind of trudge through our work. We don’t come up with our best creative ideas. We don’t have lots of bursts of energy from those emotions.

So, let me tell you about some other sort of heavy reasons I hear people say a lot. They’ll say things like, if it’s not making dad proud, or somebody in your family or in your past or in your life, they’ll say, I just want to prove to myself that I can do it.

Now, again, when you say that if you get excited and lit up and if something doesn’t work somewhere along the way or you’re not able to achieve it the first time, you’re going to be able to brush it off and go, “That’s fine. Let’s just go again,” then I’m fine with that. Keep that reason. But a lot of times when people say I want to prove to myself that I can do it, I say why do you need to prove something to yourself?

What are you trying to prove, really? What is that about? That you’re good enough? That you’re smart enough. You are worthy of doing whatever you’re doing? That you’re a good person? That makes me nervous. Let’s not do that. Let’s just decide right now that you are good enough, that you are smart enough, that you are worthy of what you’re doing. And you’re a mess. And that’s okay, too.

Let’s just decide to approve of and be proud of ourselves and love ourselves and believe that we can do it even before we’ve done it. That is so much more useful, my friends. Rather than have to prove it to yourself to then believe that you can do it, believe you can do it right now. That is the way you will most likely achieve it. That is your job, to work on approving of yourself right now without proving it externally.

So let’s not try to prove something to ourselves. Let’s just be like, “Listen, self, you’re amazing. And you have all kinds of weaknesses and struggles and shortcomings. And it’s okay, I love you. I got you. I’m proud of you. Thanks for trying. Thanks for doing your best today. Or thanks for showing up even though today wasn’t your best. Tomorrow’s going to be better. Let’s try again. What do you need?”

You see what I mean? This is a healthy relationship with yourself. Work on having a healthy relationship with yourself. Don’t use your goal to try to mend your relationship with yourself. Okay?

Another one I hear a lot is I need to show my kids. I want to set a good example for my daughter, or for my children in general. I want them to see that their mom or their dad could do it. I’m like, ooh, that is heavy to me. When it comes to my kids and their well-being and whether or not I’ve inspired them and motivated them to live their best lives, that’s a big deal. That’s important.

Now listen, when you achieve your goal, your kids might use that as inspiration and motivation to go get what they want or they might not. They might go, “I wish mom would have been home more not paying so much attention to her business.” We don’t know how your kids are going to take it, right? So it makes me a little nervous when we make it about making our kids’ lives better. That feels so heavy, right?

Even money itself, when it comes down to money. I want you to make money in your business. You can make money. And you can have a business that supports your family and supports an amazing lifestyle. I know that because I’ve done that. And I am not super smart or focused or special, okay?

But when you’re starting out, this is how I like to think about money. I do actually rely on my business. My business is how we support our family. My husband and I both work in this business now, okay? So we are dependent on it to pay our bills, put food on the table, and take care of us and our four children. But I do not put money pressure on my business that I’m not already confident it can handle.

In other words, I’m not going to go out and buy a second home or whatever other exotic luxury things I might choose to buy that my business right now can’t support. So, for me, when I was first starting out, my business could not be the place where we supported our family. So I didn’t put that kind of pressure on myself.

First of all, my husband was working full-time. And we didn’t even actually have the plan for him to come in the business in the beginning. We didn’t know we were going to do that. So anyway, he was working so we had his income.

And then I also took a little part-time job that I could do from home so that I had enough money coming in to make sure that my family was still covered. And I could put some money into the business because the business needed money in the beginning. It wasn’t generating money. It needed money. Not a lot of money, thanks to the world of online business, but it needed a little bit of money.

And so I took a part-time job because I didn’t want to put that kind of pressure on my business that I didn’t yet have up and running. I hadn’t figured out who my clients were, or how to find them, how to generate leads, how to convert leads into clients. As it grew and I figured that out and now I have a system that creates money, I rely on it for that money. But I don’t rely on it for the next level that I know it has the potential of, I’m going to wait till I get there.

Do you see what I’m saying? So if you have a lot of pressure on your goal, heaviness on your goal, pressure on your business I should say, it’s a tough place to operate fun. First of all, it’s tough to stay motivated. It’s tough to generate great ideas. And it’s devastating and stressful when there are failures, which there will be along the way.

So what is a better reason, then? It’s got to be a lighter reason. It can’t be such a heavy reason. How about wouldn’t it be cool if we did that? Wouldn’t it be fun if we did that?

I want to tell you a quick story to wrap up this episode. So, I used to work in corporate. I used to work for the University of Phoenix. It was a great experience for me. But in corporate, and I had lots of jobs with that organization and that organization has changed since then. But at the time when I worked there we would have goals, right?

For a while I was on the enrollment team, which is sort of the sales part of the company. We enrolled students, recruited students to the school. And we would have these goals that we needed to hit. And we would meet with our supervisors and we would talk about what are the goals that you’re aiming for? What have you done in the past? What do we think you might be capable of? What goal do you want to set? What are you going to strive for? What are you going to commit to this month?

And we would pick a number together, my manager and I, and we would work towards that goal. But it was kind of stressful. All of us on the team were counting on the other people to hit their goals in order for our team to hit their overall goal. And our company had goals they were trying to hit in the end that were combined of everybody’s goals, right?

And so if it looked like we weren’t going to hit our goal, we would get stressed. And we would, at least I did, I got discouraged, I got frustrated, I felt bad. It felt like I was letting everyone down. And then sometimes we would just move forward and try it again.

Now, sometimes we did hit our goals. A lot of times we did, but sometimes we didn’t. And it was just this heaviness around, I really want to hit this goal. I didn’t want to let my boss down. I didn’t want to let my team down. I didn’t want to let the company down. And so if I couldn’t hit it, it was like an emotional roller coaster. When I did hit it, it was awesome. I was really proud of myself. We gave people awards. I made more money. It was all great. The problem is then when we didn’t, that really was awful, right?

Okay, so contrast that with I started working, after that, for Brooke Castillo at The Life Coach School. And it was a similar position, I was recruiting students into her program, her coach training program. So that’s why I got that job because I had experience recruiting students. So even though it was a totally different format, a lot of things were different about it, still I knew how to talk to students about possibly going to school. I understood the fears and all of that.

Okay, so, same thing. We would set goals together about what we were trying to achieve and how many students we wanted in this class, and how do we think we’re going to do it? And we would set goals and it was great when I hit them. But then I remember this one time, I had little kids at home, I was probably pregnant too, I don’t know.

Anyway, I was emotional. I had this little desk in the corner of my bedroom, that’s where I worked because I didn’t have an office. And I remember getting on my Zoom call with Brooke to talk about how things were going and I just started crying. I just lost it. She was like, what is happening right now? Why are you crying? And I’m like, I’m nowhere near hitting the goal. And I don’t know what else to try. And I just feel so bad.

And she’s like, but why are we crying? I was like, “I feel terrible.” She was like, why do you feel terrible? I was like, I really want to hit this goal. And we set this goal together and I committed to it, and now I’m not going to get there. And she was like, oh, no, this is not necessary at all. The only reason we set a goal is just to give us a target to aim for. But if we don’t hit it, it’s fine.

I was like, are you sure? I was just kind of skeptical about it. And I remember her saying, I don’t even want you to hit that goal. We’re taking that goal off the table. Please don’t even do that. Where are you at? Where do you think you’re going to get to and I gave her a number and she was like, that’s all I want. Just do that.

I was like, really? We’re not going to have a talk about how I need to be more focused and this is kind of disappointing? No, she’s like, no, we don’t do that with goals around here. We don’t use goals against ourselves. We don’t create heaviness around them. She totally took it off the table. And she put her money where her mouth was, she genuinely still took care of me in whatever way.

And then from there, when I saw that she really meant it, it really doesn’t matter if we hit this goal or not, it’s cool to hit it. But it doesn’t matter if we don’t. I’m not mad, I’m not even disappointed. I’m just like, all right, let’s go again. Then my energy totally shifted. And we strategized new ideas and we talked about new things we could try. And eventually then we did set some big goals again.

But I remember her saying to me, what if we did this and we really kind of doubled everything? And we talked about how we might get there, but I was excited about it. And she’s like, but only because that would be cool. Because that would be fun. If we, a couple of women at home with our laptops, were able to impact the world in this way and achieve these goals, wouldn’t that be cool?

And it struck a chord in me. Some of you know to this day, my motto is, “This is going to be fun.” And, for me, I use that mostly with my goals because I didn’t use to set goals that way. I set goals thinking, “Okay, this is what I think I’m capable of. If I really try my best, this is what I could do. So I should do it. I should do my best. I should grow if I can. I should do more if I can.”

And that kind of heaviness was fine, but I could only incrementally grow. But when I shifted it to, “Now this is going to be fun,” then if we don’t hit it, it’s just not as fun. But it’s not the end of the world. Lighten up your goals, my friends. They don’t need to be so heavy. I promise you will be amazed at how much more you’re capable of if you do this.

All right, let me know how it goes. I want to hear it. I’ll see you next time, take care.

If you are a coach, healer or expert who is not yet making six figures, or not sure you’re set up properly to grow to seven figures and beyond. Go take my free training. It’s at jodysfree-training.com. I’ll see you there.