259. How to Make Achieving Your Goals Easier

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy episode 259: How to Make Achieving Your Goals Easier.

Welcome to Better Than Happy. I’m your host, Jody Moore. I’m a mother to four children. I’m a huge Taylor Swift fan, and I’m a Master Certified Life Coach. I’m here to teach you how to manage your brain and manage your emotions so that you can create a life that’s even better than happy. Are you ready? Let’s go.

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Alright, we’re going to talk about how to make achieving your goals a little bit easier today. How does that sound? Do you have any goals that feel really hard, that feel overwhelming and feel even a little bit impossible? Do you have any of those kinds of goals where your brain’s like I’m probably never going to get there; it’s never going to happen? I hope you do, I hope you have goals like that, I do.

I try to always have at least one goal in my life that’s like that because I know that helps me continue growing. And I also know from experience that if I stop growing I start to feel really bad. I start to get depressed, and down, and discouraged, and that is not good for me. So I like growth, I like stretching myself. I like to have some kind of out there goals. I also have goals that are very realistic, kind of more what I would call like to do list things. And I’m okay with you having all kinds of goals, but I want you to just have at least one that stretches you a little bit.

And I want to give you some tips today to help you to make achieving that goal a little bit easier for yourself, five things we’re going to talk about.

Number one, start right now, your brain will tell you that this isn’t the best time, this is the wrong timing. You know why? Your brain thinks there’s going to be a ‘good time’ to start on that tough goal you have. And I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I want you and your brain to hear me say that there is no good time, there really isn’t, because life is going to continue happening. And even the things that you see right now that are obstacles to achieving your goals, even though some of those might resolve themselves, there will be new obstacles that you have no idea yet that exist.

So I hear this a lot from people. I hear, “Well, it’s just not the right timing for me, there’s too much going on. I need to wait until my kids get out of school for the summer.” And then in the summer I hear, “I need to wait until my kids go back to school in the fall.” And then in the fall I hear, “Well, I need to wait until after the holidays because the holidays are really busy and chaotic.” And then after the holidays I hear, “Well, it’s winter right now, I’m kind of down. There’s a lot of darkness, a lot of coldness in winter, we need to just get to spring.”

And then we start all over again in the spring. Now, when I say I hear that from people, I mean I also hear my own brain tell me some version of that. My kids are too little, I can’t do that. My kids are getting too old and they’re too busy, I can’t do that. I’m too young. I’m too old. So there’s never going to be a good time, you guys, I promise you. Do you know what the best time is? Right now, just get started right now, because I can’t think of a single time when I’ve had somebody say, “I wish I wouldn’t have started on my goal so soon, I wish I would have waited.”

I only hear them say, “I wish I would have started earlier. I wish I hadn’t put this off so long.” Okay, so I want you to try on the idea that there is no good time, financially, time wise or any other way in your life. The time to start on your goal is right now. And getting started is the hardest part; just taking that first step is this hardest scariest part of any goal, even the little goals. I think for me many times anyway, just getting started is the hardest part.

But the good news is that once you get started, momentum is a very real and very powerful thing. And momentum will carry you towards your goal if you can just get started. Let me give you an example, let’s use an example of a very small goal which is just I need to go clean out that closet. I don’t know about you but I have a lot of little things like that happening. I need to clean out that closet.

Right now I’m looking over to the left of my desk here in my office and there’s a few things that need to get returned that I ordered in the mail and they’ve been sitting there for probably two or three months. And every time I walk in I think I need to return those things. I need to get online, print the little return labels that you have to print and then you take them to the post office and return that stuff. And it’s not even really a hard task; it’s not a hard goal. But my brain thinks so, my brain’s like, not today, we’re too busy today. We’ve got important stuff we’ve got to do today.

And even on a Saturday when I don’t have a bunch of things scheduled, my brain says, “Oh, I just don’t feel like it today, today is my day off, I want to just relax, I don’t want to have to do that, this is not the right day.” As though there’s going to be a day that’s going to be right day, that’s going to be an easier day or more perfect day to do that thing, there’s not. You know what the best time is? Right now, okay.

So getting started is the hardest part, but I guarantee you, if I just start picking up packages and getting online and finding labels to print and doing the thing, then momentum will build. And before you know it somebody will try to interrupt me and say, “Hey, mom, I need your help with this thing.” And I’ll say, “Not now, I’m doing this task.” Do you notice this?

Getting back to cleaning out the closet, sorry, I digress, I went to another example. Cleaning out a closet is the same way, I just think, oh, it’s so overwhelming, I don’t even know where to begin and there’s so much stuff, and we have to get rid of it, and where is that going to go? And then we’re going to have to maybe take a trip to the dump or else it’s going to sit in the garage. Or I don’t even think Goodwill is open, they’re taking donations right now. So all of that drama, my brain’s like, it’s just not a good time. Not to mention, I’m kind of tired, that’s going to take a lot of energy.

But if I just dive in and get started, I just start picking a few things out and sorting them into piles, before you know it, momentum builds. And when somebody comes along and interrupts me and wants to pull me off that task I’m like, “No, no, no, I’m cleaning the closet.” And I don’t even want to stop until it’s done. It’s kind of amazing how our brains do this. So, start right now, don’t wait for the good time, because the good time is right now, that’s number one.

Number two; be willing to go through the grind, okay. Depending on the level of the goal or the task you’re trying to dive in and accomplish, there may be a period of time that I like to call the grind. I call it the grind because that makes it sound hard, and exhausting, and overwhelming. And it sounds like something that I would want to quit. I don’t like grinding. And so when I know that I have to be willing to go through this grind in order to get where I’m trying to go, but also I’m going to go through it, it’s not going to last forever, then I’m much more willing to keep going.

I want to tell you that your future self will thank you for being willing to go through the grind on some of your goals. So the example that came to my mind when I was thinking about this point is with the telemarketing job I had many years ago, probably 15 years ago. I was a telemarketer; I sold something over the phone. So customers would send in an inquiry about the product I was selling. They would fill something out online or in the mail, or what have you, and they would mail it in saying, “I want to learn more about this program.”

And I would then try to call that person and get a hold of them and talk to them about the program and try to sell them on the program. But as you can imagine, trying to get a hold of people on the phone is a huge challenge. And then once I did get a hold of someone, it was a very high end program I was selling, so it usually wasn’t just one phone call. It usually took multiple calls for them to decide to purchase.

So in the beginning of that job I was just making call, after call, after call, after call. And I don’t know how many calls a day. I want to say like 150 to 200 calls every single day, just trying to get a hold of somebody who wanted to talk to me more about this program. And maybe I would get a hold of a few people, maybe not, maybe I would get a hold of somebody who wanted to continue having more phone conversations, some days not.

But I had no, what we call, pipeline, meaning there was nobody that I’d been talking to maybe three or four or five times who was now ready to buy. There was just me trying to get a hold of people, I had no pipeline at all. It was a grind, I’ll be honest.

But I remember someone saying to me, “Listen, in the beginning it’s just smile and dial. You’re just dialing as much as you can, but it will catch up with you, because even though you maybe don’t get a hold of someone, you’re leaving messages. And even if one person that day hears your message and is interested in talking to you, now you’re moving forward. And eventually you do that every day consistently, you’re going to plant lots of seeds and you’re going to have then, what we call a pipeline of people interested in purchasing from you.”

So the beginning of your goal, which is the equivalent of just dialing, dialing, dialing, not even getting a hold of anyone is the grind part. It exists with all kinds of goals. It exists with building a business, or being a salesperson in a company like I was.

It exists when you’re trying to lose weight and you’re just eating healthy and your body’s kind of freaking out, and you’re not even losing any weight yet, and your hunger’s all over the place, because your hormones aren’t regulated. And you don’t even know what to eat because the things you used to eat don’t fit into your diet, that’s the grind.

It exists with trying to stop fighting with your spouse, because the first time he gets mad and you don’t get mad back, he gets even more mad because now he thinks you don’t even care about your marriage. And you don’t even know what to do instead of getting mad, and you feel awkward, and he’s upset and you think this maybe isn’t even working. That’s the grind.

It exists in any major goal, and I dare say with what’s going on in our country right now with all the awareness that people like myself who have been pretty ignorant too in the past about race, are starting to discover. We’re going to have to go through a grind.

We’ve created kind of a mess, if you look at our prison system, and you look at our education system, and you look at our – all other kinds of systems in our world. It seems like we’ve created some problems accidentally, with best of intentions in many cases anyway, not always, but in some cases, with best of intentions, we’ve created problems. And now we’re going to have to go through the grind to change all of that.

But if we’re willing to go through the grind, it’s not going to be a grind forever, and it can serve us very well on the other side of it. Be willing to, and when you’re in the thick of it just tell yourself, this is just the grind and it’s not going to last forever.

Alright, number three, be consistent. Be consistent. I know this sounds very cliché, you’ve heard this advice many times, I guarantee it. But I love to remind myself over and over again that it is the small easy things that I do consistently that actually create the biggest result for me in my life. I don’t always like that. I want it to be one big thing that I do that has big impact and that way we get to the goal really quickly. And even though it might be really hard or really painful, at least I get there and that seems like the best way. But in the end I find that that’s not usually the way.

I find that it’s all the things that are really easy to do. I love the saying, things that are easy to do are easy not to do. Doesn’t that just like hit home when you hear that? So it’s just doing those things every day.

Let’s take exercise as an example. In my head, because I used to run, I used to be a marathon runner, I will say, because I’ve run two full 26.2 mile marathons. Given that was in another life, like before I had children, but still, I’m a marathon runner, okay. So when I decide, hey, I’ve got a little time, I want to get a little exercise, I need to move my body, my head’s like, well, we should go on a seven mile jog. Except that going on a seven mile jog is going to be very hard for me. I’m not really in good enough shape to do that without quite a bit of strain.

I also know going on a seven mile jog is going to take longer than maybe what I have the time for. And while going on a seven mile jog would probably be pretty good for my body in some ways, maybe it would be hard on my joints and other parts of my body in other ways. But it seems like doing something that’s pretty intense cardio for a long period of time would be the best way to just get into shape.

And what I’m realizing is that because I’m probably not going to maintain seven mile jogs every day for the next however long I’m going to be alive, 50 years of my life. Maybe just going on a walk is the best thing that I could do. Nothing wrong with going on a seven mile jog if you want. But what’s probably going to create the result I want of a healthy body long term is just going for a walk every day. Imagine if I did that, instead of going for a seven mile jog once a week, what if I went for a walk every single day?

The studies now say that the consistent activity, even if it’s not as intense is probably more beneficial to us in the long run than the short burst of intense exercise that isn’t as consistent that we don’t keep up. Now, I know, there’s lots of research and science and I’m sure you could prove it either way. But I’m just using that as an example of doing consistent things that might seem small are what are going to ultimately get you the result.

Alright, number four, be patient. Man, this is a hard one. Why can’t it just go faster? Why can we just get to our goal right now? Why is it taking so long? Well, guess what, most things that are pretty extraordinary, take a while. My podcast in my mind is pretty successful, but I’ve been doing it for six years. Six years, every week, recording an episode, that’s how it is. And people always ask me, “How did you grow that podcast, how did you create such an amazing podcast?” And I say, “I just recorded one every week for six years, that’s all.”

Now, not hard for me to sit here and talk into a mic and upload it to iTunes, but it’s the consistency and the not being impatient with wanting to see results right away and to keep going, even when I didn’t see the results as quickly as I wanted, that’s what got me where I was trying to go.

Now, I want to share this quote that one of my amazing listeners and followers sent me yesterday, it’s by James Clear from Atomic Habits, and it really made me go, “What!”

Okay, this is what James Clear has to say, “The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty; perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy, even if the old one was still working.”

As Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well, wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.” Wow, that really hits home for me. I just get bored with doing the thing that I’m doing every day, even if it’s creating the result I want, my brain’s like, yeah, but I’m tired of this. So we have to be patient and going back to what I said in number three, be consistent with what works.

Okay, number five, final thing that I recommend you do if you want to make achieving your goals easier is to choose to have fun with the process. Again, I know this one sounds a little bit cliché, enjoy the journey.

But, honestly, I have goals I have achieved in my life that I’m really proud of. And I have goals that I’ve been trying to achieve for a long time, that I haven’t made the traction I want to. And when I stop and notice the difference, because I do that all the time, I’m constantly trying to assess why am I successful in this area, and why am I not successful in this area? And can I apply what worked for me in the one area to the other area? And one of the main things I’ve noticed is that the goals that I’ve been ‘successful’ on in my own mind are the things that I enjoy the process of.

When I enjoy learning about it, when I enjoy experimenting with it, when I view it like an experiment and I don’t have really high or really low emotions around it, then I get there because I’m willing to be consistent. I am willing to be patient. There’s not this like relief that I’m seeking when I’m going to get out of pain and suffering and finally achieve the goal and feel better. No, it’s enjoyable along the way.

So those of you that have been listening to me for a while, or are clients in my coaching program, Be Bold, know that I like to have fun. One of my favorite sayings is, “This is going to be fun.” And so that is honestly why I think I have a successful business today is because in the beginning when I was grinding, going through the grind, it was still a grind, but I chose to have fun along the way. You can have fun in the grind, do you know this?

So let’s go back to the telemarketing example that I gave you with the grind. So even though making 150 phone calls a day to answering machines or people who don’t want to talk to you, who are mad because they don’t remember enquiring and they think that you’re just an annoying telemarketer.

Doing that is a grind, but I also figured out how to make it fun, which is I would make a game out of it. I would have fun with it. I would try to get creative about how I would approach things. I would try to get imaginative about the people I was talking to. I would create little incentives for myself and reward myself along the way, when I’d made a certain number of calls. And really choose to be proud of myself for making the calls even though maybe I wasn’t getting the result that I wanted yet.

And I had fun experimenting with how to be more efficient and more effective. And I had fun learning more about sales and how to talk to people, and how to encourage them to purchase the program I was selling. So you can make it fun even when you’re in the grind.

Again, those of you people know that I’m trying to apply all this to losing weight right now. And in fact, if you want to lose some weight with me, I’m sharing my whole weight loss journey behind the scenes. I’m creating videos of what I’m eating and how I’m feeling. And when I’m really excited and motivated, and when I’m really down and discouraged, I’m sharing all of that in Be Bold. So come with me, that’s what we’re doing this summer, and I’ve added tons of extra calls to support all of you in your weight loss journey if you want to.

But what I think is the biggest difference for me this time around is I insisted on making sure that I have fun with the process. I just decided I’m not willing to do anything that isn’t fun. I’m willing to grind. I’m willing to be uncomfortable. I’m willing to have to watch my body adjust and watch my habits adjust and to have to think about things that I don’t normally think about, and to have to track things and all of that, I’m willing to do all of that.

But I also am insisting that I have fun with all of that along the way. And that I have fun with trying to achieve the goal even, I’m not trying to achieve the goal to feel better, I’m feeling better as I achieve the goal. Do you see what I’m saying? So you can just insist that you have fun or you don’t do it. Did you know that?

Now, remember that you’re also the creator of your fun, so you don’t insist that the thing causes you to have fun, or that the process is fun. You just choose to have fun and be the fun and create the fun along the way. And I promise you it will make achieving your goals so much easier, it will help you to be willing to be patient, to be willing to be consistent, to be willing to go through the grind. And if it’s going to be fun, why not start right now?

I want to give one other analogy that I want you to keep in mind when it comes to achieving, especially a really difficult goal.

Because I sometimes see people sabotage just as they’re starting to take off. Do you guys ever notice this in yourselves or in other people? It’s like just as they’re starting to get clients and their business is starting to take off, they’re thinking, maybe this isn’t going to work, this is scary. Do I quit my job and go all in, because it’s kind of overwhelming? And we sort of want to like quit for some reason, we want to self-sabotage, maybe it’s what we call an upper limit problem or something, I don’t know.

But this is the way I like to think about it, that really helps me. Is it’s sort of like we’re trying to get a freight train moving. So in the beginning it’s really hard because that train is heavy, and it has no momentum, it’s just parked on the track. So we’re doing a combination of shoveling coal into the engine and trying to push. Now, I know that you don’t push to get a train moving, I don’t think. But just stay with me, it’s not a perfect analogy.

So I want you to imagine that you’re trying to push the train and it’s really heavy, and you’re shoveling coal, but it’s not hot yet, the fire’s not hot, the train’s not moving. We’re working against inertia and momentum here, because we don’t have any momentum. So as we push and push, that’s the grind, but if we keep doing that, the train slowly starts moving, and then it becomes a little bit easier to push, but we’ve got to keep pushing and running along with that train.

And we’ve got to keep shoveling coal because that train will start first very slowly. And then eventually it’s going to start to take off. And then this is actually kind of a scary point too, because the question is, wait a second, am I going to now jump on that train and go with it? Because that’s going to take me to an entirely different spot, and what if the train stops again, and what if this is not a train that I even like?

And what if I wish I was back where I started in the first place, because the brain doesn’t really like change and unknown, and it wants to doubt that this is going to work and this is going to keep going. But if you’re willing to just jump on that train the train is now moving, and it’s so much easier because you don’t have to push, you just have to keep the coal, keep those fires burning. And that train now has momentum. And so actually even stopping the train becomes harder than keeping it going at some point.

This is how I found goals to be, this is what I discovered in my telemarketing job, is eventually I would come back from lunch to a bunch of voicemails from potential sales, potential people who wanted to buy from me saying, “I’m returning your call.” Or, “We talked last week and I want to talk some more, I have some more questions.” Or, “I think I’m ready to buy.” And so eventually me going on vacation meant I had a whole bunch of people waiting around for me, because I made call, after call, after call, after call in the beginning.

This is true with my business now; this is true when you go to lose weight. This is true with probably any major goal you want to accomplish. So in the beginning be willing for it to be hard, but eventually that train is going to take off and you better be ready for it, because then you’re going to have a decision to make which is, are we going to stay on this train or not? Make that decision right now is what I recommend.

Alright you guys, go set some big goals and have fun achieving them. And if you want my help of course, you know that’s what I do in Be Bold. So go to JodyMoore.com/membership to check it out. Alright, have a good day. Bye bye.

Who is your life coach? If you don’t have one I would be so honored to be your coach. I created a virtual coaching program called Be Bold that I want to invite you to join me in. We can address challenges, we can work on goals, and we can do it in so many different ways.

We have group coaching, individual private coaching, and online chats along with hundreds of hours of courses and content that I’ve created just for you. When you’re ready to really take what you’re learning on the podcast to the 10x level, then come check out Be Bold at JodyMoore.com/membership.