546. Your Brain Is Lying to You About Goals

Anti-goal culture is on the rise in recent years, and I understand why. I get it. I really do. But I also know that not having a goal not only will result in you achieving less in your life, but it will result in pain and suffering. I promise you. Welcome to Better Than Happy. Today we’re diving in and talking about why your brain is lying to you about goals. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

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Happy New Year, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. We must talk about goals because it’s the beginning of the year, and I want to speak to that part of your brain that might be wondering, should I even have a goal? Should I set a goal? Because this is something I hear a lot. I’ve had goals in the past, people say to me, and when I don’t hit it, I get so frustrated and discouraged. I feel like I fall back even further than I was before I started. So why bother having a goal if so often I don’t hit it and then it sets me back?

Another thing I hear is, hey, Jody, shouldn’t I just love myself as I am and wherever I’m at in whatever, with my money, with my health, with my relationships, with my business, whatever it is. Shouldn’t I just embrace where I am? And if I embrace where I am, why would I need to move to a new place, in other words, progress and achieve goals? The other thing I hear really commonly is people say to me, so much of it is just out of my hands. Like, if I, let’s say, have a goal to sell a certain amount of something in my business, I can do a certain amount of things, but there’s a lot out of my control. I can’t control my customers and make them buy things. And so it seems like having a goal feels pointless because so much of what would result in goal achievement is actually not in my control.

Okay, so these can be valid things to consider, but if your brain is telling you any of those things, I want to talk to you today, and I want you to know that your brain has very good intentions, but is going to probably not create your best life from this place. Okay? So let’s dive in and take a look at why.

So, first, it’s important that we define a goal as a tool that we use. It’s a tool that helps you leverage the way your brain naturally works, because all of us have brains that have certain similarities in wiring. We also have a lot of differences, but there are certain core functions of the brain that are the same for every healthy human being on planet Earth. And I’m a big fan of helping you work with that brain of yours. And the more you understand it, the better you can leverage it to then create what you want to in your life. So having a goal allows you to work with your brain, and I’m going to tell you why in just a moment. But the reason I want to begin here and identify it as a tool is because any tool can be turned into a weapon if it’s misused.

I always use scissors as my favorite example. Scissors can be a very useful tool if I need to cut paper or cut hair or cut fabric or cut a bunch of things. But easily, if I misuse those scissors, I can turn them into a weapon, and I can damage property, I can hurt myself, I can hurt other people. It’s a tool that is dangerous if not used properly, right? And the same is true of a goal. A goal is a tool which you can actually use against yourself, and you can harm yourself, and you can set yourself backwards if you don’t use it properly. So we’re going to dive in today and make sure that if you’re going to set a goal for yourself or any number of goals, you’re not going to use them against yourself.

Okay, to begin with, I want to talk about why I’m a big fan of you having a goal. Now, I will say that the word goal is up for grabs. If you have a lot of negative association with that word, for whatever reason, it brings up stuff for you that doesn’t serve you, you can unwind it. You can come and get some coaching and we can take a look at that. But you also can just change the word if you have a different word you like better. But my point is I want you to have something that you want that you’re focused on. Okay? That is what I want you to think of when you think of a goal.

Something you want to achieve or become or have or create, something that you’re going to participate in the creation of, that you’re willing to participate in, that you can focus your mind on. Okay? The mind loves to focus on what we don’t want. And we all know the science behind this. What we focus on, we magnify and it tends to grow in our lives. So when you set a goal, especially if it’s a big goal and maybe a complicated goal, maybe a long-term goal even, then it gives your brain something to focus on that you want, and what we focus on, we tend to go towards and create and attract and find in the end.

Okay? And so this is the number one reason I want you to have a goal. I want you to have something useful to focus on. Now, let’s take a step back and talk about suffering and pain, because the only reason people tell me they don’t want a goal, like we listed up above, is because they don’t want to feel something negative. They don’t want to suffer and they don’t want to have what I’m calling pain. And by pain I mean discomfort, emotional discomfort. Sometimes there’s physical discomfort involved in a goal, depending on what type of goal you have. But I’m talking especially about the emotional discomfort, the frustration, the overwhelm, the maybe vulnerability. Maybe they don’t want to be disappointed, they don’t want to be embarrassed, they don’t want to be exposed in some way. And again, depending on what your goal is, the discomfort is going to change flavors, depending on, obviously, what it is.

So I want to just remind you that discomfort and what I’m going to call suffering is the price of being a human being. Okay? This kind of emotional discomfort, whether it’s overwhelm, challenge, hard work, exhaustion, or embarrassment, humiliation, stress, anxiety. At least some of that is required to be a human being alive in the world with a healthy functioning brain. That is just the way of it, my friend.

Let’s talk about physical discomfort for just a minute. I remember having this realization as I am constantly teaching this concept and constantly trying to better understand this concept for myself as well. One of my kids was pretty young at the time, and he stubbed his toe. He was running around outside and he kind of stubbed his toe and now it was bleeding, right? And he came in and he was telling me how he’d hurt his toe, and he was upset and crying and wanted me to do something about it. And so we got a bandaid and cleaned it up or whatever.

And I offered him some compassion, but then I remember having this thought like, yeah, you know, sometimes we stub our toes. It’s okay. Like, he was really upset that he’d been physically hurt. And I remember thinking, okay, this level of upset is not really necessary. Like, when you run around without shoes on, sometimes you stub your toe. And even if he had put shoes on, the nature of living in a human body is that sometimes we have physical pain. It doesn’t mean we don’t try to prevent it when we can. It doesn’t mean sometimes we don’t have excruciating levels of pain that we definitely want to try to do something about. But I’m just saying, there’s no escaping physical pain if you’re going to have a physical body, if you’re going to live in a physical body. At times you’re going to be hot or cold or sick or get injured.

I have to give you one other example. A couple of my kids, when we lived up in Northern California, in their elementary school, decided to pass this rule that kids couldn’t run on the playground during recess. They couldn’t run on the playground at all, actually. There was no running allowed on the school campus. They could only walk. And I was like, what are you talking about? This was elementary school. These were little kids. And they said, kids just keep falling down and getting hurt. And I was like, yeah, because they live in human bodies. But you know what kids need to do at recess? Run. They need to run around. That’s why we have recess, so they can get their energy out. And I was just so perplexed by this rule. But they were like, no, we don’t want kids getting hurt. So no more running. It was insane. Okay? That makes no sense to me at all. Of course, sometimes you’re going to fall down and get hurt. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run.

That is how I think about goals, okay? So it’s not to say that if you just really manage your mind, you’ll never feel any negative emotion. You can do some of that. You can do some mind management. We can take a look at how you’re thinking about certain things. But guess what? As we bring new things up, and as your goal brings stuff up, at least before the coaching, there’s going to be discomfort. And that’s okay. I still want you to go run on the playground. Okay? You can be cautious and try not to trip, but sometimes you might trip and fall and skin your knee and it’s okay. We’ll put a bandaid on it, we’ll clean it up. Your body knows how to heal itself. You’ll be fine.

And the nature of going after goal achievement is that not only will you be fine, but you will get stronger. The things that used to cause you to trip and fall down before won’t be so prevalent after a while, because you’ll get better at what you’re doing and you’ll get better at looking out for like, oh, I remember last time I tried that, it didn’t work, so we don’t do that again. You continue to get stronger and better, okay?

So just like physical pain is part of being a human being, mental and emotional pain is also part of being a human being. So even if you decided, I’m not going to set goals because I don’t want to be uncomfortable and I don’t want to be disappointed and I don’t want to be embarrassed, it doesn’t mean that you’re reducing the amount of mental and emotional pain in your life. You’re not reducing it. You’re simply going to redirect it to something else, something different, probably something less in your control, probably something less fun, like maybe it’s politics, maybe it’s what your spouse is doing that you don’t like, maybe it’s anything having to do with judging the world around you or judging yourself is what I tend to see people go to the most often. Judgment. Not very fun, not very useful.

So I have noticed in my lifetime anyway, that we’ve had this pendulum shift. I feel like when I was younger, there was maybe too much focus on goal achievement, on setting big goals and going after things and working hard and being productive and achieving things. And then we sort of saw this backlash of like, wait a second, all that working and doing and striving and achieving and trying to impress people or make money or whatever it is, is actually not fulfilling in the end. And especially if you spend your whole life trying to get somewhere, then by the time you get there, you’re actually kind of disappointed because you just wasted a lot of your life, right? Or you maybe were waiting to feel happy or fulfilled or spend time with family or whatever until you got somewhere. You get there and realize you kind of ruined your relationships by neglecting them and maybe ruined your own health, physical health, mental health, etc. and maybe that’s not the best way to live.

And so then this pendulum has shifted, like I said, in recent years back to, like, hey, let’s stop working so hard, striving to achieve so much. Let’s just embrace where we are and let’s just choose happiness. It turned into that. Rather than try to make a lot of money or rather than try to, whatever, fill in the blank, lose weight, whatever it is, why don’t you just choose happiness? What if you just could be happy right now? Let’s just do that. And I’m a fan of us doing that, but I feel like the pendulum has swung a little bit too far that opposite direction where people think that the option is either work really hard, set big goals, grow in this big way, or relax, take it easy, don’t try to achieve things and be happy.

And what I want to suggest is we need to bring it back just a little bit. We need the pendulum to land right in the middle of those two things, which is, yes, choose to be happy. Embrace yourself, love where you are right now. Don’t withhold whatever you want in your life. I’m not saying neglect your relationships or your health or put off feeling how you want to feel, or especially embracing and loving yourself until you achieve it. I want you to do all of that, and I want you to have goals that you’re pursuing. That is the ideal life. That is how you are wired to be as a human being. You know how we know this? Because I believe that’s how God operates. And I believe that’s the example Christ set for us. Right? Which is in my mind, the ultimate example of a human being.

So it’s love and compassion and joy and gratitude and self-acceptance and an understanding of your value and worth and going out and doing the work you’re meant to do in the world. Isn’t that what Christ did? Isn’t that what he demonstrated? Okay? So the question becomes, what is the work you’re meant to do in the world? And that’s where we’re all individual. We all have different interests, desires, passions, feel called to different things, and we all have slightly different things that are our purpose, right?

Okay, so one of the things I want you to keep in mind is that as a human being, you must be growing and progressing in order to feel optimal, we’ll just call it joy. Okay? I hate to use the word happy, that’s why this is better than happy, because happy sounds so trite and again, it sounds like to me sitting on the couch watching TV. But joy is different. Joy includes growth and progress. But to truly experience joy, you have to have at least periods of your life where you are growing and progressing. You have to be challenged, you have to be learning, you have to be creating and contributing. This is often what we call feeling fulfilled. Right?

Have you had times of your life where you’re like, this thing that I’m doing, this project, this job, this whatever, this part of being a mother, etc. I feel really fulfilled right now. And what happens? It never lasts forever because life changes, the world around you changes, and or especially you change, and things that used to be challenging and hard become easier, and then you need new levels of challenge in order to be fulfilled.

This is why I talked to so many clients, and this was me when I first found coaching, is I was like, hey, I love these kids. I’m so glad I get to be their mom. I wouldn’t want to change any of it for the world. But I’m so busy all the time cleaning up messes, making food, changing diapers, etc. and yet, I don’t know how to describe why I feel bored. It’s not the kind of bored where I’m sitting around going, what should I do today? It’s just the kind of bored where I could tell something was missing.

And that’s what it was, is that the, you know, somewhat mundane duties that are necessary to take care of little ones and keep a house running, were not challenging enough to my brain. I wasn’t growing, I wasn’t learning, I wasn’t being challenged mentally and emotionally. I was challenged in many other ways, right? But I wasn’t learning and creating in the way that I’m designed to, in the way that my brain wants to be fulfilled. And so that, again, is where goals come in. If I have a goal, and a goal should be something that you don’t already know how to do, that you’re not sure if you could do. It should feel outside of your reach. That’s what makes it a goal, not just something on your to-do list that you’re going to check off, right? So if I have something I don’t yet know how to do, and I maybe even have a little bit of doubt about whether or not I can do it, it’s going to require that I grow, that I be challenged, that I learn. And as I do that, I’m going to be creating and contributing, etc.

Okay? Now, the next thing I want you to think about is your subconscious brain. I wish I was more of an expert in the subconscious brain. Maybe I’ll have to go study it more, but I’ll tell you that the little bit I do know is really fascinating to me. I love thinking about that part of the brain that operates without our conscious direction. And I’m so fascinated by the fact that it is driving most of the time. I always say 80% of the time, I don’t know if that’s the right metric. Maybe it’s even more than that. But so much of what we do each day is subconscious, meaning we don’t think about it, okay?

So we have memorized patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that we do in a somewhat robotic way. Now, a lot of it we can pause and interrupt with our conscious brain and then override it, but we don’t need to, and most of the time we don’t want to because operating this way saves us a lot of energy. The subconscious brain uses a lot less energy than the conscious prefrontal cortex. Okay, here’s what I mean. When you did you learn the keyboard when you were younger? Did you learn where all the alphabet letters and keys are on a keyboard so that you can sit down and type? Or do you have to do the one finger peck? If you’re a one finger pecker, no judgment at all. Some people are actually really fast typers that way. But if you learned the keyboard, I want you to think about this. Some people did memorize the keyboard consciously where they can say the middle row is whatever it is, ASDFGHJKL.

I can only say that because I’m staring at my keyboard right now. But many of us, we probably learned it that way in the beginning, but we don’t remember that because we haven’t been consciously reciting the keyboard. But our fingers know where the letters are. This blows my mind all the time. I like to sit down and type something out, and in my mind I’m thinking the words, and my fingers are typing them. But if you asked me where on the keyboard is the M, I couldn’t tell you. My conscious brain doesn’t even know, but my subconscious brain does. And it will just go find the M as I think about the words I want to type.

Okay, so that’s the power of your subconscious brain. And it’s doing this all the time. It’s working in ways that we don’t even think about. It makes us breathe in and out, right? It does all the things that need to happen while we’re sleeping. And so here are three things the subconscious brain is doing. It’s doing all kinds of things, but these three I really want to highlight here as we think about goals, okay? It is creating more of what you believe you are worthy or entitled to have. It’s creating more of what it believes you’re entitled to or worthy of. And it’s trying to prevent you from getting what you think you’re not worthy of or not entitled to. It is trying to maintain your identity, in other words.

Who are you? It’s trying to drive you to be the person you believe yourself to be, and it’s trying to drive you not to be someone that you don’t believe you are. It is working very hard to maintain that. It’s also working to achieve what you believe you’re capable of achieving, and it’s trying to prevent you from achieving what you think you’re not capable of achieving. This is kind of bizarre, right? Because our conscious brain can come online and say, no, no, no, no. I’m worthy of these things. I’m entitled to these desires. These are righteous desires. These are good things to want and I’m worthy of them. But if your subconscious doesn’t believe that, you’re going to be fighting against your subconscious and it’s going to be working hard to prove what it believes to be currently true.

So now we enter a goal. What happens when you set a goal? Notice that when you hear people talk about goals, they always encourage you to do what? Write it down. Okay? And sometimes people will even encourage you to share it with others, to declare it out loud. And one of the things that this does is it tells your subconscious brain, hey, we’re changing what we think is true about who we are. And this is also why it’s scary to set a goal, right? If I say, okay, I’m going to take my business and I’m going to double it next year. And part of me already goes, I don’t know how I’m going to do that. I don’t know if I could do that. Maybe I’ve never done that before, or maybe I’ve been trying to do it before and I’ve failed at it in the past, or it’s been a long time since I’ve done it, whatever, okay? I don’t know if I’m worthy of that. I don’t know if I’m the kind of person who can do that. It brings up all my identity, right?

My subconscious desperately wants to prove my current identity to me. So when I say it out loud, especially if I tell people, hey, I’m going to double my business next year, when I write it down, even if I just write it down for myself, it’s sort of like making a declaration that I’m going to go ahead and believe I could be this person. Okay? And that is possible for me. And that I’m deserving of it and worthy of it and I could become it and I could achieve it. It’s a belief thing that we do when we set a goal.

Now, some of you will say, but what if I don’t believe I can do it? What if I have imposter syndrome? Or what about, like we talked about earlier, what if there are, like, doubling my business with that example, there are other so many other people involved. I can’t control whether or not people buy my program or etc. Okay? So I get it. That’s just your brain trying to protect you from negativity and doing something hard, right? But if you just decide that it’s possible that you could achieve it, or it’s possible that you could become the person that does that, or that even though there are factors outside of your control, you’re going to be the person that shows up and does everything that is within your control, because there is a lot within your control, and you’re going to give it your best effort, and then you’re going to iterate and learn and keep going until you figure out how to be that person. And that it’s possible you could become her. You don’t have to believe that you already are her. You just have to decide and declare as boldly as possible. So if nothing else, at least just write it down for yourself that you’re going to take a risk on believing that you could become her, that it’s possible.

Okay? Now here’s what happens. If you don’t let the doubt shut it down and you just keep a little door open of, yeah, I’m not her yet, but I could become her and it’s okay if I take baby steps to get there and it’s okay if it takes me time, then guess what your subconscious brain will go to work doing? Proving that is true, that you could become her, that you are becoming her, that you can take little steps in that direction, that you’re capable of change, that you’re capable of growth, that you’re capable of learning.

So there’s two things to simplify it that your subconscious brain will go to work looking for. If you’re just like, maybe I could hit this goal. It’s possible I could, right? Then number one, it’s going to look for proof that’s true. My favorite place to help it get started, and I do this with my conscious brain in order to then keep my subconscious brain in the right place, is to notice that there are other people who aren’t all that different from me who have done it.

So let’s say I want to permanently lose some weight. I might start looking around. And thanks to the world of social media or the internet or technology, it’s actually pretty easy to find. I could get online and I could say, let me find women who are about my same age, right? And seem to have maybe a similar body composition, etc. or health condition to me who did make a transformation, right? If I go find some like 20-year-old girl who lost weight, my brain’s going to go, yeah, guess what? You’re not 20.

But if I go find another 50-year-old woman who has, my brain’s like, hmm, if she could do it, I’m not all that different from her. Maybe I could do it too. Okay, so that’s what your brain will look for proof that it’s true. Now, especially if you keep on every day writing about your goal or reading over your goal or visualizing your goal or picturing your goal, it keeps telling the subconscious mind, no, no, no, this is what we’re looking for proof of. This is what we’re working on believing. This is the new story. And you’re directing your subconscious brain to keep looking for proof.

And the second thing your subconscious brain will do is to find ways to make it happen. And this part is my favorite part because what I’ve discovered in putting what I’m teaching you right here today into practice in my real life, and I’ll give you some more examples in a minute, is that my subconscious brain is so much more powerful than I ever realized. It feels like we need to understand in our conscious mind how we’re going to do it, right? That’s what we all say. Like, okay, but how? If I’m going to go after this thing, if I’m going to make more money, if I’m going to get this job or get this promotion, or I’m going to find a relationship that I’m looking for, I’m going to make friends, I’m going to grow my business, whatever it is. Then the next question we all want to know is, but how? How am I going to do it?

Notice we’re in the conscious mind trying to understand consciously how. Now there’s nothing wrong with trying to learn it, but many times the answer is that we don’t know. And rather than shut it down with we don’t know, I want my subconscious to keep working on it. So I tell it, I’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out. And that keeps it alert and looking for possibilities, looking for solutions, paying attention to people that might be able to help me get there, paying attention to books or podcasts or YouTube videos or teachers or coaches or mentors or guides who might help me get there, just coming up with my own creative ideas about things I might try. Things that will seem totally unrelated to your goal will become ideas for solutions about how to achieve it.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this in some way in your life. But if you haven’t, put it to the test because there’s nothing that makes me feel more alive, more connected in the way that I want to be to God, you might say, who’s the ultimate creator, than noticing ideas come to me or solutions come to me, either in the form of an idea or an idea that’s generated based on something else I heard, or again, just seeing somebody else go after something similar and taking components of what they’ve done. Okay? So again, I know this all sounds very theoretical, so let’s put it into a little bit of practicality here.

So a few years ago, I put on an event in Salt Lake City called Impact 2.0. I just for some reason got this idea that I wanted to do an event. I think I had recently been to a business conference that was great, but it was a bunch of bro speakers. Like, mostly men, and I like learning from men, so I don’t mind that. But it was a lot of like, masculine energy and not very many women and not very much feminine energy. And I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to do a business conference that has a lot of women and a lot of feminine energy that would appeal to just maybe a different audience, because there’s all these successful women in business and I wanted to invite my audience in because I knew all the people in my audience who were building businesses, the women especially, would benefit from it. And I wanted to put these other successful women on the stage and have them share their expertise and experience and knowledge.

And so I planned this event called Impact 2.0. We brought in speakers like Courtney Rich, who’s Cake by Courtney online and Kristen Andrus and Jess Toolson of Mixhers and Vanessa Quigley of Chatbooks and who else did we have? Emily and Amber from High Fit and a bunch of others. Okay? So really awesome, successful, amazing women in all different kinds of businesses. And when I had the idea to do this, I’m like, okay, so now I need a goal, okay? Because I could have just put this together and then said like, I don’t know, let’s just open it up and see how many people we can get to come. And that’s what I see a lot of people do. They’re afraid to set a goal, right? If I set a goal and say we’re going to get a thousand people there, what if I only get a couple hundred? Then I’m going to feel dumb and I’m going to feel like discouraged and whatever. Okay? That’s what people tell me. So they’re like, I’ll just, you know, let’s just open the doors and see how many people we get.

But I don’t operate that way because I know the power of my subconscious mind. If I just tell it, let’s just see how many we get, then it’s like, okay, and it stops working on it. It stops coming up with ideas and finding solutions. But I want to put it to work for me. Plus, I don’t want to get annoyed at, you know, something dumb that my neighbor did. My brain is looking for problems to solve. So I’m like, here’s a good problem. How are we going to get a thousand people to come to that event? So that was the goal I set. And I remember my team asking me, well, they needed to know how many people were going to come so they knew what size venue we needed. And as I reached out to all these amazing women, they were all curious too, like, how big is this going to be? And so I told them, a thousand people, we’re going to get a thousand people there.

And you guys, my brain, my conscious brain was like, how are we going to do that? That’s a lot, because this was not a free event. I don’t remember what we charged for it, but it was not inexpensive. Okay, so I was like, how are we going to get that many people? How are we going to sell that many seats? And what I tell myself is, I don’t know, but we will. We’ll figure it out. We’re totally going to get a thousand people there. Now this is the part that takes trying out, but I just want to give you permission today that you’re just allowed to believe that you’re going to, even though you have no idea how. And you have no proof. Like, I’d never done anything like this before, you guys. I had no reason to believe I would be able to get a thousand people there. I picked that number really literally out of thin air because I was like, that seems hard and I want to challenge myself and I want to grow and I want a goal to work on. And also that would be super cool if we had that many people there. And so we picked that number, a thousand people.

You know how many people we got there? Somewhere in the 900s, I want to say. We almost exactly hit it. And I can’t even tell you guys how many times that’s happened. And it’s not because it’s magical and I put it out to the universe and the universe delivered it. It’s because the subconscious brain goes to work on it and keeps an eye on it. And if I notice we’re nowhere near the thousand seats, then I start thinking bigger and thinking differently and coming up with ideas that are a thousand people in the room level ideas. And that’s what I want my brain to do is to focus on ideas that will get me the result I want, not just wait and see what happens.

Okay, so that is one purpose of the goal is to determine what level of ideas and creativity do I need to be accessing. Now, you don’t always have to go big on something, but when you do, it gets you better at thinking creatively, at thinking outside the box, at looking for solutions that you don’t have yet. Right? So if I hadn’t set that thousand-person goal, I might have been like, well, how are you going to get people there? Why don’t I, why don’t I text my friends and see if any of them want to come? Why don’t we send out an Evite and see if any of any of the people I know want to come hear these speakers? Or why don’t we go put up a flyer in the grocery store and see if anybody scans the QR code and choose to come to this thing. Why don’t we go knock on some doors?

Like, those are ideas that might get people there. They’re just ideas that are not going to get us anywhere near the thousand people probably that we want to get there. So I knew I’m going to have to think bigger. I’m going to have to think about something that will give me a higher return on investment. What is that thing going to be? I don’t know. But let’s start looking out for it. Let’s start learning. Let’s pay attention to other people who have put on thousand people events and find out how they did it. And let’s pay attention to ideas about how do you get a thousand people to buy a ticket to sit in a room to learn something like this?

Okay, so this is useful. This was a very useful goal for me because I wanted to become someone who knew how to put on an event like that. I wanted to know what do you even need to put on an event like that? How do you get the speakers there? How do you organize and coordinate the speakers and make sure the event goes smoothly? How do you sell the seats? How do you execute the event? There’s a lot of things that I learned by putting on that event. And setting a goal to get a thousand people there pushed me when it comes to marketing and sales, which is an area I wanted to grow in. Okay?

So this results in that change in identity that we want to have. I wanted to be someone who could fill a room of people at an event, who could sell seats and put on an amazing event that makes an amazing impact in people’s lives. It required that I gained new skills and new experiences and it required resourcefulness, right? Resourcefulness in terms of my effort, but resourcefulness in terms of my ideas as well. And that’s when we feel fulfilled, when we are working on things like that.

Now, what if I don’t hit the goal? What if I do everything I can think to do and I’m trying to implement all these things and I’m trying to look for big ideas and think bigger and talk to people, etc. and I’m just trying to believe it without any proof. And what if I still only got 50 people to show up? What is the answer, my friends? You guys know the right answer, but many of you don’t give yourself permission to believe it. Okay? The right answer is, who cares? We made that number up anyway. We made it up out of nowhere.

And here’s the truth. Thinking big like that, setting a big goal, pushing myself requires me, when I do it, to increase my patience. Is it useful to increase the amount of patience you have? I hope you’re saying, yes, obviously. That would be so useful in so many areas of life, right? Because the bigger the goal, the longer it’s going to take, and the more iterations it’s going to take before I’m going to get it right, which requires me then to be more patient.

I know I say this all the time, and I sound like an old person worrying about the world today, but I do just feel like everything is so immediate to us that we are losing patience. So I want you to set big goals so that you can still get Amazon Prime to deliver you something by the next day. You don’t have to be patient for that anymore, but you’re going to have to be patient around your goal because I still want you developing patience. That’s really useful, right? We also require, again, that we increase our tolerance for negative emotions.

We talked about this a little bit in the beginning, but this is something I learned from my teacher, Brooke Castillo, and it’s so true. The better you get at allowing and processing and feeling negative emotions and not making it mean that you’re wrong or something’s gone wrong in your life or you shouldn’t have tried that, the stronger you become and the more you’re able to then achieve in your life. We talked about gaining new skills, but that’s a part of it. And then finally, all of this allows you to achieve and contribute. Not every goal has to be a contribution goal. Maybe it’s just a personal achievement. But guess what? You are built in the image of God. You are made in the image of God, who’s the ultimate creator. You are a creator. You are like him or her, whatever you believe about God, them, right? Heavenly parents.

So again, I would just encourage you to try this out and just notice how good your subconscious brain is at helping you achieve things if you just choose to believe in them and set them and go for it and give it your all. Now, final caveat, and then I’ll let you go. Achieving the goal can never be a requirement for your own self-love and acceptance. You cannot hold it over your head like, once I achieve this thing, then I’ll think I’m good enough. Nope, that’s not going to work. You are doing this just because it’s how you’re wired, because you’re meant to create and grow and learn, but not because you need to create and grow and learn in order to be worthy or more lovable.

Which brings me to the second point. Once you achieve it, you aren’t any better of a person. You’re not more worthy, more valuable because you achieved a goal. You just have a different skill set now, and you’ve had an experience that expands you personally, and so that feels really good. But it doesn’t make you any more valuable, which is why if you don’t achieve it, it doesn’t make you any less valuable. It doesn’t make you less worthy. It doesn’t make you a bad person if you don’t, and it doesn’t make you an amazing person if you do. It’s just a much more fun way to live your life.

So please, whether you choose to do it in January or you think January is a random month and who cares, and you set goals whenever you want to, cool. I don’t care when you do it. But give yourself big, impossible, difficult, challenging things to work towards. This is what I get to help people do as a coach, and I love so much coaching people on their goals. And I love like the growth that people experience when we’re coaching on goals is exponential compared to the coaching we do around relationships and problems and whatever. And it’s okay to do coaching on that. I’m happy to coach you on that. But when you set a goal, you will grow exponentially, which will make everything else in your life easier.

All right, thanks for joining me today, everybody. Happy New Year. Have a beautiful rest of your week and I’ll see you next time. Bye.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.