(#309): Why You're Not Achieving Your Goals

... And how to finally reach them.

Y'all know i wasn't about to leave you high and dry!

Goals can be super powerful because not only do they provide direction... they can also give you clarity and focus to really thrive in life.

But I notice a few trends when clients come to me looking to make consistent progress, attempt to follow through, or try to reach their specific objectives. Even in spite of their best efforts.  All too often, there's something deeper that is holding them back from achieving the goals they're passionate about.

In my experience - both personal and professional - there are a few consistent (and brutally honest) reasons you are not achieving your goals.  Listen in to identify them, and more importantly, overcome them to achieve the goals you've been working towards. Whatever your goal, use these skills to attain it!

Transcript

01:32 Coach Shaun: One of the questions I get asked the most by friends and family, clients and potential clients, even other professionals in the industry is: how do I do it? How do I have time to do the workouts? To do the work, to do the podcast out, to see the clients, to prioritize all of this stuff throughout my day, how do I do it? And how do I achieve the goals that I set out to achieve? What is so special about me? I'm so lucky or whatever they say. But that's not really true, right? And you can't believe that everyone who is successful is just lucky, because that's not how life works.  Wow that person is lucky because they achieved X, or that person is really lucky because they achieved Y; that doesn't really make any sense. So when you're thinking about achieving your own goals, I think one of the biggest factors is really deciding how much of a priority that goal is, and then evaluating yourself based on if you’ve taken action and if that action matches your passion for the goal.

What I mean by that is, let's say your goal is to run a 5K.  That's awesome. If you prioritize downtime over your 5K practice, workouts, mobility, or stability work, then chances are when the 5K comes and you toe the starting line, you're going to be asking yourself if you're really prepared.  The answer is probably going to be no, because if you're prioritizing other things like downtime, work, or social life over your 5K workouts and preparation, you're not going to be prepared; and that's totally fine. But then you have to re-evaluate and say, “Why was I unprepared? Was it because I realistically did all my workouts and I'm still not prepared?” Or was it because you didn't prioritize things that you should have, and so now you're in this position.  Re-evaluating and re-framing maybe even, what got you to that path? Is it that you are not consistent, dedicated, passionate, is that the 5K wasn't really the goal, but it was more of this pipe dream that you thought if you wrote it on the schedule, you would just practice for it. That's re-evaluation that I want you guys to start to notice patterns in when you're thinking about your goals.  

Let’s go ahead and take a step back and let's pause the podcast after I ask you this question and write down your answer.  What are your top 3 goals right now, whether that's career workout, diet, relationships, whatever it is. And what's your timeline? Is it by the end of this year, by the end of next year, by my birthday, by X.  Write down one one goal at a time, and then write down what that timeline is for the goal, then come back to the podcast.

04:19 Coach Shaun: Alright guys, so if you did pause or at least think about your goals, what I want you to do now is as we go through these next couple skills and skill sets that I'm going to tell you about, I want you to think about how each of them would impact your goal.  How each of them becomes a smaller step towards achieving that goal, and whether or not this goal was something that you've actively already started working towards or something in the back of your mind.  Each of these things I'm going to tell you in the podcast is going to help to get you there, and I want you to bridge that gap between what I'm saying and putting it into practice for you, because it's going to look different for everybody.  

The first one, you're probably going to roll your eyes because you've heard it before, but let me explain, the first one is prioritizing and scheduling your time accordingly. You're busy, I totally get that. And everyone's busy is different than everybody else's, but you're really busy on Mondays, someone else is really busy on Wednesdays. But what I want to challenge you is that busy doesn't necessarily mean productive.  Let’s go ahead and make a change here, let's reframe what you're busy with, to actually putting it into an amount of time that you are “busy”. What are you working on that's making you busy: a project at work, your kids, a social situation; what is it that's making you busy and how can you change “busy” to productive? The first step is going to be by scheduling time in your day to make that busy a specific amount of time: you are busy with this from 2-4 or whatever is going to work in your schedule, and we're going to start to create this really minute by minute, five minute by five minute, whatever it is schedule so that you can really look into your routine and find gaps.  Realistically, when it comes to prioritizing your goals, it really is putting those priorities in these gaps throughout your day, so that you can look back on your day or your week and be really, really proud of the progress that you've made because you filled these gaps in your schedule.

One example is to schedule your morning routine into your day: that means factoring in all the time it's going to take to really wake up, get out of bed, brush your teeth, comb your hair, all the things you do in the morning that are non-negotiables in your morning routine.  This is going to look different for everyone, and maybe it's practicing yoga, drinking coffee with your family, to create that morning routine is going to give you time for yourself to kind of ease into the day with the right momentum and energy instead of forcing yourself through 45 minutes of getting ready in 15 minutes. You're really scheduling at this time so that you can have maybe a little bit of solitude or a little bit more energy or whatever it is.  You’re going to do the same thing for, let's say, your meal prep or your workouts; with everyone's schedule, being as busy as it is, it can be really easy to skip out on things that you think you prioritize: you usually work out during your lunch break, but you're really busy at work, so you've been skipping that and just eating at your desk.

Well, that's not doing you any good either, because eating at your desk, you're distracted when you're eating (not a good eating practice), you're skipping your workout, and you're probably not really focused on work when you're doing it because you're multi-tasking. If you were to break those up into 15 minutes of walking on your lunch break, 15 minutes of really focusing on work, and then 30 minutes of work, I bet you would be more productive because it's just segmenting and really focusing on what you want to do, but that's finding those gaps in the schedule. W hile you're doing that, you want to schedule downtime too, so you don't burn out: you should schedule a time to go sit in a room by yourself and take deep breaths, schedule time for a walk so you can be outside in nature, all these kinds of things, and give yourself permission to enjoy life. You weren't put in this earth to just pay bills and die, so remember, you have to carve out time for yourself to do the things that bring you joy.  Yes, work is going to pay the bills; I’m not saying to put work on the back burner, but I am challenging you to not put yourself on the back burner and put work on the forefront. You have to know that you are replaceable at work, and they will not hesitate to replace you when you do die.  They’re going to have to find somebody else to be that cog in the machine, and that's just the way that it is.  Finding the gaps in your day that bring you joy and scheduling joy into those gaps is really where this prioritizing and scheduling comes from.

08:54 Coach Shaun: The next one is part of my morning routine, and I do prioritize this, but I want to segment this out because it has been really life-changing in a lot of different ways.  These are all kind of wrapped into one, but I would say journaling, meditating, and expressing gratitude to others and to myself. Journaling has shifted my mindset from this scarcity to abundant mindset, from clothed to open-minded, from really focusing on negatives to focusing on positives. And if you don't think that journaling is for you, I really want you to try it for a week.  Just be consistent with it for one week, and if you don't notice any changes and you honestly see no progress, okay, then maybe you schedule a call with me and we can talk about how to journal in a productive way.  But sitting down and being able to just dump everything from your mind on to paper and not have to think about it again for the rest of the day, or maybe ever can be so powerful. 

We live in a world where we're constantly stressed, and stress hormones are super activated all the time in our bodies, and that has such a negative impact on our health overall.  Taking the time to breathe and journal or meditate helps to de-stress and signals to your body that you're safe. You stop producing the stress hormone cortisol and that stops doing all of these funky things in your system, like creating brain fog, maybe distracting you from eating or creating more of your hunger hormone ghrelin, and all these things that cause this forward snowball of awful things in your system; can be traced back to being stressed all the time, this go, go, go kind of boss mentality.  Taking that step back, deep breath, even just 1 minute of breathing can really have to reset your system.  Expressing gratitude in the same light of taking that step back and taking your deep breath, expressing gratitude has been shown to change brain chemistry to focus on more positive things in your life.  You’re becoming more mindful, being more giving in your life, not just to others, but to yourself as well; and it does stand to be said that you can’t be grateful and angry or upset at the same time.  If you're focusing on being grateful, chances are you have more positive emotions linked to your feelings and your experience, then if you are angry or upset or frustrated, or whatever it is.

If something is bugging you and something stopped you from your prioritization or your scheduling, take that step back.  Take a deep breath, express gratitude to the universe or whatever you believe in for challenging you and making you take that step back.  For forcing you to relax a little bit, and then you'll see everything kind of changes in your life, everything changes in your schedule, everything changes in your mind and you start looking at things more positively.

11:55 Coach Shaun: Another practice that I've incorporated in my life that helped me achieve my goals is getting a daily dose of nature.  If you know me, you know that nature is not my thing, being inside away from bugs, away from weather, unless I'm on the beach somewhere, then it's pretty fun, as long as there is no wildlife around me.  We know that spending time directly in sunlight for 10-25 minutes every single day when you wake up is beneficial: it can help improve your immune function, mental clarity, your circadian response, and some of the other factors that contribute to a positive and happy lifestyle.  Spending time in nature can instantly restore energy and lower stress..  Going back to that cortisol or your stress hormone, where your body is kind of stuck in this really scared state, being in nature gives you that energy back, so it lowers your cortisol levels and really helps you focus a little bit more on the peaceful and natural side of things. There’s just something to be said about it, and if you really are taking in that nature experience instead of just standing outside in a concrete jungle.  If you take in and notice things like the leaves blowing in the wind or the ants carrying trash on the sidewalk, or you notice people who are walking by, all of those things help to bring you back to the moment instead of living in the past. It forces you to live in the here and now. And that's something that can be said for even when you are inside, if you can look outside and see the weather: is it sunny, raining, a wind blowing, are there clouds in the sky, is the sun shining bright that day? All of those things force you to take focus off of what's stressing you out and put you back in the moment.  You’re lowering your cortisol, but also you're really helping your body to maintain a more clear mental state, a clear immune response, and clear the stress response, just from doing these little tiny things.

The next one, and I would say this probably a surprises a lot of people, that it actually helps achieve your goals; it's keeping your space tidy.  I saw this meme on Instagram the other day, it asked “all of those people that just stuffed your papers in your backpack, where are you guys right now?”  Almost everybody in the comments was like, “Oh, I have really bad anxiety now." Well, yeah, there is something to be said about keeping your space clean and how that impacts your mind and your body.  Clutter can actually contribute to depression, there’s a study published in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, that found that women who describe their living spaces as cluttered or full of unfinished projects were actually more likely to be fatigued and depressed, than women who describe their homes as restful and restorative. Research has found that women with messy or cluttered homes had higher levels of cortisol, and clutter in the same way that it can increase cortisol, can also lead to decreased focus, confusion, and tension. 

So 1 study, I think this was by Princeton University, discovered that clutter can make it difficult to focus on a particular task. I find this to be so accurate, it's insane. A person’s visual cortex can be overwhelmed by objects not related to a particular task, making it harder to focus and complete efforts efficiently. If you are sitting at a cluttered desk chances are, you're not really focused on what you're doing because there are so many other visual things that are keeping your attention from focusing on one specific task, even if you don't necessarily notice it.  If you have a bunch of clutter on your desk or around you or your co-workers as even, that can actually be super detrimental to the efficiency that you are trying to achieve. In some ways, clutter and mess are really linked to negative emotions like confusion, retention and irritability for sure. An organized home, or at least one clean and tidy, tends to be more positive and promoting positive emotions such as home-ness and a sense of well-being; literally proven by researchers in the brain, clutter represents unfinished business and a lack of completeness, which can be really, really stressful to people.

16:38 Coach Shaun: And that fact is especially true when people have significant concerns pressing on their lives.  If you are one of those high anxiety, higher stress people, if your home is not clean or tidy, or if it's messy, then it can be really, really detrimental for you specifically.  Cleaning, can also have a number of positive effects on your mental health, help you gaining a sense of control over your environment and engaging your mind in a repetitive activity that can have a calming effect. For anyone who says, “I'm an anxious cleaner,” like Monica from Friends, that's totally real because you are gaining control over something in your life that seems overwhelming or out of control.  Putting yourself in a position of power there can be very beneficial, not only for your mind, but for your physical well-being as well. And it can improve your mood and provide a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, which is really, really beneficial as well, because that releases dopamine and serotonin into your system; which counteracts the cortisol effect and also helps you feel good and helps your body function better, so really, good things all around, cleaning is just good for you.  I know that you probably hated it when you're a little, your parents gave you chores, but they really are beneficial for you.  That’s something to re-incorporate if you have let that slide. 

And the last one is probably is the biggest reframe or a mindset shift that came from journaling for me, and it's something that I know my clients struggle with, and I try to help them with more than anything else, when we're on calls.  It is: looking for progress instead of perfection.  Even if you don't think you're a perfectionist, there's no way you can have escaped the mantra “practice makes perfect.” Everyones said it from when we were children, and we somehow still believe that if you practice enough, you're going to be good at something. I can promise you that's not necessarily true. If you practice that something, you're going to get better and eventually, if you practice enough with the right coaches, people by your side, support, and enough consistency; you could absolutely be perfect.  It stands to be said that you can do things and not be perfect, but still achieve progress, and that's where we really start to see people fall off.  So perfection sounds like “I have only one shot at this if I fail or lose or get rejected, it means I suck, I need to quit right away;” or “nothing is ever good enough;” or “it's either all or nothing, if I can't get everything I want right now, what's even the point.”  Where progress sounds a little bit more like, “Well, I'll take as many shots as I can and I learn from every attempt and I'll get stronger and better every single time;” or “done is better than perfect;” “failure is an event, not a characteristic;” or “real world feedback can help me learn and improve;” or even something small, like “I'm going to start small and simple, then iterate, evolve over time, and it will eventually be very different than how I started.” And accepting that, so really consistency over perfection, dedication over perfection, and progress over perfection.

You can literally scare yourself into stuckness by assuming that you have to make radical life changes in order to make progress. You do not have to do that. Nothing needs to be radical and nothing needs to be crazy, nothing needs to change immediately right now or be perfect right now for you to make progress towards your goal.  If I ask you to journal for a week and see if it works and you miss one day, that's okay, I'm not asking for perfection, if I ask for a week and I get two days, that is so much more progress than not journaling at all.  That’s how I want you to see all of your goals.  Just because you didn't eat on diet this week because you were traveling, you had friends, you were stressed, work was really busy, or you were prioritizing workouts instead; that's okay, because you're making progress, because you're looking back and evaluating your performance in a specific area of your life and saying, "Okay, well, that didn't go exactly this planned, what can I do next week to improve on that? How can I make progress?" And that's the mindset shift that I really want you guys to move forward with.

20:58 Coach Shaun: Progress not perfection is the only way to bridge the gap between your ability and your ambition.  I'm going to say that one more time. Progress, not perfection is the only way to bridge the gap between your ability and your ambition.  When you are learning a new skill, or even if you're trying to perfect a skill that you have right now, when you bridge the gap between ability and ambition, that's progress, you're making progress towards that goal. And realistically, people when they don't see progress are more prone to quit because they want to see outcome Y; instead of outcome B, they are looking for the end result, not for the journey.  Things like falling in love with the journey and not the destination; those are things that seem so simple and we hear them all the time, but realistically, that's progress, not perfection, put into a different phrase.  We're looking for falling in love with where we are right now while still accepting that we have somewhere else that we want to be and somewhere that we're aiming to go, and that's so powerful.

When you're looking at achieving your goals, all five of those skills and skill sets are things that you can incorporate piece by piece, one at a time, maybe some of them are going to work better for you than others, maybe you find that journaling isn't for you, but meditating is; or expressing gratitude is more powerful than journaling for you. I want you to take at least one of these tips from this podcast and start to incorporate it into your routine that makes the most sense for your lifestyle. Now, if journaling in the morning is not for you, that's totally fine, do you have 15 minutes at lunch that you can sit, listen to your favorite music or sit in silence, or at least be away from people so that you can do this in a fashion that is going to make you proud tomorrow. I don't need you to do this for me, I want you to do this for you. You have goals you want to achieve, and I'm not a part of them right now, but I would really love to be. And this podcast is absolutely meant to instill some ideas, maybe stir up some motivation, maybe help a little bit with the consistency side of things, because honestly, no one wants your goal more than you do. You just have to take the first step to get there or the second, the third, the fifth, all of these steps, they're not by yourself, but you have to be the one that starts the movement and the other people will support you along the way. They may not be the people you think would be there, but we're here for you, I love you and I support you and your goals, and I want you to be successful.  Whatever that means for you. Thanks for listening guys.

Coach Shaun: Thank you so much for tuning in today. It was such a pleasure having you on the Crash Course podcast, brought to you by the LiveUnbreakable brand. If you enjoyed today's podcast, please some love on iTunes as a review so that I can keep this good stuff coming at you. Or share this podcast with your friends to give them a crash course on something that you're passionate about.  If you're not following me on social media yet, I would be honored to have your follow so search for LiveUnbreakable on any major social media platform and enjoy the extra motivation and knowledge shared over there, and of course, reach out to me at LiveUnbreakable.com with any questions. Until next time, y’all.