Give up goal setting and find your WHY

Goal setting and new years resolutions are a waste of time. Does anyone even do them anymore? 
Let's talk about a better way to find success in 2022!

Finding a "WHY" that outweighs any excuse
Staying connected to how you want to feel to guide your choices
Using paradoxical intentions to overcome invisible obstacles

Happy New Year!!

As a part of my mission to bring a legacy of resilience through movement, each month you can join me for a hike on the bike trail followed by a free trauma informed vinyasa class back at the studio on Main Street. Go to savagegracecoaching.com to see the calendar and join my newsletter, Yoga Life on Main Street, to stay up to date on all the latest studio news, events and gossip. And now… on to this week’s episode.

It’s time to stop working out and start working IN. You found the Work IN podcast for fit-preneurs and their health conscious clients. This podcast is for resilient wellness professionals who want to expand their professional credibility, shake off stress and thrive in a burnout-proof career with conversations on the fitness industry, movement, nutrition, sleep, mindset, nervous system health, yoga, business and so much more.

I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a resilience coach and fit-preneur offering an authentic, actionable realistic approach to personal and professional balance for coaches in any format.

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Transcript

0:00  

Because energetically those those things underneath those spheres underneath, they, they prevent you from receiving what you should be receiving. They won't let you receive a compliment. They won't let you receive that promotion or that opportunity. They won't let you see those things, let alone receive them. And so you can think that hey, nothing is happening and it's because this is not right for me or you know, I shouldn't be doing this. But actually we are stopping ourselves from succeeding. 

You're listening to the work in. I'm your host Ericka Thomas, a certification collector and refugee from the body brand nation sharing 25 years of experience in the fitness industry to recruit and support the next generation of fitness professionals, coaches and wellness educators. Join me and raise the standard of professionalism in the industry by bringing trauma sensitive training to the health conscious and health curious alike. Let's get started with today's work IN. 

The work IN is brought to you today by elemental kinetics online resilience studio. Chronic stress and trauma lives in the body. Ready or not. That puts creative fitness professionals front and center as the first line of defense and support for Trauma Recovery. Yet few get the training they need to help them navigate their own stress curve let alone support for their clients. Elemental kinetics offers personalized coaching and mentorship for fit pros so they can expand their professional scope, burnout proof their business and change the face of fitness through trauma informed class design for any format. Check it out at elemental kinetics.com 

Welcome back everyone and we are wrapping up the first season of the work and podcast and I am so excited. We have been together for an entire year. Today as I do every year. I want to take a look at setting goals, new year's resolutions, all of those things that we do where we look back at the past year, and then we look forward to the next year and ask ourselves what is it that we want to do differently? And in today's podcast, I want to just put this out there, and choosing New Year's resolutions is a complete waste of time and I'm going to tell you why.

But before we do that, I just want to thank you all for sticking with me for the entire year. We have had some amazing guests, and we've got more amazing guests coming in 2022 as well as some amazing opportunities to get together in connection. You can expect some more information about a new masterclass that is coming to you later in February 2022 as well as the first ever well retreat in March this year. And so you're going to hear many more things about that coming later, but today is all about setting ourselves. up for success in whatever it is that we are choosing to do. So first I want to talk about why setting goals is a complete waste of time. This process of goal setting is a waste of our time.

Why is that? Well, goals are very specific and they're typically limited and that's on purpose. Right? It's on purpose. We are supposed to be setting specific things that we want to accomplish with some sort of end time in mind. But my question to you is what happens after you reach that goal? For example, let's say you are a young athlete, maybe you have dreams of going to the Olympics and getting a gold medal. That's amazing. That's a big dream. It's a big goal.

And you should pursue that goal. But what happens once you achieve that golden metal, smaller goals are the same way. What happens when you achieve that goal? What happens after that?

The other piece to this wasted time of goal setting and maybe specifically New Year's resolutions is that sometimes we don't dream big enough. We underestimate what it is that we're capable of doing.

That's not to say setting small process goals aren't helpful to get you to something bigger. Sometimes you have to have the big dream in order to understand what it is. What are the small things that are going to get you there? But I think a lot of times the way we go about doing this, it's all external checklist kind of work. In other words, you have to do this and then you have to do this and then you have to do this and then you're going to get this right you're going to be here you're going to have what it is that you ultimately desire in your life.

5:47  

And sometimes when we just go about that in a very strict way that kind of list setting way those goals don't really allow us to shift and change if something all of a sudden is not going our way. So let me let me go a little deeper here because what typical goal setting misses is that it leaves out the more important question: typical goal setting a new year's resolutions really talk about what it is that you want to be, do or have often it leaves out the why. Why do you want to be, do or have that thing? And the why is more important. The WHY has to outweigh every single excuse that your busy little brain can come up with and I guarantee you it's going to come up with very many excuses. It's going to constantly be trying to talk you out of whatever it is that you've decided that you want. So if you do not understand why you want to pursue that dream, then it's easy to fall prey to all of those excuses. Knowing why you want to be, do or have that thing. is going to make the result sustainable beyond the achievement and that is critical. If you want to keep whatever it is that you're going after that big Y is going to turn your intentions, your dreamy intentions into tangible changes in your life. But we need to go beyond those simple intentions. When you're setting big dreams, whether that's personal things, personal achievement, dreams, or business dreams. All our intentions can have unforeseen mental, physical and emotional consequences. And you've heard the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is absolutely true. We have all kinds of good intentions, but sometimes we can't first see what those intentions are going to trigger for ourselves or for the people around us. So we need to allow some wiggle room in that checklist of the things that need to happen. And for our WHY to kind of give you a pathway to some kind of positive visualization to bring those dreams to life for you. And the key here is that sometimes we have this image in our mind of what it is that we want to have happen and we think we know how to get there. But sometimes, the way is not clear. Like we don't know how we want this to happen. We just know we want this to happen. And sometimes we don't even know why we want it to happen. We just know what, right,so that's where we have to go deeper below those intentions so that we can see some other pathways forward. Sometimes the road is very wobbly, you know, it isn't necessarily a straight path to get from point A to point B. So we've got to be open to those things. So what we want to do here what we want to go do when we combine our intentions is to look at why it is we want to be do we have what it is that we want to be do or have connected to the intention and those things are will become clearer when you understand why you want what you want, and then create this visualization about it. Not just what it is, not just what it's going to look like for you in your life, but specifically the feelings that you are going to feel once you have accomplished that thing and this is really critical because that emotional connection is very energetic. And it's not enough to just picture what you want in the future. You have to feel how you are going to feel when you have that. And if you can't feel it, then you definitely don't know why you want it. Right because most of us never stopped to think about this. But it is really important. It's more important to understand what it is that you want to feel over the coming weeks, months and years and move towards things that will bring that feeling into your life than it is for you to think about what I want X number of dollars in my paycheck or I want X number of clients or I want to be in this size house or I want whatever it is that you want right there. There's very tangible things. But if you tie each and every one of those things to a specific feeling, then the opportunities for you to get those tangible things often come into your life and this is what we talk about. When we're talking about alignment, right? Being in true alignment with who you are your authentic self and, and really getting in touch with Hey, is this the right thing for me to be doing? Does this feel right to me? So going beyond those intentions really means tapping into the emotional component that it really gets underestimated when we're sitting down every year to look at what it is that we want to bring into our life. It really is the magic key to both success and failure in achieving whatever it is that you want to do over the next few months. Over the next few years, whatever your timeline looks like because that emotional component can boost you or it can block you.

12:37  

Guaranteed no matter what it is that you want to be, do or have or accomplished this year. Even if you're doing everything right as far as goal setting like the quote unquote right way to set goals. Your brain is going to dig up obstacles to your success. And what I mean by obstacles is not necessarily physical things that stand in your way that prevent you from doing something. There could be invisible reasons why what you want to feel or do or have won't work or can't be done and your memory and your brain and your emotional patterns and your past traumas. Those are the sources for those invisible obstacles. You may be aware that you have these emotional thoughts that kind of stand in your way of moving forward. But you may not be right. They might be completely subconscious subconscious beliefs that you've carried with you since you were a child.

13:50  

thoughts and beliefs that were maybe passed down from your family things that you didn't even realize were so deeply ingrained in you that will stand in the way of you stepping forward into new, new expansive growth areas for you. Whether that's in your work life and your business life and your personal life. And the way those show up is in a little bit of fear or when you're that you're busy brain starts to talk you out of doing things comes up with excuse after excuse why you shouldn't move into this area. And that little bit of fear that those thoughts will invoke. It can feel really very real. Like there's a very big real reason why you shouldn't or can't do this next thing.

14:43  

But even if it isn't big enough to stop you from moving forward, it can block your energy because  energetically those things underneath those fears underneath. They prevent you from receiving what you should be receiving. They won't let you receive a compliment. They won't let you receive that promotion or that opportunity. They won't let you see those things. Let alone receive them. And so you can think that hey, nothing is happening and it's because this is not right for me or you know, I shouldn't be doing this. But when actually we are stopping ourselves from succeeding. And I want to tell you right now that it's okay, it's okay. For you to notice that that is happening. Okay. It happens to everyone. And the reason is because all of those primitive brain thoughts and reactions that we have to new things, they are deeply ingrained and designed to keep you safe. New things are scary for the body, for the nervous system. And so it's easier for the brain and the body to say no, no, we're not going there. We're not doing that. But if we want to grow if we want to grow our business or grow our personal relationships or expand in our job, then we need to push into areas that we've never been before. That's what growth is all about. That's what resilience is all about. It's like pushing the boundary and then coming back and then pushing the boundary again and then coming back and so it's really important to have some, some tools in your toolkit to help you understand and break through some of those invisible barriers to be able to hop, skip and a jump over those invisible obstacles. And that's of course what this podcast is all about. It's about doing the work In, not necessarily the work out. Like anybody can follow a checklist and get things done and be task oriented. Right. This is about internal work.

And so I want to talk to you all today about something that I stumbled upon recently but that I have been practicing for probably my whole life accidentally and that's this idea of paradoxical intention. And this was this is a an idea that was proposed by Viktor Frankl who was a psychiatrist, neurologist, philosopher, author and also a Holocaust survivor, a Holocaust survivor. He lived through World War Two World War One World War Two he passed away in 1997. And he's the founder of this type of therapy called logotherapy, which is a school of psychotherapy that describes the search for a life meaning as a central human motivational force. I personally believe that is true. I think that people who have not explored what their purpose is really struggle and you may be able to see that in your own personal life and people you know, but he wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning. So that is, that is a book you can maybe look into a little bit more if you want to learn a little bit more about this idea of paradoxical intention. But basically what it is, is the ability to lean into fear or maybe not the ability that might be the wrong word, but the practice of leaning into things that cause you fear, so paradoxical intention is basically leaning into anything that triggers that fear response or anxiety. And the way that you do that is by doing the exact thing, or exposing yourself to the thing that you are afraid of happening until you no longer fear it. So the example that I was reading about was like, you know, if you're afraid of monsters under the bed, then if you are practicing paradoxical intention, then the action there is, well you're going to get down on your hands knees and crawl under the bed. You're going to climb under the bed where these monsters supposedly are. And you're going to look around there and you're going to make sure that there are no monsters there. You're basically proving yourself wrong with paradoxical intention. And there's another piece to this because yes, we are extinguishing fear and this is something that you will see repeated in other types of psychotherapy. And therapy in general is the idea of, kind of desensitizing ourselves to things that scare us, you know, maybe that's exposure therapy, or just retelling our story over and over. In order to kind of make it really boring for us. And those things similarly will help us extinguish the physiological response of fear in the body.

20:16  

But the piece that paradoxical intention ads I think, is first of all, you have agency taking action here to do something to extinguish that fear and then you are replacing an experience in the moment okay. So for example, with our with our monsters under the bed example, you you are not only seeing that there's no monsters under the bed, but now you can you have a choice to to replace the fear of what could possibly be under your bed with some other experience, hopefully better experience that, that yes, there's no monsters under the bed and you know, hey, it's kind of hilarious that I'm under the bed. Right? So now you've got a replacement thought or feeling when you're thinking about oh, what's under the bed? Hey, remember that time when I climb it under the bed and it was just ridiculous, right?

21:15  

So those are the two pieces that we need in order to fight back against fear and anxiety in any area of our life, even if it's something simple like taking steps forward in our business or in our relationships, and things like that. So you can use this paradoxical intention to kind of move yourself forward. And I would just tell you a story here about my own experience, because I literally have been unknowingly making choices like this for myself for most of my life, and it's probably the source of why every year I try to pick something new to learn or do just to kind of give myself a little bit of something to push off of a little friction, a little struggle. So I want to tell you about one instance in particular, and this was from many, many years ago early on in my taekwondo. Training. And in my taekwondo school, when you had graduated to yellow belt, so after about four, four to six months of training, you would be introduced to sparring and in our school, we would bar with full protective gear so chest protector, shin guards, armed guards, mouth guard helmets, the whole thing. And but it would be full full contact so you would actually kick other people, hopefully on their chest protector. And you would block and so you would have some sort of padding there to protect you. And I remember one of the very first sparring practices that I participated in, in my partner was another woman in class and I don't remember what it was I sure it was some, it might have just been a simple punch, but if you have never seen a taekwondo chest protector, they have big red colored dots on them and one side is red. One side is blue. You can, you know, flip them around, if you're sparring to different, you know, people so one person is red, one person is blue, whatever it is, and so that's how they score in taekwondo you make contact on those dots, right? And I just remember this one particular sparring session.

23:42  

I was tired, I wasn't paying attention. I turned around and I took this punch right in the solar plexus, and it was because I was moving forward and she was coming in with the punch. It was a solid solid hit, knocked the wind out of me a little bit. I think that was the first time in my whole entire life that I'd ever been hit like that. And here I am in a situation where we are all friends. We're friendly. This is not a scary situation. But I just felt that, you know, reverberate through my body and I remember going home after that practice. And taking a shower and I just remember almost being on the edge of tears and I was just so I could just feel this fear just sort of bubbling up under my skin. And I hated that feeling. I hated that feeling. And I knew it was going to come back and sure enough, it did. And we would spar at the end of every practice. And there's a theory behind that, right? You're never going to be at your peak. You're never going to be fully well rested. You should always spar when you know we're practicing being tired and still doing it anyway, so but I remember feeling afraid every time we would have to put on our gear and I hated that feeling. And so I knew that pretty much I had a couple choices, right? I could, I could quit. I didn't have to do taekwondo anymore. I could quit then and never have to worry about it again. Or I could suffer with the fear. Or I could put myself in a position where I felt more comfortable. And the only way to do that would be to spar more. And so I joined the sparring team, which was like four hours of training every week. One one day every week we would stay for four hours of training. And to me that was the equivalent of climbing under the bed to flush out the monsters. And it took a little bit of time, but I overcame that. That anxiety about being in that sparring situation to the point where I really enjoyed doing it.

25:51  

And I learned several universal truths in that process over that time.

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I want to share some of those with you today. The first one is that there is always going to be somebody bigger and stronger and more experienced than you. No matter what it is that you're doing. There's going to be somebody out there better. And so what you need to do is cultivate the things that you can cultivate in order to get better if we're sticking with my sparring story. Look, I'm not going to get any taller. I'm not going to get any heavier, hopefully better. In that way. I can only get faster. Like as far as my body size. I'm stuck in this body. So the only thing I can control I'm going to control and I chose to get faster. I improved my focus. I was locked in. And so for me that made me feel safer and I could boost my skills and my speed so that I could compete, so that I could be competitive. And everything we do there are things like that, right? There are things where you can really shine and you should.  So find those things and become your best expert in them. The second thing, the second lesson there is that the goal isn't necessarily to be the best at everything or the most perfect at everything. The goal is to get better than you were yesterday at your thing. So you can create this curiosity for yourself. About how you can be better than who you were yesterday. And that is all really anybody needs to do. We don't have to be the best in the world. And that is actually something that should be very freeing. I know it was very freeing for me. And the last lesson that I want to share with you about this particular time is that it's better to have to jump and reach for a target that you cannot hit than it is to aim low because even if you miss that high target you are still getting higher. than you would if you didn't and so I just remember in those classes in that training, we would always be asked to kick way above where it was physically possible. We'd always be asked to give way more than we ever thought was ever physically possible. Why? Because you don't know what it is that you can do until you try and we never want to fall victim to this idea of trying less.

28:42  

Because it doesn't it doesn't ever let us grow. Right.

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And this is so important. I think this is really really important because in our society today, everything has gotten so easy.

28:57  

Everything is so easy. We have the world's in every bit of information at our fingertips. We have everything we could ever want or need at our fingertips. We are well fed. We are over consumers of pretty much everything and we barely need to struggle for it at all. We really don't have much of a struggle for survival anymore and that lack of struggle isn't good for us.

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Just like a butterfly needs to struggle out of its cocoon, in order for it to be physically able to fly with its wings. We also need some friction in our life. We need some challenge, something to push off of in order to grow and to find some meaningful meaning to our life. We don't learn by staying in one place and simply consuming what the world gives us. So think about what it is that you want to feel differently this year. Take your time on it. Look at the things that scare you. What makes you a little bit nervous because those are the places where you're going to find the most reward if you start to step forward into them. If you're afraid to fail, look for opportunities that might let you fail. It's okay. The world doesn't end. If you're afraid to try something new look for new things. If you want to feel more free, look for ways to simplify your life that will help you be more free. Opposites always create balance in so many ways. And that's really the root of what paradoxical intention is all about. So I would encourage you to go

The way the world has been turned on its head in 2020 and 2021  maybe it’s time to flip it back with more effective ways to become better people, coaches and businesses in 2022.

Thanks for listening to the Work IN, Happy new year and I wish you all the best in 2022. If you like what you heard today and want to join a growing movement of fit pros and wellness providers who are bringing trauma informed movement to the masses go to elementalkinetics.com/masterclass and sign up for my newsletter and free upcoming masterclass for fit pros 3 skills your certification left out.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai