Today I am discussing how to set goals and make it fun !
In this episode I discuss how:
Show notes and the transcript can be found here: https://michellekevill.com/goals
Today I am discussing how to set goals and make it fun !
In this episode I discuss how:
Show notes and the transcript can be found here: https://michellekevill.com/goals
[00:00:00] Hello, everyone, I hope you are well, and if not, at least you are here. Oh my God, it's the new year. I cannot believe it. I am actually writing this just before Christmas, and I'm about to go on a very, very lovely break when you are receiving this. It'll be around mid-January and I'm getting back into the swing of things. Ok, so given it is the new year, I wanted to talk about goals. So look, I've never really been a fan of New Year's goals. To me, it seems like a really, really big fanfare. And, you know, it's never really bothered me like having to set a goal for New Year. And I know we're talking about this after New Year's, but I feel that's typically when everyone kind of gets started and then like coming up, you know, to around like March, April, like, we kind of, you know, those goals will all of a sudden they change and they're not as relevant anymore. I personally have never really understood as to why the start of the year we as a as a society like right. This is a goal that we're going to try achieve. And then again, we get a quarter way through it and then we end up forgetting about it or not achieving it. So at firstly, I wanted to talk about what I call Go, go, go, go. Fomo because at this time of year, everyone is asking you about your goals.
[00:01:42] I never really cared. Like, you can set a goal whenever you want, really. But I feel a lot of people are pressured to be at this point when you're hearing it, at least starting those new goals and creating something like really cool and life changing. And I feel as a society and I talk about this as well in the like fuck self-improvement episode. There is a big push again on improving and doing better and a new start. And for some reason, in this new start and in this new year, things will be completely different. But as we know, it all comes down to our thoughts and I feel in society it's a great way to sell a shit. Most goals that I see are for losing weight and going to the gym. As if that would again, make our problems disappear. Side note actually lost like almost 15 kilos one time I got a stack of comments. And guess what? Guess what, I still hated myself, because again, it's all down to your thoughts, I actually thought I needed to lose even more weight and would have been underweight because at the end of the day, it's not changing the circumstance, it's changing how you think. So if you're upset that you don't have a goal or a plan, ask yourself why. Why does it matter? Why do you need a goal for the new year? Because it's not the fact that you don't have a goal.
[00:03:12] It's your thoughts about the goal and about you comparing yourself to others who are, I don't know, like, I'm going to go to the gym like six days a week and do all these things. Also, maybe you do have a goal and your goal is like completely different from what society or like your friends are expecting. Like, my New Year's goal last year was literally to one hundred and six percent Crash Bandicoot four. This was one of my goals and it's actually like, I feel it's a great achievement in the gaming world. It sounds random, but who cares? It's the goal that I fucking wanted. I wanted it to be like a fun goal and the goal again that you're creating. It's for you. It's not for society, it's not for your parents. It's what you want to do and achieve. And you do not need a fucking goal per say. You don't need to sit there and be like, Right, I need to make a goal and this needs to be really hard. And it has to be like, this has to be something like where I'm improving myself. It can be whatever the fuck you want. Goals can also be really easy. And that is why I think people avoid them. Goals sound so hard to achieve, and I feel sometimes we do this on purpose.
[00:04:34] Sometimes we we create unachievable goals to prove to ourselves that we can't meet goals and then we don't do it again. We berate ourselves for not meeting the goal. We don't achieve the thing and then we hate goals. We're like, No, I just can't achieve them. They suck. Well, that was at least to me, and I realized it was making this like some of the goals were achievable. But I was also making the process really hard through my thoughts and how I treated myself. So guys, it's the new year. You're probably thinking about goals and stuff. Here is the spiel on all things 101 when it comes to goal setting from a life coach and from a person who used to berate and beat the shit out of herself. And some of the stuff I'm going to tell you is a complete mind fuck to what we've been taught. Look, it's never about the goal. The goal isn't actually about achieving the goal. Stay with me here. It's about who you become. Along the way, people think it's about achieving the goal because that's what's going to, you know, it's a goal you set. Like you go to the gym, say you say you're going to go to the gym six days a week for entirely for a year, which is ridiculous.
[00:05:59] And then when you don't meet it, it's like you haven't met that goal you haven't like. It's almost like a sense of achievement has been lost. And then we berate ourselves and then we think we failed. That is the complete fucking opposite. And I'm going to use a metaphor to explain this. All right. I want you to think of a bowling alley, right? And everyone thinks with goals like the goal is to hit the pins right to get a strike. For example, the pins at the end of the bowling alley are a guide. They help you keep on the right track to move you forward. That's so you're not throwing the ball like into someone else's alley to hit, you know, something completely different. If you are the person throwing the ball, you have to get the ball to those pins. Now think about it. What do you have to do to get the ball to those pins? Well, you have to you have to throw the ball. That's one thing, but that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, you could throw it and then I don't know. I don't know if you've seen those things, but sometimes I throw it and that it doesn't actually roll it just kind of plunks on the ground. You've got to learn how to get closer to those pins. You've got to learn how to roll the ball, how to move it, how to like, maybe, you know, whenever I throw a bowling ball, it always goes into the gutter on the side because I swerve it like you got to develop a technique to get you closer to hitting those pins.
[00:07:43] Society tells us hitting the pins wins the game. I am telling you as a life coach that it doesn't fucking matter, does not matter if you actually hit the pins. It's all the learning you did in between. If we use the bowling for metaphor again, if you say hit five pins, society yourself might be like, Oh, you know, you never reached the goal, and I would say, Fuck that you hit five pins. Look at all the learning you did to get to this point, even by trying you hit five out of 10 pins versus if you never tried to achieve that goal and you just wouldn't have hit any please. No hitting a goal is not the point. It's learning along the way. The goal is just the guiding star. That's it. Like if we take to really complete different examples, it's like if I wanted to learn how to be a basketball player versus a life coach. Obviously, the skills and learnings I would take in between a completely different hence why we set the goal just to keep us on the right bowling alley. The right path, the right structure. That's it.
[00:09:06] You're still so many steps ahead if you try and I'm doing this in air quotes here fail versus if you didn't do anything. But we place so much emphasis on the goal itself and achieving that that it keeps us completely stuck, almost like what is the point? Like, we either just berate ourselves along the way and we don't give ourselves slack when we even meet like half our goal or get close to it, or we purposefully set really hard, unachievable goals to reinforce that, Oh, well, see, I just I just can't do it. Now you might say, well, Michelle, if like the goal itself doesn't matter if it's in the same realm of things like that should be OK. But again, let's kind of go with, you know, let's go with a guiding star here, right? It's like if I wanted to if I set the goal, I want to be like $100 million coach, right? I've like I've just started a business, I've been in business for six months, that's star like I cannot even really just see it. I can still set that goal, but I can also set things that are a little bit closer to home to get me to that eventual goal. That's like way in the future, you can set multiple smaller goals that are achievable that is going to develop and work on your skills each time and get you just one step closer to that much bigger goal.
[00:10:39] You're still going to have the goal a little bit, you know, in view, it's it's going to be like a like a star that you can see, you know, like way out that you can just like, barely see it. And I believe society has kind of we have had at least had this message instilled around. It's about achieving the goal. And then if we don't, it's like we suck. And another thing that keeps us stuck that people forget all the time and they go on about how lazy they are. You have your brain is built for self-preservation. It wants familiarity and to keep us safe. That is literally what humans have evolved and survived off. That is literally the reason we are here today. If you ever if you ever think you are lazy, please remember that is a human concept and we are wired to literally try survive. If you think doing that thing is hard and it is scary, then your limbic system thinks, What the fuck? Why are we leaving the cave of safety when there might be bears out there to try and eat us? It doesn't realize we live in the 21st century that going out for that really scary goal isn't actually a direct threat to our survival. Now, I used to when I had that knowledge then think, OK, I have to berate myself to do stuff because I have a limbic system working against me.
[00:12:19] No. So if you're thinking that I want you to literally put all those thoughts you have into a model and see what you get. Is it like anger? Is it like hate for yourself? If you look at some of the actions you buffering? Are you not doing it? Are you making it fucking painful for yourself so that the results you create, are you not achieving your goal or reinforcing that look goals are painful? Because you're doing that to yourself and then, oh my God, guess what? You've created a new neural network that's reinforced for like, ever because you're just practicing these thoughts and you know, the feeling and the action, et cetera, that makes setting goals or achieving them suck. Well, you want to do is you want to love yourself through a goal and setting a goal. You want to look at how do you actually want to feel when you go out for this goal? What actions do you want to take? And also realize that, yeah, it it takes time. Yes. You know what you might be like, right? I'm going to take this on, and I'm going to set it this as a goal I want to work on and I'm going to, you know, be a lot kinder to myself. Guess what, you're probably your brain is probably going to want to take a massive break for a while before you start to get into key.
[00:13:49] Sometimes I don't want to work on my business, and I love my business. My brain is sometimes so adamant. Now what I do is I fucking listen to it and I'm like, Right, I'm going to take the break. And that actually happened recently for me. I was meant to get these episodes out a little bit earlier. And I just I couldn't do it. I and I listen to my body, I was like, right, OK, I'm not going to do this, I'm going to like I literally just binged video games and I did that. And guess what happened all of a sudden? I don't know how to explain it, but it was almost like my I was ready to, I was ready to work again. I was like, Right, I'm ready. You will want to do the work if you're not telling yourself achievement is the most important thing and you let your brain figure its shit out, you let yourself learn how, like how to work on goals that works for you. Because if you're like me before I was looking at people like Brooke Castillo, like Lindsey Mango and like like quite a few like high achieving coaches. And I was like, Right, I need to be hustling. I need to be working all the time, and I've talked about this before.
[00:15:07] That is not the case. But what I also didn't realize was I needed to learn how to set goals and how to like that period where I work towards the goal. How do I do that in a way that works for me, and it's going to look completely different to how Brooke's going to do it or anyone else. Sometimes I am literally and I do it. Sometimes I am going to procrastinate or I am going to, like, need to take a fucking two hour nap. But it's when I allow myself to do that, and I gave into it instead of just berating myself and going into that unintentional model. That's when I was able to work out. All right. This is what I need to do. This is what I need to like, change and work on, et cetera. For me, I talk about this in my break episode. It was literally more breaks. It was more fucking breaks. And when I say figuring out a way that works for me, I'm going to give you one really, really quick example. I set a goal for this month to get through some of the life coach school. They have like a business training and be wanting to do this for ages. And I just I'm like, I don't have enough time. I set that goal for myself.
[00:16:15] Like to get it done before December. And I kid you not. It's like my brain just figured out. It's like, Well, because what I was expecting to do right was, I need to sit down. I need to watch the video, you know, I need, I need to really be into it. But I've always known that that's not exactly how I learn, how I learn. Like is is literally like sometimes through listening and like listening to a podcast. I'm walking the dog. And that's what I did. I kid you not. And that's how I got through all the trainings. I did it in a way that worked for me. I didn't set myself and say, Well, I should be doing it this way because this is how like other people do it. I did the learnings and the training. I did what I needed to do in a way that suited me. I trusted myself and my ability, and I did. I got through those trainings. When it comes to working on your goals, you need to do it in a way that suits you, not what society your mom, whatever expects how it works for you. That is so important. And this leads me to my final part, which is how to set goals. Like what are some tips to set? Some really like clean, loving goals for yourself? Firstly, write your goal out on paper with a due date.
[00:17:37] Your brain will freak out when you do this, and right now you'll like NOOO. No, no, that's a good thing that is completely normal. It is. So it's great. If you feel nervous, good because your brain is like shit. It's real and in your subconscious. It's actually trying to think of things and figure out, Right, how could I do this? And your brain will start to problem solve. Seriously, that is one of like the do that do that today. Now, no, to write everything out. I mean, every single thing you need to do. Just write it out, and it's totally fine if you have like fifty thousand things, just write. Write them out when it's on paper. You can use your prefrontal cortex to analyze it, to almost read it as if it was a fact versus a thought in your mind. It's like a bit of a separation technique, and it's brilliant. Now. Write down why you think you can't achieve it and how you could challenge that. So I was looking, I did this myself and I was looking at my one from the very first one I did and it looked at. One was, well, I've never coached before. That was a reason why I didn't think I could achieve my call with, like being a coach, etc.. So what I did was I just I looked at the opposite like I problem solved.
[00:19:02] It's like, OK. If this is my fear, how could I strategize around this and it's like, well, I could coach for free, I could, you know, go on on forms, I could ask people. This is like, this is also really important because it gets you to challenge your excuses. It gets you into a pattern when your brain comes up with like a fin on a main way. When your brain comes up with a fee, you are starting to develop this skill of. All right, this is a fear that I have. How could I just treat this as like a learning? Ok, like, OK, I've never coached before. That's that's something that I I'm thinking I'm using as I can't achieve this goal. Well, how could I work towards that? How could I make that like a mini goal? What are the little steps that I have to take to make that? Then you plan out all your actions and you prioritize them. So personally, I like to set one big six month goal. Then little kind of mini monthly goals that goes towards that goal. And then each week I'll work on like maybe two or three things that kind of funnel up to that next goal. Like the example I gave with like, you know, 100 million in the star and stuff like that, we set crazy, unachievable goals like, set a goal, you're allowed to have a big goal, but set goals in between that.
[00:20:24] And, most importantly, make it fun. Allow yourself to relearn fun, go achieving goals don't need to be painful or hard. It is just a guiding schutte... -blah... Star. Allow yourself to figure out like listen to your body as you're doing this. Coach yourself along the way. See what's coming up for you. Let this be a fun experiment. Where are you going to re-learn how to love goals again and how to love the process of doing goals? Listen to yourself and trust your intuition. And if you knew. Check out the rest of the episodes I did on self-improvement because that all leads into this as well. And I I now love setting goals, and I love teaching my clients how to think so that they can develop the skill on their own of loving their own goals and journey along the way. And I want to show you how to do that one on one. So reach out to me. I'm offering free sessions so you can get a taste of what it's like and you can make your own decision. So that is all for now. I hope this has been helpful. Seriously, go out. Set a goal treat as an experiment. You don't. If you don't hit the goal, exactly that is totally fine. Learn along the way. That is what goals are about. All right. See you bye.