Never Too Festive: Parenting with More Joy & Less Mom Guilt

36. The Subtle Mistake That Destroys Ambition (And How to Avoid It When Setting Goals)

• Elizabeth Hambleton

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Ever wondered what it truly takes to redefine yourself as you hit major life milestones, like turning 40? Join me on Never Too Festive for an eye-opening exploration into goal-setting, where we uncover why so many of us stumble and how we can flip the script. As we edge toward year's end, I'll guide you through crafting a vision for your life that's both ambitious and achievable. Drawing from my expertise in branding, we'll unravel the complex dance between defining success and overcoming the motivational quicksand that often traps us. If you've ever felt lost in the art of goal achievement, this episode promises to equip you with the tools to transform intentions into tangible successes.

In the pursuit of health, fitness, and financial goals, I introduce you to the powerful dynamic between lead and lag measures. Understand why focusing on actions within your control—like consistent exercise or thoughtful spending—can lead to the outcomes you desire, without the frustration of chasing results you can't predict. With insights that encourage setting lofty goals while building sustainable habits, this episode is your roadmap to a purposeful, joy-filled life. Let's embrace big-thinking and mindful choices, turning everyday chaos into a stylish adventure filled with joy and sparkle. Grab your iced coffee, and let's make this journey toward a connected and creative life both inspiring and achievable.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Never Too Festive. I'm your host, elizabeth Hambleton, so some of you who know me like in real life may know that it is actually my birthday this weekend. So happy birthday to me, and I'm turning 39, which means, obviously, that I will be turning 40 next year. I think that 40 is not what it used to be. I don't really ever see any over the hill type of cakes or balloons or anything like that anymore. I think we have as a group, as a society, moved on to thinking that 40 is perhaps not as old as we used to think it was, but nevertheless, the end of a decade and the beginning of a new one always makes people, I think, be a little bit more introspective, think about goals, who they are, who they want to be, who they thought they were going to be, because that's always interesting who you are versus who you thought you were going to be be, because that's always interesting who you are versus who you thought you were going to be. Certainly, I will say that my 30s held some surprises. Some were not in my hands, like hello COVID, looking at you, and you know, some things were in my hands and I just made maybe different decisions than I would have thought I would when I was in my 20s, looking forward, and all of this had me thinking about goals. Even if your birthday is not near this time of year at all, you may be in that end of year state of mind thinking about your goals, and with that I kind of wanted to touch on goals and the idea of creating a vision for your life and who you want to be.

Speaker 1:

Hey there, mama, and welcome to Never Too Festive, the podcast where we celebrate the extraordinary in everyday motherhood. I'm Elizabeth Hambleton, your host and fellow mom, on a mission to help you rediscover your sparkle, redefine your style and reclaim your sense of self in the midst of motherhood mayhem. Do you ever feel like you've lost touch with the stylish, confident woman you used to be before kids? Are you tired of living in yoga pants and feeling like you've gone from thriving to just surviving? Well, mama, it's time to reclaim joy, creativity and style, while embracing the fabulous mom you were meant to be. So grab your iced coffee and join me as we embark on a stylish adventure together, because here on Never Too Festive, there's no such thing as too much sparkle, too much flair or too much celebration. Get ready to shine bright and live your most fabulous, joyful life, because you deserve it.

Speaker 1:

I do think that often the term vision board or vision casting is thrown around in a way that's maybe not ultimately that helpful for the average person because it can feel so vague. It can feel hard to achieve. The idea that you can sit in your living room and just think positively and one day you'll have a mansion and a Porsche and a million dollar bank account can feel just not real, I think for a lot of people. But I do think there's a lot of value in goals. The question is, when so many of us set goals, why do more of us not achieve them? I actually did a little research for this episode and it turns out the numbers do vary based on where you're looking. But a lot of people cite a research study by the University of Scranton and they said that 92% of people fail to reach the goals that they set. That's crazy. That means only 8% of us are achieving the goals we set out to. Some research studies are a little more general. I've seen as low as 80% fail to reach their goals. That would bring it to a 20% success rate. That's definitely better, but 80% is the best I've ever seen and that still means that the majority of us are not completing the goals that we set out to.

Speaker 1:

Obviously there's a range of reasons, but when I talk to people about goals in a work setting which I do a lot as a branding expert and I noticed that a lot of people don't set out with a real plan for their goal. They say I want to do X, y, z, and maybe they have a date, maybe they don't, and it's all very vague and I don't think that a lot of people would even know if they've reached their goal. When it's super vague, like I want to be successful, well, how do we know? What day are we going to wake up and think, oh, this is what success feels like? The problem with so many vague goals is that the goal keeps moving, that maybe you think when I make a hundred thousand dollars, I'll feel successful, but then you make that and you think, I don't know, there's still a lot of bills or things I wish I could have and my kids have gotten older and life is expensive, so I actually need 150 or I need 200 or whatever.

Speaker 1:

It is that, the idea of something like success or health, like I just want to feel healthy. I think that's a great idea, but what does that really mean to you? And if you do want to get better at goals, there's something called SMART goals and you can look that up online. It's an acronym and it talks a lot about how you can set better goals. That's actually not what I wanted to go into today, because the idea of setting better goals is definitely important. You can do some research on that yourself if you're interested. Some research on that yourself if you're interested.

Speaker 1:

But even once we have a goal that is measurable and we have a time frame and a lot of those things, how do we go about actually achieving that, implementing the goal? Because really, for most of us, I think that it's a motivation issue. I've been there. I am not throwing stones in my glass house. We've all done it. We start off with a good idea. Life gets busy, life gets frantic, things get thrown in our way that we weren't expecting and our motivation to try or to put in extra work in some area of our life just starts to fall off the bandwagon. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about how you can create lasting motivation when you are setting goals that you want to achieve.

Speaker 1:

Most people who I have talked to and who I've seen online and clients I've worked with set a goal and it's the end point that they're focused on. Which kind of is the definition of a goal? And that's fine. We need to be clear on that. We need to know that we're going to use weight loss as an example. Just because it's so universal, it's easy to understand. We all know what we're talking about.

Speaker 1:

So people say I want to lose weight. That is, frankly, a terrible goal. It is vague. There is no deadline. If you lose one pound, have you succeeded in the goal? I don't know. If you lose 20 pounds, have you succeeded? It's hard to tell. It needs to be way more specific so we can improve that goal by saying I want to lose 10 pounds. That's an improvement. Still not amazing. If we give a time frame, that is easier.

Speaker 1:

The human psychic, whatever our mind, does not do well with long-term, open-ended goals. Our mind does better with boundaries, when there is an end point. If I told you, tomorrow you have to give up sugar for the rest of your life, most of us would find that very challenging. If I told you, hey, can you go 10 days without sugar to feel better? Most of us would think, okay, 10 days, I mean may not be amazing, but I could do it because there's an end in sight, there's that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, right? So you need to give an end date.

Speaker 1:

So let's say I want to lose 10 pounds in three months. That's a much more reasonable goal. We have a clear idea of how we would know if we were successful. Is it 10 pounds, probably, or, more right, roughly around 10 pounds, and is it in three months? So we know exactly what we're working with. The thing is and this is the really important part most of us focus all on the goal and the end and the result.

Speaker 1:

So maybe in week one we start working out, we're doing whatever we want to do. We're watching our carbs or we're cutting our calories or we're following some sort of plan or whatever we're doing, and we want the scale to go down because we think that is showing that we are making progress. If you want to lose 10 pounds in three months, then you need to lose roughly three pounds a month. So that's a little less than a pound in a week. So at the end of the first week, most of us would want to start to see the scale going down. Okay, it's gone down a pound, then the next week we want it to go down another pound. Right, we want to see that what we're doing is creating our desired results, and I think that's totally natural. But what happens if we don't see immediate results? Or if, in something like weight loss, maybe we go down two pounds in the first week but then we go back up one that next week, because we maybe had more salt, or we went to an event and maybe ate a little more than we meant to, or whatever it is, maybe ate a little more than we meant to, or whatever it is.

Speaker 1:

Weight is not an absolute number. For most of us, it goes up and down. So you might feel like you're making progress, but then you lose progress, or progress isn't fast enough. And then what happens? We lose motivation. We think, oh man, I lost two pounds, but now I'm back up. Or, even worse, I'm up three pounds and so I'm back up from where I even started. That's terribly demoralizing, demotivating.

Speaker 1:

So what are we doing here? We're focusing on the result, and that's what's called a lag measure. It lags behind. It's the result of something else. Our eating and our exercise pattern are creating this result. That can be very hard because for many, many things in life, we don't have control over lag measures. Maybe when we want to grow a business online, well, we can post on Instagram or post on social media or do whatever and we hope to get a certain number of views, but ultimately we don't have complete control over what we get. That's a lag measure. We want to get healthy, so we try to exercise and eat right, and we want to lose weight, but losing weight is a lag measure. We don't ultimately have complete control.

Speaker 1:

Let's say you want to get your finances in order. I'm going to save, whatever it is $500 this month, and so I'm going to budget these things and it's going to be great that we have maybe a little more control over. But what if your tire blows out on the road and you have to buy two sets of tires or a set of tires for the back of your car? So you have to buy two tires? Well, I don't really know tire prices exactly, but two tires if they're. Maybe nice could be either all of that $500 or eat into it heavily and you think, oh, I made choices here that were supposed to be helpful, but I didn't get the result I wanted, because something else that's out of our control came up. If your tire blows out on the road and you use your car every day to get to work, to get to life, to get to school, then of course you have to fix it. You don't really have control, so maybe that eats into the savings.

Speaker 1:

So when things like this happen, it's so easy to get really demoralized to say, oh, this isn't working, I'm trying, nothing is working, I'm just going to give up, I'm just going to go back to what I was doing, I'm not even going to try, and that's a huge reason that people don't reach their goals. So you might be thinking but what's the alternative? The alternative is to focus on what's called lead measures. So there's lead and there's lag. A lead measure is something that you have 100% control over. It is something that you hope will give you a desired outcome a lag but you can't say for sure what the lag will be. You can say for sure what the lead would be.

Speaker 1:

So, on these examples, the lead measure in getting healthier or losing weight is how much you eat or how many times you work out. If I said I'm going to work out three times a week for three months in a row and I hope that it will help me to lose 10 pounds, but I can't guarantee that I can 100% control. Obviously you know if you get sick or something a little out of, but like, largely you can control. If you work out three times a week over six months, you can make that commitment. You can say I'm going to schedule this out. If it can't do it this day, I'm going to do it this day. I'm going to be consistent. I have control over how often I go to the gym and then I can hope that it leads to feeling stronger, feeling healthier. Maybe my genes fit a little better.

Speaker 1:

Same with eating. You have control over the lead measure of what you eat. What you put in your mouth is a lead measure. You can choose. I'm not going to eat the cookie, I'm going to eat the whatever salad instead and you can hope that that leads to weight loss or feeling healthier or feeling less bloated or whatever your goal is. But you don't have 100% control because if you and I and 100 of our best friends all ate the exact same diet that was shipped to us in pre-portioned meals by a nutritionist.

Speaker 1:

If 100 of us all ate the exact same thing, our bodies would process it differently. Some people would lose weight really quickly, like I can guarantee you. If my husband and I ate the exact same things for three months, he would lose a lot more weight than me because his metabolism is just faster. So our lead measures would be the same. He and I are eating the exact same pre-portioned meals, but our lag measures would be the same. He and I are eating the exact same pre-portioned meals, but our lag measures would be radically different. If I lost five pounds, he would lose probably 15, because he just has a totally different body than I do. So that's the difference.

Speaker 1:

And then, with finances, maybe your lead measure is I'm going to cancel my Netflix to save the money on that, or I'm going to choose to only eat out once a week and I'm going to save by cooking at home these other nights. Whatever it is, you have control over how many times a week you go out, unless maybe you're doing it for work but largely you have control over where you eat. You have control of even if you're going out. You can choose to go someplace more fancy or someplace a little less expensive. So you have control over that lead measure. I'm going to choose to only go out on Saturdays for this many months to save some of the money I was spending going out. Now. The lag measure is that hopefully you can actually save that money and put it towards whatever you're saving for a vacation or in your savings account or whatever you want to do investing. Now you may not be able to save all of it. There may be a health thing or a car thing or whatever, where you're like hmm, I was wanting to save this for X, but Y came along and I need to spend it on that. That's a lag measure.

Speaker 1:

Your lead measure is what you have control over, and the thing that's so different about focusing on the lead versus the lag is that the lead, because it's in your control, you can see consistent results results. We stay motivated as humans when we see success. That's why software and Netflix and all those things are gamified Social media. They want you to unlock the next star or continue watching or anything where you can level up or see improvement. There's so many apps where you can track different habits and then you get a little prize or some sort of icon in the app if you hit a week or you hit 10 days. We as humans are programmed for continuing things. That feel successful when you focus on the lead measure and you have control over that and you can see success. That's how you build long-term habits, because you stay motivated. If you focus on the lag and what's not in your control, it is so universally easy to get demotivated and to just give up. So if you've never heard of lead and lag measures, I hope that this will help you reframe how you think about your goals and kind of your visions for the new year.

Speaker 1:

As we go into January soon. I know a lot of us even though the holidays haven't quite gotten here are in that planning mode thinking about our businesses, we're thinking about our schedules, we're thinking about the new year, our finances, our health, all of it, and I encourage you just to dream big. Yes, there are things that are hard, there are things that maybe you won't end up achieving, but I do think there's a huge value in thinking big, thinking bold, going for the big win, because if you stay on the sidelines and have no goals, you are guaranteed to not hit those milestones, but even if you do miss a few things, you end up not making some of those dreams happen. It still is. There's so much value in who you become, going after them and getting more purposeful about your lead measures and how you can create a really cultivated and purposeful life.

Speaker 1:

It's really that's what a lot about what this podcast is for. It's about helping you be more mindful about the decisions you're making day to day and how they come together to create the life you're living. Hopefully, it's a life of joy and it's a life of connectedness, a life of beauty, a life of creativity, and that's what I want to help you cultivate in 2025. That's what I plan to focus this show on, and if you have any requests for things you'd love to see throughout this next coming year, definitely feel free to text me in the show notes and let me know. I hope that it's a source of inspiration and a great mix of encouragement, but also tangible takeaways. So I just want to wish everyone a very happy holiday. I hope that you are celebrating with people you love and you are enjoying yourself, finding rest amidst the busyness, and with that, I will see you next week.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining me today on Never Too Festive. I hope you are leaving feeling inspired and refreshed. If you've loved what you've heard, don't keep it to yourself. Share this podcast with a friend who could use a little extra sparkle in her life. And hey, while you're at it, why not leave a review on your favorite podcast platform? Your feedback helps us continue to grow and inspire more women like you have questions or feedback you want to share directly with me? Simply click the link in the show notes to send me a text. I'd love to hear from you. Until next time, remember, all we have is today, so let's choose to live our most fabulous, joyful life together.