Don't Let Your Goals Sabotage Your Intentions

In this episode of The Efficiency Advantage, productivity expert Juli Shulem reveals why traditional goal-setting often leads to overwhelm, procrastination, and burnout—and what to do instead.

Juli introduces a powerful shift from rigid goals to meaningful intentions, helping you create clarity, reduce pressure, and build steady momentum toward what truly matters.

If you’ve ever abandoned your goals, felt overwhelmed by planning, or struggled to stay consistent, this episode will show you a simpler, more sustainable way to achieve progress in both business and life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Are you ready to finally break free from overwhelm, procrastination, and burnout? If you're ready to focus on what truly matters and create momentum to reach and exceed your goals in business and in life, then this podcast is for you. Welcome to the Efficiency Advantage, the podcast where clarity meets action and purpose that fuels your progress. So here's world-class productivity expert and your host, Coach Julie.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Welcome to the next episode of the Efficiency Advantage Podcast. I'm Julie Shulem. I'm your host, and today we are going to talk about something I'm really excited about. Okay, granted, I get excited about all of these topics because they are something I've been working on and worth for my entire adult life. But today I'm going to talk about goals. But I'm going to help you to think about them much differently than you may have been in the past. And today, my intention for you, a little sneak peek of the plan here, is to get back to your intentions and to avoid feeling like a failure. Ah, this is something that I've had clients tell me that that's their reason that they don't put goals together. They don't want to plan their goals because they are afraid of failure. So they figure, well, if I don't write anything down and make these goals, then I can't fail at anything. There's nothing that I can say I didn't do. But I'm going to share with you another way of thinking about this because a lot of times it's the words that we use. And many times having a goal puts that pressure on us. And many people say that they feel overwhelmed when it comes to planning goals and writing these things down and goal setting, you know, for the new year or at any time. So I'm going to kind of pull that apart a little bit for you and help you to look at this from a different perspective. So I want you to think about reframing goals as intentions. Intentions to do things that will maybe give you some clarity, to open up some ideas, and just to kind of take away that stress and overwhelm and avoidance behavior that many people have associated with goal planning. So from this point forward, I'm not calling them goals. I'm calling them intentions. And it was interesting. I was working with and speaking with a group of business owners recently, and we were talking about this very same subject. And when it was my turn to share, I told everybody that I don't consider them goals. Even on my spreadsheet, my written-down intentions are indeed intentions. And that really hit a wonderful positive chord with everybody in the room. So I'm going to share this with you. So as you might know, most people end up abandoning their New Year's resolutions early, often by mid-January or early February. And this often happens because the goals that they set are often too vague, or they might be just really aggressive, like I'm going to make a million dollars this year, and you've only made 120 the last year. So that's a little asking for it. But you know, you want to be realistic as well as a little bit of a stretch. Sometimes there are just too many with no prioritization, just a lot of things written down with no real structure around it. And then the last part often is that these intentions are disconnected from your daily structure and your calendars and how you're actually running your life and living your life. So these areas are some of the ones that I've heard people share as to why they pull back from putting their intentions down and writing these things in a place that you will actually be able to access them. That's another aspect. But one of the big issues that I want to share with you is when you're thinking about the things that you'd like to have in the next year, you also want to know what the why is in front of them. So I'm going to share a funny story. When I was in my 20s, 30s, around that time, oh my gosh, I had the funniest goals. I think they're funny because I look back on them now, and yes, I did save them because they were interesting. And I save all of my intentions from the years that I've been doing this, which is a few decades here now. And I actually have noticed when I first was putting these together, it was a goals list. And then around 2013, I think it was, I shifted to that intentions list from goals. So I noticed that some of the things I had were just uh interesting, to say the least. I remember I was looking at my list, and oh, I wanted to have a chauffeur uh who would, you know, drive me around and take me places. And of course, my own personal chef would have been really handy. It was just kind of funny, the things that I had goals of then, which are not based with in any reality that I was in at all. So they weren't things that I ended up acquiring, although I did have some help with cooking at one point. I do remember that. But it was something that I needed to get more clarity on. And I'm going to share with you a little bit about how you can not just shift what you're going to be putting down on your intentions list, but kind of how to go about doing that. And you want to be able to really look at what is the difference between a goal and an intention. And often goals are those things that we aspire to have, you know, they're way out there. And oh, my goal is to be, you know, to have a house or to be a millionaire. You know, these they're these big things, and they're often something that is going to be taking a lot of time. They're not something you're gonna be able to acquire in the next year per se. Whereas intentions, they're a little more direction-focused, often value-aligned, and they're way less stressful. So when you're thinking about your intentions, these are aspirations, these are things that you want to work toward. And by working toward them versus saying, Oh, I have to hit this mark, whatever that mark is, you're actually helping to reduce the overwhelm and allow for progress without perfection. Goals often require a perfection, if you will. Whereas if you're aiming for an intention, well, then it's a little bit different, right? It's a little bit more like I'm working toward this thing. And the main thing that you want to be working toward is consistency, not this huge burst at the end of the year, oh, I didn't hit this goal, I better do XYZ and you know put everything else aside. No, we want to actually create a consistent cadence of working toward our intentions so that we end up actually seeing progress and benchmark, let me just say goal acquisition, but intention acquisition. How about that? So that you can see that there's progress toward these things that you want to acquire or aspire to. So one thing that you can do in terms of designing the next year is think about really how do you want that year to look. Sometimes I kind of project out to the end of the year and think about, okay, well, what do I want to say I have done at the end of this time frame? That's a really great way of getting perspective on where you want to be. Again, don't forget to think about the why. Why do you want to be there? What does their mean? What's that going to bring to you in the future? What value does it have for you in your life and those of the and of those other people in your life as well? So one idea that you can do, which I just did this last year, so I'm going to share my personal experience with this, which is having an annual theme. So, like a theme of the year. You might have it be you're going to be organized, or maybe simplification, maybe health is going to be your focus for the year. So last year, mine was relationship with friends and family. So I committed to traveling to see people I don't get to see very often. I ended up traveling pretty much every single month last year. It was amazing. Now I did other things in my life as well. I had other intentions, but I kind of made sure that my priority for the year was to fit more people into my life that I hadn't seen enough of. And it was amazing. I had such a great time. And I had all the other things that I wanted in my life also. So this was really, really helpful because when you have kind of a theme or a direction of what you're doing, that helps with decisions. It acts as a decision filter, if you will. And it helps keep intentions aligned with your personal and your professional life. It also prevents competing priorities from fragmenting your attention and having you go off on tangents that you really didn't intend to do or want to do. So again, here's a really interesting point to consider because uh when we're creating our intentions, we want to be efficient about how we do things. And uh when you have intentions set up and you have this theme, if you will, for the year, well, that is going to help reduce those decision-making opportunities. And when you're reducing decisions, you will actually become more efficient because you'll be actually deciding what you're going to do and what you're not going to do. Now that's another area I want to bring up. So one of the things that I also encourage clients to do when we're working on their intentions is to think about the things you don't want to do anymore. So for me, there were some things I decided I did not want to put my time toward anymore. I can make time for them, I did in the past, but I had some new directions. I had some new projects. This podcast is one of them. I wanted to make sure I could devote the time to these new projects so that I was not going to fall short of my intentions for the year. So you want to think about the things that you are not going to do. And let me tell you, wow, that makes your decision making so much easier because now there are things that you are not going to put your time toward. And you don't have to make a decision about, oh, should I contact, should I, you know, work on this kind of a project or should I, you know, work on marketing for this thing, or you know, there are various things. Should I go to this event? Should I be on this board? Well, if you're gonna eliminate some of these things in your life, that's going to free you up for the new things that you want to have in your life. So thinking about the theme and thinking about the things you don't want to do anymore. Okay, so those are a few things just around the whole concept of creating your intentions. Now, when I work with someone and put my intentions together, I have a formula, I have a template, if you will, and I have it broken into two categories. I have my personal category and I have my professional category. And there's a reason for that. If you lump everything into one big list, it's gonna be hard to kind of separate it out and put some actual intention or actual plan together for these intentions that you have. So I divided it up into personal and professional. Things that you might want to acquire, by the way, you can have a material, you know, uh category, but I actually like putting that in my personal one. So let's say you need to buy a car, want to buy a car this next year, that would be in your intentions list. You intend to buy a new car for the year, put it in your personal category. So this prevents work goals from crowding out personal priorities. Oftentimes, people put a lot more time and energy toward their professional goals, and then they don't really pay much attention to their personal priorities and their intentions there. So this helps you to make sure that you've got some balance there. All right. This also allows for realistic and achievable intentions in all areas. Again, this is going to help you create that somewhat elusive to many balance in your life. So this way you're making sure you're putting time toward both aspects of your life. Also be mindful. Not everything needs to change at once. You don't have to scratch whatever you were doing last year that maybe didn't get fulfilled. You can actually add that to your list or put that back on your list and just add some other things into it. Now, another thing that you also might want to consider doing, and I do this myself, is I have a continue category under both personal and professional. And in the continue category, I have those things that I'm doing already. They manifested, they occurred in the last year or more, and I want to keep that going. There's nothing that needs to be changed about that. I just want to continue. So have a section for continue the following. That way you're not exchanging new stuff or the things that were already working perfectly well for you that are making you happy and improving your life and adding value. Okay, so you've got these two categories. And a lot of times we have this goal set or intention set as an annual event. You sit down and write these things out, and then you never look at it again till the end of the year, or time to make another one of these lists, and you're like, wow, I wonder how that worked last year. Well, that's not really how that's supposed to go. You want to be looking at this list on a regular basis, and at the same time, you want to be planning and scheduling the things that are going to get you to those intentions. These should be something that you break down and build in early wins, and then you will have confidence that, yeah, you can get this to happen. So make sure that the intentions that you have on your list are not all stretch intentions. You don't want to make every single thing on there something that you've never gotten close to. Have a few in there that you've achieved some success with in the past, and maybe you want to just expand that a little bit. So you can have a few aspirational intentions, but make some of them also really attainable. Something that'll build confidence that, yeah, you've got this, you can do this, you can add new things, but also either continue ones you've had, or maybe step your game up a little bit in some of those other areas. So early wins, that's going to really help reinforce that you can do this. It also will create this great positive feedback loop for you. And it will also increase the likelihood of sustaining these intentions long term so you don't toss them aside too soon. So when you're putting your intentions together, I'm going to share with you how I've done mini workshops with my clients. And the way that it works best is, or the way that it has worked best, there are many, many ways things can work wonderfully well, is to just block out a short period of time. This is not something that is going to take you hours and days and weeks, people. This is something that you can do in seriously a half an hour if you really just sit down and focus on this one thing. But think about the things that you would like to achieve. And think about what you would like to achieve in this year. Now, if you want to really, really do this upright, I'm going to encourage you to sit down and think about what would you like to achieve in 20 years? What would you like to achieve in 10 years? What would you like to achieve in five years, three years, and this year? By breaking this up, some of those things that you are thinking about in the more long-range future, put them down too. But they're not going to go on your list of what you're going to do this year unless there are some steps that you can be working on toward that more long-term goal, right? You can actually look at the more long-range goals and see, okay, well, what do I want to achieve by then? I'll give you an example. Many years ago, I wanted to go back to school and get a master's degree. Well, that required investigating some options. It required looking and seeing what I had to do in order to get accepted. It required me having to reschedule a lot in my life so that I'd have time to actually put toward achieving the degree. So it was something that I wanted to attain in the next five years. But I actually was able to do some of the steps toward that intention in the year coming up. So this way I was able to get into a program within the year. And I learned that for me, because I had a full-time practice, I also needed to break it up and let this stretch out over three years. So I took three years to get my master's because I took just one course at a time. And at the same time, I also took in one intentional break of a semester or term, I should say, so that I could do some traveling. And that way I was still meeting my intention of five years, have the degree, and I did. And that way I was able to kind of look ahead, see what kinds of things I wanted to go for, and then back it up and say, well, what little first steps can I do toward that end? And that became one of the goals or intentions of my year. Okay. And that was in a personal category. So you sit down, you have your paper and handwrite these, please handwrite these. It'll be much better for you to kind of really come to terms with what is it you're writing. And you'll also have time to kind of think about it when you just type it out. Sometimes it just goes too quickly and you're not really spending time thinking about it. So give yourself a little bit of a time limit and let yourself just run wild. If you're someone that likes to do a mind map, go for it. That's a great way of kind of letting your mind run wild and come up with the things that you want to. And this way you can just let this be a brain dump, if you will, of all the things that you're thinking about doing for the next foreseeable future. And then you'll go through this list. And I'm when I say a small amount of time, I'm saying like five, 10 minutes. Really, you can do a lot in that short time period. And then when you get done with this list of everything that you can think of, then you break it down into okay, this is a 20-year goal, a 10, a five, three, one. And then the ones, the ones, the items that come into that one year category, those are the ones that you'll start putting into the two categories of personal or professional. And maybe you did that in the beginning, and that's completely fine. So however you get to that list is great. The most important thing is make sure this is written down. People who succeed at achieving their intentions have written them down. If you just have them floating around in your mind, you end up generally not prioritizing them, scheduling them, and having them become a reality. Okay, so that's a little bit about how to make that occur. And when you're connecting your intentions to the calendar, this is where the magic happens. You want to make sure that you are putting your intentions and the steps toward them into your calendar. You have steps that you may need to be taking on a regular basis, on a weekly or monthly basis to aim toward that goal. Let's say, for example, you want to earn$10,000 in the next in a month. Okay, well, that equates to$2,500 a week. And that equates to$500 a day. Well, how are you going to get$500 a day? What does that mean? How many people do you have to see? How many deals do you have to close? How much business do you have to do in order to achieve that goal? Well, if you break it down into these smaller elements, that way, or increments, I should say, this way you're going to be able to actually pull it together and see that you are making progress toward that intention. It works. It works every time. All right. So that's uh a few ideas about pulling this together. I'm going to be speaking about calendar usage in the next couple of episodes. I'm doing going deep into how to use a calendar, and I'm going to help you to execute all of these wonderful intentions that you've created. So I'm going to invite you to choose a theme for the year. Identify the small set of personal and professional intentions that you have set up for the year. By the way, the year can be at the beginning of the calendar year, it can be on your birthday, it can be at a certain quarterly uh change, whatever works for you. It doesn't have to be January 1st. Okay? It can be what whenever that time frame works. And your goals need to be printed out or written down in a place you can see them, and you need to reference them often. Check and see how you're doing. Are you getting close to some of them? That's important. Don't wait till the end of the year to find out. Oh, wow, if I had only done these four or three things, I could have actually achieved that intention. Okay, don't be that person. All right. Schedule time to write these down. Schedule time with yourself to sit and create this wonderful intentions list and motivate yourself. And don't make it too lengthy. If you have a gazillion things on there, it's gonna be sad at the end of the year. It's gonna be hard to achieve everything. So make it realistic. Okay. I will look forward to talking with you or sharing more with you at an upcoming episode. If you have ideas you want to share and questions you want to ask, please go to askJulie J-U-L-I.com. There is a place for you to do that. And please subscribe, follow, and share the podcast. Have a productive day. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

So that's it for today's episode of the Efficiency Advantage. Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a private VIP day with Coach Julie herself. Be sure to head on over to the EfficiencyAdvantage.com and pick up a free copy of Coach Julie's gift. And join us on the next episode.