[26] Setting Achievable Goals: Tips for Living a Fulfilling Life

In this episode of "My Life is a Saturday," host Melissa Janssen discusses the importance of setting achievable goals. She provides practical tips for avoiding common goal-setting pitfalls and shares strategies for staying motivated and on track. Melissa emphasizes the need to connect goals to a personal "why," break goals down into smaller, manageable steps, and celebrate progress along the way. She also introduces the concept of SMART goals and encourages listeners to focus on progress rather than perfection. Tune in to learn how to set realistic and obtainable goals that will lead to a more fulfilling life.

Book: "Atomic Habits" by James Clear

Transcript

[TRANSCRIPT]

0:00:00 - (Melissa): Welcome to my life is a Saturday, the podcast that helps you live your best life by embracing a Saturday mindset. I'm your host, Melissa Janson, and each week I'll be sharing my experiences and interviewing guests who have learned how to make the most out of every day. From tips on how to develop a positive mindset to ideas for living a more fulfilling life, we'll cover it all. So get ready to let go of your worries, embrace your passions, and live life for the fullest.

0:00:26 - (Melissa): Ready to dive in? Let's go, you. Hello. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. We are working our way to 30 episodes and I can't be more excited or proud that we're on this journey. Today's episode is going to be about setting achievable goals. I know every new year we get really hyped about setting goals and changing the way that we are and living a different life, but it can get really overwhelming when you start digging into it. And sometimes we set goals that aren't really that great.

0:01:06 - (Melissa): Examples of goals that aren't that great are ones that have no time frame attached to them, ones that ask you to go from zero to 100, ones that don't align with your values, and ones that you're setting because you think it's what you're supposed to do, but it doesn't truly align with what you want from your life or who it is that you want to become. Even sometimes, goal setting can kind of suck because we don't value the goal as much as we think we do, or we think that that goal is going to produce some magical outcome that's going to be transformative, but we're afraid to put in the work to get there.

0:01:49 - (Melissa): Have no fear. Don't even worry about it. I'm here to help you set more achievable goals. I'm going to help you avoid these obstacles and become more mindful and realistic about the goals that you set. And this is going to create a domino effect in your life. As soon as you start setting realistic and obtainable goals, you're going to start hitting them. And there's absolutely nothing that helps motivation better than remembering your why and actually completing goals.

0:02:17 - (Melissa): This is the last year, or maybe last year was last year. You will no longer be setting goals and not achieving them or setting goals and giving up midway because we are going to give you all the tools to overcome that. The first thing that we're going to do to set achievable goals is to connect every single goal to a why and the why could be different for each goal. When you spend time understanding the why that's driving your actions, the why that you want this goal, the why that it's so important for you to achieve it. It's easier to avoid distraction and focus on pursuing your goal.

0:02:58 - (Melissa): Naming the purpose, setting the why of your goal helps you gain awareness of your vision. It helps you see where it is that you want to go. It gives you the opportunity to better articulate your ideas to yourself and to others who need to help you achieve your goal. It helps you decipher what you shouldn't be doing and also prioritize what you should be doing. It is the meat, the juice, the jetpacks, the fuel for your goal to get you from where you are now to where it is that you want to go when you determine what your why is. I like to do this exercise called the seven levels and basically you have your goal.

0:03:41 - (Melissa): My goal is I want to run a five k. So we're going to first write why. Well, I want to win a race. I've always wanted to participate in a race. Now we're going to go down to level. Why? Because I think that that would feel really good down a level. Why? Because I would be proud of myself for accomplishing the goal. Why? And you're going to go down why and seven levels. And that's going to help you get very specific on what's motivating you to accomplish this goal and it's going to give you something to fall back on.

0:04:21 - (Melissa): Now, as we work on developing the goal and taking action on the goal, we'll know what we should be prioritizing and what we shouldn't be doing and it's going to be all connected to that. Why? Next, we're going to break our goals down. Pretty simple and self explanatory in the sense, but I'm going to go even deeper on it. You're going to instead of setting one big goal for the year, so I want to run a five k.

0:04:51 - (Melissa): That's my one big goal. I'm going to break that down into smaller, more obtainable goals. I could do it month by month. I could do it week by week. I personally like to set 90 day goals. I think setting quarterly goals is a superb way to go after it. It's long enough to see real progress without overwhelming yourself with change. So take your big goal and then we're going to break it down into 90 day sections. So I want to run a five k at the end of the year, these 1st 90 days I'm going to walk a five k and then maybe my goals for the next 90 day period will be to half jog, half walk a five k. And then for the next 90 days it'll be to jog the five k. And then for the next 90 days it's going to be to run the five k. And at the end of those 90 days, at the end of that big year, I'm going to be able to run my ass all the way through a five k and see, breaking your goal down, it may feel like teeny, tiny baby steps. Okay, so for 90 days I'm going to walk a five k. Woohoo. That's not really getting me far.

0:06:09 - (Melissa): But what it's going to do is it's going to give you the opportunity to build consistency, to build belief in yourself that you can do it and just show up for yourself. Because you're not moving the needle from zero to 100, you're moving the needle from zero to zero one. And that is how you're going to create lasting change in your life. The next thing that we're going to do to set obtainable goals is to allow ourselves some buffer time, give ourselves the opportunity for life to happen.

0:06:39 - (Melissa): Because guess what? It's going to happen. You're going to get overwhelmed with work projects and you're going to lose your motivation and things are going to come up that are going to delay the progress on your goals. So you're going to want to build in just a little bit of time, like maybe an extra week into achieving your goals so that you keep the motivation. You still have your deadline, but you're staying on track along the way because you've given yourself the opportunity to be living on a spinning rock in the middle of nothing and everything all at once with 7 billion other people who have their own goals and priorities and ideas in mind.

0:07:21 - (Melissa): You're going to get distracted, you're going to become overwhelmed. It's just a part of the process. And giving yourself buffer time around your goals, a little bit of extra time for life to happen is going to keep you consistent and on time. On time in progress, progressing towards the ultimate end goal. This next one is my favorite. When you're setting these realistic goals, you are going to focus on progress, not perfection.

0:07:57 - (Melissa): I know if you're anything like me, then when you set a goal, you want to go from zero to 100. You want to wake up and be a brand new bitch, doing the new thing 100% of the time, never messing up, never failing, never forgetting never losing motivation. And I'm just going to stop you right there and stop myself and let you know that that is not realistic. There are people and there are situations in life where we have to flip the switch and become a completely different person overnight. But I'm telling you, in our normal day to day lives, that is not realistic and that is not a way to be supportive or loving to yourself as you build a life that you love.

0:08:39 - (Melissa): So instead, we're going to focus on the little things. We're going to focus on overcoming. Let's see. We're going to focus on not allowing how we feel in the moment, determine what it is that we do. We're going to focus on making little progress every day towards the big goal. We're going to focus on making choices that align with our goal. Progress, not perfection. Looks like you want to run a five k this year. You've broken your thing down your first quarter, your first 90 days set of goal.

0:09:18 - (Melissa): The only thing that you need to do is to walk five k. Maybe it's not every day, maybe it's every other day. I don't know what the specifics of your goal are, but that's what you're doing. Well, the first week, maybe just getting out there and walking to five k is really overwhelming and you just don't know how you're going to do that because you've never, ever kept your word to yourself. And so it's just like, oh my gosh, I'm just not going to be able to do that.

0:09:42 - (Melissa): Don't worry. Progress, not perfection. That first week we're going to put on our shoes, we're going to walk to the end of the driveway and back. That is it. We are not holding ourselves to a higher standard than that because we are making progress. We are not aiming for perfection. And over time you're going to be able to build on those habits. I think a couple episodes ago we talked about atomic habits by James clear. It's a great book. If you haven't read it, I would highly recommend it.

0:10:05 - (Melissa): The audiobook is also amazing. In there he talks about habit stacking and just building yourself up to doing two minutes of the new habit. Working on a goal, deciding that you're going to run a five k or walk a five k. Working on any type of goal is developing new habits. Everything that you do is out of habit. And when you want to change your life or build something different or become someone new, you're going to have to look at what makes the building blocks of you. And those are our habits. So we need to start shifting those and give ourselves the grace to do it in small sections. Again, not from zero to 100, we're going from zero to zero one.

0:10:55 - (Melissa): Okay. This next one is honestly challenging for me to overcome and that's why I want to include it. Because if it's challenging for me, I'm sure that there's some of you that it's challenging for, too. Don't focus on your past failures. Don't allow your intermingle to tell you that you've tried a million times to run a five k or to lose the weight or to hit that goal. And you've never been able to do it before, so you're obviously not going to be able to do it now. So why are you even going to try? Because your life is just going to always do the same. Because you are just a creature of habit and there's absolutely nothing that you can do to ever be better because you just lose motivation. You can't keep up with it. And it's just you've failed before, so why even try?

0:11:40 - (Melissa): Babe? No. It is so easy to go down that spiral. It's so easy to listen to your intermingle and to be consumed with all of the reasons why it's never worked for you before. You've never achieved that goal. You've always just given up and that this is going to be the same way. But instead of dwelling on those past failures, those past times that you've given up, let's work on a few strategies to keep you motivated and on track.

0:12:12 - (Melissa): First, we're going to celebrate the small wins. Who cares what happened in the past? The fact that this week, Monday through Friday, you got up, you put on your walking shoes, you walked to the mailbox, and actually on Friday you walked all the way to the end of the block and back. Woohoo. We're going to give ourselves a pat on the back. We're going to do something just for ourselves. Maybe at the end of that week, you take a nice bubble bath or you take some time and listen to an audiobook and color in a coloring book.

0:12:42 - (Melissa): You celebrate the small little wins. Because going from wanting to create a life that you love to actually creating the life that you love means that we're going to go from zero to zero one and from zero one to zero two and from zero two to zero three all the way up till we get to that 100% transformation that you're looking for. And if we're not going to celebrate all those little points, the zero one, the zero two, the zero three.

0:13:12 - (Melissa): It's going to be a long fucking boring ass ride to the end goal, to that 100% to the thing that you really want. So we're going to celebrate all of the small wins. The next thing that we're going to do to avoid getting stuck on our failures is that we're going to think about all of the related benefits of going after this goal. Sometimes pursuing a goal isn't just about the destination. It's not about achieving the goal. It's about becoming the person who can achieve the goal along the way. It's about enjoying the journey of transformation.

0:13:45 - (Melissa): It's about pushing yourself through those hard times and allowing yourself the care and love to rest if that's what's needed. So we're going to think about all of the related benefits that come with achieving this goal. I want to run a five k by the end of the year, the first quarter, the first 90 days, I'm going to walk a five k. The first week, I'm just going to focus on getting my shoes on and getting my ass out of the house.

0:14:10 - (Melissa): And in that, I am building self. Oh, shoot. What is the word? Self esteem. Still not the right word that I'm trying to go for. You're building self trust. There we go. You're building self trust. You're teaching yourself that when you say you're going to do something, you follow through. You have your own back. You are there for yourself. And through the weeks of moving that dial from zero to zero, one to zero, two to two to four to six, all the way up to 100, you're teaching yourself that you have your back, that you will always follow through on what you say. And maybe I just said that sentence and your intermingirl was immediately like, no, you don't follow through on what you say.

0:15:04 - (Melissa): You will. You use these steps and apply them to your goal, all the things we've talked about in this episode, and you will start building that self trust. You will start following through on your word. You will start keeping the promises that you make to yourself. You will start showing up as that person that you want to be. You will start creating the life that you love. It's as simple and as complex as that.

0:15:27 - (Melissa): Okay. And then the last thing to help you overcome your failures, and this is one that I'm going to give you with a little bit of a warning, is that you're going to find somebody that you trust, that loves you, that wants you to succeed. That is always in your corner and cheering on your side and wants to see you make it. Wants to see you live a life that you absolutely love. You're going to ask that person, why do you think that I failed at this?

0:15:58 - (Melissa): Sometimes we have to get that outside opinion. We have to ask the people that support us and love us the most about what they see from the outside. That is limiting us in our growth, in our expansion, and in our ability to obtain our goals. The reason that I want you to ask somebody who really loves you and values you and supports you and wants you to become and be is because you're opening up yourself to a lot of vulnerability. And if someone does not have your best interests in mind, it's really easy to take what they say to heart. Because in some cases, the people that don't have the best interest in mind for you also echo things that your intermingle is saying to you on the daily.

0:16:47 - (Melissa): And we are not here to play into the things of the intermingle or our impostor syndrome, or our negative thoughts or the narrative that we have about ourselves that's not always supportive. You know what I'm talking about. When you mess up, you're like, I'm the dumbest person in the world. I can't believe nobody's ever going to be able to love me. Oh, I just am lazy. Those sentiments, those aren't the things that we're looking for here. From the people that we love, the people that love us, that we ask this question to, why is it that you think that I failed at this?

0:17:18 - (Melissa): Are going to provide you real insight and an outside perspective and something like food for thought? You don't have to take what they say as the ultimate end all, be all of the situation. But what you do need to do if you ask somebody for this insight is to be curious about it. Be curious about what they're seeing and why they're saying that and where it's coming from. And be open and honest with yourself as to whether or not there is validity in what they're saying.

0:17:49 - (Melissa): Whenever you ask somebody for their opinion on your life or on your actions, it can really be a catch 22. But when you do it with the right mindset and you're open and respectful of the things that they say, it can be transformative and it can give you a really clear picture of what the next step is for you. I say all of this with another warning that I deeply believe the majority of the time, people's opinions of you are none of your business.

0:18:26 - (Melissa): And I know I'm telling you to ask somebody that loves and supports you for their opinion, and these are the cases where it is appropriate and it can be your business, since you're asking. But in the majority of life, the shit that people think about you and the shit that people say about you is none of your business. Their opinion of you, it doesn't even matter, because the opinion that should matter to you the most is your opinion of yourself. What you think of yourself, how you support yourself, how you love yourself, how you show up for yourself, how you keep your word to yourself.

0:18:58 - (Melissa): You are the most important opinion out there and I just want to give you that warning. Caveat to the asking for an objective analysis. And lastly, I want to talk to you about smart goals. If you've been in the goal setting realm for a while, then you've definitely heard about smart goals. But in case you haven't, smart goals is a way to set a goal that helps you find clarity within the goals. And smart is an acronym meaning specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely.

0:19:39 - (Melissa): I'm just going to give you a brief overview of this because I have a guest coming on the podcast in a few weeks that smart goals are her jam, and I am really excited for her to talk to you and to dive really deep into them. But for now, you're going to make goals that are smart goals. They're going to be specific. This is saying exactly what it is that you want or want to do. Two, they're going to be measurable.

0:20:04 - (Melissa): This is how you're going to know that you've accomplished your goals and are satisfied. Three, they're going to be achievable. Like realistic. I'm all about living in the delusion of unrealistic expectations for your life and for how the universe shows up for you. And I'm all about living in that. I do love that, and I talk about it a lot here on the podcast. But when we set goals, we want them to be, like, realistic.

0:20:39 - (Melissa): We are going to let the miracles happen as they happen, and we're going to be like, okay, look, is it realistic for me to achieve this huge ass goal when I've never done anything quite like it? In some cases it is, but you also want to set yourself up for success. You don't want to set yourself up for immediate failure and for being so overwhelmed by the distance you have to cover that you don't even try.

0:21:10 - (Melissa): So we're going to set goals that are achievable. You're going to set goals that are relevant. Like, how relevant is this goal to your values, your future plans? What's important to you and your life? Is it relevant? Decide about that. And your goals are also going to be timely. Like, when do you want to achieve this goal? By what time frame are you giving yourself to achieve a goal? And that's it. That's a smart goal. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely.

0:21:41 - (Melissa): When you decide what it is, the goals that you want to achieve, what it is that you want to work on, you're going to write smart down and then you're going to work on those specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely. And then you're going to walk through these steps of setting achievable goals. You're going to go back and connect your goal to a why. You're going to break your goal down into achievable parts. You're going to schedule in buffer times for your goals because life's going to happen.

0:22:13 - (Melissa): You're going to focus on project, not project progress, not perfection. And you're not going to dwell on past failures. Like, you're not going to let what's happened in the past determine what it is that's going to happen in the future and how it is that you're going to show up for yourself. I truly believe that whatever goal, whatever vision you have for your life, whatever it is that you want to become or achieve, it's there for a reason. It's there because you can do it.

0:22:41 - (Melissa): Fuck. Maybe it is a goal that seems unrealistic, but if you put it out over the next three to five years, it's totally achievable. There's absolutely nothing, I think, that you wouldn't be able to do if you gave yourself the time and you were consistent and you didn't let your interming girl get to you and you broke that big ass, unrealistic goal down into smaller, achievable chunks and you moved the needle from zero to 0.1 instead of from zero to 100.

0:23:07 - (Melissa): You can be that bitch. You can do the thing. You can live a life that you absolutely freaking love, that you could be like, I'm on a spinning rock in the middle of nothing and everything all at once, and my life is the jam, baby, 100%. I absolutely believe that. And I hope that this episode has helped you realize that setting achievable goals is doable and that you can develop the skills and the habits necessary to become the person you want to become and live the life that you want to live.

0:23:38 - (Melissa): I absolutely loved this episode. I hope that you did too. And I want you to know that you were in the right place at the right time. You're hearing this because there's something that I said that you needed to hear. And if you don't feel like you're leaving this episode with anything valuable, sign in the DMs. Let's chat. I want to make sure that I'm bringing you the best of the best when it comes to living a life that feels like a Saturday.

0:24:02 - (Melissa): You have everything in you that you need to achieve the life that you really love, and I'm here to support you every single step of the way. I love you. Happy Wednesday. Talk to you next time. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to my life is a Saturday. I hope you enjoyed this episode and are feeling inspired to live your best life. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with your friends.

0:24:30 - (Melissa): You can also follow us on Instagram and Facebook at my life is a Saturday for more fun and inspiration. Remember, life is short, so let's make the most out of every day.