Written by: Nicki Brown, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
We’re now a few weeks into the New Year. By now, you’ve undoubtedly been inundated with articles and invitations to workshops around goal setting and New Years Resolutions claiming to help you “do goals differently” so that you can successfully set and achieve your 2022 goals and make this year your “best year yet.” At worst, these may have contained recycled information you already knew but have struggled to put into practice. At best, they may have offered fresh perspectives and practical strategies that help you understand the fundamentals of how the mind and habits work to help you tackle your goals with new gusto. Either way, you likely approached them with fresh eyes and optimism, thinking: “This is the year I turn it all around.” So?—How’re you doing? We’re four weeks in—are you still going strong, or has your motivation dwindled? Studies have shown that roughly two-thirds of people will have abandoned their New Year’s Resolutions by February. And for those of us who may have started the New Year with yet another set of lockdowns and restrictions, we may barely have had time to get our goals off the ground before they came grinding to a halt again.
The truth is, even before covid, many people have set the same or similar goals year after year and repeatedly found themselves on February 1st staring down another failed attempt. The perception of repeated past failures is enough to shake our confidence and our belief in ourselves right from the start, but, most often, we blame things like: “busyness,” lack of willpower, improper motivation, or strategies. Let’s be honest, it’s easier to blame someone or something else than to take personal responsibility, but there are often very practical reasons why our goals fail. Some of the most common pitfalls are that the goals are either too lofty, too vague, or lack structure (i.e. milestones and accountability measures), and while those might be the reason you’ve struggled in the past, I want to draw your attention to some other possible lesser-known factors that have nothing to do with a lack of strategy, know-how, or circumstances.
Did you know that our most significant obstacles to achieving our goals are usually unconscious and held at the identity level? Yet, even though our identity plays such a crucial role in our success, few people stop to ponder the deeper questions like: Who am I really? Are my goals actually aligned with me, or am I chasing something that I think I “should” want? And why do I even want this—truthfully—what is it I think this will give me? Understanding the answers to these questions can help you create goals from a clean and clear place, increasing the likelihood of achieving them and, more importantly, being satisfied with their achievement. After all, there is no value in chasing goals that are not aligned with you; if you do, you’ll likely either give up before you reach it because “the juice is not worth the squeeze,” or achieve them only to end up realizing that they didn’t satisfy you the way you thought they would because they didn’t give you what you were really looking for. Here are five things you can do to avoid setting goals that are doomed to “fail” or leave you dissatisfied.
DIG DEEPER
On the surface, it seems simple enough: know what you want and why you want it. This helps with the motivation, of course, so it’s good advice…except for one little thing: The thing you think you want is rarely what you really want. We all go around thinking we want to lose 10 pounds, get the raise, find that perfect partner and deep down, we don’t want any of those things; we want what we think they will give us—confidence, security, validation. When we dig deeper, our goals are often based on superficial desires that veil our core motivations, which often centre around our sense of safety and self-worth. The truth is that losing 10 lbs might make you more confident in the moment, but it does nothing to fix the underlying issue with your confidence (which has little to do with the weight itself). To restore confidence, you must unravel where the belief originated. What event or situation created the misunderstanding that you needed to look a certain way to feel good or worthy? This means recognizing that weight loss is a band-aid solution to the lack of confidence. You’ll likely lose the weight and then find something else about yourself that needs “fixing” for you to feel confident. Even if losing weight does make you feel secure, it doesn’t change the fact that this confidence is now dependent on an impermanent solution, meaning if you gain the weight back, your confidence disappears. The same could be said of chasing more money or relationships to create a sense of security. When we dig deeper into our goals, we find that they’re typically rooted in the misconception that we need something outside ourselves to make us feel “good enough,” whole or complete. The catch 22 is that when you chase goals from a place of lack and scarcity, you’re already starting from the foundational belief that you’re “not enough,” which subconsciously communicates that you’re also not good enough to get the goal. This only magnifies the lack of confidence and security. If you want to feel confident or secure, you have to be willing to explore the root cause of the lack of confidence or security. Heal the beliefs and the misunderstandings around the perceived deficiency. Ironically when you do that, you will likely still have the same goal, but it will be coming from a different place, one born more of love, desire and excitement than need, so it will likely be easier to achieve.
RECOGNIZE THAT THE GOAL WILL NOT MAKE YOU WHOLE
I just touched on this above, but it's worth repeating: Many of us chase goals assuming they are the missing piece, that they will somehow complete us or make us feel whole. My coach said something profound once that stuck with me; she said: “The world is always trying to sell you something that is already yours.” What does that mean exactly? It means we’re conditioned to believe that the magic is out there, not realizing it’s already within us.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking I’ll be happier when…
With our consumer-based economy and social media, there is a constant stream of targeted and passive advertising unconsciously filling you with subliminal messaging that says: you’ll be happier when you buy this or have that. It feeds on our insecurities, making us believe that if we’re just more of one thing or less of another, we’ll be able to land that perfect job, get that dream partner, win the approval of our parents and so on. We mistakenly have allowed ourselves to believe that these things will make us feel “better” or “worthy.” We’ve bought into the belief that something outside of ourselves will validate us and make us feel good enough, safe, or whole, including being busy, productive, and achieving our goals. Believing that your happiness will come “when” some outer condition is met or at some point in the future means it’ll never be here now. “When” is a lie, we tell ourselves to distract from the truth of “what” and the “why”— the two questions we should be asking ourselves: What am I trying to cover up or compensate for? What is keeping me from being happy right now? And why? Through these questions, we can begin to take responsibility for ourselves and our happiness and question the stories we create in our minds about what will make us happy and why. The secret to goal setting is soul setting; It’s going within and discovering the truth—that you have everything you need NOW. That you are good enough as you are now, whole and enough, exactly as you are right now. If you’re seeking validation, freedom, peace, security in something else, know that no one and nothing can give that to you; it’s already there within you. When you realize this, you set yourself free from the “need” for something outside of yourself to be the answer to all your problems. Ironically, once you’re free of the “need” for the goal, you’re able to pursue and achieve the goal with greater ease because you’re not starting from a place of lack, already feeling desperate and inadequate; you’re starting from a place of confidence and fullness.
KNOW YOURSELF
Do you know yourself? Many people think they do but often harbour limiting beliefs and misconceptions about whom they are based on what others have taught or conditioned them to see or believe about themselves. Our upbringing is conditioned by our caregivers, experiences, social and cultural groups, media, and society. So much of that influence distorts our perception of our true selves. The person we know is a created identity, the person we believe we are or the one we’ve learned to be through this conditioning. To know yourself, you must uncover and unlearn all you currently know. Understanding how this conditioning has shaped our beliefs allows us to strip away who we think we are, be open to learning new things about ourselves, and see new possibilities. It’s also important to know that our basic needs, deepest desires, and core fears are our primary motivators, so understanding these and being able to recognize how you exaggerate or hide parts of yourself to maintain your sense of love, security and belonging is helpful to avoid setting goals that stem from our insecurities and tendencies for people-pleasing.
One of the most powerful tools I’ve found in this process is learning to ask the right questions—The right questions have a way of bringing out our dormant knowing and radically shifting our perspective to see things (including ourselves) differently. Did you know the brain is naturally wired to try to answer questions? This is one of the reasons coaches are such a powerful resource because we’re trained in knowing how to ask the best and most powerful questions to help naturally draw out your own deeper awareness and insights about yourself. Getting to know yourself is often less about discovering and more about uncovering—when we remove the conditioning, we often find that person’s truth. Another great way to get to know yourself is increasing your awareness around your thoughts, speech and actions. We don’t realize how much of these things happen on autopilot—we become so used to how we think/act that we don’t realize how automatic they become. Acting as a curious scientist observing yourself without judgement can help you collect information about the things you think about and how they make you feel, how you talk to yourself, how you tend to self-sabotage which can help identify blocks and unhelpful patterns of behaviour. Getting to know yourself—the good and even the not-so-good, can help us begin to see ourselves clearly and then learn to give love and compassion to the parts of ourselves that we may have previously shamed or hid. The key to aligned goals is to know yourself, continually do your inner work to heal and clear your misconceptions, and then work towards those goals with high intention and low attachment.
THERE IS NO ONE SIZE FITS ALL APPROACH & NO ONE KNOWS YOU BETTER THAN YOU
Many of us are conditioned to look outside of ourselves for the answers, and these days there are many people out there positioning themselves as experts. Keep in mind that experts have expertise on a specific subject matter—meaning when you are the subject, YOU are the expert. Stop outsourcing your knowing and your power to others and copying their vague, specific and general ABC, 123 and acronym-based strategies, assuming they’ll work for you because it worked for them. We often look to people outside of ourselves for the answers, the shortcuts, the silver bullet solutions. We all want an expert to give us the step-by-step or copy and paste strategy to their results. But while they can take their years of knowledge and experience and distill their processes and their systems, they will never be able to give you your blueprint to your success. Even if we have similar problems, your combination of traits and experiences makes you unique, so nobody knows you and what’s best for you better than you. So don’t beat yourself up when their strategies don’t work for you and think it means something about you—the only thing it means is that you need to take what works for you and leave the rest, then find some new information to fill in the gaps and try again. While I admit frameworks and guidance can be helpful, this should always be paired with your intuition. If any part of their strategy doesn’t sit right with you or goes against your instincts, trust yourself and always do what feels most aligned to you.
Your best path to success is to follow your inner compass—your true north is your intuition and your self wisdom. This comes back to knowing yourself. Just because they achieved success that way does not mean that has to be your path to success. Once you remove the noise of the external conditioning and the ego and tune in to your inner voice, you’ll hear your best way forward. If you struggle to listen to your inner voice and intuition, I suggest cultivating a practice of meditation and tuning in to your body. Your gut and your heart have neurons just like your brain. There is a reason why people say: “Listen to your heart” or “Trust your gut” — they are also centres of intelligence in your body. Practice getting out of your logical mind and tuning into your body and what feels right. You might notice a subtle sensation or feeling, perhaps a pull or urge to act on something—do it. Try it and see how it turns out. Start with small decisions—go for a drive without an agenda. Turn off your GPS and ask yourself, do I make a left or right at the stop sign? Carve your own path—remember, there are often many possible routes to the same destination, so be open to the possibilities. If you want to make lasting change in your life, you must develop the ability to trust yourself.
ENJOY THE PROCESS AND CELEBRATE THE PROGRESS
So many of us want fast results, and it’s no wonder we live in a world of instantaneous gratification—we can practically have all our needs and desires fulfilled in an instant. All the information and connection we could ever want is at our fingertips with just a few taps and clicks—even food and products are all readily available to us, to be picked up or even delivered to our door, same day. We’ve gotten so used to getting everything quickly and conveniently that it feels hard to have to wait or work for it. We want to read a book, watch a video or take an online course and learn everything we need to know quickly, but we often forget that knowledge alone isn’t power; it’s the integration of knowledge—which comes only from the repeated application. Of course, that’s not sexy, and nobody wants to hear that, but it’s true. It’s taking all you’ve learned and put it into practice, not just once but over and over again. This part is always easiest in the beginning when you’re full of excitement for the possibilities, eager to put what you know into action, thinking you’ll see immediate results—but when you don’t, it’s all too easy to give up because you feel like you failed. Let me remind you, failure is part of the process of success, and can you even call it a failure if you never stop trying until you succeed? Don’t fall back into old patterns or stories thinking it works for other people and not you, or you’re just not “cut out for this” because perseverance is everything. Some change is natural and easy; other times, it’s hard, but either way, it usually takes more time than we expect and happens more slowly than we’d like. Sometimes change is so gradual that it’s almost imperceptible. It’s hard to see it clearly when you’re so close, but try to make a habit of slowing down and taking the time to notice the progress. Small gains and little wins also deserve to be celebrated—celebrate yourself daily just for showing up. Step back and change your perspective so you can survey your progress and celebrate how far you’ve come even before you’ve arrived. Be present and full of gratitude now; appreciate all the parts of the journey—make it fun. Do something new or challenging and allow yourself to be happy and proud just for doing it, no matter how it turns out, because if the journey is not enjoyable, you’ll burn out before you get the goal.
So if you find yourself in the next couple of weeks faced with another set of failed New Years’ goals or resolutions, then maybe it’s time to take a radically different approach. Throw out the goals, resolutions, and expectations and decide to uncover yourself—Make this the year you unlearn all you think you know and be open to getting to know your true self. Through this process, you’ll find yourself more empowered to achieve your goals than ever before—-to flourish, you must focus on laying a solid foundation, and YOU are the foundation from which your goals and dreams will grow.
Nicki Brown, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Nicki is a women’s empowerment coach and the owner of Sunflowers In Sunshowers, a company that focuses on helping women flourish through holistic and transformational life coaching. She is passionate about the work she is doing to help women love themselves wholly and live their life more fully. After experiencing a “quarter life crisis”—she struggled with her identity, life direction and overall life satisfaction—this was her awakening. She began a healing journey of self discovery and uncovering which led to dismantle her pre-conceived beliefs and re-define not only herself but her vision of “the good life”. This journey eventually led her to realize her calling as a life coach and pursue a certification as a life and health coach. Her mission is to help women heal from their past conditioning and misunderstandings so that they can uncover their authentic selves, step into their power and create their vision of “the good life” too. To date, she has had the privilege of helping women all over the world from London, England to Portland Oregon.
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