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INTRO: Welcome, my name is Christy Fechser,  and you are listening to All In The Name Of Growth. This is the podcast for women who are seeking inspiration and advice on how to design their life on their terms. We cover relevant topics like mindset shifts, setting boundaries, growing a business, overcoming limiting beliefs, plus the timeless topics like life, business, relationships, and money. After 20 years of marriage, raising a family, building several businesses as an entrepreneur, and mentoring women for over a decade, I have a thing or two to share. I love helping women see their life with a fresh perspective. So thanks for tuning in. 

0:42  

Hey, so excited to have you with me. Really excited to be able to try to do the podcast also on video. I have been thinking a lot about my course and the way that I disseminate information and the content that I give. And I know that everybody learns a little bit differently – everybody is a little bit different in the way that they consume information and content. So I’m trying to hit the high points of the visually… the people that like to visually see things and the people who like to audibly hear things, and the people who like to read things. So we’re gonna hit the blog, YouTube, and podcast and see if we can get the information out there for the people that are really searching for it. So I’m excited to try it this way. 

1:22  

And I’m also excited about today’s topic to be able to talk about goal setting. This is something that’s really big in my life and has been so pivotal. And I know that it is really impactful for a lot of other people who are goal setters. And so I want to be able to help people understand why goal setting one is important, but also how to actually achieve your goals. So this is probably going to be a reoccurring theme through the podcasts and videos because it is something that is so critical and something that most people don’t do. 

1:53  

In fact, did you know that less than 10% of the population even sets goals? Let that sink in for a second – less than 10% of the population even sets goals. I can’t even imagine that… I can’t even imagine. The other thing about that though, the sad thing for me is that less than 8% of the people who are setting their goals are actually achieving them. That is heartbreaking. It is so heartbreaking to me, personally, because I know what it is meant to set goals. I know what it means to have vision boards and written out goals and even putting them in an audio file that I can listen to, journaling all of the things that helped me to be able to set my goals and to be able to achieve them. In fact, I have a course. And in that course, one whole module is completely about goal setting, because that’s how important it is. 

2:49  

So I’m excited to be able to talk to this today. Really what I want to do is share probably five or six reasons why people don’t succeed at setting their goals. And the first one, the BIGGEST reason why people don’t succeed at their goals is because they’re so distracted, that they can’t even focus on what they’re trying to achieve. And distraction can come in a lot of forms. I’m not just talking about binge-watching Netflix, although that is a really good distraction. 

3:21  

I’m talking about family distractions, or personal distractions, or work distractions, or it can be social media distractions, news, distractions, the world climate distraction. Like, we can get caught up in other people’s stories and their lives and the game that they’re playing and it totally takes us out of being the main character in our own lives and realizing that we are the ones that move that needle forward and that we are the one that needs to continue to be plugged into our own lives and focused on what it is we’re actually trying to achieve in our own lives.

3:57  

We live in the most incredible day and age where information is available to us at the drop of a hat. We can find out anything, more than we need actually. And I think that one of the things is that people get so caught up in watching other people live successful lives or what appear to be successful lives because not all of them are. And they don’t actually take that into their own life and try and live those principles with themselves. So like for example, my son since my youngest son, he loves YouTube. It’s so his jam and he loves gaming, and he wants to be a YouTuber if he’s 10. And he’s wanted it for as long as I can remember – for as long as I can remember him saying the thing that he wanted out of life, that was the thing he wanted was to be a YouTuber. 

4:53  

And it’s been funny to me because he watches and watches and watches other people play games and you know he consumes content. And we have talked about it once that if he wants to be good at his craft in being a YouTuber, and being a gaming YouTuber specifically, that he needs to get really good at gaming. And I think that people don’t like spend the time to think about that – that they’re so caught up in what everybody else is doing in their life and their lifestyle, that they don’t focus on what things they can implement in their own life to try and change their own outcome. And that is obviously one of the biggest pieces of goal setting. And achieving your goals is to just get focused on what you’re trying to do and learn your craft, which actually takes me into my next point. 

5:41  

Point number two is that people are not willing to learn what it’s going to take in order to achieve their goal. So I have a goal, I want to be completely fluent in Mandarin Chinese. It is something I’ve wanted for years, it is the hardest language on the planet to learn. And I cannot learn it if I am not literally focused on setting aside time every day to make sure that that is happening. That I am setting aside that time to memorize those characters, really understand and learn the fluctuations that come with the tonalities of what Mandarin is, and how to construct sentences because it’s backwards from English, which is actually helpful for me, because I kind of already speak English backwards. 

6:31  

But the thing is that if you’re not willing –  I mean, it’s one thing to say, ‘Oh, I want to be fluent in Mandarin”, but it’s another thing to actually put in the work to make it happen. And in my previous business that I built, I have a lot of people set this goal of like a money level or like a rank level that they wanted to achieve in their business. And then there was no like fruit. There was no labor happening to produce what they were wanting. And it always boggled my mind that they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, I want to earn like $10,000 a month within the next six months,” but they were putting in like maybe an hour a week into the side business to try and grow it into a business. And I’m like, an hour a week isn’t gonna get you what you want nor do you have even the ability to perfect your craft and learn what it is that you need to do and refine your message and your approach to be able to like funnel it down into the thing that you’re trying to achieve. 

7:28  

And it’s so important that if you’re going to set a goal, that you’re going to also learn how to achieve that goal, right? Like if you want to become a chef, you have to learn how to cook, you have to start at square one. And which leads me to my next point, and that is that everybody, when we get started in goals, we have to realize that we have to start at the beginning. Like nobody can get to the top rung of the ladder without taking the first step up the ladder. And I was actually having a conversation with my youngest son about this the other day too because he has big goals for what he wants to achieve in his life. He lives in an adult world so he’s very like mature and forward-thinking for a 10-year-old. 

8:11  

And I was talking to him about how he really likes the big… like if you imagine a ladder and if you imagine the first rung on the ladder is normally within like, you know, a one-foot stepping height of where our feet are planted on the ground, and that’s where the ladder starts. But a lot of people don’t want to take the first step. They want to be on like the fifth step. And so I showed him an image, and it basically had all of the first four rungs gone, and the fifth one was there but it was something that you can’t even reach. 

8:44  

In the image, it was something you couldn’t even attain or reach because it was so far above where you are. And people get so caught up in wanting to be there without realizing that you have to take the first step on the ladder to be able to get to the next step to the next step to the next step. There’s actually a story about a man who came to California back in the Gold Rush days, and he bought a plot of land and he was out there working his land, working his land, working his land, trying to find the gold and he ended up quitting and sold his land to somebody else, went back to the country that he came from. And the man that bought it went out there with his pick, you know, dunk dunk dunk dunk dunk within like three feet found this like huge vein of gold. And it’s so true, it is so so so true. And this has been a huge motivator for me for the last decade is that it will seem impossible before it actually starts happening. And that is just part of the process. 

9:38  

So when you’re out there and you’re like trying to achieve your goals, recognizing that one, you have to start on the first rung, but two, don’t skip steps and don’t give up midway up the ladder because you’re going to just burn your whole dream to the ground and you won’t ever be able to achieve the thing that you want. And the bad thing about that mentality, that way of going about your goals, is that when you get yourself to a point where you quit mid-goal, and you do it over and over and over, you are teaching yourself that you’re a quitter. And that you will never achieve the things you want in life. And so you stop even trying because you’ve never achieved anything. And that’s, I think that that is probably one of the biggest reasons why people don’t set goals, or why they aren’t achieving them is because they’re quitting on themselves before they even have a chance to succeed at it. 

10:26  

Okay, next one, you don’t set yourself up for success. And in this I am talking about, not just like… setting yourself up for success is like really multifaceted because it comes down to your health, it comes down to your sleep, it comes down to your social environment, how much time you’re spending on your distractions like we talked about already. There’s a lot of things that can affect your success. I mean, it could literally be telling people about the thing that you’re wanting to do, and having them shut your idea down before you can even get it out there. I had good girlfriend, a couple of years ago, gave me a book called, ‘What Do You Do With An Idea’, and it’s so cute, it’s a children’s book. But I love the point in it, and it was basically that you protect your idea, and you protect your goal from the outside forces that are going to try and shut you down. 

11:19  

And you sit with it, and you feed it, and you nourish it until it becomes so big that it’s a force to be reckoned with and doesn’t matter what anybody else is gonna say about it. So when we look at setting ourselves up for success, and we’re looking at our social environment, like are there people that are that are supporting you? Or are they going to shut you down? Are you like setting yourself up for success because you’re allowing yourself the time to sleep and eat and take care of yourself? Or are you burning the candle at both ends, and skipping meals so that you have no energy? 

11:51  

This is something for me that I have to remind myself of literally every week because I’m not a big eater. I, like, food isn’t really my thing. I eat to live and sometimes I forget that I have to eat to live. And so I wake up in the morning, and I’m so excited to get with my day and I start moving along, and then at like 11 I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m dragging.” And by two o’clock, it’s nap time because I can’t even function, and it’s because I didn’t eat anything yet. 

12:17  

And my body needs to function off of something. And so it is for me, as much as it is for anybody else, this is, I’m like, saying all of this from personal experience because I’ve experienced this myself. It’s important that we take care of ourselves internally and externally, that we are making sure that we are setting our priorities up straight, which is my next point, is that in order to achieve a goal, it actually has to be a priority. So a lot of people will set goals because it’s like the trendy thing to do, right? Like, oh, yeah, my new goal is or they set New Year’s goals because it’s the thing that we’re supposed to do, but then they’re not actually committed to those goals and that’s why they always fail at them. 

12:59  

So it’s one thing to be like, ‘Yes, I actually want to get in shape, and I am totally committed to this and I am carving out time and I am going to the gym or I’m going to go for a walk at minimum. I’m going to do something that’s going to move that needle forward.’ And a lot of people though will be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I see all these other people on Instagram or you know, out there in the world, and none of them are actually…’ The people that are consuming the content being distracted from their actual goals, they’re not actually, like focused on that as a priority. 

13:33  

And that person that they’re watching, it is a priority for them. And it is something that they’re working on. And they make it look easy because it is a priority. But when we’re just like, ‘Oh, wow, well, I want what they have. And so I guess I’ll set my goal to be, you know, bathing suit ready for summer, or a six-pack, or I want to have more money, or I want to have a cleaner house’, or you know, like we look at other people’s lives a lot of the times and we’re like, ‘Well, I want what they have so I guess that’s my goal.’ That is a crap way of setting your goals, let me just tell you that. 

14:05  

The thing that you need to find in yourself in goal setting, and this is my final and probably as critical as my first point, is that you have to have feeling to your goals. And a lot of people will be like, ‘Oh set SMART goals so that they’re like measurable and attainable and realistic and you know, whatever time-bound.” SMART goals aren’t going to serve you unless there’s feeling behind it unless there is an emotion that you are connected to, something that you’re trying to attain because we can all say like, ‘I want a million dollars’, but why? Why do you want a million dollars?

14:40  

And I’m not saying that you have to justify the million dollars. I’m saying that there has to be a reason like an underlying feeling that you’re connected to, to be able to actually achieve that goal. I am 100% set in this thought process of how to actually attain your goals. I have actually – you can go on my website, I’ll put it in the comments, or in the description in YouTube and on the show notes in the podcast, I have a whole guide that walks you through understanding the emotional part of setting goals. It’s really, really good. And people will think that we only have like four major emotions, right? 

15:18  

Like anger, sadness, happiness, frustration, maybe I don’t know, like, those are our like, that’s our feelings. But there’s so much more than that. There’s so much more to our feelings, and now like feeling accomplished, that’s why people really want to set goals, right? It’s because they want to feel the feeling of it because money doesn’t make you happy, and buying things doesn’t make you happy. There’s a feeling inside of yourself that accompanies that – and that’s the feeling you’re actually trying to get. So when people do drugs, it isn’t that they want to feel crappy, it’s that they want to stop feeling crappy. They want that like numbing feeling, instead of dealing with their issues, they’re numbing themselves. For people who want to lose weight, it may not actually be at all, that they want to look any different. Maybe they just want to feel different. 

16:08  

So when we get to the heart of it, and we really understand, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I cannot emphasize enough why you need to have feeling and understand that feeling that you’re actually trying to connect to. It’s so so important to be able to understand that what you want to feel is that you can trust yourself – that you can set your goals and achieve them and you can trust yourself, that you have your own back. That come what may, you’re going to figure it out. That’s an internal feeling that we have inside of ourselves, or that we don’t have inside of ourselves. Or maybe you want to feel like prosperous or courageous or like I said, like that you accomplished something, that there’s so many feelings that we want to to feel emotions that we’re actually attached to that it isn’t the physical aspect of it. It’s actually like the adrenaline rush part of it, right? Like adrenaline junkies, they do the crazy things they do because they love the rush – the feeling that is coming from that crazy thing that they’re doing. 

17:13  

So, I mean, the proof is out there in every aspect of everything. I mean, it could just be revenge. There are people out there that are like working their butts off just to tell you, ‘I told you, I could do it.’ You know, to like, give it up in your face kind of thing. And while that’s not necessarily the best way to go about goal setting, I understand that it is an emotion that can move you along. So those are my I don’t know, 1-2-3-4-5-6, maybe things? Let’s see, distraction, stop the distractions, not being willing to learn, you don’t set yourself up for success, it isn’t a priority, there’s no feeling behind it. 

17:51  

I know that there was one more in there, and I can’t remember what it was because I did it on the fly. Okay, so that was like six things. So I am just going to one, recommend if you’re really committed to your goal setting, go over to my website, find the link and go to the website and find this emotion prompt worksheet that I have created that talks about the emotion behind goal setting, and also gives you over 400 emotions that you can pinpoint what it is you’re actually trying to accomplish so that when you are looking at your goals, they can become more of a priority because you understand the feeling that you’re actually going for and trying to achieve those goals. 

18:33  

So, okay, that’s it for today. Thanks for joining me. So happy you’re here. And I’m really looking forward to doing this again next week. Bye. 

18:44  

OUTRO: Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of all in the name of growth. If you felt like the content shared today was helpful or inspired you in some way please share it with your friends. And be sure to tune in again for a fresh perspective on growth mindset shifts and leveling up your life and business.