In American culture, it’s very popular to discuss goals around the new year. From the day after Christmas, into the first half of January, goal setting tends to dominate our dialogue.
Personally, my FAVORITE time of year to revisit goals and jump into massive action is August, and here are the reasons why:
Most people are deadline driven
The average person is deadline motivated. Most of us tend to focus on the urgent needs in front of us and put on the back burner the items that can wait. When a goal for the year is set in January, it’s easy to defer taking action. There is a wide gap between the starting line and the deadline.
The nice part about August is that you start to get that urgency feeling. OOF! Seven months have already passed. If I am going to hit this goal by the end of the year, I better start jumping on it right now. Summer has passed and the nearness of the end of the year starts to add that necessary pressure.
Summer Vibes are Dwindling
When summer hits, many people take their eyes off their goals. It’s very easy to set it all aside when we take a vacation and mentally want to check out. However, it’s also very common that we forget to pick the baton back up when we return home. The general feel of summer is to chill, which doesn’t coincide with taking massive action toward our goals.
August is the perfect transition. We mentally feel like it’s time to tuck away the flip flops and get out the running shoes.
Routines Matter
One of the most important aspects of achieving goals is to break them down into habits and to build those habits into our routines. For many people, the summer is full of interruptions to the routines. Whether it’s traveling, house guests, kids at home, or many other factors, the daily rituals can be more challenging. With August comes a return to normal, and it’s much easier to habit-stack those daily rituals that will lead to success.
If you would like to use a proven template to model your goals in a way that will help you be successful in achieving them, click here for an example of how I design mine.
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OOOOF! I’ve done it before and now I’m doing it again. I am publishing on the internet something very personal and vulnerable to me because I believe it will help others.
In the 10-week course I teach, we spend a couple weeks laying the foundation of how to set effective goals, why it matters to have a why, evaluating where you are on the wheel of life and creating a vision for what you want to create.
Then, for the next seven weeks we dive deeply into each of the seven spokes.
Lastly, we use the final couple of weeks to wrap up all of that content and write your vision plan to create the life you want. It’s written in such a way that you are significantly more likely to follow through and achieve your goals.
Between now and the end of the year, I am going to write about my experience setting these goals and the path to achieving them by the end of the year.
The last five months of the year can be so incredibly powerful if we choose to harness the opportunity. Any of those January goals that were set and not accomplished, can still be done.
I have a personality that is heavily driven by deadlines, so the end of the year is when I put my blinders on and get to work.
Over the next five months, I am going to explain each section of this vision plan, and will be showing up on Instagram almost every day in my stories to track the progress of each spoke.
I have a pretty clearly defined reason for doing this, and I’ll happily share my motivation with you.
The purpose of this blog and my entire coaching practice is to motivate and inspire people to create the lives they desire. I want you to be your absolute favorite version of yourself. Publishing my goals and publicly tracking them will make it crystal clear and obvious how the path to your success (however you define it) is paved in the small, daily decisions made over an extended period of time. It requires lots of self-love and grace. And it’s messy.
Now, let’s track my beautiful mess for the next 23 weeks.
If you have life changes you would like to create and are curious to see if hiring a coach may be beneficial to you, click here to schedule a complimentary strategy session with me. In this one hour call, I will walk you through an exercise that will give us a clear picture of where you are and where you want to be and then we will discuss the best next steps for you to get there.
Did you know that every now and then life will hand you a gift you probably won’t recognize?
When we have a major life-changing event, we are presented with an opportunity to create new habits at the snap of our fingers.
Traditionally, changing too many habits at once is nearly impossible. For most people, your brain experiences overwhelm, and after a brief period of time, you will revert back to what was comfortable. It has been proven that tackling one new habit at a time will set you up for the best long-term success.
However, there is one exception.
When you experience a major life change, you are forced to create all new habits at once.
Most of the time we are not consciously aware of this opportunity so we just stumble along until we find a new normal.
If intentional, you can set yourself up for great success, whether the new life change is positive or negative.
Personally, I am encountering this right now. Tomorrow is my last day at the job I’ve had for four years. Beginning Monday, I am officially self-employed. Everything about my routine will be changing. For four years I have had to shuffle every aspect of my life around the concrete blocks of 8:00-5:30pm being consumed by a full-time job and the commute to and from there.
Suddenly, come Monday morning, that giant block will disappear. Because of what I know about habits, I am choosing to consciously move into this space. Since I will be instantly forced to create new habits around my lunches and snacks, morning routine, evening routine, and time constraints, I can design them with intention.
This morning I sat down and reflected on my goals I set for the year. I attached every single one of them to a daily habit that could help me get there.
My challenge for you is that next time it feels like the rug is being pulled from underneath you and everything is changing in one moment, choose to see the opportunity. Regardless of whether the reason for the life change is positive or devastating, you are being handed a fresh start and can design your new normal. Choose your habits wisely and with intention.
Got a question or wanna chat about this topic? Text me at 813-946-6706.
Limiting beliefs are the most common obstacle holding us back.
A limiting belief is something we believe to be true about ourselves or our circumstances but is not based on fact. We THINK it’s a fact, but when we break it down, it’s a story we are telling ourselves is true.
Recently on a coaching call, I heard one of the most common limiting beliefs arise. I decided it was appropriate to address it on the blog because if you are using this language, it’s time to change it up.
The statement: I don’t have enough time to _______[insert something you claim is a priority to you]____________.
We hear this one all the time, don’t we? I don’t have enough time to exercise, eat right, spend quality time with my family, market my business, do my hobby, etc.
The reality may be that there truly is no margin left on your schedule. I have been there, but learn to reframe the situation to state what is a fact.
For example, I cut having a regular exercise routine out of my life for two years. I know. I know. I know. I am not advocating this to other people. I do not recommend it as a lifestyle choice, but it was a conscious decision I made.
Technically, I DID have time to exercise. There are were other things that could have been moved to make room for it, but I chose different priorities.
I had a baby I was breastfeeding, a full-time job, and decided to launch my business on the side. Getting two kids and myself ready, dropped off to childcare, and picked up was 11 hours of every Monday-Friday. Add the cooking, cleaning, laundry, bedtime routine, and quality time with them, and I had about 1 hour of margin a day I could squeeze in. On any given day, that one hour could be used for self-care, quality time with the husband, or working on my business.
I share that with you to say why language is important.
Instead of saying, “I don’t have time to exercise,” I would say “My health is still a high priority to me. For this season, taking care of my health looks like prioritizing a full night’s rest, making good choices with my food, and trying to get my heart rate up when I play with my kids.”
It was a conscious choice I made. I was not a victim. The calendar wasn’t controlling me. I knew I was in a temporary season with too many things on my plate to do it all. I chose my job, sleep, quality time with my family, and launching a new business over a routine exercise schedule.
If “not enough time” is something you find yourself complaining about, my recommendation is to start talking about time in the language of priorities. Not getting your full night’s rest every night? Be honest with yourself about why.
“Staying up late to ________ is more important to me than the health benefits of a full night’s rest.” Fill in your blank. Scroll social media? Read a book? Study? Check emails? Watch TV? Clean the house? I’ve consciously chosen to sacrifice a few hours of sleep for another priority on many occasions, so I’m not judging you. I’m just saying…call a spade a spade. It gives you a healthier perspective.
If the circumstances you are in have you feeling trapped, or you feel out of control, then my recommendation is to make a gameplan of how you will change the circumstance, not accept that it is a truth about how your life always has to be.
Sometimes the answer may be setting hard boundaries in relationships, or even ending ones that cannot be saved. It may look like asking for help, or looking for a new opportunity. Your solution could involve pivoting a new life direction, scaling back, leaning in, leaning out. Every situation is different.
You have the time to do what matters most to you.
Let the way you spend your time be a reflection of your priorities.
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This week it’s time to get back to the basics. Although I refer to the “7 spokes” almost every week, it has been quite some time since we talked on the blog about what they are.
Our lives are a complex balance of many areas. If you’re anything like me, you often feel like an octopus trapped in a human body trying to balance more plates on your hands than possible. It’s normal.
In the Ziglar model I teach, we focus on 7 spokes of the Wheel of Life:
Mental
Physical (Health)
Spiritual
Personal (Self-Care)
Family
Career
Finances
Personally, I like to add an 8th bonus spoke that I track in my life, which is Philanthropy.
When I work with my coaching clients on achieving balance in their lives, the goal is never, ever to create an even wheel. There is no sense in striving for a goal that cannot be achieved. In the rare instances when it is achieved, it is never sustainable. That simply isn’t how life works.
Balance is when each of the spokes is healthy, stable and strong. Some areas may be stronger than others. Some may need more support and attention than others. This makes you human.
Each and every week as I assist in guiding my clients toward creating the lives they desire, the goal we are always working to achieve is growth. Growth is the goal.
My recommendation to everyone in the goal setting process is to ensure that you are intentionally monitoring each of these areas of your life, and looking for room for improvement. When any one of these areas are weak, they will drag down all the others.
Some spokes, when they become particularly high, can raise up the others. If someone is ever uncertain of which spoke to focus on first, I always recommend the mental spoke. It is the one spoke that when improved to the highest level you can attain, will naturally raise all the others.
The other spokes, it may not work out the same. You can have all the money in the world and lack strong relationships or your health. You can have the closest family ties and be completely broke. You can get into the best shape of your life while your career is suffering.
However, your mental spoke will lift up all the others. When you see things with a healthy perspective, are filled with gratitude, feel confident in your own skin, overflow with joy and have a positive attitude, the abundance will help every other spoke rise.
In January, I led a free five day mental fitness challenge. If you missed out on the opportunity and would love to take a peek at the material we covered, I am opening it back up. You can enter your email here and Monday-Friday next week, you will receive tips each morning to help you improve your mental spoke.
This quote came across my Instagram stories last week, “You don’t inspire others by being perfect. You inspire them by how you deal with your imperfections.”
Immediately, I resonated with it at a very deep level. I had never been able to put language to what I was trying to create with this blog and in my coaching business, but this line said it all. If you have followed my content for any length of time, then you know I regularly interweave my mistakes with the lessons that accompanied them. My desire is to teach by walking alongside you, not by standing behind a podium on a platform pretending to have it all figured out.
So with that said, it’s time to circle back to a post from December, where we discussed the three recommendations to effective goal setting. As a recap, the three principles were:
Don’t set goals, solve problems
Focus on the habits
Have an abundance of love and grace
We are now six weeks into the new year, and chances are your goal chart is not trending perfectly up and to the right. Most of you have probably hit some bumps in the road. Let’s talk about those. Since I know most people learn best through stories, we will discuss the bumps through my own personal experiences in the first six weeks of 2021.
At the beginning of the year I set 9 goals for 2021, but knew I could not tackle them all at once. They needed to be handled a few at a time.
For this year, the spokes that needed to most attention were:
Financial
Upgrading from a sedan to a minivan (Also a family spoke goal)
Finishing our 6 month emergency fund (we began the year with 2 months)
Saving money toward a home upgrade (having 1 bathroom for a family of 4 has its moments 😉
Family
Finishing our home renovations so we can list our house
Capturing more photos and videos of my children (At 2 and 7 their childhood is in its prime and I want to treasure these days)
Health
Lose 20 pounds by prioritizing daily exercise and cleaner eating (long list of the reasons why I want to do this. They are all health benefits and quality of life connected. I love my body as she is, and want to take better care of her)
Self-Care
Prioritize stress management outlets
Career
Transition to full time coaching
Mental & Spiritual
Prioritize my meditation practice daily
It’s important for me to share my list of goals with you so that the rest of the content makes more sense.
It’s not wise to tackle all the goals at once. I knew I needed to pick three to focus specifically on for quarter 1 so the rest could fall into place over the course of the year.
For January, I decided to tackle my morning routine because it’s a foundational habit. It would help the mental, spiritual and physical goals that I set, which I believed would set me up for success everywhere else.
However, I hit some major roadblocks. Oftentimes, when trying to create new habits, we discover other habits that must first be addressed in order to create the space for the new habit to develop.
In my attempt to wake up earlier, I needed to go to bed earlier. In my attempt to go to bed earlier, I discovered just how much I had gotten accustomed to doing after the children went to bed. My 2020 routine had been to have the children in bed by 8pm and then I would sleep 11pm-7am. Trying to shift to a 5am wake up call meant a 9pm bedtime.
I truly thought I could do it on January 1st. However, as the month progressed, I realized that so many other spokes were getting completely neglected. I had created space in that time for my writing, cleaning my house, quality time with my husband and stress decompression. Going to bed earlier, so I could put new things into my morning routine that weren’t already in my life, proved to not be sustainable for me.
Something had to give, somewhere.
I already knew my plate was full and at maximum capacity. I told that to people regularly. However, I had convinced myself I could squeeze in some new habits. The truth was, I definitely could not. So what was going to go? Something could no longer fit.
The middle to end of January looked messy as I powered through deadlines and projects and intentionally let things fall through the cracks while my husband and I discussed a sustainable solution.
I had to shift the order I planned to accomplish my goals.
On January 1, the map I made for my year slated my career changes for Q3. I believed I could keep growing this business on the side of a career and make the leap later. Two weeks into the new year I proved I was wrong.
We re-evaluated the goals and realized that one goal on the list of 9 could be THE catalyst of change in every other area. The career spoke.
In 2020, my schedule looked like working a full time job for 40-50 hours a week, and then running this blog and coaching business for an average of 10 hours per week. If you go back and reread that list of 9 goals, imagine how much easier they would all be to accomplish if I transitioned into a career that allowed me to add back in 10-20 hours a week to my other spokes AND increased my income significantly.
I had to pivot.
I paused my January intentions of mastering my morning routine and set to figure out how to make the transition. And today, as I write this blog, I’m in that messy middle. I am working with the leadership at my dayjob to find a replacement and train her/him while I tie up any loose ends. Simultaneously, I am building a strong foundation for what is to come in the near future.
As I sit here in mid-February with none of my habits completely successful, I have the power to choose the story I tell myself. I know that I cannot yet check any boxes and declare one accomplished, but I can see that the stage is being set and preparations are underway.
Have you hit any roadblocks on your journey to accomplish your goals? What solutions are working for you? How are you overcoming the obstacles?
Do you realize you still have the power to accomplish everything you intended? What can you learn from what DIDN’T work last month? How can you be empowered by that experience instead of discouraged?
Beginning April 7, I released a blog once a week for 42 straight weeks. After over a decade of desiring to be a consistent blogger, I proved to myself I could do it. I made a commitment and saw it through.
And then last week I did not.
It was the first time I missed a post in 43 weeks.
Behind the scenes, I was juggling an intense workload and a massive amount of moving parts in my personal life.
When it got to the point I realized I could not carve out time for my writing, I had an opportunity.
Whenever anything happens we are not expecting, we have an opportunity. I had 100% full control over the story I attached to that circumstance. The story I chose to attach would affect my emotional response. My emotional response would affect my mood, and my ability to perform at a high level in all the other facets of my life.
In the moment where I realized I had too heavy a load to carry and the blog would have to be the dropped ball, I chose grace for myself.
I chose to tell myself the story of “well done on your 42 week streak. Sometimes life happens. You’ll pick up where you left off next week.”
I choose to tell you this story because chances are, you too have broken a commitment you made to yourself. Something you said you would start doing, continue doing, or maybe stop doing. Considering it’s the first week of February, statistically speaking, many of you have probably already fallen from perfection on your new year goals.
I encourage you to love yourself through the journey of imperfection.
My recommendation is to pause when the unexpected occurs, and take control of the stories you attach. You can choose a story that discourages you and causes you to beat yourself up. It will probably take a jab at your self-confidence and your perseverance.
Or, you can choose a story that empowers you. You can remind yourself of your worth and how you will rebound.
There was a season of my life I participated in hustle culture, mostly from my teen years through early twenties. I believed that burning the candle at both ends and running myself ragged would help me get to the top faster.
I specifically remember one speaker in college who greatly inspired me. He was a highly successful businessman who was the guest speaker at an event my last semester. There were two quotes he shared that day that I wrote down and internalized,
“You can sleep when you’re dead.”
And
“Do not put off for tomorrow what can be done today.”
My type-A personality loved the reinforcement to continue to pursue my workaholic behaviors.
Fast forward two years from that event and my body was crashing, my marriage wasn’t very healthy, I was regularly sick, I lived with constant brain fog and I was exhausted all the time, to the point of falling asleep in my desk at work. This was not working for me.
I later learned that sure, this man had accumulated a lot of wealth and had built one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, but his family suffered. His marriage ended in divorce and come to find out, he didn’t have a strong relationship with his kids until they were adults.
After my body crashed and I took my sabbatical, I started reframing the way I did everything.
The first thing I did was grab a couple mentors. I looked specifically for people who were in their sixties and had created a life that looked like what I wanted mine to resemble at that age: strong family, successful career, financial independence and a peaceful confidence.
It was fascinating to me what these two very different people had in common. Although they had never met, their habits highly resembled one another:
• Strong spiritual life • Daily meditation practice • Full night’s rest every night • Prioritized healthy eating • Always stayed hydrated • Had strong boundaries around their time • Valued philanthropy • Read books constantly • Insatiable hunger to learn
I started realizing that I had none of these habits, and I had to release my beliefs around hustle culture. I was “too busy” to slow down and make time for these habits.
Instead of believing I could sleep when I was dead, I spent months getting 9 hours of sleep a night until my body caught up. Now 7.5 is when my body naturally wakes up.
Instead of believing nothing could wait until tomorrow, I now believe that almost everything can wait, and I pick the most important priorities each day. I am deliberate at prioritizing each area of my life and giving it space on my calendar. What’s not on the calendar waits until its designated time. I have fully accepted that my to-do list will never, ever, ever get to zero.
I calendar time with my husband to binge-watch television. I set aside time with my kids to sit in the house with no plans and chill on the couch or chase them around in circles (quite literally, one of their favorite games is playing ‘catch me’ while we run around the kitchen island).
Less truly is more.
As we enter into the peak of the holiday season, I hope you are able to detach from any hanging to-do lists. I hope you give yourself permission to rest. I hope you freely allow things to wait until January to be done. I hope you enjoy the present moment, enjoy your families, and create space and time for restoration, whatever activities that word involves for you.
Grace and Peace my friends,
Sophia
.
Thanks for making it to the end of this blog post! Two options to keep going if you want more:
Looking to create more peace in your life? Then I highly recommend downloading the free E-book from my site, Create Peace. Just drop your email below and it will be sent to you.
Since most of my readers have discovered this blog in the last few months, that means many of you weren’t around last year when I did a 30-day series where I blogged every single day with habit tips for the 7 spokes of the wheel of life. I thought today was appropriate to provide a recap of those posts and give you links to them in case there’s a certain area of your life you are looking to improve this coming year.
First off, let’s chat about what the 7 Spokes are and why they matter. The 7 spokes are personal (self-care), mental, physical, spiritual, family, career, and financial. If any one of these spokes are low, it will hold back all of the other areas. (Side note: If you want a free download of a Wheel of Life and directions on how to analyze for yourself where your strengths and areas of growth are, just download the free e-book Create Peace at the bottom of this page)
For many years I struggled with missing certain goals over and over again, and had this feeling like I was stuck. Finally, I was introduced to the Wheel of Life and realized that I couldn’t make headway because I had a flat tire. My negligence to get certain parts of my life in order was holding back the areas where I wanted to find more success. It’s all intertwined.
As I shared in the “Before you set your 2021 goals” post, a key component in goal setting is habits. True success occurs when we change something we do daily. Habits are the difference maker between creating sustainable life changes or just sprinting and reverting back.
So, what are the two most important concepts to understand about goal setting? Habits and the seven spokes. Creating healthy habits in each of your spokes and continuing to adjust them as your seasons and circumstances change will be some of the most important decisions you make.
In this series, I highlighted habits within each spoke to help inspire others to look at the habits in their own lives and reflect on areas of growth. My hope is that one or more of these posts may be helpful to you as your create your intentions for 2021.
We all know what it feels like to have the wind sucked out of us when disappointment takes over. It’s an awful feeling. I used to experience it much more often, until I learned a valuable lesson:
Setting expectations only leads to unnecessary disappointment.
In 2009, tears streamed down my cheeks the whole way home on a flight from Los Angeles to Tampa. While there, I had been offered the ideally perfect job for me, with the minimum salary we needed to survive, and I felt like everything I had worked 5 years toward creating was coming true. We filled out the paperwork for an apartment in Glendale and starting planning our new lives.
Then, I got the strangest phone call the night before I left. It all came crashing down. I would have to leave L.A. with no prospects, my tail between my legs and the reality that we would probably be staying exactly where we were…in the 470 sq ft studio in the same zip code where I grew up.
I was devastated. We both were.
My husband finished his L.A. internship and came back to our tiny studio. We didn’t know what else to do since it was the peak of the recession, so we started our own business. Fresh out of college. That business ended up providing an income that supported both of us and opened up doors to relationships that have changed the course of our lives.
We still ended up making all the things we wanted happen…just here. In my hometown. Not 2500 miles away. Now we both have careers we love, two kids, a home, and my family lives in the same neighborhood as us.
When I think back to how disappointed I was when the opportunity I thought I wanted didn’t work out, I realize that it was a gift.
Plan B became Plan A, and I am better off for it. How can we even see what gifts may be resting in Plan B if we are too busy being overwhelmed in grief from Plan A (that by the way…never happened, was never going to happen, and literally only existed as a figment in our imagination)?
Mindfulness teaches us to keep our thoughts and energy in the current moment. This is particularly challenging for me, but I’ve learned it’s the best path to my inner peace. When I feel the emotion of disappointment coming on, I pause. I ask myself if I am only feeling this because of an expectation I set in my own imagination, and if I am missing a gift that is right in front of me.
As we prepare for 2021, my encouragement for you is to hold the plans loosely. I believe setting goals and intentions are important. They give us something to strive toward. They help us rise into growth and self-improvement. However, we must be prepared for the curveballs that are inevitably coming.
And before I go, I know many of you probably feel disappointment the most from other people. I feel you. But it’s really not much different than what you expect from your future plans. We cannot control either people, nor plans. I try really hard to release people of crazy high expectations, especially the expectations to which I hold myself. I choose to observe people. I let their actions show me their personalities, their priorities, their insecurities, their fears, their past hurt, their strengths, their gifts, etc. When someone disappoints me, I just watch it and observe it. I allow the experience to teach me something I need to learn about myself.
In simple terms…I hold my expectations of people much like I do my plans…loosely and with gratitude.
Thanks for making it to the end of this blog post! Two options to keep going if you want more:
Looking to create more peace in your life? Then I highly recommend downloading the free E-book from my site, Create Peace. Just drop your email below and it will be sent to you.
