Category: Goal Achievement

Every December do you start thinking about the next year? I do. I am a lover of all things goals, vision boards and planning. This is prime time for me to start thinking about what I want from my life in the coming year.

After a decade of setting goals and making vision boards, I want to share with you what led to results and what kept me spinning in circles.

Here are the top 3 changes I made to my goal setting strategies that delivered great results.

1.     Don’t set goals. Solve problems. 

We have been taught over and over and over again that goals should be measurable, have deadlines and all these systems on how to set them properly. I did it for YEARS. And I missed a ton of the goals I set.

True change happened in my life when I focused less on the “goal” and more on the problem that needed to be solved. 

Most people are more motivated to solve a problem than meet a goal. So if there is something you want to achieve, rather than focusing on the finish line, focus on why the finish line even matters.

Since health goals tend to dominate New Year resolutions, let’s start with that example. Traditionally, the goals you hear about are number of pounds lost or a new pants size. And how many people give up by February? A lot.

Restructuring this goal for me looked like replacing the pound goal with solving the problem of why I was always so tired.

Just tackling the problem of needing more energy led to more sleep, drinking more water and replacing foods that made me tired with foods that fueled my body. By default, I lost weight.

Can you restructure a goal you were planning to set into a problem you need to solve?

2.     Focus on the habits

I highly recommend as you map out the problems you seek to solve, look for a habit that is connected to that area. True life change happens when we change something we do every day.

Instead of focusing on the large goal, focus on the daily habit that will lead to that success.

For example, we “dabbled” in the Dave Ramsey get-out-of-debt philosophy for six years and kept gaining, not losing debt. We simply could not deal with tracking cash. I know the cash envelopes work for other people, but we could never use them successfully. Three months into using the app EveryDollar we were making financial progress. It syncs with your checking account and any other accounts you want to link. Every transaction, you can drag and drop into a budget line item.

We set a daily goal that we would track our transactions in the app. This simple daily habit kept us tied closely to our budget and helped motivate us into wiser decisions. It inspired us to find ways to enhance our income. By a year in, we had eliminated a ton of financial stress. By three years in, we were debt free (minus the house).

The big goal wasn’t what got us the results, it was the daily habit of making tiny steps in the right direction.

3. An abundance of love and grace

I chose to include this one because my journey completely changed when I fully grasped grace. Goals involve growth. Growth is messy. It requires getting out of your comfort zone and being awkward.

I think one of the mistakes we often make is that we expect it to be easy to achieve our goals. The reality is…it’s most likely going to be two steps forward and one step back. A constant volley between encouragement and discouragement. When the discouragement hits, many people label it a failure and give up. Once you realize it’s just part of the process, you can keep going.

To keep going we have to shower ourselves in grace and love. We have to understand when we make mistakes, we are just human. We have to realize that done is better than perfect. We have to remind ourselves we are worthy, capable and strong.

I feel confident in saying you can accomplish anything you set your mind to achieving. My recommendation is to translate it into a problem to solve, focus on the daily habits that will get you there and to be filled with grace and love for yourself along the way.

2021 is coming. You got this.

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.

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We are two weeks into our 12 week course Create Peace, and I’m seeing a reoccurring pattern that is extremely common with the women I coach.

I find myself encouraging them to lower the standards.

This doesn’t seem like what you would expect from a coaching conversation and yet it happens constantly.

What I have noticed is that the women I work with have this innate drive to improve, but the expectations often don’t match the reality.

In a recent coaching conversation, a mom shared with me that she is already waking up at 4:15am to get some quiet time alone before the family starts waking up. In an effort to improve one of her spokes, she was looking for more time in the day and said “I’m struggling with the fact that I can’t wake up any earlier than I already am.”

Woah. Stop right there. Let’s flip the script.

A full night’s rest is an extremely high priority that I always encourage people to rearrange their lives around. Let’s not adjust there.

I shared with her that I look at my priorities and habits alongside each other constantly. I also measure them against the season of life I’m in and what’s realistic.

Currently, I’m in a season where I am not carving out time for a traditional workout, and I refuse to feel any shame about it. My kids are early risers so they wake me up in the mornings and it’s go-go until everyone is at work and school. I pick them up and we go straight into dinner and bedtime routines. By 8:00pm I have my quiet time before I crash. I choose to use that time for writing, coaching, quality time with my husband, social time with friends, self-care, or the 1,000 tasks weighing on my mind.

However, health is still a priority to me. So what that spoke looks like right now is I got a standing desk at work. I jump on the trampoline with my kids to get my heart rate up. We go on walks in the neighborhood and I try to add in some jogging to have a little cardio. I am regularly lifting my 35 pound toddler.

In addition, I pay very close attention to what I’m eating and am maintaining my health through good food choices, which is 80% of it anyway. I do not budge on prioritizing my water intake and my sleep.

I know eventually my seasons will shift and I won’t have a two year old who always wants to crawl on me. One day, I will return to my love of a structured yoga practice and running triathlons. One day I will be in fantastic shape. I will enjoy the rewards and feeling that come with a fit body. In the meantime, I am releasing the shame around these thunder thighs.

But right now, in this season, balancing these priorities, I am not trying to be superwoman. For some women, their workout is a non-negotiable and that’s fantastic. My health is a non-negotiable, but I’ve just had to find ways to stay healthy that look a little different right now.

To bring it back around to the 4:15 a.m. mom, after we talked it through, what she needed wasn’t more hours in the day. What she needed was to tweak the hours she has to be most efficient. She went from setting a habit goal around how early she rises to looking at her habits around social media and setting goals to prevent her from getting sucked into the scroll.

Another client had to lower the standards by releasing the idea that she had to complete this 12 week course in 12 weeks. It remains online indefinitely, so she is now looking to get through the material over the next 6 months instead because life is throwing her some curve balls.

I regularly find myself helping people slow down, take a deep breath and adjust their expectations.

May we all find the grace with our lives and our circumstances to set expectations that match the capacity we have to do and give in our current reality.

Grace and peace my friends,

Sophia Hyde

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.

If you enjoy reading these posts, then drop your email into the box at the footer of the website and you will get an email from me each week with a new post.

They’re not helping you affect change

Last night I was on a coaching call, and my client was struggling with setting her goals. She had a story in her mind that she needed to lay out her 5-10 year plan, and I was going to help her achieve it. I mean, I’m happy to do that for someone…but that’s not what most people need.

In our culture, we reward and incentivize the goal setters. We’ve all heard the training…set S.M.A.R.T. goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound), but did you know this is completely useless information for 80% of the population?

Most people are not motivated by goals. They are motivated by solving problems.

Don’t get me wrong…about 20% of the population loves goals (my hand is raised right now). We get a high off writing down our plans and checking the box when they’re achieved, but for many people, words on a sheet of paper are not motivating.

Let’s go back to the example from the coaching call. I asked her why she even signed up for the 12 Week Create Peace course with me. She said that initially she thought she wasn’t a fit at all. She thought it was irrelevant timing to where she was at in life, and she wasn’t really in a mental-space to focus on personal growth and development or goal setting (a very common misunderstanding of the work I do).

However, she downloaded the free e-book Create Peace and printed it out because “Who can’t use some more peace?”. Her partner happened to see it lying around and read the first page. He said to her “This is exactly what you need,” so she decided to take the plunge and see what happened.

Naturally, I asked her what was preventing her from living in full peace. She went on to describe some challenges she is facing in her personal life, especially the inability to help an aging parent because of Covid-19, and the emotional toll it was taking on her. She described how she can easily swing back and forth from doing really well to emotionally dark places.

Right there.

It was that simple.

She was struggling to set an intention (a.k.a. goal) for her 12 weeks in the course, and it was right in front of her.

I shared with her how 80% of people are problem solvers, not goal setters. I asked her if instead of trying to set a goal she could pick ONE PROBLEM that if solved would bring so much peace into her life.

Her response was finding coping mechanisms on how to manage the low-lows of the emotional roller coaster. How many of us can resonate with that? How many of us have absolutely been there?

That was it. I encouraged her to set that as her intention for the course, that by the end of our 12 weeks together she would feel more emotionally stable and equipped to handle the day to day stresses of life.

She didn’t need a five year plan. She didn’t need a vision board with vacations and new cars and a fancy house to motivate her to make her life better. She just needed to make the decision that she was going to be intentional about creating some new habits to help her sustain a healthy mental space on a regular basis. And that is enough.

So, what about you? Are you a goal setter or a problem solver?

Thanks for making it to the end of my 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.

If you enjoy reading these posts, then drop your email into the box at the footer of the website and you will get an email from me each Wednesday with a new post.