Why can’t I stick to long-term goals? A free-spirited guide to feminine goal setting.
Audio more your jam? Listen to this post as a podcast episode.
It’s happened, petal. We’ve passed the point of no return. The 2024 halfway mark is upon (and behind) us and besides the sub-zero temperatures inside the homes of Australia (thanks, un-insulation), there’s something else lurking amidst the solo business owners among us.
The looming list of goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year.
If you’re anything like me, your goals chart would look a little like this, with some goals sitting in the 100% bucket (usually something instant like ‘cancel Netflix subscription’) (also, said nobody’s goal, ever), some sitting in the 0% bucket (if I hated running for the duration of 2012 - 2023, the probability of a sudden interest in 2024 was slim at best) and most scraping in at about 18%.
For some of you, this might induce a sense of panic, dread and anxiety. ‘Not AGAIN’, we groan, lamenting the thought of yet another’s year passing us by, another opportunity lost.
Let’s hold up RIGHT there, babes. If you are a goal setter, if you’ve been setting and re-setting goals in January, July, December, year after year after year and you’re absolutely done with literally copying and pasting your goals list from last year to your goals list for this year, this is a blog post [podcast episode] that will completely change your capacity to set and achieve the goals you want to achieve. If you’re a free-spirited business owner and you’re finding yourself stuck in this cycle of work sprints followed by burnout (and repeat), this process will help you regain some of that fun, feminine, free-spirited energy you’ve been missing.
Before I really get going, this is not going to be a blog post walking you through a spreadsheet that makes absolutely no sense to you or a 101 on the SMART goals acronym (because, while helpful, clearly, our humanity has proven that it ain’t enough).
I’m going to walk you through:
Why it’s so hard to achieve the goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year, no matter our intentions
Why motivation (or lack of it) doesn’t matter when it comes to goal setting (and what you need to focus on instead)
The giant gaping step we’re missing as feminine solo business owners when it comes to goal setting (and the real reason we ‘fail’ at achieving the goals we set)
The free-spirited four step method I use to reverse engineer and set the goals I want to achieve as a business owner
How you can apply this to your own goal setting process and start to make your 2024 goals happen
How this method will seriously change your perspective when it comes to the labels you attach to yourself around ‘failing’
Why does achieving my goals feel so hard?
Here’s the thing we don’t really get into when it comes to goal setting: The process of setting your goals, and how you feel during that process, is completely separated from how you feel when you’re actually doing the things you need to do to achieve those goals.
Let’s break that down (break it doooown - anyone? Just me? Okay.):
Goal setting is usually something we do at a milestone or transition point in life (for example, the new year, a new financial year, or a birthday). We’re excited. We’re feeling the energy of momentum that comes with a transition. We’re channelling these feelings into the goals we’re putting down on paper. These feelings attach themselves to our goals and we see our goals through the lens of motivation, excitement, anticipation, renewal. All of the good feels.
Fast forward say, 10 days beyond the goal setting day (okay, let’s be generous - let’s do a month). If you’ve used this quite masculine project manager’s guide to goal setting, you might have broken your yearly goal down into monthly, weekly and even daily actions you need to take to make your goal happen. You might notice that you’ve skipped a few of these, you haven’t done some of them at all, or the actions you have taken haven’t gotten you as far as you thought they would. Because, life, right?
Let’s fast forward again, 4 months beyond the goal setting day. Again, if you’re working your goals like a project and aligning with those monthly, weekly or daily actions, you might notice a pattern that could be described as sporadic at best, or you might be reading the goal you set for yourself and wondering why for the life of you, you thought you’d be able to make it happen alongside managing clients/being a mum/getting enough steps/drinking water/seeing your friends/watching season 1, 2 and 3 of Bridgerton on repeat.
Or you might have achieved every single one 6 months in advance and currently reading this blog post smugly sipping a spicy marg poolside.
The real reason you don’t achieve the goals you set out to achieve
The reason you don’t achieve the goals you set out to achieve is because the process of living your goals feels nothing like the process of setting your goals.
When we set our goals and move into the realm of ‘actually getting the fucking thing done’, especially if we’re aligning ourselves with the project manager’s approach of monthly/weekly/daily actions, we are not accounting for how we want to feel.
Because you can absolutely leverage January motivation for a few days, a week, even a month at best. But that motivation will fade, and when it does, all you’re left with is actually just doing the hard thing you need to do. Without specifically aligning the goals you set for your business, life, whatever it might be, with how you actually want to feel living them, you’ll never get out of goal setting gaol.
Why does my January motivation fade faster than that Kmart jumper I put in the dryer?
Raise your hand if this is you: my motivation feels like a spontaneous wave that comes and goes without warning, one that I have to catch when it’s up and try and muster again when it’s down. (Okay, you can probably tell I’m not a surfer).
Motivation, or lack of motivation, is one of the most commonly researched topics on the internet when it comes to productivity. How can I kickstart my motivation, get it back when I’ve lost it, and why the hell does it go away in the first place?
The thing is: when it comes to achieving your goals, your motivation (or lack of it) DOESN’T matter. That’s right. People who achieve their goals without burning out, aren’t secretly operating on a 365 day motivational high sustained by some magic pill they found on the dark web.
James Clear illustrates this beautifully:
“Today you may be saying, “I need to be motivated to get anything done,” but I guarantee that it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’ve taught yourself to believe certain limitations, then you can also teach yourself to break through them.”
“The patterns that you repeat on a daily basis will eventually form the identity that you believe in and the actions that you take. You can transform your identity and become the type of person who doesn’t need motivation to perform well.”
If we wait around for motivation to kick in, come back or reemerge before we take action on achieving our goals, we’ll likely be copy+pasting our goals into the next decade.
And if you’ve set goals in the past, and used any kind of goal setting framework, you’re probably familiar with the idea that achieving your goals really boils down to the actions you take on the daily - whether or not you’re feeling motivated to take them.
So once we’ve set up our system to support us taking those actions (whether you’re working with something like James Clear’s Atomic Habits system, or a similar framework), we should just seamlessly be able to make those actions happen, right?
Yeah, no. Why? There’s a huge element we are missing when it comes to the way we set goals and what we need to do to achieve those goals.
The free-spirited four step goal setting method I use as a solo business owner
Here’s how I completely turned my entire goal-setting process on its head and finally started achieving my goals as a solo business owner (and how you can too):
Start with one day:
Let’s put the big vision board down for a minute. Picture a day in your mind. Let’s call it your ideal everyday, day. We’re not talking about your dream day where you’re on holiday in Barbados sipping unlimited cocktails and magically having untapped access to a full-time nanny for your adorable children. We’re visualising our ideal day when it comes to a regular any ole’ day of the week with two things in mind: what we’re doing, and how we’re feeling.
I’ll give you an example. My ideal everyday day includes some of these things:
Feeling: I’m not spending every waking minute outside of work time in their faces, but I want to feel present, not distracted by work or torn, resentful or behind when it comes to work.
Goal: I’m around for my kids in the morning and have plenty of time for them after school or daycare pickup.
Feeling: I want to feel energised, refreshed and that my mind is clearer and less chaotic.
Goal: I take three 15 minute walk breaks in the sunshine every day, and I do yoga at least three times a week before I go to bed.
Feeling: I want to enjoy having the mental space to creatively produce content that supports others, and feel excited that I’m taking action to build my audience each week.
Goal: I have space and time to create 1 x blog post/podcast episode every week, to help build my audience.
My list continues, but you can see how each piece of my ideal everyday is linked to a specific action, but also to a *specific feeling I want to feel*.Get in your feelings:
Now that you have your ideal everyday day, run through your list and pick out common feelings that stand out to you. You might also want to create a list of feelings that you don’t want to feel.
Some examples from my list might include:
Feel More:
Present
Focussed
Energised
Creative
ExcitedFeel Less:
Resentful
Distracted
Urgency (or feeling ‘behind’ if you’re a solo business owner)Now, let me be clear: we’re not talking about eliminating all the feelings you don’t want to feel entirely and suddenly switching to 100% happy all day every day. The goal here is to switch our focus from the things we think we have to DO to make our goals happen, to the way we want to feel instead.
Putting it all together:
This is where the lightbulb might switch on for you.
Zoom out to your big goals list: pick your vision board up again and look at your goals for the year. Like, *really* look at them. Now, align each one of your goals with at least one of the Feel More feelings on your list from step 2.
For example, let’s look at the goal ‘generate half a million dollars in revenue in my business for 2024’. On the surface, this might look like a goal about earning more money. But it’s not actually about generating half a million dollars in revenue. Let’s reframe this for a minute: why do you want to generate half a million dollars in revenue? It might be cecause you want:
Financial freedom. So, why do you want financial freedom?
It might be because it gives you the power of choice, So, why do you want the power of choice? Why is that important to you?
Because *I want to be as empowered as possible* to create the best lifestyle I can for myself and my family.
So your feelings aligned goal is actually ***empowerment*** when it comes to being able to create the lifestyle you want.
So the goal becomes ‘Empowerment’. Now, that you have aligned that action goal with the feeling you want to feel, you can then choose how you want to achieve that goal. So it might be by generating half a million in revenue, or it might be by strategically switching up the way you work so that you have more time empowerment to create the lifestyle you want.
So, how do you know the right goal to set when it comes to feeling the way you want to feel?
This is where breaking down those monthly, weekly, daily actions comes in. See, I said they had a place, right?
Map the actions you will need to take…
Each month, week, day, to achieve the goal you have set for yourself. It doesn’t have to be super-specific - for the purpose of this exercise. This process should just be enough to give you a high-level look at what you’ll actually be doing each day if you want to make your goal happen.
So for example, some of the actions you might take toward generating half a million a year in revenue will look different depending on where you are in your business journey. The important part of mapping out the actions you’ll need to take are the three questions you’re going to ask yourself afterwards:
Do the actions I’ll have to take to achieve this goal align with my goal everyday feelings?
If not, can I change the action steps I take to achieve my goal to align more closely with my goal everyday feelings?
And finally, if not - is this goal really something that I actually want to achieve?
You can now see how this process opens up the doors to a myriad of alternate possibilities when it comes to the goals you set and what you actually do to achieve them.
There are no right or wrong paths, no better choice across the board - only the right path and choice for how YOU want to feel.
You’ll now use your feelings aligned goals list to re-set your goals for the year, month, half-year, whatever period you’re working with. And instead of aligning each of your goals *solely* with that SMART metric, you’ll have a process for curiously questioning each of your goals to help you really drill down to how you want to feel, why you want to achieve your goal and what actions you can take to truly align with this.
Your feminine, free-spirited goals era has entered the chat
Using a feelings aligned goals system also has the power to completely transform a lot of the labels we tend to attach to ourselves when it comes to setting and “failing” our goals.
Seeing your un-ticked goals listed out on paper year after year might inspire thoughts around failure, resentment, imposter syndrome, or just plain ole’ disappointment. You might tell yourself “I’m such a procrastinator” or “I just don’t have it in me” or “If only I had more time”.
However, once we completely transform the way we see our goals, and align them with how we want to feel - therefore aligning those daily, weekly, monthly actions with how we want to feel - we start to move out of this ‘failing to do the thing’ mindset and into a completely different space that begins and ends with ‘did I feel the way I wanted to feel this year?’
Personally, using this system has helped me seriously change the way I live my life. It removed me from the pattern of setting the goals I thought I should set (instead of the goals I actually wanted to live), helped pull me back into the present of enjoying the journey to get where I want to go and honestly? It puts a lot of the fun and free-spiritedness back into running a business and how I live and work day to day.
We see a lot in the solo business community about the power of systems and I TOTALLY ADORE a good system. But we can’t systemise without having the right goal posts. When we systemise toward the wrong goal, that’s when we start to get those cycles of action followed by burnout and honestly? We start to feel like a robot. But we’re not robots. We’re beautiful, free-spirited, entrepreneurial solo business babes.
I hope this little exercise will start to open up the possibility that you can live like one.
If you liked this post, You might also enjoy These podcast episodes:
Do this BEFORE you map your goals: LISTEN HERE
How to actually LIVE your goals in 2024: LISTEN HERE
For more on setting up systems and habits to help you sustain those actions you want to take, I cannot go past James Clear: https://jamesclear.com/ . He shares a weekly newsletter every Thursday called 3, 2, 1 including 3 short ideas from James, 2 quotes from others, and 1 question for you to ponder.
