199. When You Get What You Want (And It Doesn’t Solve Your Problems)
As a coach, I help clients get what they want, whether that’s a new job, a better handle on their finances, a more connected relationship with their sweetie, or anything else.
I also use my tools in my own life to achieve goals, shift habits, and build relationships that delight me.
That being said, even when your goals are achieved and your life is deeply satisfying, you may run into a sense of malaise because … well, things still aren’t quite perfect.
This week, I’m digging into the surprising phenomenon that sometimes happens when you finally achieve your goals - you feel worse than ever.
Tune in to learn what you can do if you find yourself making your dreams come true but weirdly feeling worse than ever.
Want customized support creating your wildly delicious life? Let’s hop on a free consultation call.
I’ll help you understand the blockers you’re facing and how to handle them moving forward. And I’ll share how a three-month 1:1 coaching package could supercharge your progress as well as your satisfaction.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why getting what you want can actually trigger worse feelings than not having it.
Why you may feel an urge to run away from your achieved goals as soon as you reach them.
What you can do to navigate that feeling of surprise let down after a big achievement is unlocked.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about getting what you want and it not solving your problems.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I hope you’re having a glorious week. I’m here this week to talk to you about a topic that I find to be deeply fascinating. And it’s something that comes up for a lot of my clients. It’s something that’s come up in my own life.
So what I am talking about is the surprising and deeply unsettling phenomenon where you get what you want, you achieve your goal, you find yourself having done the thing you set out to do. And instead of feeling deeply satisfied, instead of feeling good or even great, you feel worse. It doesn’t solve your problems. It doesn’t do what you thought it would do. You feel a sense of unease or even a lot of people find this deep grief or this deep, it’s almost like despair.
I’m a coach, so of course I think this is very fascinating. But I also think it’s a really painful, painful experience for people, especially because it can be really hard to go after your goals, to achieve them, to put yourself out there, to keep going. And when you go through all of that, when you navigate all of that, and then at the end of the day, it feels bad. That is just really, really difficult.
So I wanted to do a podcast episode to talk about why that happens, what’s actually happening, and of course, what you can do about it. Both what you can do if you’re already in that position and what you can do to prevent yourself from being in that position later as you go about achieving more goals in the future.
So as a coach, I help my clients get what they want, achieve their goals, untangle problems, all that kind of stuff. Whether it’s getting a new job, feeling better in the job they’re currently in, starting a business, getting a handle on their finances, getting more connected with their significant other, or finding a significant other if they’re single and they are looking to be partnered in a short-term or long-term way. I help clients with all kinds of stuff like that.
And also in my own life, I’ve used the coaching tools to do really incredible things, to build this business that I love so much, and to build my relationship with my significant other, Alex, that is honestly the best, most incredible relationship I’ve ever been in. And the longest lasting romantic relationship I’ve ever had. And I’ve used it for smaller things in my life too. For building friends when I moved to Sacramento. I’ve used the coaching tools I teach for all kinds of things.
I’ve coached clients through all kinds of transitions, transformations, shifts, changes, goal achievements, et cetera. And this happens sometimes where someone achieves a goal and then maybe they feel better for a little bit, maybe they don’t feel better at all. And then they feel much worse. And there’s a lot of different reasons. I think this can happen, but I’m going to talk about my own experience first.
So something I’ve seen that happens with me is when there’s something you want that you don’t have yet, you can fantasize about how amazing everything is going to be when you get it. And then when you’re having a bad day, you can kind of fall back on this, well, like when I finally quit my job, I’ll feel so much better. When I finally launch my business, when my business finally makes six figures in a year, when I finally have a partner.
I remember I got a haircut I didn’t like a few years ago. Maybe y’all remember that because I definitely talked about it on the podcast. Like, I remember being like, when I finally get my hair grown out again and I’m out of this terrible haircut, which by the way, my hair has finally grown out of that haircut. And it’s been reshaped several times by a great local hair person, and I forget the word for that.
Anyways, it’s been reshaped. It’s lovely, which is also why I stopped talking about it because this is a thing that happens. Like when we achieve our goals, first of all, before we achieve our goals, we assume that once we achieve those goals, it’s going to solve every problem in our life and we’ll always be happy forever and ever once that thing is accomplished, which as we all know, that’s not how it works.
But also once we achieve a goal, like sometimes our brain just stops thinking about it. It’s like the thing like haunts us and keeps us up at night until it’s done, and then we’re just like onto the next. But there’s another thing that I also want to talk about in this podcast. So for like little things, medium things, I think that happens a lot. But for really big things that we’ve wanted for a really, really long time, I think there’s also this other pattern at play.
And the other pattern is this. I think when there’s something you’ve fantasized about for a really long time and dreamed of and probably worked really hard to get, and then you have it, then you’re like, oh, and then you still have bad days or you still have struggles. Of course you do because you’re a human. And then you’re like, well, I already have the thing that I fantasized would fix everything and it didn’t fix everything.
And that can kick up a very interesting, sticky kind of despair of like, well, what was the point of all of that work? And was this thing that I worked so hard to get really worth it? Because now suddenly we have to admit that even though we have what we wanted, we have our achievement, it did not fix everything. It did not make our life superhuman. It didn’t move us out of the sphere of things going well and things going badly and there being joy and there being suffering and there being stubbed toes and bills that get missed and now we have late fees.
And I think this is really interesting because if you look to a goal to solve every problem in your life and make you be happy, you are just setting yourself up for disappointment. But I think a lot of us don’t realize we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.
And I’ve had this happen in my life, both with my business, because when I worked in corporate and I worked other jobs, I remember just being like, when I work for myself, like that’s when everything will finally work and feel good. And I’ll be happy, especially if I can work for myself and make money. Guess what? I’ve worked for myself and made money. I’ve been in business for nearly six years, six years this month. And in that time I’ve made, you know, the business has created over $800,000 in revenue. So that’s a lot of money.
And it didn’t solve all my problems, y’all. Is it great? Yes. I’m not belittling or undermining what I’ve done here. The incredible accomplishment and the incredible joy it is to get to have my own business and do this work like for my living. And also, it does not transcend me out of the human experience. I still have bad hair days. I still wake up in a foul mood sometimes. Like I still have all of those textures of the human experience. But if you expect the thing to be the fantasy, then that can be really painful.
And then the other one is, you know, having this like long-term amazing partnership. So I love my relationship with Alex. I’m obsessed with it. I think it’s incredible. And I’ve worked so hard at it, just like I’ve worked so hard at the business. And it is amazing. It is the best relationship of my life. It is incredible. And it doesn’t solve all my problems, right? I still have things that come up. I still have laundry that needs to be done. We still have to figure out what’s for dinner.
Not that those are actually problems. That’s just like the day-to-day labor of being a human and being alive. But then on top of that, there are also problems, right? There’s also like a while ago, they found a nodule on my thyroid. And then I had to go in and get a biopsied to find out, like, is it cancerous? Spoiler alert, it’s not cancerous at this time. So that’s really great and we’re happy.
But what I’m saying is just because you have a goal and achieve it, doesn’t mean your life is going to feel good and amazing for every single moment for the rest of time. And I think sometimes that’s what people think I mean when I’m talking about satisfied AF. And it’s not, because that’s not realistic. And that’s not what being alive in this incarnation is like or about.
Here’s the other thing though, that I think is really interesting, I think sometimes the only way we know how to get ourselves to achieve a goal is to lie to ourselves in this way and tell ourselves that once we’ve achieved the goal, everything will be perfect and magical.
It’s like we can’t figure out how to get together the motivation to do the labor if the end game isn’t going to be this like high-intensity perfection. But that sets us up for so much pain that sets us up for such a sense of failure because we’re smart people and you know, you’re still going to have ups and downs and everything, even if you achieve your goal, right?
And a lot of goals are not something you achieve once and then it’s done. Like it’s super fun, some of them are, right? Like if your goal is to write a novel, you can write a novel and then you can edit the novel and then you can be done with the novel.
But a lot of goals, like business goals, like if you want to have a business and build the business and you want the business to support you, you have to keep doing the things, right? You have to keep doing the work. You have to keep bringing in the sales. If you get a job and the goal is to get the job, you get the job, you have the job, but then guess what? Then you have to do the job, right? You have to do the job and keep doing the job if you want to keep having the job and keep making the paycheck.
So I think we really set ourselves up unfortunately and for sadness and despondency and potentially failure when we tell ourselves the lie that when we have the thing, everything will be better. So I think part of the way to get out from under this getting what you want and then feeling worse is to be more honest with yourself. Like I want to do this thing and I’m willing to do the work to get it, and I’m willing to do the work to have it. And I also am going to be honest to myself ahead of time and say it’s not going to solve a hundred percent of my problems.
Getting a long-term life partner is great and it is magical and it will give you so many gifts and it’s not going to solve everything. You’re still going to have to have a living, and do your laundry, and figure out what’s for dinner, right? As well as navigating like the bigger ups and downs that come along, like someone T-bones your car. Like, I hope that never happens to you, but these kinds of things do happen.
Or like another friend of mine recently dropped a food processor blade on her foot. That sucked, and that was like just life and she had to deal with it and then figure out what to do from there. These things happen. I wish they didn’t, but they do.
The other thing that I think is really important to talk about is when you get what you want and then it doesn’t solve every problem and it doesn’t make you happy, you may feel an urge to run away from your achieved goal. You may feel an urge to sabotage the thing you worked so hard to get.
I also experienced this a lot, just to be really candid, in my relationship with Alex. Like I spent so much of my, first of all, young adult life but also my adult life, wanting a partner, wanting someone who loved me, wanting someone who cherished me. And then I found this person, I found this incredible partner and we got together and our relationship was great.
And then there were all these moments throughout a lot of the middle years of our relationship where I’d be like, nothing’s wrong, but I kind of want to run away. Or like, nothing’s wrong, but I feel kind of frustrated that it didn’t solve all of my problems in the way that I thought it would. Yes, my life is magical, but it didn't make my life magical.
Honestly, the biggest thing that makes my life magical is doing the small daily work to notice what’s working, what’s going well, and to appreciate it, and then doing the small daily work of moving myself towards whatever it is I’m currently working on, with joy, with love and with pleasure, not with like a whip and a crack and like, you have to do that to feel good about yourself.
So that’s another thing too, right? It’s like, sometimes people work so hard to achieve a goal and then it doesn’t do what they thought it would do. Like it doesn’t solve all of their problems or they can’t tolerate the having of the thing. This happens sometimes, like there’s other coaches who’ve done podcasts about this. They call it like success tolerance, things like that.
But the way I think about it, it’s like if you want so badly to be loved by a significant other, but you don’t have a lot of practice being loved by a significant other, you don’t have a lot of practice allowing yourself to be known and be loved at that level, once you get it, it may feel actually really uncomfortable.
This is something I’m talking about all the time on the podcast, no matter what it is you’re working on, is that moving into things incrementally is much more sustainable. Moving into things incrementally means you can do it without injuring yourself. Like if you think about sports analogies, like if you try to go from not walking or running at all to running a marathon, you’re probably going to injure yourself. And people can do those kinds of metaphorical injuries in all kinds of ways. And also you don’t build up a tolerance if you try to go from zero to 60, right?
So even something like wanting to be loved, you’re like, why would I have to build up a tolerance? But for a lot of people, it can feel very vulnerable to be loved. Both the vulnerability of like, I’m being seen, that’s scary. And the vulnerability of like, oh no, now I care about this person. What if they go away? What if the world takes them away? That can feel very scary. And so that’s, I think, another reason actually that getting what you want can feel terrible.
So many reasons that getting what you want can feel like shit. It’s so surprising. I think the risk with this podcast is I don’t want you to hear this podcast and be like, oh, well I shouldn’t go after what I want because it could feel terrible anyways. I mean, life can feel terrible, but I think you still should go after what you want.
But I want you to go after what you want in a way that sets you up to be able to have the thing, to be able to enjoy the thing, and to be able to still enjoy your very human life with its ups and its downs and you still have to do laundry and figure out what’s for dinner and it didn’t solve all your problems.
But just because something doesn’t solve all your problems does not mean it’s not worth going after. I’m so glad I built my business. I love getting to do this work. It’s absolutely incredible that I can work for myself. I can have all the freedom of that. I have all the flexibility. And then the work I do is getting to have what I think are like the most interesting, important conversations with people.
I get to have such a huge impact in people’s lives. I get to help people with the things that matter most to them and hold space and be with them in their vulnerability and in their striving and in their struggling. I’m obsessed with it. And also, it doesn’t have to solve all of my problems to be worthwhile.
Or having an incredible partner and going through the vulnerability of allowing myself to be loved, going through the vulnerability of loving someone else that much, having them matter that much to me, it’s incredible. It’s such a privilege and a delight and deeply uncomfortable. And it doesn’t have to solve all of my problems to be worthwhile.
So this is what I want you to think about. If there’s something you want to go after, I want you to go after it. But I want you to go after it in a way that, first of all, the journey towards it can feel sustainable and pleasurable because that is setting you up to actually enjoy having it. And then setting yourself up to remember, goals are amazing, but they are what they are.
And no goal that you achieve is going to, like, I mean, it might radically transform your life. It’s not going to transcend you out of the human condition. And if you expect it to, you’re setting yourself up for failure, whether you achieve it or not. And I just think that’s unfortunate. What if we don’t do that?
Okay, so what do you do if you do achieve something and you feel that surprise let down of like, this isn’t what I wanted. It didn’t solve all my problems. I don’t know how to tolerate having it. I feel an urge to run away.
Okay, so first things first, I think you do have to figure out what is the let down. Is the let down, I thought this would solve all of my problems and it didn’t? Then maybe you want to learn how to accept having a human condition and how to accept having this wonderful thing in your life and letting it be what it is, right?
If you have used coaching to create an incredible relationship with a significant other, that’s a gorgeous thing. And can you just enjoy that for what it is and forgive yourself for having thought that it would solve all of your problems?
But if the surprise let down is I can’t tolerate this, that’s slightly different, right? Then it’s like, can I learn to tolerate it? Do I want to learn to tolerate it? Is it actually something I want?
Which leads me to the third category of like, a lot of times people pursue goals just because that’s what society says we should be doing. Society says you should get married. Society says you should have kids. Society says you need to get a certain kind of job. Society says you need to keep up with the Joneses.
So sometimes you’ll go after a goal, like maybe you buy a house and then you’re like, I don’t actually like owning a house. So in that case, it might actually turn out that the goal and you are not as good of a fit as you thought you were. And in that case, you could decide like, well, I want to figure out how to have the house because I already have it. Or you could be like, oh, I give myself permission to change my mind and do something else.
So I think you have to do a bit of discovery with yourself or with someone like me, a coach, talk it through like if you achieved a goal and then you feel let down by it, why is that? Is it because you thought it was going to fix everything in your life? Is it because it’s bringing up vulnerability that feels really uncomfortable to be with? Is it because it was actually never a good fit for you and you didn’t realize that until you got there?
Those are all going to have their own answer, their own solution. And if you have goals you’re thinking about pursuing and you want to preventatively avoid getting to the end of having them and then feeling that despondency, that sense of despair of like, ugh, I’ve gotten to the utmost goal of my life and it didn’t solve all of my problems, there’s a few things you can do to set yourself up ahead of time.
One thing is, would I still want to do this thing if I knew it wasn’t going to solve all of my problems? That’s just a question you can ask yourself. Another question you can ask yourself is, what’s an enjoyable way, like an enjoyable, sustainable way to get to the goal? Because a lot of times achieving goals also feels terrible because people are driving themselves with self-hatred or self-shaming or anxiety or kind of fear of disapproval.
Whatever fuel you use to achieve the goal, that’s what the goal is going to feel like. So that’s another reason you could get to having achieved the goal and then have that deep sense of unhappiness, might be because the fuel you use to get there feels bad.
So we didn’t dig into that as much, but I have other podcast episodes about that. But that’s another question you can ask yourself is like, how do I pursue this goal in a way that feels good to me? Another question is like, do I need to build some skills in order to be able to have and hold the goal, right?
So it’s like, if you’re trying to get a job, if your goal is to get a job, you’re not just going to get the job, you’re going to have to do the job. Do you need some skills in order to be able to do the job in a way that feels good to you when you have it? That could be the same for any other goal, right?
It’s like sometimes people have something on the internet that goes viral and they blow up really fast and it’s like too much attention and too much pressure all at once and it feels too uncomfortable for them. So you can think about what might happen with this goal? Like, even though I want to achieve the goal and I want to go after it, is there anything about achieving the goal that might bring up a vulnerability? And can I stair step into that? Can I prep myself for that? How could I set myself up for success in navigating that?
And then of course also ask yourself, like, do I really want this thing? Do I really want this thing? Is this really something that’s meaningful to me? Or is this something that my parents, my family, my culture, my peers said I have to have in order to be good, in order to be successful, in order to be happy?
Answering these questions ahead of time is a little bit of extra work upfront, but I think it can help you avoid a lot of pain and a lot of disappointment. And a lot of despair, quite honestly, because getting what you want and then feeling terrible is really rough because you’re like, well, I already got my big goal. And if that didn’t fix it, nothing will.
And I know that for me personally it was really painful, and I’m a coach, right? So I know a lot of this stuff already. And I still had to go through it personally and be like, oh, even though I consciously knew this wasn’t going to solve all my problems and fix everything in my life, apparently some part of me still thought it was.
And then I had to navigate that and be like, oh, what do I do from here? And how do I rebuild my sense of joy? And how do I rebuild my sense of contentment after going through this huge disappointment that I felt like I should have seen coming, but of course I didn’t, right? And that’s life, right? Hindsight is 20/20, all the things.
I also think this is part of why working with a coach is so powerful because even when I’ve worked with coaches before, and my clients, when they’ve worked with me, they’ll be like, I want to do this and it’s going to do this. And then I’ll be like, will it do that? Because sometimes it will, right? Like if you were like, want to get a job and the job’s going to make a certain amount of money, it will pay that much. But if they’re like, and then I’ll be happy forever, there’s an opportunity there for me to be like, will that actually be something that’s going to happen? Yes or no, right?
Obviously nothing’s going to make you happy forever. You’re going to have the full spectrum of human emotion and things will be happy and things will be difficult too. So what I’m saying is coaching is a way that you can go after a goal. It’s going to feel more sustainable. It’s going to feel more enjoyable, but it’s also going to help you dissolve these accidental self-deceptions along the way so that actually when you get to the goal, you can enjoy it for what it is. And you’re not putting all the pressure on it that we sometimes put on our goals to make us feel amazing all the time and solve every problem we’ve ever had in our lives.
All right, so that’s what I have for y’all today. Why you may feel terrible when you get what you want, how to navigate it if you do, and how to help set yourself up to prevent things from feeling that way in the future as you go about achieving goals. Again, goal achievement is a beautiful, powerful thing. I think you can do anything you put your mind to. Like anything you’re willing to put in the practice and the time and the effort for you can create something incredible.
And also if you are honest about what that will actually do for you and what it’s unable to do for you, you’re going to have a much more enjoyable time, both of achieving the goal and of enjoying the achievement once it’s done.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. I will talk to you next week, have a lovely week in between.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I hope you’re having a glorious week. I’m here this week to talk to you about a topic that I find to be deeply fascinating. And it’s something that comes up for a lot of my clients. It’s something that’s come up in my own life.
So what I am talking about is the surprising and deeply unsettling phenomenon where you get what you want, you achieve your goal, you find yourself having done the thing you set out to do. And instead of feeling deeply satisfied, instead of feeling good or even great, you feel worse. It doesn’t solve your problems. It doesn’t do what you thought it would do. You feel a sense of unease or even a lot of people find this deep grief or this deep, it’s almost like despair.
I’m a coach, so of course I think this is very fascinating. But I also think it’s a really painful, painful experience for people, especially because it can be really hard to go after your goals, to achieve them, to put yourself out there, to keep going. And when you go through all of that, when you navigate all of that, and then at the end of the day, it feels bad. That is just really, really difficult.
So I wanted to do a podcast episode to talk about why that happens, what’s actually happening, and of course, what you can do about it. Both what you can do if you’re already in that position and what you can do to prevent yourself from being in that position later as you go about achieving more goals in the future.
So as a coach, I help my clients get what they want, achieve their goals, untangle problems, all that kind of stuff. Whether it’s getting a new job, feeling better in the job they’re currently in, starting a business, getting a handle on their finances, getting more connected with their significant other, or finding a significant other if they’re single and they are looking to be partnered in a short-term or long-term way. I help clients with all kinds of stuff like that.
And also in my own life, I’ve used the coaching tools to do really incredible things, to build this business that I love so much, and to build my relationship with my significant other, Alex, that is honestly the best, most incredible relationship I’ve ever been in. And the longest lasting romantic relationship I’ve ever had. And I’ve used it for smaller things in my life too. For building friends when I moved to Sacramento. I’ve used the coaching tools I teach for all kinds of things.
I’ve coached clients through all kinds of transitions, transformations, shifts, changes, goal achievements, et cetera. And this happens sometimes where someone achieves a goal and then maybe they feel better for a little bit, maybe they don’t feel better at all. And then they feel much worse. And there’s a lot of different reasons. I think this can happen, but I’m going to talk about my own experience first.
So something I’ve seen that happens with me is when there’s something you want that you don’t have yet, you can fantasize about how amazing everything is going to be when you get it. And then when you’re having a bad day, you can kind of fall back on this, well, like when I finally quit my job, I’ll feel so much better. When I finally launch my business, when my business finally makes six figures in a year, when I finally have a partner.
I remember I got a haircut I didn’t like a few years ago. Maybe y’all remember that because I definitely talked about it on the podcast. Like, I remember being like, when I finally get my hair grown out again and I’m out of this terrible haircut, which by the way, my hair has finally grown out of that haircut. And it’s been reshaped several times by a great local hair person, and I forget the word for that.
Anyways, it’s been reshaped. It’s lovely, which is also why I stopped talking about it because this is a thing that happens. Like when we achieve our goals, first of all, before we achieve our goals, we assume that once we achieve those goals, it’s going to solve every problem in our life and we’ll always be happy forever and ever once that thing is accomplished, which as we all know, that’s not how it works.
But also once we achieve a goal, like sometimes our brain just stops thinking about it. It’s like the thing like haunts us and keeps us up at night until it’s done, and then we’re just like onto the next. But there’s another thing that I also want to talk about in this podcast. So for like little things, medium things, I think that happens a lot. But for really big things that we’ve wanted for a really, really long time, I think there’s also this other pattern at play.
And the other pattern is this. I think when there’s something you’ve fantasized about for a really long time and dreamed of and probably worked really hard to get, and then you have it, then you’re like, oh, and then you still have bad days or you still have struggles. Of course you do because you’re a human. And then you’re like, well, I already have the thing that I fantasized would fix everything and it didn’t fix everything.
And that can kick up a very interesting, sticky kind of despair of like, well, what was the point of all of that work? And was this thing that I worked so hard to get really worth it? Because now suddenly we have to admit that even though we have what we wanted, we have our achievement, it did not fix everything. It did not make our life superhuman. It didn’t move us out of the sphere of things going well and things going badly and there being joy and there being suffering and there being stubbed toes and bills that get missed and now we have late fees.
And I think this is really interesting because if you look to a goal to solve every problem in your life and make you be happy, you are just setting yourself up for disappointment. But I think a lot of us don’t realize we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.
And I’ve had this happen in my life, both with my business, because when I worked in corporate and I worked other jobs, I remember just being like, when I work for myself, like that’s when everything will finally work and feel good. And I’ll be happy, especially if I can work for myself and make money. Guess what? I’ve worked for myself and made money. I’ve been in business for nearly six years, six years this month. And in that time I’ve made, you know, the business has created over $800,000 in revenue. So that’s a lot of money.
And it didn’t solve all my problems, y’all. Is it great? Yes. I’m not belittling or undermining what I’ve done here. The incredible accomplishment and the incredible joy it is to get to have my own business and do this work like for my living. And also, it does not transcend me out of the human experience. I still have bad hair days. I still wake up in a foul mood sometimes. Like I still have all of those textures of the human experience. But if you expect the thing to be the fantasy, then that can be really painful.
And then the other one is, you know, having this like long-term amazing partnership. So I love my relationship with Alex. I’m obsessed with it. I think it’s incredible. And I’ve worked so hard at it, just like I’ve worked so hard at the business. And it is amazing. It is the best relationship of my life. It is incredible. And it doesn’t solve all my problems, right? I still have things that come up. I still have laundry that needs to be done. We still have to figure out what’s for dinner.
Not that those are actually problems. That’s just like the day-to-day labor of being a human and being alive. But then on top of that, there are also problems, right? There’s also like a while ago, they found a nodule on my thyroid. And then I had to go in and get a biopsied to find out, like, is it cancerous? Spoiler alert, it’s not cancerous at this time. So that’s really great and we’re happy.
But what I’m saying is just because you have a goal and achieve it, doesn’t mean your life is going to feel good and amazing for every single moment for the rest of time. And I think sometimes that’s what people think I mean when I’m talking about satisfied AF. And it’s not, because that’s not realistic. And that’s not what being alive in this incarnation is like or about.
Here’s the other thing though, that I think is really interesting, I think sometimes the only way we know how to get ourselves to achieve a goal is to lie to ourselves in this way and tell ourselves that once we’ve achieved the goal, everything will be perfect and magical.
It’s like we can’t figure out how to get together the motivation to do the labor if the end game isn’t going to be this like high-intensity perfection. But that sets us up for so much pain that sets us up for such a sense of failure because we’re smart people and you know, you’re still going to have ups and downs and everything, even if you achieve your goal, right?
And a lot of goals are not something you achieve once and then it’s done. Like it’s super fun, some of them are, right? Like if your goal is to write a novel, you can write a novel and then you can edit the novel and then you can be done with the novel.
But a lot of goals, like business goals, like if you want to have a business and build the business and you want the business to support you, you have to keep doing the things, right? You have to keep doing the work. You have to keep bringing in the sales. If you get a job and the goal is to get the job, you get the job, you have the job, but then guess what? Then you have to do the job, right? You have to do the job and keep doing the job if you want to keep having the job and keep making the paycheck.
So I think we really set ourselves up unfortunately and for sadness and despondency and potentially failure when we tell ourselves the lie that when we have the thing, everything will be better. So I think part of the way to get out from under this getting what you want and then feeling worse is to be more honest with yourself. Like I want to do this thing and I’m willing to do the work to get it, and I’m willing to do the work to have it. And I also am going to be honest to myself ahead of time and say it’s not going to solve a hundred percent of my problems.
Getting a long-term life partner is great and it is magical and it will give you so many gifts and it’s not going to solve everything. You’re still going to have to have a living, and do your laundry, and figure out what’s for dinner, right? As well as navigating like the bigger ups and downs that come along, like someone T-bones your car. Like, I hope that never happens to you, but these kinds of things do happen.
Or like another friend of mine recently dropped a food processor blade on her foot. That sucked, and that was like just life and she had to deal with it and then figure out what to do from there. These things happen. I wish they didn’t, but they do.
The other thing that I think is really important to talk about is when you get what you want and then it doesn’t solve every problem and it doesn’t make you happy, you may feel an urge to run away from your achieved goal. You may feel an urge to sabotage the thing you worked so hard to get.
I also experienced this a lot, just to be really candid, in my relationship with Alex. Like I spent so much of my, first of all, young adult life but also my adult life, wanting a partner, wanting someone who loved me, wanting someone who cherished me. And then I found this person, I found this incredible partner and we got together and our relationship was great.
And then there were all these moments throughout a lot of the middle years of our relationship where I’d be like, nothing’s wrong, but I kind of want to run away. Or like, nothing’s wrong, but I feel kind of frustrated that it didn’t solve all of my problems in the way that I thought it would. Yes, my life is magical, but it didn't make my life magical.
Honestly, the biggest thing that makes my life magical is doing the small daily work to notice what’s working, what’s going well, and to appreciate it, and then doing the small daily work of moving myself towards whatever it is I’m currently working on, with joy, with love and with pleasure, not with like a whip and a crack and like, you have to do that to feel good about yourself.
So that’s another thing too, right? It’s like, sometimes people work so hard to achieve a goal and then it doesn’t do what they thought it would do. Like it doesn’t solve all of their problems or they can’t tolerate the having of the thing. This happens sometimes, like there’s other coaches who’ve done podcasts about this. They call it like success tolerance, things like that.
But the way I think about it, it’s like if you want so badly to be loved by a significant other, but you don’t have a lot of practice being loved by a significant other, you don’t have a lot of practice allowing yourself to be known and be loved at that level, once you get it, it may feel actually really uncomfortable.
This is something I’m talking about all the time on the podcast, no matter what it is you’re working on, is that moving into things incrementally is much more sustainable. Moving into things incrementally means you can do it without injuring yourself. Like if you think about sports analogies, like if you try to go from not walking or running at all to running a marathon, you’re probably going to injure yourself. And people can do those kinds of metaphorical injuries in all kinds of ways. And also you don’t build up a tolerance if you try to go from zero to 60, right?
So even something like wanting to be loved, you’re like, why would I have to build up a tolerance? But for a lot of people, it can feel very vulnerable to be loved. Both the vulnerability of like, I’m being seen, that’s scary. And the vulnerability of like, oh no, now I care about this person. What if they go away? What if the world takes them away? That can feel very scary. And so that’s, I think, another reason actually that getting what you want can feel terrible.
So many reasons that getting what you want can feel like shit. It’s so surprising. I think the risk with this podcast is I don’t want you to hear this podcast and be like, oh, well I shouldn’t go after what I want because it could feel terrible anyways. I mean, life can feel terrible, but I think you still should go after what you want.
But I want you to go after what you want in a way that sets you up to be able to have the thing, to be able to enjoy the thing, and to be able to still enjoy your very human life with its ups and its downs and you still have to do laundry and figure out what’s for dinner and it didn’t solve all your problems.
But just because something doesn’t solve all your problems does not mean it’s not worth going after. I’m so glad I built my business. I love getting to do this work. It’s absolutely incredible that I can work for myself. I can have all the freedom of that. I have all the flexibility. And then the work I do is getting to have what I think are like the most interesting, important conversations with people.
I get to have such a huge impact in people’s lives. I get to help people with the things that matter most to them and hold space and be with them in their vulnerability and in their striving and in their struggling. I’m obsessed with it. And also, it doesn’t have to solve all of my problems to be worthwhile.
Or having an incredible partner and going through the vulnerability of allowing myself to be loved, going through the vulnerability of loving someone else that much, having them matter that much to me, it’s incredible. It’s such a privilege and a delight and deeply uncomfortable. And it doesn’t have to solve all of my problems to be worthwhile.
So this is what I want you to think about. If there’s something you want to go after, I want you to go after it. But I want you to go after it in a way that, first of all, the journey towards it can feel sustainable and pleasurable because that is setting you up to actually enjoy having it. And then setting yourself up to remember, goals are amazing, but they are what they are.
And no goal that you achieve is going to, like, I mean, it might radically transform your life. It’s not going to transcend you out of the human condition. And if you expect it to, you’re setting yourself up for failure, whether you achieve it or not. And I just think that’s unfortunate. What if we don’t do that?
Okay, so what do you do if you do achieve something and you feel that surprise let down of like, this isn’t what I wanted. It didn’t solve all my problems. I don’t know how to tolerate having it. I feel an urge to run away.
Okay, so first things first, I think you do have to figure out what is the let down. Is the let down, I thought this would solve all of my problems and it didn’t? Then maybe you want to learn how to accept having a human condition and how to accept having this wonderful thing in your life and letting it be what it is, right?
If you have used coaching to create an incredible relationship with a significant other, that’s a gorgeous thing. And can you just enjoy that for what it is and forgive yourself for having thought that it would solve all of your problems?
But if the surprise let down is I can’t tolerate this, that’s slightly different, right? Then it’s like, can I learn to tolerate it? Do I want to learn to tolerate it? Is it actually something I want?
Which leads me to the third category of like, a lot of times people pursue goals just because that’s what society says we should be doing. Society says you should get married. Society says you should have kids. Society says you need to get a certain kind of job. Society says you need to keep up with the Joneses.
So sometimes you’ll go after a goal, like maybe you buy a house and then you’re like, I don’t actually like owning a house. So in that case, it might actually turn out that the goal and you are not as good of a fit as you thought you were. And in that case, you could decide like, well, I want to figure out how to have the house because I already have it. Or you could be like, oh, I give myself permission to change my mind and do something else.
So I think you have to do a bit of discovery with yourself or with someone like me, a coach, talk it through like if you achieved a goal and then you feel let down by it, why is that? Is it because you thought it was going to fix everything in your life? Is it because it’s bringing up vulnerability that feels really uncomfortable to be with? Is it because it was actually never a good fit for you and you didn’t realize that until you got there?
Those are all going to have their own answer, their own solution. And if you have goals you’re thinking about pursuing and you want to preventatively avoid getting to the end of having them and then feeling that despondency, that sense of despair of like, ugh, I’ve gotten to the utmost goal of my life and it didn’t solve all of my problems, there’s a few things you can do to set yourself up ahead of time.
One thing is, would I still want to do this thing if I knew it wasn’t going to solve all of my problems? That’s just a question you can ask yourself. Another question you can ask yourself is, what’s an enjoyable way, like an enjoyable, sustainable way to get to the goal? Because a lot of times achieving goals also feels terrible because people are driving themselves with self-hatred or self-shaming or anxiety or kind of fear of disapproval.
Whatever fuel you use to achieve the goal, that’s what the goal is going to feel like. So that’s another reason you could get to having achieved the goal and then have that deep sense of unhappiness, might be because the fuel you use to get there feels bad.
So we didn’t dig into that as much, but I have other podcast episodes about that. But that’s another question you can ask yourself is like, how do I pursue this goal in a way that feels good to me? Another question is like, do I need to build some skills in order to be able to have and hold the goal, right?
So it’s like, if you’re trying to get a job, if your goal is to get a job, you’re not just going to get the job, you’re going to have to do the job. Do you need some skills in order to be able to do the job in a way that feels good to you when you have it? That could be the same for any other goal, right?
It’s like sometimes people have something on the internet that goes viral and they blow up really fast and it’s like too much attention and too much pressure all at once and it feels too uncomfortable for them. So you can think about what might happen with this goal? Like, even though I want to achieve the goal and I want to go after it, is there anything about achieving the goal that might bring up a vulnerability? And can I stair step into that? Can I prep myself for that? How could I set myself up for success in navigating that?
And then of course also ask yourself, like, do I really want this thing? Do I really want this thing? Is this really something that’s meaningful to me? Or is this something that my parents, my family, my culture, my peers said I have to have in order to be good, in order to be successful, in order to be happy?
Answering these questions ahead of time is a little bit of extra work upfront, but I think it can help you avoid a lot of pain and a lot of disappointment. And a lot of despair, quite honestly, because getting what you want and then feeling terrible is really rough because you’re like, well, I already got my big goal. And if that didn’t fix it, nothing will.
And I know that for me personally it was really painful, and I’m a coach, right? So I know a lot of this stuff already. And I still had to go through it personally and be like, oh, even though I consciously knew this wasn’t going to solve all my problems and fix everything in my life, apparently some part of me still thought it was.
And then I had to navigate that and be like, oh, what do I do from here? And how do I rebuild my sense of joy? And how do I rebuild my sense of contentment after going through this huge disappointment that I felt like I should have seen coming, but of course I didn’t, right? And that’s life, right? Hindsight is 20/20, all the things.
I also think this is part of why working with a coach is so powerful because even when I’ve worked with coaches before, and my clients, when they’ve worked with me, they’ll be like, I want to do this and it’s going to do this. And then I’ll be like, will it do that? Because sometimes it will, right? Like if you were like, want to get a job and the job’s going to make a certain amount of money, it will pay that much. But if they’re like, and then I’ll be happy forever, there’s an opportunity there for me to be like, will that actually be something that’s going to happen? Yes or no, right?
Obviously nothing’s going to make you happy forever. You’re going to have the full spectrum of human emotion and things will be happy and things will be difficult too. So what I’m saying is coaching is a way that you can go after a goal. It’s going to feel more sustainable. It’s going to feel more enjoyable, but it’s also going to help you dissolve these accidental self-deceptions along the way so that actually when you get to the goal, you can enjoy it for what it is. And you’re not putting all the pressure on it that we sometimes put on our goals to make us feel amazing all the time and solve every problem we’ve ever had in our lives.
All right, so that’s what I have for y’all today. Why you may feel terrible when you get what you want, how to navigate it if you do, and how to help set yourself up to prevent things from feeling that way in the future as you go about achieving goals. Again, goal achievement is a beautiful, powerful thing. I think you can do anything you put your mind to. Like anything you’re willing to put in the practice and the time and the effort for you can create something incredible.
And also if you are honest about what that will actually do for you and what it’s unable to do for you, you’re going to have a much more enjoyable time, both of achieving the goal and of enjoying the achievement once it’s done.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. I will talk to you next week, have a lovely week in between.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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