22. How to Not Give Up
Are you currently working on a big goal and you’re trying everything you can to bring it to life, but you’re starting to get tired and it feels like it’s never going to happen?
Or maybe you're trying to make a smaller shift, but it just seems like it's not working and you're about to just give up on it altogether?
Whether you want to radically change things in your life or just make some small changes, the lesson I’m sharing today will teach you how to do it without giving up along the way.
(Spoiler alert: it involves changing how you think about whatever it is you're working on.)
Here's the short version: however you think you'll feel when you get the thing you want = the perfect fuel for getting there without giving up.
This may have you scratching your head. Most people think they have to, you know, achieve the goal first and then enjoy it. But it's actually much more effective (and an antidote to burnout) to feel the feeling ahead of time and use it intentionally to keep showing up for your goal for as long as it takes.
Join me for this week's podcast, and I'll teach you how to do it.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If you want guidance in walking yourself through my deep dive strategy sessions, subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts! Make sure to follow the instructions here to receive an email from me with the PDF document!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What is required of you if you have a big goal that is challenging to bring to life.
One question you can ask when you feel cynical about your goals and feel far away from them.
How to show up and keep showing up for as long as it takes to reach your big goal.
Why you can’t expect to feel amazing when you get to your destination if you’ve struggled along the whole journey.
How to feel as amazing now as you think getting to your goal will feel.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
Leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to receive an email from me with my deep-dive strategy session PDF document so you can walk yourself through it!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we are talking about how to keep going when the going gets tough.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. It’s podcast day. What a fun day. Love being here and talking to y’all and sharing my teachings and concepts with you so that you can have way more fun, way more meaning, way more delight in your work, and be super productive, work on your own terms, you know, all the good stuff. All the stuff we want that we think we can’t have at once. That’s what I’m here to help you have and I’m pretty excited today to talk about a lesson near and dear to my heart, which is how to keep going when going feels hard.
So I’m at the end of my day here and I’ve had five lovely coaching calls today with a variety of clients who are all working on really different things. And I think all of those calls had a lot in common with what I’m going to teach and talk about today because one single coaching call can really change the trajectory of everything.
I’ve seen this again and again where just one coaching call will shift something for a client and they’ll just see things completely differently. They’ll see work completely differently; they’ll see their boss completely differently. But sometimes we’re also working on things over a longer term where we’re not just changing one thing, we’re not just tweaking something. We’re creating a really big goal or we’re working on something that has a lot of moving parts and we’re trying to create something - like a really big result in our life.
Like maybe we’re trying to create a promotion, maybe we’re trying to switch to a different kind of schedule at work and we’re getting everything set up, so we have the systems and processes in place to support that. Maybe we’re working to get a new job, or hit some kind of financial goal, where all the little steps along the way are super helpful and the coaching insights and a-has are wonderful, but we need to be able to keep going.
We need to be able to keep working on things even when we hit those little rough patches that we sometimes do when we’re working on things over a longer period of time. So we’re going to talk about that today but first, I’m going to read y’all a review.
This review is called, “An awesome antidote.” And the review says, “The advice works. I tried it out today and already feel more positive and in the driver’s seat about my experience of my job. I’m really looking forward to hearing more about avoiding burnout and loving my job.”
Thank you so much for this lovely review and it’s my pleasure to share this work with you. I’m so glad it’s helpful for you. That’s exactly what I want because I want all of y’all to have meaningful, joyful work, and I believe it’s possible.
That’s a big part about what the vision and mission of my business is, is that I think even though work is work obviously, I think it can be fun and I think we can have really wonderful experiences there, empowering experiences at work, even in a culture where there is so much institutionalized oppression, I think we can unlearn that internally, which will change how we show up to work and then we can also do the work to change policies and institutions.
And I think it’s easy to become cynical and to think like, god, why even fucking bother? And I get that. I’ve spent some time in my own life being cynical from time to time, but I don’t think it’s useful because when we’re cynical, then we’re just like, well, it’s never going to work so why bother, then we don’t do anything, we don’t make any changes, then nothing does change.
Whereas at this point in my career, I’m like, nope, I believe in my vision, I believe in my mission, I don’t think it’s going to be the easiest thing ever but that’s okay because I’m in it for the long haul. And incremental growth and moving in that direction, even if we never make it to where my vision is, even if we just move in that direction, I think that’s going to already put us in a really amazing place, versus if we stay cynical, we just have more of the same or even worse than what we already have because we don’t do any effort to create the life and the world we want to have.
So that really lends itself to our topic, which is how to keep going when the going gets tough. So the way I’m going to talk about this, I’m going to presuppose a few things. I’m going to presuppose that you have big goals, I’m going to presuppose that you’re working full-time, but your dreams are much bigger than that, and you’re trying really hard to bring them to life, but you’re also getting a bit tired.
So that is kind of the starting point for this week’s podcast. You’ve been hustling, you’ve been focusing, you’re just not where you want to be yet, you used to feel so hopeful but now you just want to nap.
And you may be in that kind of cynical place, like I was just talking about, wondering if it’s worth it, wondering if it’s ever going to happen, wondering if you want to keep doing all the effort and keep doing the self-improvement and keep doing the extra practice, whatever the things are that you’re doing to try to get to your goal, whatever that may be.
And you’re like, “Ugh, is it really going to get me there? Is this really going to work? Why is it taking so long?” And in your darkest moments, you might even wonder like, “Am I actually cut out for my goals? Is it even possible for me?” But what if that’s just the wrong question?
What if the question isn’t am I cut out for this, or should I be there already? What if a better question is how do I need to do this work in order to be able to show up and keep showing up for as long as it takes? Any time we’re working on something that’s bigger, that has many moving parts, or a goal that we are going to need to take a lot of action on and try and try and try and try and succeed and succeed before we get to the ultimate thing, then it’s not just about doing it, it’s about continuing to show up. It’s really about sustainability.
So you of course don’t have to keep working on whatever you’ve been working on. You don’t have to keep working on the same goals if you don’t want to and there’s nothing wrong with pivoting. But if you do want to keep working on the current goals and you just need a better way of doing it, that’s what this podcast is for.
And I realize for some of you, you might be like, “I’m actually not working on goals, I’m just trying to live my life and not hate my job.” So I think this applies to that too. I would just repackage that and call it a goal. If you’ve been hating your job for a while and you want to not hate your job or even, gasp, love your job, I guess I did just say gasp versus gasping, this is how I talk sometimes.
I also think in emojis, but I didn’t want to really gasp. I don't know, it felt weird. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. If you want to radically change things in your life, whether it’s achieving a big goal or just really changing how you think about something when you’ve been thinking about it in a different way for a long time, this lesson will work for you.
Okay, so the answer to the question how do I need to do this work in order to be able to show up and keep showing up for as long as it takes is this; you have to learn how to make the journey towards your goal feel as good as you think hitting the goal will feel.
And I don’t mean this in a perfectionist way at all. I’m not saying you should always be happy and always feel amazing. But as a general practice, this is what we’re aiming for. So often, with goals, we are waiting until the goal happens to feel good. And it’s like this trap of I’ll be happy when.
We’re like, “Well, I really want to get that promotion so I’m just going to hustle and grind and cry at night and want to give up and not give up and then when I get the promotion, I’m going to feel amazing.” But first of all, it doesn’t actually work like that because however you feel along the way is going to be how you feel when you get there.
So we can’t be struggling along the whole journey and then expect that when we get to the destination, we’re going to feel amazing because we’ve been practicing feeling terrible. So what we’re actually doing is we’re flipping that whole paradigm on purpose. We’re saying, okay, let’s make ourselves feel as amazing now as we think getting to the goal will be. Let’s make ourselves feel as amazing now as we think getting to the goal will feel. Now, this might seem like a tall order. You might be like, wait, what?
So I bet your questions are like, how do you do that? And that’s a great question. Because for most of us, we are not used to achieving goals in this manner. The answer is whatever feeling you think you’re going to feel when you arrive at that outcome, you practice feeling that way now.
You practice feeling happy now, you practice feeling proud now, you practice feeling satisfied now. You practice feeling whatever that end goal feeling is about your achievement before you have achieved it. You practice appreciating it. You practice appreciating you for having gotten yourself there.
Think about what you will believe about yourself once you arrive at your goal and practice those thoughts and feelings ahead of time. Why? Because what you practice along the way will be the difference between whether you give up or keep going, and guess what else. How you feel along the way determines how you feel when you achieve the goal.
Like I was saying before, whatever we practice along the journey is the feeling that we’ll get at the destination. So if we practice hustling and grinding and telling ourselves we’re not good enough because we’re not there yet, then when we achieve the goal, we’re going to feel like we’re not good enough and like we’re not there yet, even though we’ve achieved the goal.
Whereas if ahead of time we’re like, I’m so awesome for doing this work, I’m so brave, I’m scared and I’m still showing up, see, this is my point. You don’t have to be 100% happy. It’s not a perfectionism thing. We can be scared along the way, we can be nervous, we can be uncomfortable because growth, let’s face it, often is uncomfortable.
So I don’t want you to confuse the destination feeling like the journey to say it has to be all rainbows and daisies. It doesn’t. But it means that we’re practicing ahead of time that satisfaction that we think we’re going to get from the goal.
So often when people do goals, they feel dissatisfied the whole way and then they do give up. They don’t want to keep going because their goal becomes this symbol of failure because we’re not there yet. Whereas what I’m suggesting is that you see your goal as a symbol of triumph even before you’ve achieved it.
You celebrate your awesomeness for having the goal and for working on the goal, and you celebrate it the way you would if you’d already done it, even when you haven’t done it yet. The thoughts that we think as we work towards our goal are the thoughts that we will think when we’ve achieved that goal.
Just like the feelings we feel as we work towards our goal are the feelings we’ll feel when we achieve that goal. Thoughts and feelings are habitual. I know sometimes it seems like they kind of just happen, but that’s not actually true. Thoughts are practiced. They are neutral pathing in our brain that we get used to and then we apply them to things.
So if you want to get to that goal and be able to apply a thought like this is awesome, you need to be applying that thought ahead of time along the way and finding what’s awesome along the way, even if it’s not quite the same as the awesome of when you finish.
You could still be like - if you’re writing a novel, which is not an example about work at all, but go with me because I know lots of people are secretly trying to write novels and not writing them because they’re making the journey feel fucking terrible. So if you want to write a novel and you spend 10 minutes working on it, that’s awesome.
You get to celebrate that tiny success as much as you would celebrate the whole book because that celebration, that feeling, that positive feeling ahead of time, that celebration ahead of time, that’s what will get you to keep going.
Any thought you keep thinking over and over becomes a pattern. So if you keep thinking a thought over and over, you will often keep thinking that thought, even when your circumstance changes, even when you achieve your goal. No matter what happens in your life, your brain’s like, well, I have this neural path now so I’m just going to use it because it’s already here.
The brain is really smart, but it does some weird shit y’all. And one of the things it likes to do is be super-efficient. So if it already has a neural pathway, it’s like, I’m just going to use this one because as we talked about a couple episodes back, we can rewire our brain but that’s effort. And while we are good at effort and can do it, there’s a part of your brain that doesn’t want to do any effort because it wants to conserve all your energy in case you have to fight a tiger later.
That made sense when we were humans a long time ago in different life circumstances. It doesn’t make as much sense now, but our brain still has that habit.
So to recap, whatever you want to be thinking when you achieve your goal, practice thinking those thoughts while you’re working towards your goal. Whatever you want to be feeling when you achieve your goal, practice feeling that way while you’re working towards your goal.
Practicing the thoughts and feelings of having achieved your goal does a few things. Thing one, it feels great. When you create intentional feelings in this way, you can work really hard while still feeling really good. It’s not the same as hustling, it’s not the same as grinding. It won’t drain you; it won’t burn you out.
And using these enjoyable feelings as sustainable fuel will get you where you want to go and it’ll often get you there faster because when we’re hustling and grinding and burning ourselves out, then we have to pause, we have to recover, we have to spend a while being cynical, we have to spend a while feeling sorry for ourselves.
Whereas using this good feeling intentional fuel, it is more consistent, it’s more sustainable, and it’ll allow us to keep going. And then there’s no rush. Do we want to get to our goal? Yeah. But when the journey feels good too, we don’t have to rush, which is great because rushing tends to slow us down. Not speed us up.
Okay, so thing two that practicing feeling your feeling and thinking your thought ahead of time will do is it will build up your ability to enjoy your own accomplishments once you have achieved them. You would think we would not need to practice doing this, but we really do.
I coach a lot of really smart, successful, high-achieving people, and most of us, myself included, do not have a great skillset at celebrating and enjoying our accomplishments. So many of us, as soon as we accomplish something, we’re just off to the next thing to accomplish.
It’s like this never-ending to-do list. And we’re always just like, what’s the next thing, what’s the next thing, what’s the next thing. When we can build up our ability to enjoy our accomplishments, again, it feels really good. But it’s also excellent fuel. And when we don’t do it, we either don’t make it to the next accomplishment or by the time we get to it, our brain is on to the next goal without any delight or celebration at all.
So I kind of see this going multiple ways. So for some people, they stop achieving things because it doesn’t actually feel good to achieve those things because they’re not giving themselves any time. And then for others of us, and I was kind of more in this camp, we keep achieving things, but no achievement ever feels good, and it just feels like you’re living your life on this crazy fucking hamster wheel.
And when people get in this place, they tend to look at the job and be like, “Oh, this is the job’s fault, I don’t like this job anymore.” But sometimes it’s actually just that we stopped enjoying our accomplishments, we stopped celebrating ourselves. And when we took that part away, our jobs stopped feeling fun. It stopped feeling good.
I’m not saying celebration is required but I think when we celebrate, it does feel better along the way when we do it ahead of time, but it also makes all of our accomplishments feel more exciting and it think it actually makes us more likely to accomplish more, which I’m about to get into in a minute.
Because I know some of y’all don’t care about how you feel and you just want to achieve, achieve, achieve. But here’s what I want you to know; I do think you achieve more this way. The brain likes to do things that feel good. This is why the brain’s like, let’s eat pizza and watch Netflix and drink this bottle of rosé.
Because to the brain, that feels good. Of course it wants to do that rather than like, write whatever report you’ve been avoiding and procrastinating on. But when you make the process of achieving your goal enjoyable and you celebrate achieving it along the way and when you get to that finish line, you teach your brain that achievement is fun.
And if you do this and you do it consistently, your brain will notice and it will begin to associate goals and goal achievement, but also the process of achieving the goal, not just the end point, with feeling good, which also makes it easier to keep showing up and keep crushing those goals.
Okay, to recap, however you feel while you work on your goals is how you will feel when you achieve the goal. However you think you’ll feel when you get to your goal, you can practice feeling that way now and along the way and you can use it as sustainable fuel.
When we want to give up, it’s generally because we feel helpless or hopeless or we feel a lot of dread. And like I was saying before, working towards our goals and growing ourselves, we are going to experience some discomfort. We are going to experience some fear. We’re probably even going to experience some frustration.
So it’s not about being perfect, it’s not about being in this Polly Anna headspace. It’s about bringing ourselves back to the satisfaction, bringing ourselves back to the joy, bringing ourselves back to the delight. And if you can’t get to any of those, even just bringing ourselves back to the curiosity of like, how might it feel to achieve this? What could I learn from this?
Going all the way to how we think we’ll feel at the end is great, but curiosity is a great in between if you’re not able to get there. And if you’re struggling with this, you can go revisit the episode on confirmation bias, which teaches us how to begin to pick apart our old thoughts.
So if your brain’s like, “I want to feel better and I want to feel the good feeling ahead of time but my brain’s super convinced this is just hard and terrible,” that episode on confirmation bias can help you unpack how to just begin to shift that thought so you can get more access to that good feeling and use it as fuel, and then yes, not give up, keep going, and crush those goals.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. It’s podcast day. What a fun day. Love being here and talking to y’all and sharing my teachings and concepts with you so that you can have way more fun, way more meaning, way more delight in your work, and be super productive, work on your own terms, you know, all the good stuff. All the stuff we want that we think we can’t have at once. That’s what I’m here to help you have and I’m pretty excited today to talk about a lesson near and dear to my heart, which is how to keep going when going feels hard.
So I’m at the end of my day here and I’ve had five lovely coaching calls today with a variety of clients who are all working on really different things. And I think all of those calls had a lot in common with what I’m going to teach and talk about today because one single coaching call can really change the trajectory of everything.
I’ve seen this again and again where just one coaching call will shift something for a client and they’ll just see things completely differently. They’ll see work completely differently; they’ll see their boss completely differently. But sometimes we’re also working on things over a longer term where we’re not just changing one thing, we’re not just tweaking something. We’re creating a really big goal or we’re working on something that has a lot of moving parts and we’re trying to create something - like a really big result in our life.
Like maybe we’re trying to create a promotion, maybe we’re trying to switch to a different kind of schedule at work and we’re getting everything set up, so we have the systems and processes in place to support that. Maybe we’re working to get a new job, or hit some kind of financial goal, where all the little steps along the way are super helpful and the coaching insights and a-has are wonderful, but we need to be able to keep going.
We need to be able to keep working on things even when we hit those little rough patches that we sometimes do when we’re working on things over a longer period of time. So we’re going to talk about that today but first, I’m going to read y’all a review.
This review is called, “An awesome antidote.” And the review says, “The advice works. I tried it out today and already feel more positive and in the driver’s seat about my experience of my job. I’m really looking forward to hearing more about avoiding burnout and loving my job.”
Thank you so much for this lovely review and it’s my pleasure to share this work with you. I’m so glad it’s helpful for you. That’s exactly what I want because I want all of y’all to have meaningful, joyful work, and I believe it’s possible.
That’s a big part about what the vision and mission of my business is, is that I think even though work is work obviously, I think it can be fun and I think we can have really wonderful experiences there, empowering experiences at work, even in a culture where there is so much institutionalized oppression, I think we can unlearn that internally, which will change how we show up to work and then we can also do the work to change policies and institutions.
And I think it’s easy to become cynical and to think like, god, why even fucking bother? And I get that. I’ve spent some time in my own life being cynical from time to time, but I don’t think it’s useful because when we’re cynical, then we’re just like, well, it’s never going to work so why bother, then we don’t do anything, we don’t make any changes, then nothing does change.
Whereas at this point in my career, I’m like, nope, I believe in my vision, I believe in my mission, I don’t think it’s going to be the easiest thing ever but that’s okay because I’m in it for the long haul. And incremental growth and moving in that direction, even if we never make it to where my vision is, even if we just move in that direction, I think that’s going to already put us in a really amazing place, versus if we stay cynical, we just have more of the same or even worse than what we already have because we don’t do any effort to create the life and the world we want to have.
So that really lends itself to our topic, which is how to keep going when the going gets tough. So the way I’m going to talk about this, I’m going to presuppose a few things. I’m going to presuppose that you have big goals, I’m going to presuppose that you’re working full-time, but your dreams are much bigger than that, and you’re trying really hard to bring them to life, but you’re also getting a bit tired.
So that is kind of the starting point for this week’s podcast. You’ve been hustling, you’ve been focusing, you’re just not where you want to be yet, you used to feel so hopeful but now you just want to nap.
And you may be in that kind of cynical place, like I was just talking about, wondering if it’s worth it, wondering if it’s ever going to happen, wondering if you want to keep doing all the effort and keep doing the self-improvement and keep doing the extra practice, whatever the things are that you’re doing to try to get to your goal, whatever that may be.
And you’re like, “Ugh, is it really going to get me there? Is this really going to work? Why is it taking so long?” And in your darkest moments, you might even wonder like, “Am I actually cut out for my goals? Is it even possible for me?” But what if that’s just the wrong question?
What if the question isn’t am I cut out for this, or should I be there already? What if a better question is how do I need to do this work in order to be able to show up and keep showing up for as long as it takes? Any time we’re working on something that’s bigger, that has many moving parts, or a goal that we are going to need to take a lot of action on and try and try and try and try and succeed and succeed before we get to the ultimate thing, then it’s not just about doing it, it’s about continuing to show up. It’s really about sustainability.
So you of course don’t have to keep working on whatever you’ve been working on. You don’t have to keep working on the same goals if you don’t want to and there’s nothing wrong with pivoting. But if you do want to keep working on the current goals and you just need a better way of doing it, that’s what this podcast is for.
And I realize for some of you, you might be like, “I’m actually not working on goals, I’m just trying to live my life and not hate my job.” So I think this applies to that too. I would just repackage that and call it a goal. If you’ve been hating your job for a while and you want to not hate your job or even, gasp, love your job, I guess I did just say gasp versus gasping, this is how I talk sometimes.
I also think in emojis, but I didn’t want to really gasp. I don't know, it felt weird. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. If you want to radically change things in your life, whether it’s achieving a big goal or just really changing how you think about something when you’ve been thinking about it in a different way for a long time, this lesson will work for you.
Okay, so the answer to the question how do I need to do this work in order to be able to show up and keep showing up for as long as it takes is this; you have to learn how to make the journey towards your goal feel as good as you think hitting the goal will feel.
And I don’t mean this in a perfectionist way at all. I’m not saying you should always be happy and always feel amazing. But as a general practice, this is what we’re aiming for. So often, with goals, we are waiting until the goal happens to feel good. And it’s like this trap of I’ll be happy when.
We’re like, “Well, I really want to get that promotion so I’m just going to hustle and grind and cry at night and want to give up and not give up and then when I get the promotion, I’m going to feel amazing.” But first of all, it doesn’t actually work like that because however you feel along the way is going to be how you feel when you get there.
So we can’t be struggling along the whole journey and then expect that when we get to the destination, we’re going to feel amazing because we’ve been practicing feeling terrible. So what we’re actually doing is we’re flipping that whole paradigm on purpose. We’re saying, okay, let’s make ourselves feel as amazing now as we think getting to the goal will be. Let’s make ourselves feel as amazing now as we think getting to the goal will feel. Now, this might seem like a tall order. You might be like, wait, what?
So I bet your questions are like, how do you do that? And that’s a great question. Because for most of us, we are not used to achieving goals in this manner. The answer is whatever feeling you think you’re going to feel when you arrive at that outcome, you practice feeling that way now.
You practice feeling happy now, you practice feeling proud now, you practice feeling satisfied now. You practice feeling whatever that end goal feeling is about your achievement before you have achieved it. You practice appreciating it. You practice appreciating you for having gotten yourself there.
Think about what you will believe about yourself once you arrive at your goal and practice those thoughts and feelings ahead of time. Why? Because what you practice along the way will be the difference between whether you give up or keep going, and guess what else. How you feel along the way determines how you feel when you achieve the goal.
Like I was saying before, whatever we practice along the journey is the feeling that we’ll get at the destination. So if we practice hustling and grinding and telling ourselves we’re not good enough because we’re not there yet, then when we achieve the goal, we’re going to feel like we’re not good enough and like we’re not there yet, even though we’ve achieved the goal.
Whereas if ahead of time we’re like, I’m so awesome for doing this work, I’m so brave, I’m scared and I’m still showing up, see, this is my point. You don’t have to be 100% happy. It’s not a perfectionism thing. We can be scared along the way, we can be nervous, we can be uncomfortable because growth, let’s face it, often is uncomfortable.
So I don’t want you to confuse the destination feeling like the journey to say it has to be all rainbows and daisies. It doesn’t. But it means that we’re practicing ahead of time that satisfaction that we think we’re going to get from the goal.
So often when people do goals, they feel dissatisfied the whole way and then they do give up. They don’t want to keep going because their goal becomes this symbol of failure because we’re not there yet. Whereas what I’m suggesting is that you see your goal as a symbol of triumph even before you’ve achieved it.
You celebrate your awesomeness for having the goal and for working on the goal, and you celebrate it the way you would if you’d already done it, even when you haven’t done it yet. The thoughts that we think as we work towards our goal are the thoughts that we will think when we’ve achieved that goal.
Just like the feelings we feel as we work towards our goal are the feelings we’ll feel when we achieve that goal. Thoughts and feelings are habitual. I know sometimes it seems like they kind of just happen, but that’s not actually true. Thoughts are practiced. They are neutral pathing in our brain that we get used to and then we apply them to things.
So if you want to get to that goal and be able to apply a thought like this is awesome, you need to be applying that thought ahead of time along the way and finding what’s awesome along the way, even if it’s not quite the same as the awesome of when you finish.
You could still be like - if you’re writing a novel, which is not an example about work at all, but go with me because I know lots of people are secretly trying to write novels and not writing them because they’re making the journey feel fucking terrible. So if you want to write a novel and you spend 10 minutes working on it, that’s awesome.
You get to celebrate that tiny success as much as you would celebrate the whole book because that celebration, that feeling, that positive feeling ahead of time, that celebration ahead of time, that’s what will get you to keep going.
Any thought you keep thinking over and over becomes a pattern. So if you keep thinking a thought over and over, you will often keep thinking that thought, even when your circumstance changes, even when you achieve your goal. No matter what happens in your life, your brain’s like, well, I have this neural path now so I’m just going to use it because it’s already here.
The brain is really smart, but it does some weird shit y’all. And one of the things it likes to do is be super-efficient. So if it already has a neural pathway, it’s like, I’m just going to use this one because as we talked about a couple episodes back, we can rewire our brain but that’s effort. And while we are good at effort and can do it, there’s a part of your brain that doesn’t want to do any effort because it wants to conserve all your energy in case you have to fight a tiger later.
That made sense when we were humans a long time ago in different life circumstances. It doesn’t make as much sense now, but our brain still has that habit.
So to recap, whatever you want to be thinking when you achieve your goal, practice thinking those thoughts while you’re working towards your goal. Whatever you want to be feeling when you achieve your goal, practice feeling that way while you’re working towards your goal.
Practicing the thoughts and feelings of having achieved your goal does a few things. Thing one, it feels great. When you create intentional feelings in this way, you can work really hard while still feeling really good. It’s not the same as hustling, it’s not the same as grinding. It won’t drain you; it won’t burn you out.
And using these enjoyable feelings as sustainable fuel will get you where you want to go and it’ll often get you there faster because when we’re hustling and grinding and burning ourselves out, then we have to pause, we have to recover, we have to spend a while being cynical, we have to spend a while feeling sorry for ourselves.
Whereas using this good feeling intentional fuel, it is more consistent, it’s more sustainable, and it’ll allow us to keep going. And then there’s no rush. Do we want to get to our goal? Yeah. But when the journey feels good too, we don’t have to rush, which is great because rushing tends to slow us down. Not speed us up.
Okay, so thing two that practicing feeling your feeling and thinking your thought ahead of time will do is it will build up your ability to enjoy your own accomplishments once you have achieved them. You would think we would not need to practice doing this, but we really do.
I coach a lot of really smart, successful, high-achieving people, and most of us, myself included, do not have a great skillset at celebrating and enjoying our accomplishments. So many of us, as soon as we accomplish something, we’re just off to the next thing to accomplish.
It’s like this never-ending to-do list. And we’re always just like, what’s the next thing, what’s the next thing, what’s the next thing. When we can build up our ability to enjoy our accomplishments, again, it feels really good. But it’s also excellent fuel. And when we don’t do it, we either don’t make it to the next accomplishment or by the time we get to it, our brain is on to the next goal without any delight or celebration at all.
So I kind of see this going multiple ways. So for some people, they stop achieving things because it doesn’t actually feel good to achieve those things because they’re not giving themselves any time. And then for others of us, and I was kind of more in this camp, we keep achieving things, but no achievement ever feels good, and it just feels like you’re living your life on this crazy fucking hamster wheel.
And when people get in this place, they tend to look at the job and be like, “Oh, this is the job’s fault, I don’t like this job anymore.” But sometimes it’s actually just that we stopped enjoying our accomplishments, we stopped celebrating ourselves. And when we took that part away, our jobs stopped feeling fun. It stopped feeling good.
I’m not saying celebration is required but I think when we celebrate, it does feel better along the way when we do it ahead of time, but it also makes all of our accomplishments feel more exciting and it think it actually makes us more likely to accomplish more, which I’m about to get into in a minute.
Because I know some of y’all don’t care about how you feel and you just want to achieve, achieve, achieve. But here’s what I want you to know; I do think you achieve more this way. The brain likes to do things that feel good. This is why the brain’s like, let’s eat pizza and watch Netflix and drink this bottle of rosé.
Because to the brain, that feels good. Of course it wants to do that rather than like, write whatever report you’ve been avoiding and procrastinating on. But when you make the process of achieving your goal enjoyable and you celebrate achieving it along the way and when you get to that finish line, you teach your brain that achievement is fun.
And if you do this and you do it consistently, your brain will notice and it will begin to associate goals and goal achievement, but also the process of achieving the goal, not just the end point, with feeling good, which also makes it easier to keep showing up and keep crushing those goals.
Okay, to recap, however you feel while you work on your goals is how you will feel when you achieve the goal. However you think you’ll feel when you get to your goal, you can practice feeling that way now and along the way and you can use it as sustainable fuel.
When we want to give up, it’s generally because we feel helpless or hopeless or we feel a lot of dread. And like I was saying before, working towards our goals and growing ourselves, we are going to experience some discomfort. We are going to experience some fear. We’re probably even going to experience some frustration.
So it’s not about being perfect, it’s not about being in this Polly Anna headspace. It’s about bringing ourselves back to the satisfaction, bringing ourselves back to the joy, bringing ourselves back to the delight. And if you can’t get to any of those, even just bringing ourselves back to the curiosity of like, how might it feel to achieve this? What could I learn from this?
Going all the way to how we think we’ll feel at the end is great, but curiosity is a great in between if you’re not able to get there. And if you’re struggling with this, you can go revisit the episode on confirmation bias, which teaches us how to begin to pick apart our old thoughts.
So if your brain’s like, “I want to feel better and I want to feel the good feeling ahead of time but my brain’s super convinced this is just hard and terrible,” that episode on confirmation bias can help you unpack how to just begin to shift that thought so you can get more access to that good feeling and use it as fuel, and then yes, not give up, keep going, and crush those goals.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, listen on Spotify and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher.