78. Stop Weaponizing Your Goals
When it comes to goals, there is one thing I see people doing that makes it way harder to actually achieve them: turning the goal into a way to be mean to themselves.
When I first launched my coaching business, I set a goal to make $100,000 in the first 12 months.
I’d never actually made that amount in corporate, and I’d never run a business.
But I thought I should be able to start a brand-new business and create six-figure revenue within 365 days.
There’s nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. I’m all for it.
But I made that ambitious goal and then I beat myself up when it was hard, which was neither fun nor effective.
That’s what I mean when I say “weaponizing a goal.”
I mean, taking your big, wild, audacious goal and using the fact that you haven’t achieved it yet as an excuse to judge yourself.
I mean taking your ambitious, improbable goal and using the fact that it’s hard against yourself as a judgment.
Goals are a way to measure what we’re doing, to see if we’re on track for where we were trying to go.
But when we weaponize them and use them against ourselves, they feel terrible.
They become symbols of pain.
It feels yucky to look at them or think about them.
It’s hard to keep going.
So if you want to actually achieve your goal, it’s important to know how to engage with it without weaponizing it against yourself.
Tune in this week to learn how.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What it means to weaponize your goals.
Why having big goals is great, but can become problematic.
My own experience of weaponizing my goals against myself.
Where perfectionism plays a huge role in how we weaponize our goals against ourselves.
How to see where you’re weaponizing your goals, and how to stop.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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Unf*ck Your Brain – 90: Perfectionist Fantasies + Tomorrow Thinking
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women 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, happy Wednesday. We are talking about goals today. And I'm pretty fucking excited to have this conversation with y'all because it addresses something that I see all the time that makes it so much harder for people to actually achieve their goals. And that is when people weaponize their goals.
Now, first thing’s first, what do I mean by weaponizing a goal? What I mean when I say that is when we take a goal that we have and make the fact that we haven't met it yet mean something bad about us. So as an example, I talk all the time about how when I first launched my coaching business my first goal was to make $100,000 in the first 12 months from doing that.
And something that's interesting about this is that I wasn't even quite making $100,000 in my day job. I was pretty close between my salary and my bonuses and stuff. I was pretty close, I think, to 100 but I don't think I was quite there. I think I was like in the 90s somewhere. And yet, I was like, okay, but I'm going to launch this business and I should be able to make more money doing that even though I hadn't really ever run a business before. I had done some freelancing and I'd had some various clients and run some workshops and stuff.
And listen, having a big goal is great. Having a big, ridiculous, wild, ambitious goal is super fun, when it's fun. It also tends to make people feel kind of barf-y and terrible, which I talk about sometimes in the podcast. My coach, Kara, calls this barf club. But when we like kind of hang all our worthiness on our goal and it's a big, wildly ambitious goal, I think that kind of puts us in a problematic position.
And that's basically what I did, I was like, okay, I quit my cozy corporate job, I'm going to launch this business and I'm going to get to six figures within a year. And I was looking to do that, I don't think I realized this at that time, but I was looking to do that as a way to prove to myself that it was okay to leave my job and that this was a good thing I was doing, it was a good decision, and I was going to blow my own mind with what I could accomplish.
And the truth is, I have blown my own mind with what I've accomplished. And the truth also is that trying to make 100K in that first 12 months in the way that I was doing it felt fucking awful and was totally, pretty miserable. And I remember at least once, and probably a few times, in the early days of my business, Alex would just look at me and go, “Is this your dream life?” She was like, “This is what you said you wanted to do, but you don't seem to be liking it really.” And I remember being like, “This is not my dream life. I am not liking it. What am I doing?”
And there were a lot of little pieces that came into play about why it was the way it was. But I think one of them was that I was weaponizing that goal. I was trying to meet that goal and I was not meeting that goal. And I was making the fact that I wasn't meeting that goal mean something bad about me.
I was making it mean that I made a mistake in leaving corporate. I was making it mean that I would never get to the 100k in 12 months. I was making it mean that I was a failure. I was making it mean that I was stupid. You know, all these terrible things, I was making it mean them all the time, probably without really knowing I was doing that. And sometimes while knowing I was doing it because I'm a coach and that's like what coaches think and talk about all of the time.
And so as y'all maybe also know, but let's just review, I did not make $100,000 in my first 12 months in business. I did not make $100,000 my first calendar year in business, that was my second goal. And I did make 100K in my second 12 months in business. So I did get there eventually. And now I'm way past that, I did multiple six figures, I did a quarter million in 2021 That's fucking insane.
Let me just say that, like my mind is blown. I'm like, whoa. But making that much money was so much more fun and I wasn't weaponizing my goals against myself nearly as much. And I probably still was a little bit because as we always talk about, we're humans over here. And when we're rewiring our brains and teaching our brains to think differently, our brains are going to do that old shit like a lot of the time.
So this is like a three steps forward, one step back. We're like not doing this perfectionistically, it's a little bit of everything all the time kind of thing. But I'm having a much better experience now. But something I see with my clients all the time and other people and other coaches is that they have sometimes it's a big ambitious goal, like mine was.
But sometimes it's like a little teeny goal. It's like a little sweet, very discreet goal like I talk sometimes about some people call it the minimum baseline, I call it too small to fail where we set like a tiny goal. But sometimes when we set a tiny goal, we don't meet it right away either. And change is hard, right? And changing habits requires a lot of effort because we already have the neural pathing for the habits done. So our brain wants to do those habits and there's usually like rewards, whatever, whatever.
Anyways, basically, I don't give a shit what size the goal is, what I see a lot of people do is not meet the goal yet and then make that mean something bad about them. And so that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about weaponizing your goals. And I just want to invite you to fucking stop that shit.
Now, if you want to keep doing it, of course, you can. But it's not very fun and I think it actually makes us much less likely to achieve our goal because it feels like shit, right? And we're building this negative associative connection. We're building that associative connection between feeling like shit and our goal. And then, of course, we don't want to work on the goal because every time we think about the goal, we feel like shit.
This happened so much in the beginning of my business. I was like trying to learn how to sell coaching. I was like a baby brand new coach trying to also be a coach, which was a new skill for me and trying to run a business, and it was hard. I didn't know how to do it yet. And I was learning how to do it all the time.
But the more I made that mean I was failing and bad, then the more I also didn't want to do it. And the more I didn't do it, the slower I was going to get better at it. Right? When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense that when we weaponize a goal we then don't want to work on it because why would we? It feels terrible.
Okay, so then the question is, if we're not going to weaponize the goal, what are we going to do with it? And I think a lot of people, and me too, often think about doing the opposite. But in this case, I think the opposite would be like glorifying the goal.
And I think that's actually where we get into a problem where we fantasize about how good the goal will be. And then when we actually achieve the goal, of course, we're still humans with human brains and so our life is 50/50 and it's not magical, right? It's not like unicorns, and rainbows, and daisies.
This is what my coach, Kara Loewentheil, calls the perfectionist fantasy, which is the fantasy idea that when we achieve our goal, we're going to feel amazing and magically all of our problems will be solved, and we’ll be a perfect happy human all the time. So if you have never listened to her podcast episode on that, I would highly recommend going and checking that out immediately after this podcast episode is done.
But that's what I'm saying, is I don't think we want to weaponize it, I don't think we want to glorify the goal either. I think it's actually more helpful to kind of get more like middle of the road about the goal, kind of where it's like the goal will be fun and exciting and interesting, and also we're not like making it high stakes.
So we're not making it high stakes in that we're going to make it mean something bad about us. And we're also not making it high stakes in that we're going to make it mean our life will be amazing, or make it mean then we'll be complete as a person or like any of that shit. Where it's more just like this is a cool thing I could do. How could I do this cool thing? And when we take the stakes down in this way, I think it actually makes it a lot easier to just work on the goal.
It makes it more fun to have the goal, but it's like kind of a chill version of fun. Because when we're in that perfectionist fantasy, when we're like frothing about how amazing our life will be when we achieve the goal, that's kind of a not chill fun. It's like very, I don't know how to explain it. It's like kind of like frenetic and it makes us in a hurry to get there. And then we're like, oh, I feel bad for myself because I'm not there.
So I think a lot of people kind of whip back and forth between that weaponization where the goal makes us feel like shit. And let's be clear, the goal does not make us feel like shit, we make ourselves feel like shit by beating ourselves with the goal. We have weaponized the goal, the goal did not weaponize itself. So we flip flop between that and then that like frothy fantasy where we're thinking about how amazing it will be.
And the thing about those two places is usually when we're in those two places, we're not doing any fucking work. We're also not enjoying our current life. We're either weaponizing the goal and making ourselves feel like shit, or we're doing the fantasy thing and just like thinking about how amazing things will be later.
And instead, what I would invite you to consider is enjoying the life that you have now, finding ways to enjoy that using things like the what is working list. I also have a whole great episode about appreciation that could be really beneficial for that. And taking some fucking action on that goal.
Let's be clear, those two things can go together, right? So we can think about the things that are working in our life right now and enjoy our life right now, and kind of use some of that positive emotion that we're cultivating about our current life as fuel to take action towards our goal. I also think we can think about like that completing the goal would be satisfying and we can borrow some of that positive emotion from the future to take some action now.
But I want to be clear that the frothy version of that actually does not make it easy to work on the goal because it kind of hinges on that perfectionism that it's all perfect, that kind of like element of it. And that kind of tends to make us want to fantasize versus us wanting to get to work and do some shit.
Okay, so this is kind of a short episode because basically this is all I want to teach you, is that a lot of us have goals then we weaponize them and use them as a way to beat ourselves up. And then that feels terrible and so then we give up on the goal, and then we feel terrible. And then we tell ourselves we always give up on things and that will like never be able to change our lives. And then we get despondent, and we get in what do I call it sometimes, oh the pit of despair and we do the fuck it effect.
And we just get stuck in this like helplessness of like, I can never make my life different. And we think it's because of these things we've attributed to being negative about ourselves. Like, we're like, “Oh, I'm just not a person who can make change,” or like, “I always give up on everything.” But I think a lot of that actually resolves when we stop weaponizing goals and we stop making our goals mean fucking anything about us whether they're achieved or unachieved, right?
And then I also want to warn you about that other potential pitfall, which is, if we try to go from weaponization and do a 180, sometimes we wind up in that frothy fantasy where we're just thinking about how great things will be later. It's not that there's anything wrong with that, but it tends to not do anything that we actually want done. And then we usually wind up circling back to I never accomplish things, duh, duh, duh, all that bullshit.
And it kind of perpetuates the myth that we'll be happy later versus figuring out how to be happy now, but also like remembering that there's so much working in our lives already that we could be enjoying, that we're not enjoying when we're fantasizing, we're also not enjoying when we're beating ourselves up. And that we can take that positive emotion and use it to actually do effort towards our goal. And that doing effort towards our goal is how we actually get to our goal.
That is like very basic, but I think all of our brains forget this all the time. They're like, “Oh, I have to beat myself up, I have to like fantasize.” No, just if you have a goal, all you have to do to get there is to do effort towards the goal. The beating oneself up, we all think that's so fucking useful but it's not. It's a distraction.
I have clients tell me all the time that if they stopped being mean to themselves they wouldn't get anything done. And we could have a whole episode on that, and probably we shall. But let me just say right now that there are lots of people in the world doing lots of things, even you're doing lots of things that you're not having to beat yourself up to get yourself to do.
And so I invite you to take a look around your life about where you're already doing that and why you do those things. And what if you can employ that in these other areas? Also, just like, what if beating ourselves up isn't worth it? Some of my clients do use the anxiety and the self-beating to get things done. And I do agree that for a short while that can work, but it's like burning coal. That is what creates the burnout, my friends.
That is what creates us feeling like shit and hating everything. And then we just try to keep cracking the whip, but eventually it stops working because we're too burned out for it. So I'm not saying that that's never true that people do suffer from that energy. I'm just like, but why would you if you don't have to? Why would you ever choose that? I mean, you get to if you want to, free well and all. But why? I think there's another way that's more fun and more effective.
Okay, if you want to work with me on how to stop fucking weaponizing all your goals so you can actually enjoy yourself more and create more of what you want in life, I've got two ways you can work with me. I'm currently accepting one on one clients. Let me actually be clear on that, I have a wait list.
I'm currently accepting one on one clients who will be starting in July. I should tell you all that because I've had a few of you be very sad that you can't start right away. But don't worry, I'll give you some stuff to work on until July and you can start getting that transformation right away. And then we'll have six months together and you'll blow your mind with what you can create.
And then I also have a group coaching program launching in July called Satisfied As Fuck. It's going to be fucking spectacular and it's going to be all about helping each and every client create a life and a career that is satisfying as fuck, whatever that means for them.
And I would love to talk to you about either program or both of them. So scoot on over to korilinn.com/learnmore and sign up for a consult and let's have a conversation about how to make your life more of what you want it to be. All right y'all, that's what I got for you. Bye 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.
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