What Got You Here Today
Won’t help you get to where you want to be.
Today I want to chat about identities and beliefs and mindsets (shocking, I know!) But more importantly, I want to talk about them in the context of goal setting/getting. As this time of year rolls around a lot of us get into goal setting for the following year and while I have a blog post coming about the mindset shift I made around goal setting coming up, I wanted to focus on the importance of shifting our mindsets/ditching old beliefs so that we might be able to actually achieve some of our goals in the next year.
Lose weight - oh, sorry, “get healthy”. Save money. Find my lover. Scale my business.
These are incredibly common goals that we all set at the start of next year and despite my note of sarcasm with the first one, there’s nothing wrong with any of these - aside from the fact that most of them next come to fruition and we end up either back where we were OR feeling even worse about ourselves. So, why is it so hard for us to “stick” to any of our goals?
Goals are meant to be challenging and within that there will be moments of frustration/desire to give up/etc. But it’s when we bust through those frustrations to get back on track or stay focused on the prize at the end of the road that we feel so elated. If it was easy, it wouldn’t feel as good when you reach the desired milestone. However, it’s in these moments of frustrations that we have a choice and this is where we usually end up falling back into old ways of thinking and being. If you shift your belief about yourself in that moment of frustration, however, you have the opportunity to grow into the next iteration of yourself.
For example, if my goal last year was to make $175,000 and I did it (YAY!) but next year I want to make $250,000, I can’t have the same mindset that got me to $175k because if I HAD a 250k mindset, I would have made 250k! But this goes for everything. If my goal last year was to be able to walk up 1 flight of stairs without gasping and I did it (YAY!) and now my goal is to walk up 2 flights of of stairs without gasping I will need to adopt a 2 flights of stairs mentality.
So, how the heck do we shift our mindset if we have no idea what the mindset to achieve our desired goals is???
We need to first establish what you perceive it to feel like/be like when you reach your goal (visualization works here). This is ALSO important to helping you decide if the goal you want is really something you actually desire, or something you think you should desire. If we don’t have an emotional attachment, understanding of what the feeling would be like when we “arrive” at our goal, we aren’t going to be as invested in the process to get there. To do this, you can look at people who HAVE achieved a similar goal to what you are desiring and see what mindset they have. How do they speak about themselves, their desires, their goals? Do they have a growth or fixed mindset? It’s kinda like how they used to say “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” We have to do this with our minds. Our minds have to level up and start thinking like a more invested version of ourselves in order for us to create actual shifts.
So, let me use myself and my future goals as an example to show you how I’m doing this:
One of my goals for next year is to HEAL. Heal my body, my mind, my relationships, my finances, myself.
So let’s focus on the healing of my body:
1) In order for me to make progress in healing my body I first have to decide what I think that would look like.
For me, healing would look like my hormones becoming more balanced and thus, the symptoms I’ve been experiencing happening less and less. When this happens, I believe I will have more energy, more drive, less fogginess, and definitely less itchyness (eczema is one of my symptoms).
2) Once I’ve established my “destination” then I have to consider who do I need to be in order for that destination to happen
I need to look at every decision I would have normally made around food, sleep, movement, and stress VERY differently. Before I would just try to override my body’s requests with hustle mentality. Hustle mentality is NOT going to help me achieve my goal of healing. So, when I go to order food/make food I need to ask myself: Is this nourishing me towards healing or taking me further away from healing? When I am debating about whether or not to move my body in the day, I need to ask myself: Will movement help me towards healing or will it take me further away? Will resting my body help me get closer or further from healing? A year ago, I wouldn’t have even considered asking these questions because my mindset was not in the place to help me heal. It was in the place to help me survive and that is all.
3) After I’ve started asking questions, I need to become aware of what obstacles/beliefs are popping up when frustration arises:
I’ve noticed when it comes to healing my body, I will sabotage myself when I start to feel myself make progress, so I had to look at the context that created this situation. I have an old belief that a smaller more toned body is bad for me, because when I was in a smaller body a lot of unsafe things happened to me. This belief pops up when I start to see noticeable changes in my face or body structure but all of those beliefs aren’t about healing, they are about aesthetics. So I need to parent that belief and help my brain understand that I am not moving my body and eating a certain way to LOOK a certain way, I am doing it to FEEL a certain way and if my body adjusts to accommodate that is still safe. Other beliefs that pop up that get in my way of healing my body: my belief that rest is unproductive and therefore bad (I tied my value to my productivity my whole life), the belief that I will be less respected and therefore abandoned if my body changes size (I saw this happen with fellow body image activists), the belief that if I am going to be moving my body I need to hardcore every time (what’s the point in doing it if we can’t do it perfectly?), etc. Can you see why it’s so important to understand your destination AND the mindset required to get there?? If these thoughts pop up and I don’t have an idea of what a person that has healed themselves would say in those moments, I will just default to what my thoughts tell me.
4) Set the expectation ahead of time that goal getting is NOT linear and there will be times when I default to past ways of thinking/believing but it doesn’t mean I have to give up or wait a week to try again:
In the past when I would set goals for myself (saving money, achieving a status, etc.) if I defaulted to old ways of thinking I would just give up on the dream altogether, thinking “What’s the point? I’ve already given up.” But then I realized that one decision doesn’t have to derail the train. It might take you off course a wee bit, but you can get yourself back on course with the next decision that comes along. Every moment is a new opportunity to become the person you desire to become.
Setting and achieving goals IS fun (says the achiever…) but it’s up to us whether we want to let the process confirm tired old beliefs we have about ourselves OR if we want to use that frustrating process to drive forward with more gusto than before - encouraging yourself that you can write this story any way that you decide. Deciding to confront those old stories is powerful work and necessary for growth, but I know that you are capable of it, because I am capable of it! If I can do it, you can do it. We are all humans with the ability to critically think, focus, and move forward towards our goals in the way that makes the most sense to us.
