338 Holly Worton ~ How to Achieve Your Goals + Overcome Obstacles, Step By Step

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Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 338. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today I am going to talk about goal setting, because I realised I have never actually talked about that. I have talked a lot about my year-end planning; I talk a lot about my year-end review; but I haven’t really talked about goal-setting and this week’s episode was inspired by a conversation I had with somebody online which led me to reflect how, sadly, uneducated I was for the vast majority of my life. It really wasn’t until I was in my late-30s, and I trained as a coach, that I really learned proper goal-setting and how to apply it to my life — and that changed everything. That was really a ‘before’ and ‘after’ point in my life. I know I have a lot of those. But really it is no wonder that I spent so many years just kind of drifting through life and letting things happen to me and not having a really great life because I wasn’t planning in the right way and making the right decisions for myself and yeah, I achieved a lot of great things in those years but honestly it would have been a lot faster and easier if I had just planned more in advance which is why I think I am so obsessed with planning now — I realise how much easier life had been and how much nicer life has been because I take the time to plan what I want to experience.

So, if you have listened to any previous episodes, especially the ones from the end of the year, you will know that goal-setting and planning is a massive part of my annual year-end review and plan for the next year. Obviously I wouldn’t get anything done, or not very much done, without it. I am really, really, goal orientated. I take a lot of time each year to plan the future year and really look at what I want to achieve, what I want to experience and if I didn’t do that I would probably just sit around and let stuff happen to me. And that’s not great.

So before we get into today’s episode, I wanted to say a massive thank you to Rosie a new patron and also invite you to join me on Patreon, if you get value from this podcast I would love for you to head over there and support me to help support the production of this show. If you head over to: http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton you can join me there. Membership starts at just $1 a month and you get exclusive access to stuff that I don’t share anywhere else. So that is it, let’s get into the episode.

So, goal-setting, it is not something I learned in school, it is not something that a lot of people learned in school, and I think it is shocking that this very, very, important life-skill is just left to I don’t know if you are lucky enough to hear about it and learn the strategy. It is not hard, it is really basic, and I have been doing it for so many years now it is really integrated into my life. But it wasn’t that way, it wasn’t that way for most of my life.

As I said, as a result of this conversation with this person online, I realised that a lot of people just don’t know how to do this stuff. The question had come about because they asked: what do you do when you feel you are not achieving your potential? And my answer was: I set goals, I achieve them, I set new goals. That is obviously a more simplified version than the reality but that it all boils down to.

So how do you set goals? How do you achieve goals? How do you make that happen?

Here’s what I do: I look at what I want to experience in life, what do you want to experience in life? Journal on it, what do you want to experience, this year, next year, in five years, in ten years, twenty years. I did a blog post and previous podcast episode on this and I am starting to add to the show notes a new section called “related episodes”, this is something that I started adding to my new Business Mindset books, so I wanted to add this to each podcast episode in the show notes because a lot of times I talk about similar things to things I have discussed before but not exactly the same. So, episode 325 was all about life-goals and planning for each decade of your life so if you want some ideas on how to set goals and how to look at what you want to experience in the long-term, ten, twenty, forty years from now, that episode might help you.

So think about what you want to experience in life. To me, this is the basis of goal-setting. So ask yourself: what do you want to be, do, have; how do you want to feel in life? And then use that to create a list of personal and professional goals. To me the trick is finding what you want to experience in life and looking at what you need to do to make that happen.

So something that a lot of people often do, almost half of the American population according to sources I found online, is making New Year’s Resolutions. Around this time of year you often find people saying: here is why I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions, here is why New Year’s Resolutions don’t work. So I thought it was really important to explore how goals are different from New Year’s Resolutions. They are very similar; New Year’s Resolutions are kind of a type of goal, but they are not really. So let’s look at some statistics on New Year’s Resolutions, according to statistics I found online, about 40% of American at least make New Year’s Resolutions, however only 8% of them are successful in their resolutions. That’s not very good. The top 5 New Year’s Resolutions are: weight loss, getting organised, spending less and saving more, enjoying life to the fullest, living life for fulfilment and getting healthy. So, how are goals different from New Year’s Resolutions? Let’s pick some of these apart. Lose weight, what does that mean? If you lose one pound is that good enough?

A very common way of writing goals, or creating goals, is using the SMART goal method and this is something that I am sure you have heard before, but if you haven’t look it up. SMART goals mean that your goals are: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. So what does that mean? Lose weight: it is not specific, so how much weight do you want to lose or how much do you want to weigh? So if you weigh 150lbs and you want to weigh 130lbs you have two ways of wording that, you could say that you want to lose 20lbs, but I think a better way of doing it is looking at what you want to be, which is you want to weigh 130lbs. Personally that is how I would do it. Measurable: that is clearly something you can measure you need to weigh yourself, step on a scale, and you will know how much you weight. Is it attainable? Yes, that’s do-able. Is it realistic? Well, it depends on what your deadline is, which leads us to the next bit which is time-bound. So you need a date for when you want to achieve the goal, so you want to lose 20lbs in a month, probably not realistic. Two months, probably realistic, depending on what you are doing. Three months, definitely realistic. So look at playing around with different deadlines to make your goal more realistic and attainable.       

“Get organised”, what the heck does that mean? Does get organised mean decluttering your office; using a calendar to organise your schedule? What does that mean to you “get organised”, you need to be really specific. And again, it needs to be something that you can measure, it needs to be something that you can attain, it needs to be realistic and time-bound. When do you want to get organised by? Again what does that mean get organised, what does that mean to you? Does it mean organising the shelves on your bookcase? I say this as I look over at my bookcase which needs organising once again, I keep buying books and the bookcase keeps getting really disorganised, so that is something I could add.

So “spend less and save more”, what doesn’t that mean? You need to create a budget; how much do you want to spending and how much do you want to be saving every month? You need to get really specific with that goal, it is definitely something that you can measure, it definitely is attainable, I don’t know, it depends on how much you want to spend and how much you want to save. And timely, start looking at when are you going to achieve these different breakdowns of the goals. So maybe you want to save 1000 whatever is your local currency, 2000, 3000, whether or not that is realistic, has to do when you want to achieve these goals by.

“Live a fulfilling life” and “enjoy life to its fullest”, what does that mean to you? Maybe that means having a job that you enjoy? Maybe that means building your own business? Maybe that means having a family? You need to break that down into very specific things and again, you want them to be measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. “Get healthy” what does that mean to you? Does that have to do with losing weight? Does that have to do with eating different types of foods, or not eating different types of foods? Does that have to do with exercising on a regular basis and how often? So again, you need to break these resolutions down to specific goals that work for you and that are meaningful to you.

So that is the basic difference in my opinion between New Year’s Resolutions and goals. New Year’s Resolutions are often really vague, they are not specific, and yeah, that is why people don’t achieve them in my opinion.

So how are goals different from New Year’s Resolutions? They are specific, they are measurable, they are realistic, they are attainable, and they are time-bound.  The thing that distinguishes goals from dreams is that they have a deadline. Deadlines are really important, when do you want to achieve this by?

The other important thing with your goal setting is to write it down. So you can refer to it often. It is said, and I don’t know who did this study, but it is said very commonly that people with written goals are 50% more likely to achieve their goals and if you look at your goals every day you are even more likely to achieve your goals. So when you are setting our goals, look at them from many different angles, so take into account how much time you are going to have to dedicate to them, how much money you are going to invest in them. How is that going to impact your life? All of this, asking these questions will help you figure out how realistic your goals are. How much time are they going to take? How much money are they going to cost? How is it going to impact your relationships and the rest of your life? If you decide that at the cost of everything else you are going to, I don’t know, go to med school, that is a lot of years, if you have a partner and five kids that is going to be really, really, difficult, it might not be realistic. Or it might be realistic if your kids are all adults and they are all grownup, but it is going to cost money.

Again, you are going to have to consider our goals from many different angles and consider how they are going to impact your current life and are you willing to experience that impact, because a lot of times we set goals, or we come up with dreams or plans and we think: oh, it would be so great if I did this or that, but once you step into the reality of doing the things you need to do to achieve these goals you realise: hmm this is impacting my life in a way that…I don’t know if I really like it!  So it is really important to consider this from all these different angles from before you start to work on the goal so that you realise whether you really, really, want to work on this. I think this is one of the reasons that a lot of people fail to achieve their goals, because they didn’t consider the impact before they start.

So, goals. Write them down. Look at them every day. And create an action plan. So you need to break each goal down into little chunks of little actions that you need to take in order to achieve the goals. So, pulling up, I feel like I have talked to you about my plans for this year about a thousand times already, so I have set one of my goals is to publish second editions of all of my Business Mindset books this year. So what do I need to do to make that happen? I need to do at least one Workcation a month, I need to hire someone to design the workbooks, I need to hire someone to design the covers, I need to design the interior myself. Before I even get to that point I need to update all the book and I need to have them edited and I need to have them proofread. There are so many different things I need to do. And if I don’t have this project broken down into all those little action chunks it would be so overwhelming and I think that is one of the reasons, there are many reasons, that I haven’t done this work before now, because it just felt like a big thing and I wasn’t really sure if it was useful. But when I looked at what I want to achieve this year, in terms of income streams, and where I wanted my money coming in from, I realised that these books are good but they could be a lot better and each book, which currently an ebook can be turned into four different income streams: the eBook, the paperback, the audio book, and the workbook. So it allows me to help people in different ways, because not everyone likes ebooks and it allows me to create multiple income streams into my author business that I don’t currently have, so each book becomes four income streams, four income streams becomes sixteen income streams — that sounds really exciting. So that is what has made me pick this up and break this project down into little bite-sized chunks so that I can achieve these goals.

So that is one example. It is very important to break these goals down into little chunks. If you look at your goals and if you look at your plans and it still feels overwhelming that just means that you need to break it down into smaller chunks, smaller actions. And block them into your calendar, that is really, really, important, you need to know that you have enough time to do all this. One of the things that I do when I am planning my goals for the year is I print out an annual calendar, an A4 size, one page and I get a highlighter and I highlight all the stuff I want to do. There are two classes that I have signed up for this year, three actually, and so I highlight all of those in one colour and then I highlight my work-cations in another colour and my fitness stuff, my kickboxing, in another colour, I have all this stuff in my calendar at a glance where I can see how booked up my year is. I want to do quarterly walk-cations, so I am going to be walking a couple of long-distance trails next year and another shorter trail, so I have got to those in the calendar as well, because one of the trails is a two-week trail, the other a one-week trail, these are going to block big chunks of my year, so I highlight those in a different colour.

And, this is all super-helpful in seeing how much free-time I have, so that is kind of my year at a glance and then I take my goals and I put them into my Google calendar and I block off all the little bits and pieces of time that it is going to take me to achieve these goals. So looking at my calendar for the next couple of weeks, I have got a work-cation, well actually, as I am recording this I have a work-cation coming up, but actually it was last weekend by the time this goes live. Then I have got times blocked out to record the audio book and because I have already recorded an audiobook, I have an idea of how long it is going to take. It is hard to do too many chunks at a time, audio is really tiring, so I have broken that down into many different days. I want to re-create my old muscle-testing video that got deleted off of YouTube when my channel died, so I have got some time blocked off for that. I have got time blocked off for doing the project of the book in terms of communicating with my cover-designer and communicating with the workbook designer, communicating with the editor, going through the comments from the editor and the proofreader, all this stuff is blocked out in my calendar. So, I can see how much time it takes and to reconfirm that I have the time to do this and that my deadlines are do-able – they are, I think it is do-able, I think I should be able to release the first Business Mindset book, which is Business Beliefs, by the end of the year, I think it is totally do-able looking at my calendar. However if it weren’t do-able all I would have to do is just drag and drop stuff around, all these little tasks, and my time-blocks, and then readjust the deadline.

I kind of feel like this would be easier if you were looking at my screen as I am talking about this, but you understand the concept. Google calendar, if you are not using it, it is a really, really, important part of how I achieve my goals, because that is how I manage my time. So you are going to create an action plan, we are going to make sure that it is do-able and then do it, take the actions step-by-step, work your way through the actions to achieve your goals, it is that easy. Except sometimes things can get in the way, sometimes you need help, sometimes you need support, you might need an accountability buddy, a lot of people find it really useful to either make their goals public on their blog, or have accountability partners or have a mastermind or master-gut group to help ensure that they achieve their goals, that they do the actions that they need to do. I have found this really useful in the past, now I don’t know, I think I am getting good at achieving my goals on my own. However I am working with my coach, Lisa Wechtenhiser, this year I signed up for a year-long program to get support and accountability as I am working through my goals because I have this really ambitious plan for both publishing and personal goals for this year and I wanted to make sure that I did the things that I need to do to achieve my goals. So hire a coach, or hire a buddy, or work with a friend — accountability can really help.

Again, look at your goals and look at your plan, every single day. This is something that I am not so good at. I printed a copy of my goals, I have got it in my journal, I printed another copy of my goals, and it has disappeared {laughing} it has fallen down I think in the corner of my desk, I can’t see it! I am going to pause this and get it…  I can’t believe I lost this thing! See the importance of having a system that works, my God I am so glad that I did this so you can see the lack of perfection in my process. So, I printed my publishing calendar, I printed by month-by-month plan, I printed my goals, and I put them up in a place where I could see them, and then at some point, when I was reorganising my desk, I put it on a clipboard and then ended up in a place where I completely forgot about it. So, do as I say and not as I do. However, I am still working through my goals by magic! So, have your goals in a place where you can see them every day. Again, this is not something that I have been doing but it is something I need to do. I find it really, really motivating to look at my plan. Clearly I need to do it more often. Find a way, either hang it on our wall, or put it somewhere where you are going to see it everyday, not like me!

So look at your goals, look at your plan every day, get help when needed and celebrate when you achieve your goals. Celebrate when you achieve your milestones. I am not that great at doing that. This is definitely an area that I want to improve in, I think it is really important to celebrate when we achieve our goals. I am going to be putting a lot of work to my goals this year. And I really, really, need to remind myself to celebrate, because otherwise it is so easy to forget about what you have achieved and move on to the next thing. I often have stuff that is overlapping – a lot of m goals overlap, it is not linear, it is not like I do this thing and then I achieve it and then I do the next thing. Stuff is going on all the time so that is why, at least to me, to celebrate and again I don’t celebrate as often as I could. It is very useful to celebrate, often I don’t give my achievements more weight, so celebrate.

So, hiccups, stuff can come up along the way. Again, I think it is really important to consider your goals from many different angles, take into account, how much time, how much effort, how much money, what kind of impact your action plan to achieving these goals will have on your life. That is very, very, important. However, stuff can still get in the way, one of them being your mindset. Now I have done tons of podcast episodes on mindset. A lot of times our mindset blips, whether they are limiting beliefs, fears, blocks, will come up as we are working through our action plan. So it is really important to pay attention to the mind crap that comes up: you might be afraid of failure, you might be afraid of success, you might find you might find yourself making excuses, you might realise that you don’t want to leave your comfort zone – this is all mindset stuff. And it really helps to do the mindset work as you are taking the practical action steps to achieve your goals. I often talk about the spiral staircase we are on as we are working to achieve our goals, working on this path of personal development: one step is your practical action, the next step is your mindset, practical action, mindset, to me they go hand-in-hand, foot-in-foot. They way I have gotten to where I am today, especially in the last few years, since I started doing this mindset work, is to do both of these together. I don’t wait to take action and think I need to do the mindset work first. Conversely, I don’t force myself to take the action if it is not feeling right. I take the action, see what comes up, do the mindset work. Take new actions, see what comes up and do new mindset work. It is constantly a path. So, mindset stuff could come up.   

Also, what if someone else asks you to do something else with your time, to reevaluate your priorities, what if someone says: oh but could you help me out with this? Or could you sign up for that? So this is a time when you need to reevaluate, what are your priorities? Your original goals or helping this person out? It could be a friend wants you to sign up for a dance class once a week with her. What is your priority, this dance class or your original goal?  If your original goal is the priority then you have got to say: I am sorry, I cant do that. I don’t have the time, I cant’ fit it in my schedule, I am really, really, sorry, maybe further down in the future. But you really need to evaluate what your priorities are. If your goals are your priorities, and if you have mapped out your actions steps and all that in your calendar, you will see clearly whether or not you have time to do the dance class with your friend. Now again, you need to see how your goals fit into your life. Are you going to drop all of your friendships at the cost of achieving your goals? Maybe, but then what is the cost of that, are you going to end up without any friends at the end of it? Maybe you can, if you plan properly, say to your friends, look for the next three months I am going to be really wrapped up in this plan that I have, and I will be back to normal after that. Again, this is all possible if you plan and if you really look at your calendar and see how these goals fit into your current life, this is all about the planning, I love planning, this is why.

What if you lose momentum?  So again, you need to evaluate: is this goal still important to me? If it’s not, because things have changed, then drop it. If it is, then just take one action, no matter how small that will bring you closer to achieving your goal. One step, one step will take you out of a plateau, one step will take you out of a loss of momentum and one step will take you out of procrastination, that is it, one step.

What if you have a million other ideas? I write them all down in one place where I keep a list of all the things that I want to do. So I have a file in my Evernote of future goals and plans that I want to do, so this year, when I was planning my year, I knew that it was a big, busy, year, and I really wanted to go on a wilderness quest, I have been wanting to do this for years, it hasn’t happened for various reasons. So I put it on my list ‘in parentheses’ because if I happen to have the time to do it, I will. But honestly I don’t think I have the time for that. So I have got that in addition to being in parentheses, on my plan for this year, I have got it on my Evernote of my list of stuff I want to do. I have an Evernote file for all the courses I want to take, all the stuff I want to learn. So I have all this stuff, all my other ideas, down in one place where I keep a list of things I want to do, that way I won’t forget them, so I can add them to the plan for next year, or the following year, or five years from now. What I do, when I am planning my year, I pick and choose the things that are most important to me that I want to achieve or experience or create or do and then prioritise and then I pick the most important ones for the next year.

Perfectionism, that is another thing that can get in the way. I kind of feel that perfectionism is a mindset thing, it comes from not feeling like you are good enough, not feeling that you can ever be good enough, perfectionism is a mindset thing that I would approach using mindset tools, whether it is Psych-K or something else. There is no such thing as perfection. I am a big fan of delivering and being good enough, of doing good enough, getting it out there and achieving my goals in the best way I can. Not seeking perfection because there is no such thing as perfect.

Another thing that can get in the way of you achieving your goals is not breaking it down into small enough steps. I said that earlier, but I think it is really important to highlight: you need to break it down into tiny little chunks. Asana is really good for that, it is a free online system for achieving your goals or projects, actually, it is good for project management. So you create a project and all the action steps you need to do each project and then you can break those down into subsets. I find it really useful, so I use Asana for all of my books and specifically for the second editions that I am creating, for Business Beliefs, I have got all of my little steps down here: decide on the subtitle, complete the final draft, create the copy for the workbook, there is a chapter that I wanted to add to it, format it, get it proofread, not in that order, get the new cover designed, format the workbook, create the audio book, get reviews, publish it, and set up Amazon ad for it. So these are all tiny little chunks of things that I can do to achieve this goal of releasing the second edition of my Business Beliefs book and the same goes for the other three Business Mindset books. So Asana is free, it is really, really good for creating projects and achieving your goals.

Distractions, if you are getting distracted by other things, that is a sign of not having your focus on your goal. Again go back to reading your goals every day and reevaluate your goals, if you are getting distracted by other things, what are these other things that are distracting you? Is it stuff like social media, if so how can spend less time on social media? You can download apps that will block social media during certain hours, you can restrict your time on your phone for certain types of apps. There are lots of things you can do to physically remove those distractions from your computer or your phone. Maybe you are getting distracted by I don’t know friends, maybe you need to have a talk with them about how you really love spending time with them and you love going out a few nights a week, but you are going to need to reduce your time because you are not achieving your goals. I don’t know, if these people truly are your friends they will understand. There are plenty of distractions, if you are still having problems with distractions after listening to this, let me know and I will see if I can help you to come up with a plan to minimise them.

Not making your goals a priority is another thing. Again, read your goals every day, and make them a priority. I think a lot of times when we suffer from distractions, it is because we have not made our goals a priority.

Giving up, sometimes we give up. I think giving up should be a conscious decision, it shouldn’t be just: oh I just let things peter out now I have forgotten about my goals. If you are going to let go of one of your goals, or stop working towards it, that should be a conscious decision. You need to stop, re-evaluate, is this goal a priority? Do I still want to do it? If it is something that no longer fits into your life then delete it from your list of goals. If it is something that you still want to do but other things are higher priority, then either lower it on the list of priorities or bump it off the list and save it for next year or in the future. You shouldn’t just be randomly be giving up on your goals, it should be a conscious decision to continue or not continue with the goal. And it is okay to make changes, it is okay to reevaluate, I reevaluate stuff all the time. My life changes, my priorities change. It is okay to reevaluate, it is okay to change, it is okay to cancel or postpone your goals, but again it should be a conscious decision and not just a random giving up.

Again, unreasonable goals, sometimes we just don’t have enough time to achieve all of our goals which is oftentimes a failure again in the planning process however sometimes life doesn’t go to plan, sometimes new stuff comes up and you may need to…you might have a health problem, a family member might have a health problem, something might get in the way and again that’s a time when you need to stop, reevaluate, reprioritise, replan and maybe bump some things off to next year of cancel them all together.

So, all of this has helped by imagining those setbacks and leaving yourself some leeway. So looking at my calendar it is quite full for this year, however it is not, I have still got wriggle room. January and February are the months where I have got most wriggle room, starting from March I have got a lot of stuff going on, through November, let’s be honest. October, November it starts to ease up just a tiny bit, December as well, I have got more space. Starting in March I really need to be focussed. There is some wriggle room, there are a couple of weeks in September where I don’t have anything planned, there are a couple of weeks in November. So look at your calendar and I think that is why it is so important to print out and I will put a link in the show notes to the calendar that I print. It is on a website called: http://timeanddate.com and you can create the calendar for you year based on the country that you live in and the reason why that is important is that you can add holidays to it, a little red circle with the holidays on it. You can add the moon phases, if you want to or not. You can add local holidays, national holidays, whatever. It is very simple, but it is a really simple way to plan your year and again, I use a highlighter to highlight all the different dates that I have blocked out that I am doing these things. 

So, that’s that, it really really helps in the planning process. I hope you found this interesting and useful I am going to wrap this up. If you have any questions please let me know. I think I have been fairly through in explaining how I plan my goals. Again, write down your goals, set your deadlines, look at your goals every day. Create your action plan, put it into your calendar, get help when needed in terms of support and accountability. Celebrate your goals when you achieve them and all along the way pay attention to your mindset. Pay attention to your mindset work that you might need to do to make it easier to achieve our goals and to ensure that you achieve your goals. But also be flexible, be willing to re-evaluate your goals along the way. Check your plans, reevaluate your plans, pivot and postpone. Make conscious decisions all along the way about whether or not your original plan is still what it needs to be.

So maybe also block into your calendar a half-an-hour or so, on a quarterly basis, on a monthly basis, to reevaluate your plans for the year. However, if you are looking at your goals and you are looking at your plan every single day you might not need to block out that time because you will be seeing your goal and seeing how they fit into your life and seeing how they fit into your lifestyle. You will see whether or not whether you need to evaluate any of your goals.

Again, that is all for now, I hope you find this interesting and useful; I welcome any feedback or questions you might have. Please drop me a line and let me know any questions you had about this episode, you can email me at: [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there. And remember to visit; https://hollyworton.com/338 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you so much for listening.