Tired of falling short?
So many of us set goals and never reach them, but do we ever stop to think WHY? It’s rarely a case of “I’m not good enough” and Suz dives deeper into why you may be coming up short.
You’re listening to Episode 93 of the Music-Preneur Mindset Podcast.
Hello! You’re listening to Episode 93: Why You Haven’t Reached Your Goals.
I’m your host, Suz, a mindset + productivity coach helping music professionals get clear on their goals, priorities, and next steps all while decreasing overwhelm and avoiding burnout.
This episode is brought to you by my free live training on March 3rd, Tapping into Your Vision. During this 90-minute live training I’ll be showing you how to get super clear on your vision, identify your top priorities, and limit the amount of white noise and distracting tasks that don’t serve your vision so you can effectively reach your goals and work with greater intention and less overwhelm.
You can register for FREE on this episode’s show notes page: http://therockstaradvocate.com/ep93. When you register you’ll receive my free checklist: From Flustered to Focused so don’t wait!
I created this free training because so often we don’t take the time to properly lay a foundation for achievable goals. What I mean by achievable is a goal that’s in line with what we truly want, because when it’s not, that’s when we start to snowball down a path that actually takes us further and further away from reaching anything that resembles a goal.
That foundation – a clear vision, a clear set of priorities, and a strong sense of boundaries – is covered in the training. In today’s episode we’ll be covering what happens when that foundation isn’t there and why that happens.
The first reason we don’t reach our goals is if we’re in a defeated mindset. This is a perfectly normal mindset to have during a global pandemic, where each day we grunt out a complaint like, “Every time I go to do something it takes much longer than it should,” or “Uggghh this’d be so much easier if things would just go back to normal,” or “What’s the point when every day something else happens to knock my plans out of wack.”
If you don’t believe you’re in a position to reach your goals you sure as shit won’t. It’s just that simple. As Gandhi said, “Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.”
Everything we do stems from what we believe. If you allow your frustrations to take over and act from a scarcity mindset or defeatist mindset, you will surely be defeated. It’s important at times like this to hit pause. Hit pause and say, “Ok. What can I control right now?” Your mindset is one of those things. How you react to something, how you react to the world around you is a choice. And that choice affects your actions and outcomes.
You can choose to see this past year as a wash or as an opportunity. As a hurdle or as a challenge you will rise to meet.
We spoke last week about drawing boundaries. Set emotional boundaries for yourself. By deciding to stop, hit pause, take a breath and say, “What can I do about this?” you can get to your goals a lot faster.
You may also say to yourself, “The world around me has changed, do my goals need to change?” Maybe your goals need to change so take the time to figure out what your new goals will be.
Maybe the goal simply needs to be tweaked. Maybe you need to pivot in a new direction. You could sit there and blame Mercury retrograde and curse the Gods above and say, “UUUGGGHHHH Why? Why did this happen?” Or you could say, “Ok. Let me assess what is happening right now. What is currently my most important priority and what can I do to take action on it?”
If you’re currently struggling to reach your goals, I encourage you to just take a minute and examine your mindset. It is ok to not be ok right now. It’s ok to feel down in the dumps, to feel like nothing is working out, to feel like this is all just too much, because it is, but you also do have control.
You can decide to take a break and trust that when you’ve adequately recovered you will once again take action with intention. You can decide, “I’ve had my pity party and I know things are really difficult right now, but if I want to move forward in my career, what am I going to do about it? What can I shift in my mindset so that I can start taking action now?”
If you are dealing with a lot of grief and overwhelm and you’re just in it and you are not able or ready to take action in your career right now, then it’s ok to hit pause a little longer. It’s ok to say, “You know, what? This is not the time right now for my career. I have to handle personal issues or I have to handle my day job right now so that I can keep the lights on or be there for my kids when they’re being home-schooled.”
I’m fully onboard with challenging yourself and taking action even when the going gets tough, but realize that you have to have a lot of strength to push back tough and strength requires rest.
That’s the piece I hate so many successful people leave out of the equation – the fact that preparation includes rest and recharging. No one runs a marathon without rest and plenty of fuel inside of them to sustain the journey. They don’t run a marathon after an all night bender.
If you’re building a career, be in it for the marathon and realize when you need to hit pause. When you’re ready to put in the work, when you feel recharged but frustrated at your lack of progress, that’s when you come back to this list.
That’s when you work to shift your mindset in order to reach the goals you know you’re fully capable of achieving.
While a defeatist mindset is one of the biggest reasons we fail to reach our goals, the second is being unrealistic not about the goal itself but about the deadlines and structure surrounding the goal.
Let me be clear – I truly 1000% believe if you have clear goals and you’re willing to put in the work, anything truly is possible. We see examples of the impossible being made possible each and every day.
So I never believe people have unrealistic goals, but they often DO have unrealistic timelines for those goals. If you are saying to yourself, “I’ve set these goals, I’m working working working towards them and it just feels like they’re so far away,” it could be that you just set an unrealistic timeline to reach those goals, and your expectations around the finish line are skewed.
Often when we’re new at something we have no clue how long it takes until we begin to chip away at the pieces. So you hope for the best and believe that thinking positively means setting a deadline that represents great achievement and mastery, where your learning curve is kept inside a perfect bubble and life’s plans can’t get to it, rather than truly sit with the goal and break down alllllll of the tiny pieces that make it up and alllll of the outside forces that aren’t within your control and how they may affect your trajectory.
And then you realize, once you get into it, how much work it truly is. Or you come to realize a whole piece of the puzzle that you didn’t even know existed. How could you? You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it, ya know?
I talk about this all of the time when I discuss time management. I call it the purse curse – we plan waaaay too much in a day because we plan inside a 24 hour day when we NEVER have 24 hours to get work done in a day. Never. So we set unrealistic expectations about what can be done in a day and then when we don’t meet those absurd expectations we hate ourselves and feel like a loser and then go into the next day with a defeated mindset.
What if we flipped the script on this for a second? Remember Fraud Talk? Remember that lil voice of Imposter Syndrome that we discussed in Episode 11? Whenever we set a goal we manage to hold ourselves back at times by imagining the worst. We imagine alllll of these scenarios where nothing goes as planned and we fail at everything. But, when it comes to planning, we plan inside this perfect bubble that we somehow believe we have complete
control over at all times.
Let’s flip that.
Let’s PLAN in worst case scenarios. Let’s give ourselves a four-hour day and that’s at best. You have less than four hours in a day to get your work done and that’s what you plan for when you make your list of things to do the next day.
BUT when it’s time to take action THAT is when we live in a mindset of a perfect bubble of best case scenarios. THAT is when we say, “What if I take this next step and AMAZINGNESS happens?”
Plan in worst case. Act in best case. I promise you you will actually get more done and feel better about doing it. But, I know enough and I’ve been at this long enough that you won’t immediately feel better about doing it. You’ll first feel guilty, lazy, and second guess yourself a thousand times and you’ll want to push harder.
Don’t.
It’s at that point that I suggest you re-listen to the season premiere of this podcast’s latest season, Episode 91, and learn how to redefine your hustle.
The last reason I truly believe people fail to reach their goals – they’re chasing someone else’s goal. Maybe it’s the goal their parents wanted for them, maybe it’s the goal their arch nemesis is going after and they got swept up into racing them to the finish line instead of charting their own path, or maybe it’s feeling like it’s what society expects of them.
No matter the reason, chasing a dream that isn’t in alignment with your values, vision, and true desires will never be reached and even if/when it is it will never bring any fulfillment, which is even worse than not reaching your intended goal.
As I said earlier, take time to hit pause. Reflect on what you’re going after and whyyyyy you’re going after it. If you can’t easily and fully articulate why you’re pursuing a goal that’s a BIG red flag that your goal needs to change. Make sure you know why this goal matters to you. You might have outgrown it and never took notice because you never stopped to think about it and what it means to you.
I often ask clients before we begin working together, “What is your main goal?” When they respond, “to get a record deal,” I know right away they have NO clue what their goals are, because a record deal isn’t a goal, it’s a byproduct of your journey.
It’s not something you chase, it chases you when you’ve accomplished amassing a certain level of notoriety and demand from your growing audience. Notice I didn’t say respect or accolades as that’s not what automatically garners attention from labels.
Whenever I dig deeper with them they usually say, “I want someone to bankroll my career.”
Ohhhh well THAT is a horse of a different color! All a label is is a bank loan with a hefty interest and a LOT of control.
If all you want is money to build your career, get a small business loan and spend the money how you want to spend it, hire the people you want to hire and build a career on your terms.
Remember, I stand by what I said – there’s no such thing as an unrealistic goal but there ARE unrealistic timelines and unaligned goals that can keep you from success, especially if they’re paired with a defeatist mindset.
As always I’d LOVE to hear what what you think about why you or someone you know isn’t reach their goals in the comments section of the show notes. Simply go to http://therockstaradvocate.com/ep93 and let me know if you agree with my reasons and/or have other reasons of your own.
And, while you’re there, be sure to sign up for my free training I’m hosting March 3rd to help you determine what matters MOST in your life so you can block out the white noise and focus on reaching your goals with intention this year. It’s a free event and the details can be found in the show notes page, all you have to do is RSVP to save your seat!
Thank you so much for listening and if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe as I’ll be back every week with a brand new episode! And if you like what you’ve heard I’d love it if you’d rate, follow, leave a review, or share from your platform of choice.
Until next time, Rock/Star. Keep planning, keep learning, and I hope to see you back here next week so we can get grounded to get rising! Take care.
Key Highlights
- Join me for a Tapping Into Your Vision webinar on March 24th at 4:00pm
- What a defeatist mindset is and how you can get out of one
- The importance of setting realistic timelines for your goals
- What successful people leave out of stories about reaching their goals
- Why you should plan in worst case scenario, but act in best case scenario.
- Checking in with yourself to make sure it’s truly YOUR goal that you’re chasing
Links/Rocksources
- Theme music brought to you by DC-based Indie/Pop band Sub-Radio
- More podcast episodes can be found here
- You can download a copy of the episode’s transcript here
- Our Sponsor: Tapping Into Your Vision webinar on March 24th at 4:00pm EST below and get my From Flustered to Focused Checklist when you sign up!
- Wanna work together?? Schedule your call here
- Episode 11: SILENCE THE FR@^D TALK!
- Episode 91: The Hustle & Why It Needs To Be Redefined
Tapping Into Your Vision Rescheduled: Now March 24th @ 4:00pm EST.
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