You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode 437.
Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it’s all about real clients, real problems and real coaching. And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.
Well, hello my beautiful friends. I’m excited to talk to you today about is your big goal too slow? Because I’ve been coaching a lot of you on this exact issue, and the way you’re approaching it and thinking about it is causing so much unnecessary suffering.
I am in Lake Tahoe right now, the last day that I will be here. I’ve been hanging out with my friends, Alex and Leila, and Ryan and Zoe, and we’ve just had such an amazing time. And I am heading to Arkansas to see my beautiful son start his first year as an Arkansas student playing golf on their team.
And I sent him a message and I said, “Hey, what do you think? How is it?” And he said, “It’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of.” I’m like, oh my gosh. So I’m flying there today to go hang out with him for the weekend, watch him do some golfing, check out the campus where he’s going to stay and just spend some quality time with him.
And then I’m back to Austin. I’m going to do a speaking engagement there. So, I’m excited to be doing all those things and sad to be leaving Tahoe. But let’s talk about you, my friends. Let’s talk about when your big goal that you set for yourself isn’t happening fast enough.
So here’s the pattern that I see. I teach you all about the Possibility Formula, I teach you about dreaming big, I teach you about believing in your highest capability and your highest capacity in yourself. So you go out and you set these big goals for yourself, and I love that for you. I want everyone to be setting really big goals and thinking outside the box and exploring what truly is possible in your life.
But then what I see some of you doing is when you’re not on target for those goals, you start suffering. So first, I want to talk about the reason for setting a big goal is not so you can hit it easily and feel great about yourself. That’s not it. You can do that. Just set your goal really low and hit it and you’ll feel great about yourself.
Big goals, you’re not going to hit really easily. That’s the point of them. So when you set a big goal, the goal of setting a big goal, the reason why you set a big goal is so you will think better. You will open up and expand your thinking. It will have you thinking in new ways. It will have you exploring creatively.
Because if you only do goals you know you will hit, it’s because you already know how to do them, which means you don’t have to think beyond your own current capacity, which doesn’t help you grow, which doesn’t help you evolve. Yes, you can hit your goal, but really, so what? Why do you even have the goal?
The goal for me in the big goals I’m encouraging you to set is so you think better, you expand your mind. One of the second reasons why I encourage you to set a big goal is it requires you to practice believing in yourself, practice believing in something that isn’t real yet, practice in using your mind to create emotion based on your future and not on your past.
Creating your life from your future, from your imagination, from what could be possible for you is an exciting, dynamic, contributing life. And if you’re only looking to your past or to your present to define what you’re capable of, you will not have to practice believing in yourself because you already do, you’re already confident, you already know what you already know.
But practicing believing in yourself beyond your current self is an amazing skill. Because once you get good at it, you can just keep evolving and growing beyond your wildest dreams.
The third reason why I want you to set a big goal that is way beyond your current capacity is that it will take you out of what I call the only one how. So if you only have one how for how you’re going to get somewhere, you only have one way of getting to that place, if that how doesn't work, you’re going to quit.
And so people that set goals only when they know how they will achieve them usually don’t achieve them at the rate that they want to because typically, you need to try multiple hows to create a new result in your life. Because you don’t know how to do it. That’s why it’s such a big goal in your future.
Every great thing that was ever invented, that was ever done for the first time, nobody knew how to do. It was let’s try this, let’s try that, let’s try this, let’s try that. And if you feel like you’ve exhausted every single option, you are wrong. You are wrong because you will know when you’ve exhausted every single option when you have success, when you’ve arrived.
Is it possible? You don’t know yet until you’ve achieved it. Then you’ll know. So big goals make you think better, they make you practice believing, and they help you loosen your grip on one how and encourage you to have many hows in your life.
The only way we truly fail is if we quit. And we will quit if there’s only one how to do something. If there’s only one way to do something, we will say that it’s impossible. We will look for one thing one time, we won’t find it, and that’ll be it.
So the rule then becomes we set these big goals, we expand our mind, we start expanding our hows, we start saying we are committed to achieving this goal no matter what, we’re going to try whatever we need to try to make it happen.
And through that process, we grow and we evolve and we find corners of ourselves that we didn’t even know existed. We find capacities within us that we didn’t even know that we had. That is the point of a big goal.
But so many of you are trying to use that big goal against you. I was coaching someone yesterday and she was telling me that she had set a goal for the year for a million dollars. And we’re about a little more than halfway through the year, and she was at $400K, and she was very discouraged.
And I said to her, “First of all, let’s not lose the plot. $400K in half a year is extraordinary and we need to fully appreciate that accomplishment. Second of all, the reason that we set the million-dollar goal was never to beat ourselves up, was never to quit, was never to be upset. It was only to encourage us to practice believing and thinking in new ways and really igniting excitement over what is possible and loosening our grip on one how.”
So if you’re halfway through the year and you’re at $400K, that million-dollar goal will have you thinking in different ways. It will have you exploring in different ways, curious, wonder how I get there, wonder what I do, wonder what’s possible in the next five months. And we start thinking on that level instead of, “Well, the math doesn’t work out, there’s no way I’m going to make a million now, I’ve really let myself down, I’m not growing, I’m not accomplishing,” whatever story that you’re telling yourself, not helpful.
Big goals are there to serve us. Not for us to feel bad about ourselves. So what I told her is I said, “The reason why we have the goal of a million against the current finance of $400K is so we know what we’re solving for. If we don’t have the goal, we can celebrate the $400K, but we don’t know the gap that we’re trying to close. We don’t know the how that we’re trying to learn. We don’t think in a bigger way.”
We think, “Maybe I’ll earn, I’ve made $400K so far this year, maybe I’ll make another two, maybe I won’t, I’m just pretty comfortable.” We don’t have any direction. When we have a million-dollar goal that we stay committed to right up until the end of December, we always know where we’re going.
We’ll always know what problem we’re solving for, we always know what ultimately we are trying to create for ourselves, and it gives us that direction, that motivation. And what’s so beautiful about it is if you continue to believe in the goal of a million all year, you get to enjoy the emotion of that belief. The excitement, the confidence that comes from already being a person that is making a million dollars in your mind.
Now, that is not to say that you will always hit that goal in the timeframe that you state. Who cares? Who cares? Once you get there, if you haven’t hit it, we just set the next goal. We just move on. We just keep growing. We just keep evolving. We don’t beat ourselves up. We ask ourselves, “Why didn’t we hit the million? We’re going to do that next year. What isn’t working? What else do I need to try? What is working? What can I double-down on?” That is it.
We use our goal to serve us. It is our servant, our goal. It provides our brain direction, it gives us somewhere to focus. It does not become a weapon that we ever use against ourselves. So, where is your current situation, and what is your ultimate goal, and what are we solving for? How much math do we need to do here?
In this woman’s example, she was $600K short. But that sounds like a lot of money, but she had just made $400K. She had so much leverage. She already knew clearly how to sell, she had customers, she had a good niche, she had a viable product, she had people that were willing to pay her, not just a few people, but a significant number.
When you see where you are, then you have to see, okay, I just need to think into the next level of myself. It’s time to grow. Now, had she not had her million-dollar goal, she wouldn’t need to grow at all. She could just live very comfortably on $400K a year.
But that doesn’t ask as much of her. It just asks her to coast with the peddling that she’s already done. Now, I want to be very, very clear. You never want to use your goal against yourself, to beat yourself up, and call yourself lazy, and that you didn’t accomplish anything, and then you give up. That’s the first thing that I told you.
But you also never want to use that goal to put pressure on yourself, to make yourself work long, ridiculous hours, to have hustle energy, to have stressful energy, to have painful energy of inadequacy and unworthiness and all of that.
People sometimes change their goal so they don’t feel the pressure of their goal, but that is ridiculous because a goal doesn’t cause any pressure. It’s your thought about that goal. And remember, the goal is there to make us feel great, to make us feel excited, to make us think better, to make us evolve.
If we use that goal in our C-line as a reason to feel inadequate or upset or pressured or stressed, we are missing the point of what a goal is there for us to do. Do not change that goal for any reason. Simply change your thoughts around that goal.
If you are coming up on December and you are $500,000 short of your goal, do not change it. You know what you ask yourself? You say, “How do we make $500,000 in a month?” That is an amazing question. And whether you actually make the $500,000 is not the relevant point. It’s that you asked yourself to think in such a bigger way, you asked your brain to think in such a higher quality, higher-producing, higher-functioning way.
Instead of saying, “That’s impossible, nobody’s ever made $500,000 in a month,” or have they? Or could I? What would need to happen? What would I need to do? How many leads would I need? How much conversion would I need? What kind of irresistible product would I have to have? What would be the price?
Notice, all of a sudden, we’re in this high-functioning, thinking creative mode, versus, “Well, I guess I’m not going to meet that goal so I might as well just take December off.”
Now listen, sometimes you do want to take December off. Sometimes that’s the plan. But don’t take December off because you’re so exhausted from beating the crap out of yourself in November. Take December off because you want to, because that’s your choice. Not because you’re exhausted from your own brain beating you up.
This is a process. I go through this myself all of the time. I ebb and I flow in my belief. I believe that it’s going to happen, and then I don’t believe that it’s going to happen. I believe that it’s going to happen, and then I don’t believe that it's going to happen, and then I try a bunch of new things and half of them work and half of them don’t.
I think up a whole ‘nother layer of things, and then I get creative and I get excited about my creativity, and then I have to step more into myself, and I have to work harder, and I work smarter, and I have to show up better. And no matter whether I hit that $100 million goal or not, I am so much better, smarter, creative for having it.
I have lived into that $100 million goal even before it has been manifested in my life. And I will never sit here and think about how far away I am from it, and how inadequate I am because I’m not doing it. I will think about what I have done, and I will always celebrate my accomplishment and feel amazing about myself. And then ask for more.
Ask my brain for more, ask myself for more. Let’s see what we’re capable of. Let’s see what we can do. Let’s see if we can break through all of the barriers that are there. And figure out which ones are mental and which ones are real, and the ones that are real, how can I use my mental energy to overcome them? How can I use my brain to overcome this?
Now, a lot of people will say, “Okay, well, if you set the goal for $100 million, then maybe you hit $50 million, that’s amazing.” And it’s not even about that. It’s not even about the achieving of the number. It’s about who I have become in the promise to myself to achieve the number, in the having of my own back to achieve the number.
And when I feel discouraged and frustrated and like I don’t want to keep doing this, and this is not working, and I’m not good at this, and all of that, I go right back to my goal and I go back to the belief that I will achieve it. Then I’ll look back on that moment and be like, “I’m so glad I didn’t quit. I’m so glad I didn’t give up.”
My friend Tonya asked me the other day, she said, “How important is that $100 million goal for you?” I said, “It’s the most important. Not because I need $100 million. That is not it. But it’s because that is the end game that will create me as I want to be.”
Who will I need to become? What will I have to overcome? What insecurities am I going to have to work through? What diplomatic problems with my team am I going to have to work with? What are the motivating factors that I’m going to have to work with? What is in my brain that I’m going to have to work on overcoming, that will cause that for me? That is what it’s about.
So let’s talk through this. Think about your goal. What is your goal that you have for the end of the year? And have you already given up on it? Are you haphazard with it? Are you treating it flimsily? Have you changed it? Are you not wanting to talk about it anymore because you feel like you’re not going to achieve it? Where are you with it?
When you think about it, how do you feel? Maybe some of you are going to surpass your year goals. Amazing. But I’m talking to those of you who don’t feel like you’re quite going to make it. What is that feeling? Are you wanting to give up? Are you wanting to focus on something else? Are you diverting your attention? Are you being indifferent to your goal and to yourself and to that desire?
Just notice that. And then ask yourself, is it possible that you still could achieve it? If the answer is no, you have work to do on your mind because nothing is impossible. You could do it. And start exploring in your brain how you could.
Notice the negativity. Notice your brain saying, “Well, you’ve never done that before and that’s not possible, and you already tried to do that one thing and that didn’t work, so what else are you going to do? There’s nothing else to do. It’s impossible. Stop listening to this podcast, it’s ridiculous.”
Let your brain chatter and give yourself permission to believe in your goal anyway, to explore the possibilities anyway, to explore the impossibilities anyway. Then ask yourself how much you are believing in that.
And I hear this a lot; people go, “Oh no, I really do believe in it, I really feel it, I really believe in it.” I said, “You know how I know you don’t believe in it? Because your A-line doesn’t match. When you really believe in something, your actions show it. You show up in a different way. You deliver in a different way. You talk in a different way. You present in a different way.”
This is not something you just do in your head. If you want to know if you believe in a goal, look at your A-line and notice what’s fueling the actions. Is it fear? Is it doubt? Is it worry? Or is it confidence and determination and excitement?
You need to be able to distinguish between those two so you know that you’re fueling your life, you’re fueling your goals, you’re fueling your business or your career with positive energy. Because listen, this is a never-ending dream.
My friend Alex, I was talking to him about getting to $100 million. He’s like, “Girl, when you get to $100 million, you’re going to want to make $250. You know it.” I’m like, “I don’t know, it doesn’t feel that way right now.” He’s like, “You for sure will.”
And I remember when I really wanted to get to $10 million. I thought that would be the pinnacle, and now it’s $100 for me. It’s me and my goal. It’s the dance I do with her. She is waiting for me. She is my future self waiting for me and encouraging me and laughing at how serious I take things that aren’t even that serious and how worried I am about things that do not need worrying about.
And when I look from that perspective, when I look from my future self perspective, I’m just delighted with how cute I am right now. I’m just so worried and cute and struggling. But she’s already there. She’s like, “Girl, this is so fun. I’m making $100 million a year over here. You got nothing to worry about. You’re going to get here soon enough.”
And there’s no rush and there’s no pressure. And I don’t need to change the timeframe of my goal to make myself feel better. That will allow for less creative thinking. It’s okay to have a tight timeframe. That doesn’t mean you have to hurry and put pressure on yourself, but it does mean you need to think better.
How am I going to make $50 million in the next six months? Huh, interesting question. Brain, ideas? Brain’s like, “No, no, no, that’s not going to work, we can’t do that,” and I’m like, “But what if we could, brain? What are your ideas?”
Then all of a sudden, my brain goes to work and starts getting creative and comes up with ideas and puts things together that have never been together, and ideas to try new things that I’ve never tried before. And whether or not that produces the $50 million is not the point, my friends.
It’s that my brain’s expanded. It’s that I focused on something besides buffering. Instead, I’m focused on something creative and neuropathways and possibilities in my life.
So for each of you that has this goal, we’re more than halfway through the year, reignite it, re-excite yourself about it, think at that higher level. Don’t have to know the how, come up with seven different hows, seven different ways, try all of them. This is how you blow your own mind.
You keep creating ideas, you keep creating ways, you keep creating hows, and then one day, one of them works. And then you make $400,000 in one day. And you wonder what in the world you were so worried about.
You realize that you had been limiting yourself by what you thought was possible. You never even considered making that much money in one day, and then boom, you did because you kept thinking in a creative way. The options for how to do things is endless.
When you look at the realm of possibility, decillion possibilities. More possibilities than your brain has time to think of. And yet, you’re only giving yourself one how. When you could be coming up with hundreds and hundreds of hows, hows that have never been thought of, the first how will be thought of with your brain because you gave yourself space and a goal to focus on.
That is how it works. Do not limit yourself. Do not go offline. Keep online, go for your goal to the very last minute. Have a beautiful week everyone. Keep going for it. Keep going for that big goal. Talk to you soon. Bye.
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