How to Set Goals
Hey there, welcome to the Mindset for Life podcast. This is Bethanie Hansen, your coach, and I'm here to talk to you about goal setting.

When was the last time you set a goal? I mean, a clear goal, something achievable, measurable, attainable, something you really wanted to hit. I can remember having such a goal, I decided that I was going to lose a certain amount of weight.

Now, those of you who have listened to my podcast a lot, you already know that I went on a weight loss journey, during which I lost 95 pounds successfully over the course of almost a year. And then, a couple years later, I was kind of vacillating around that last 10 pounds, and I decided, let's just move it forward. So I can say  I actually lost 100 pounds. So I had to really lose about 10 or 15 pounds at the bottom, there.

And then, I lost the five more and hit my ideal goal weight. I didn't have that goal in the beginning. In fact, I didn't really care what my end goal was, I had first decided on a goal that was about, oh, 65 pounds of weight loss, I really didn't think anything else was achievable. I didn't even think it was possible. Then when I got close to that 65 pound mark, I started to wonder if I could lose about 15, more, maybe 20. More, I was pretty excited about that. And ultimately, I learned that I could lose 20 More than that 25 more, until I really hit that 95 pound mark initially. Sometimes when we set a goal. And sometimes when we're working towards a goal, we really don't know what's possible for ourselves, what we're capable of, we don't know until we get started.

So an initial goal could be something really attainable. Something that's not a huge stretch, but is aspirational for us. That 65 pound goal for me was definitely aspirational. It was a huge distance off in the dirt journey. And it took many, many months to achieve that first chunk of my goal. But once I attained that big goal, I started to see that there was another path ahead, I could also travel and another one.

Perhaps in your goal setting you've had a similar experience, or you might in the future. When work goal setting, it's first difficult to decide what the goal should be, what is a reasonable achievement, that's going to take our time and effort that's going to inspire us and make us feel really great about a challenge. And it's going to be not so far off that we feel it's a totally unattainable goal. If I had been told, when I started that journey, that I should lose 100 pounds, I would have felt very devastated. I don't think I would have started, I would have been so discouraged because I had tried to lose weight for years, nothing worked. And I could at best lose 20 pounds maybe.

So when I started on the journey where I really did lose 100 pounds, it took very small, achievable goals over time consistently practiced. And then when the achievement was reached, I had to keep going. First, I had to maintain the success of attaining the first milestone, and I had to get used to what it was like to live in that space. Then I had to keep going.

So when we're talking about goals, a lot of people talk about smart goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, time bound. Oh, what else, and timely... something like that. When we're talking about smart goals, I think what we really mean to say is let's break it down into some steps.

Let's break it down into some planning. Let's break it down into ways we can actually measure and see if you're on track to reaching the goal. Let's just say you have a professional goal.

Perhaps you want to write a book, perhaps you want to make an advancement in your career in your leadership and your teaching or your coaching. Whatever it is you'd like to attain in your goals, pick one thing, one thing you're gonna go all in for. Something you actually care about that motivates you.

Let's choose something pretty big, but not impossible. Like let's just say if you want to write a book,