Teri Holland (00:00.53)
Are you still on track to achieve your goals this year? January 12th was International Quitters Day. The second Friday of January is when 80% of people will quit on their New Year's resolutions or their annual goals. Two weeks, two weeks after the new year, they are done checking out. Bye-bye.
Why does this happen? And by the way, if this is you, just know that it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. You haven't failed. You can get back on track. There are reasons why people quit by this day. And we're going to talk about them in this episode. And I'll share with you some tips for how you can get back on track with your goals. If you have quit already, or maybe just taken a pause on those goals.
Teri Holland (01:08.674)
So a lot of people have already given up on their goals, and there are some reasons why. First of all, let's reassess what that goal was. Was it a well-formed goal? Now we've spent the last several episodes talking about goal achievement and how to set well-formed goals. So was this goal a well-formed goal? Did you set yourself up to succeed at it? Was it actually achievable?
I've seen people set some pretty lofty goals and then they wonder why they fail at it and they think, oh, I'm a failure, I'm no good. I can't have what I want in life. Well, no, you just need to reevaluate your goal and adjust it to set something that is achievable. I had someone come through my trainings once who set a goal to make a million dollars in the next two months, but they were starting pretty much at zero with a brand new business, no network.
no audience online, nothing, and expected to make a million dollars in two months. And that's just not achievable. And the way you'll know if your goal is achievable is that feeling you get. You know, I'm a big fan of setting really big goals and stretching the envelope. But in the realm of what is real?
So this is not meant to downplay your goals or to tell you to think small and to, you know, to stop dreaming so big. No, we want to have big dreams. We want to have big goals. That's what pulls us forward into a compelling future. You know, the way I look at this, it's like if we took your favorite chocolate cake recipe and we take out the flour,
Teri Holland (03:03.81)
You know, the way that I look at this is if we took the best chocolate cake you have ever tasted and we take out the chocolate and the sugar and the butter and we leave you with flour and I don't know what else goes into a cake? Flour and maybe, I don't know, baking soda? Is that in the cake? Just the dry, powdery ingredients, flavorless.
know, maybe water, maybe we leave in water. You're not going to have a good cake and you're not going to be excited to eat it. So those big goals are important because they give us the desire, the juice, the fuel that fuels us forward towards what we want to achieve. So we want to have big goals, but they still have to be in the realm of what is achievable.
And the way that I gauge what is achievable for me is how do I feel about that goal? If I set the goal and there's an instant, ooh, like tension in my body, if I feel fear around it, or if I feel a lot of doubt or skepticism, or it feels like, oh, that's too much, that's too big, that's too soon.
then maybe I need to reassess it. And it doesn't mean that I get rid of that goal or I stop wanting it. It just means maybe I need to give it more time and space to develop. So maybe that goal isn't a two month goal. Maybe that goal is a one year goal or a five year goal. Maybe that's a vision I have for the future that I'm going to hold on to.
But in the meantime, I'm gonna set some smaller, more specific goals that are going to help get me there, those stepping stones that we talked about a few episodes back. So what is going to get me to that big goal? For example, if I think about I'm gonna be a bestselling author, if I put that in the space of I'm gonna do it in six months,
Teri Holland (05:11.058)
know, it feels, it feels, I wouldn't say scary, it feels, but there definitely feels like there's tension in my body when I think of it. But when I give myself two years, which gives me time to finish writing the book, editing the book, publishing the book, figuring out how to market the book, all of that, two years feels really achievable to me. So now that's the vision. That's the big long term goal. But my little goals in the meantime are to write every day.
I'm going to spend time writing every single day because I'm not going to have a bestselling book if I don't write the book. So I need to write and I need to write daily. And it doesn't even mean for me that I'm writing that book every day. I am engaged in the act of writing every day. That's what works for me. So if you have already dropped your New Year's goals or your New Year's resolutions, ask yourself, was it really achievable? Did I give it enough space to be achieved?
Did you really want it? Sometimes we set goals because we think we're supposed to want it. But did you really want it? Is it really what you want in your life? Or maybe, maybe you don't. Maybe you just get rid of it, take it off your plate. You will not achieve a goal that you don't want to achieve. You won't do it. Did you have a strategy to get there? Our goals need strategies to support them. Now you might not know exactly how.
you're going to achieve your goal, but you need to have some kind of strategy in place. And if you don't have a strategy, find someone who has done what you want to do and find out from them, what is the strategy? How did they get to where they want or where you want to be? How did they do it? You can learn so much by modeling your success on others. And this is something I teach my NLP trainings is you find a model of success.
someone who has accomplished the thing that you want to do and you interview them, ask them questions and find out how they did it, their belief system, what do they believe is true? What do they value about this? What's important to them? And you learn as much as you can and you install that on yourself. Now you might not know how to do that because that's very NLP specific, but what you can do is find someone who has done what you want to do.
Teri Holland (07:32.974)
and see if they'll let you ask them some questions about how they got there. Because chances are if they have done something successfully and they've done it several times successfully, then if you model that success, if you do what they did, you should get some level of success at it. When I had Heather Grace Stewart on the show, she talked about her book process and publishing self-publishing books. She talked about how she writes. I want to write a book.
If I listen to Heather and do what she does, I should have a book and be able to self-publish it. So you find someone who has done what you did or what you want to do. They've already done it and you want to do it and see if you can follow their steps and how they got there. This is what I do in my five-day podcast challenge is I have been successful with my podcast. I had a very successful launch with it and over the last eight years it has grown tremendously.
I've had many opportunities come from podcasting. And so I've broken it down into steps. If you follow my steps, you will be successful at launching your podcast. You will have a podcast. And everyone who has launched with me to date has been in the top 10% or higher of podcasts worldwide, which proves to me that my system didn't just work for me, but it works for other people. So if you wanna launch a podcast, you find a system and you follow the system. You find someone who has done it.
successfully and ideally has helped other people to do it successfully too and you follow their steps. You model success. Don't model mediocrity. Don't go out there and find someone who has kind of done what you want to do. Like if you want to run a marathon this year, don't go and find someone who has, they've done some running and they've done a few 10ks, maybe even a half marathon. Don't model that person because they haven't done it yet.
go find the person who has run several marathons and done it in a way that's healthy and safe and injury free. And they take really good care of their body. You go find that person and find out how do you do it? How do you train? What are my first steps? And you get their strategy because they obviously know how to do it very well. Or even better, you find a running coach who not only does it and has done it repeatedly successfully, but...
Teri Holland (09:57.35)
you find someone who has also coached other people to success successfully. That's the person you want to model. And all of this is predicated on are you taking action? Are you taking action to achieve your goals? Because nothing happens without taking action. So if you set a goal or resolution on January 1st that you're going to, I don't know, let's say you're going to quit smoking and you haven't done it yet, well, what are the steps you've taken?
quit smoking? Have you tried hypnosis? Did you get some self hypnosis recordings that you can listen to that will help you? Have you replaced the habit with something healthy that you can go to instead? Are you sleeping enough? Are you hydrating enough? What are you doing to replace those behaviors that you want to get rid of to help you to quit smoking?
you taken action or did you just expect that you would wake up in the morning on January 1st and never want a cigarette again? And by the way, there are people who do that. There are people who successfully quit by making the decision. That, by the way, is a true resolution. And we haven't talked about this yet. Not this year. I've talked about it previous years, but the only problem with resolutions is that most people don't make them. People talk about, oh, resolutions don't work, resolutions fail. I don't make them because they don't work.
Resolutions work just fine, but most people who think they make a resolution aren't making a resolution. A resolution is to resolve something, which means it is finite, it is complete. You have accepted the change at the unconscious level and you are determined that it is done. I have a good friend of mine who decided one year that for New Year's he was quitting smoking and he did it. He stopped. Cold turkey stopped. Never smoked again.
and then the next year he decided he was giving up fast food, did it, boom, done, no more fast food. And he has been very successful at doing this because he's actually resolving something. He is making a commitment and his behavior follows. See, when you make a change at the unconscious level, your behavior follows. When we make a change at the conscious level, we're trying to control the behavior and your conscious mind isn't great at making changes.
Teri Holland (12:18.246)
You have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind, and your conscious mind is great at setting goals, but your unconscious mind is the goal achiever. Your unconscious mind is the goal getter. Your unconscious mind is the domain of all our learning, change, and behavior. That happens unconsciously. It doesn't mean that you didn't decide it consciously or that you're not aware of doing it consciously, but when that change happens...
At the unconscious level, it happens in an instant. You don't have to think about it, plan it out. You don't have to give yourself a star every day that you do the new behavior. It's done and your behavior follows easily. You know, I'm a part of many networking groups and I remember several years ago, there was a woman in a networking group I belonged to and she hadn't been there for a while, probably about a year or so. And then she walked into a meeting one day and we were all floored. She looked...
so different. She had lost a considerable amount of weight. She looked incredibly healthy. And of course, everyone wanted to know, what are you doing? What did you do? What happened? How did you make this change? And she said, I just decided one day that it was enough. And I didn't do anything specific. And she said, I didn't follow any kind of meal plan. I didn't cut anything out.
I just decided that I didn't feel comfortable in this body anymore and I decided to make a change and it was easy. I just started making better choices with my food. I started wanting to move more. So I started walking and moving more because I wanted to. And that was it. And that is change at the unconscious level. When I was in personal training, I worked with a client who is to date one of the most
the most amazing clients I've ever worked with. And I've worked with some amazing clients in my time coaching, but she was really a standout client, just a remarkable woman all around. I learned so much from her. I think I benefited more from that relationship than she did. And she benefited, don't worry, she benefited, but I think I got more out of it. I learned so much from this woman. And she told me that when she quit smoking, it was because she was...
Teri Holland (14:36.798)
lighting up a cigarette one day, and her friend said to her, you know, those things control you. And she looked at the cigarette and she looked at him and she said, nothing controls me. She put that cigarette out and she never touched another one again, that was it. That is change at the unconscious level. But then you hear about people who set a resolution to quit smoking or quit drinking or quit whatever, to make whatever change in their life they want.
they struggle at it and they maybe stick to it for a little while, maybe the first two weeks of January, and they quit. It doesn't mean that they're quitters, and if this is you, this does not mean that you are a quitter. What it means is that you've been trying to make this change consciously, and your conscious mind can only focus on so much at a time, because behavior is the domain of your unconscious mind.
Your unconscious mind is running 90 to 95% of your life. Your conscious mind is only like five to 10%. And so if you're trying to make change consciously and you're thinking about it consciously, it means you have to think about it. Top of mind, every day, all day. So let's take one of the most common New Year's resolutions, which is to lose weight. So let's say you decided at the beginning of this year that you're going to lose weight. And then you...
You have to think about it. You have to think about, okay, what am I eating today? What do I have to have for breakfast? When am I going to the gym? What do I need to do in my workout today? When is lunch? What am I going to eat for lunch? Do I have the food I need? Do I need to go to the grocery store? I'm waiting for dinner with friends. What restaurant are we going to? Is there something there that I feel comfortable eating? Do I need to plan in advance to eat? Have I had enough protein today? Did I drink all of my water? And it's exhausting. But your conscious mind can do it so you can temporarily make that change consciously.
because you're focused on it. And then the moment your conscious mind has to deal with something else, which inevitably it will have to deal with something else because that's what it does. So life happens. Suddenly there's a crisis at work or your kid gets sick or something, you know, it doesn't have to be anything monumental, but something takes your attention. And poof, there goes that focus on
Teri Holland (17:01.426)
your new lifestyle. It goes out the window because now your conscious mind has to focus on something else. And so your unconscious mind takes over once again and it will default back to the behavior that you know, that you're comfortable and familiar with. So you go back to your old ways of eating and your old ways of working out or not working out. You go back to your old lifestyle and then you say, oh I failed again. I failed at another resolution. You didn't fail.
you did not fail. You just hadn't made the change at the unconscious level. When change happens at the unconscious level, you don't have to think about it all day. When it happens at the unconscious level, you just find yourself making different choices. So if we take that same example of wanting to lose weight or wanting to get healthier, getting fit, we take that same example. When the unconscious mind accepts this is the new way of being, this is the new reality,
then your behavior changes with it. Suddenly it feels easy and natural to go to your workout, to add more movement into your day. You want to drink more water and you don't have to think about it or measure it. You just start reaching for water throughout the day and you start making different food choices that support your health and wellness because it's just how you're doing it. It's just your new way of being.
And then you're like my friend who people say, what did you do? How did you do this? And you go, well, I don't know. I just started eating differently and I started moving more and it just became really easy. And we can transfer that to any goal. If your goal is to grow your business, to make more money, if your goal is to run a marathon, if your goal is to read every single day, no matter what it is, if the change happens at the unconscious level, it becomes easy. It's like now you're swimming,
downstream, not upstream. You're not working against yourself anymore. You're working with yourself. And it doesn't mean that you don't take action. You do take action, but it becomes easy to take those actions. So if you are one of the people who have already quit on your New Year's goals, on your resolutions, first of all, no, you are not alone. You are in very good company with many people.
Teri Holland (19:23.126)
if you want to get back on that horse and you want to start shaping your life differently, there are some strategies you can use to do it. I have a great system for you. It's called the Goal Achievement Blueprint. I'm going to link it in the show notes. This is a way that you can start to work with your unconscious mind to begin to not only set really well-formed, well-intended goals to set yourself up for success,
but how to help your unconscious mind to get on board with the change so that you are working with yourself, not against yourself anymore. So I wish you all the luck in the world in achieving your goals this year. And if you need any help, you just reach out to me and I'm happy to have a consultation with you and we'll talk about how you can achieve these goals this year. And also you can set goals at any time. So if you haven't set your goals yet for the year,
You can set them today. You can set them tomorrow. You can change your goals. You don't have to lock yourself into a goal. And on that note, I'll just say this, I think a lot of people fail because they lock themselves into a goal. You can reevaluate. You can reassess your goals at any time. You are in charge of your life and therefore your results. So I hope that was helpful today. If you need help, reach out. I'll put my consultation link. I will put the goal
And as always, if you want to send me a message and let me know if this episode was helpful today, reach out to me on Instagram. It'll also be in the show notes. If you love this episode, leave me a five star review on the platform you're listening on, and please share it with a friend. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hope you're having a fantastic day. Bye for now.
