Ep. 281: How to Get Any GOAL (Not Just Weight Loss!)

Ready to change your mind about weight loss? Grab The 5-0 Method to lose all the weight you want and keep it off forever.

Wanna know how to get *any* goal? Today on the Get Your GOAL podcast, I’m sharing the proven formula that will get you to your goal weight, or anyplace else you want to go!

Most of us think getting to our goal will be just a straight line to success, and when things get tough, we just give up. But that doesn’t have to be your story. When you know what to expect along the way, even the bumpy path to your goal is navigable. And the truth of it is, the road to your goal looks like… a checkmark!

Click the image below to download the Get Your GOAL Formula, including helpful worksheets and a visual map to success.

On this week’s episode of the Get Your GOAL podcast, I’m drawing you the map and pointing out all the milestones you can expect, so you can get YOUR goal, no matter what it is.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Why success is NEVER linear
  • How to THINK about your progress, and
  • What to DO when the road gets tough

If you’re ready to get your goal, this episode is for you!

Transcript

My goal with this course is to teach you how to get your goal, no matter what that goal might be. The Get Your GOAL Formula is relevant to all goals, no matter what you want, either big or small goals. It is not only for, “I want to do something enormous in my life.” You could have a very small goal that you would still use this formula for. And to be clear, there's no such thing as a small goal. What you want for yourself is what you want for yourself, and all goals are “gettable” with this formula. Let's first consider how we normally think about getting goals: we all sort of think that you plan to do something, you do something, and then you get success, right? Like it's just that simple. It goes from A to B to C, in a relatively straight line up. On one side, you start with how good you feel right now. Which is to say that you feel pretty good, you feel like yourself. But then you start doing stuff and that's very exciting and then you keep doing things and you get to your success and your feelings are a little bit higher on the other side where you’ve gotten your goal. You feel a little bit better because you've gotten what you wanted. In reality, though, there are slightly more steps to getting a goal than these three here of having a plan, doing the tasks, and then having the success. With the Get Your GOAL formula, you can visualize the process of getting your goal as a big checkmark. No matter what the goal is, there will be a point when you don't feel quite as good as you did at the start, but there will also – your inevitable success! – be a point when you feel so much better than you thought. Your success with the Get Your GOAL Formula isn't about feeling a little bit better. Your ultimate success is going to be so much higher than you imagined. This image of the Get Your GOAL check mark means a couple of things: first, that the trajectory to your success is going to be different than you expected. It's not going to be a straight line between you and feeling amazing, nor will it even be quite as simple as the single checkmark. The fact is, there's going to be both ups and downs on your way. You can possibly expect to feel worse before you feel better. And this is the thing that I think is probably the most important thing to know about getting your goal. Even though it does not sound like amazing news, I think it's really important to understand and to even have that in your mind as you get going. This way, you're not surprised by this and you don't get three weeks in and start thinking, “Why is everything going wrong?” It's supposed to feel like that. The tough part of the Get Your GOAL Formula is that you are not going to feel like you are being licked by kittens the entire time. You are sometimes gonna feel really lousy and that's completely normal. It's completely part of the process and it does not mean that you aren't going to get your goal. In fact, it's really good news. It means that you are in the process of getting your goal. Yes, what I mean is that if you feel bad, you're on the right track! Briefly, here are the five steps of the Get Your GOAL Formula: Step number one is knowing where you are and what you want Step number two is to pick a plan (this is where the 5-0 Method comes in) Step number three is to do stuff to find your thoughts and collect data Step number four is to practice having the thing you want Step number five is to follow the five fundamental truths up the staircase of success And, of course, we’re going to start by explaining… Step FOUR. Step number four is to practice having the thing you want and I call this the hard bounce at the bottom. In fact, it is the bottom of the checkmark. It is the part where you are going to feel the worst. Why in the world would I start by talking about that? Here's why: Because even though I have put this out here as a five step process as though it goes directly in some linear fashion from one through five, the real truth of it is that you can be on step four at any point in the process. Put simply, the hard bounce at the bottom is the point at which you are being or feeling or doing something that is not the way you see yourself right now. You currently have a thought about yourself. In fact, you have lots of thoughts about yourself, which is called your self-concept. You have sentences that you are thinking about yourself that are your self-concept that are something along the lines of, “I weigh…” whatever it is you weigh. And if you are losing weight, your goal is to lose weight and to weigh a very specific number. That means that at the end of your goal you will be a person who weighs a different number. And that sounds like a fact. I mean you step on the scale, you see a number, it's data. This is a fact. You have thoughts about that fact and that means that you are going to have to think something different about yourself when you weigh a different number. Have you ever thought about that? We think about our weight all the time as though it is unchanging, and as though we can change our opinions by simply seeing a different number on the scale. I will tell you from my own experience when I was losing weight, every time I stepped on and saw a low number, I was like, “OMG, I can't believe it!” even though I was doing all the things to lose the weight and I wanted to lose the weight and I had a number in mind. It took me nine months to lose 30 pounds, and it took me another good nine months to actually hear that number in my brain as believable. It took me over a year before I stopped trying on three or four different sizes of the same pair of jeans because I had no idea which size would fit me. It could not wrap my brain around being a different size. That was the hard bounce at the bottom. That was me living in between two self-concepts. I had the data to prove the second self-concept, but my brain was still thinking old self concept thoughts. You currently think, “I weigh such and such.” If you were to think to yourself right now, “I weigh my goal weight,” wouldn’t your brain just explode? It would be like, “No, I don't. That's not true!” But when is your brain going to get used to that number? Seeing it on the scale doesn't make you have a new thought about yourself. You are going to have to practice thinking that new thing about yourself. And lots of us wait until we're already at that number before we even start practicing it, because it feels so out of reach, it feels so difficult. However, practicing before you get there is one of the things that can help you stay there. Not practicing having the thing you want will almost guarantee not getting the thing you want, because your brain doesn't know how to think about this thing that you want. So, the reason I bring up step four first is because it can occur to you at any point in time along your journey. When you are at step one, for example, deciding on your goal, you might notice that it's really hard to pick a number. Because it's really hard to even think about your ability to have something that you want. It's really hard for you to even picture yourself being anything else different than you are right now. Picking something, choosing something, or wanting something for yourself might already be outside of your self-concept. Truly, many of us get told our entire lives that we can't have what we want, that our wants aren't important, that we have to serve other people first, that things are just too difficult here. You might find that it's really easy for you to pick a goal for yourself, but then when it comes time to choosing how you're gonna get there – using The 5-0 Method, for example – that making that decision feels really tough. This is one of the ways that you know that you are already at step four, the hard bounce at the bottom, because it feels tough to make a decision. You might sail through that one too, but when you get to step three, where you're doing stuff to find your thoughts, all of a sudden you're like, “I don't know how to do things,” or “It's really hard for me to eat my calories,” or “It's really hard for me to go to bed. It's really hard for me to exercise every day.” We might attribute that to being unmotivated, but it has nothing to do with motivation. It really has to do with finding yourself here at step four, practicing having the thing you want. It feels outside of your current self-concept to do things like eat the right number of calories or go to bed on time or exercise or journal. The way that you'll know that you are at step four, the hard balance at the bottom, is because you'll notice what it looks like in your life. You will notice yourself being indecisive. You will notice yourself arguing with yourself. You will notice yourself having lots of self-doubts. You will notice yourself having an urgency to make changes. It will also show up as inertia or a plateau and yes, what I'm telling you is that when you get somewhere in the middle of your weight loss and all of a sudden you are not losing weight anymore, it’s because you are at the hard bounce at the bottom. You are trying to practice having the thing you want and it feels very uncomfortable. This is a psychological principle called cognitive dissonance – where you are trying to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time. It is, biologically speaking, the most uncomfortable place for your brain. Your brain is supposed to agree with itself, and generally speaking, that works in your favor. Most of the time it works for you to have a self-concept and to move forward with that. Because, as I mentioned here, when you try to hold a different self-concept, all of a sudden you can't seem to do anything. All of a sudden you're arguing with yourself, you're self-doubting and you're indecisive or you have so much urgency to make changes that you're doing lots of different things. It works in your favor to think of yourself one way right up until you want to think of yourself a different way. The fact is you can hit this hard bounce, not just once, not just twice, but dozens of times on your way to getting your goal. It never, ever, ever means that you can't get your goal. This is the thing that I want you to take away from today. First of all, that you're gonna feel worse before you feel better. And also, that feeling worse does not mean anything about your success. I cannot stress this enough, because I know that every single one of us gets to this point where we are arguing with ourselves, or we are doubting ourselves, or we feel so urgent to do something right now, or we can't seem to make anything happen, or we're just not sure. But none of that means that you are not going to get your goal. In fact, it is evidence that you are on your way! The reason you feel lousy is because you have two self-concepts. If you only had the one, “I'm a person who weighs what I weigh and I'm never gonna change,” you'd feel okay. It'd feel normal. It wouldn't feel like much of anything at all. The fact that you feel discomfort means that you are moving towards the thing you want. It's really good news, even though it never feels like it. You guys, step four feels awful and if you know this beforehand that you are going to feel awful and it is proof that you are on your way, I feel like this can actually help you keep moving. This could be the piece of information that makes all the difference between you getting your goal and you quitting because you feel awful, and that must be proof that you're never gonna get there. It's not. It's proof that you're on your way. Knowing that step four can happen at any time means that any of the other steps might not feel amazing. However, they also might. You might find yourself sailing through lots of this stuff. Step one is to decide on your goal, and honestly, it is both that simple and that difficult. You get to just pick, do you know that? Do you know that you can pick anything? You can decide out of thin blue air, any number you want for your weight. There's no moral imperative for you to be a certain weight. There's no moral imperative for you to earn a certain amount of money. There's no moral imperative for you to have a certain kind of relationship. There is nothing about your goal that you “have to” choose. You can simply decide that you want something and then have it. It's kind of amazing. It's kind of mind blowing, and this is why I mentioned that you could be at Step Four at any point in time, because even that concept of asking yourself what you want and recognizing that you can have what you want is a little bit mind blowing. But you can, and all you gotta do is ask, “What do I want?” Step Two is to choose how to get started. Lots of us have drama and a hard bounce at the bottom at this point, which is why I have provided you with The 5-0 Method. This program tells you to do these exact things, and you will get your goal. This is what fitness trainers or anybody who has a business plan or a relationship plan or a weight loss plan or any kind of a plan wants you to believe – they tell you what to do, you do it, and then you get your goal. And to be fair, it is kind of that simple. There will be things that you do to get where you wanna go. But choosing that plan could also blow your mind. Boom, we're down here at step four already. Again! Here's the truth: Any plan can get you where you want to go, any of them. The thing that makes a plan work is you, believing that it's gonna work. Now as it happens, I do offer science-backed information about how to lose weight. It's sensible, and it works, but if you don't believe that it's gonna work, it won't work for you. Nothing will work for you unless you believe it will work for you. Next up is Step Three, do stuff to find your thoughts and collect data. This is different than most plans will tell you. Most plans will just tell you to do stuff! However, what I know about doing stuff is that you have a lot of thoughts about it. You have a lot of thoughts about the stuff you do, and whether or not you're capable, and whether or not it's gonna get you there. When you just do stuff, there's a really good chance that you will stop doing stuff because you have thoughts about it. And your thoughts create your feelings, which drive your actions. Sometimes you find yourself not doing something, for example, not eating your calories, not drinking your water, not going to bed, not exercising, or not journaling – even though you have a plan and you have a goal. When you find yourself not doing things, it's because you’re having thoughts. You have thoughts about the stuff that you need to do to get your goal and those thoughts, just so you know, aren't helping you. If you had helpful thoughts already in your brain that were getting you where you wanted to go, you'd already be where you wanna be right now. If you are not at your goal, it’s because of your thoughts. They're slowing you down, and this is completely normal! This is what happens to all of us. The reason we have goals is because we're not already there. When you understand that this is part of the process – doing stuff to find your thoughts – a couple of things will happen. First, you will journal (using The Two-Step Tool) and you will find your thoughts, and you will recognize that lots of them are unhelpful. And second, you will recognize that it doesn't matter what you do. I know we all think that there's a right way to do things and there's a wrong way to do things and that if you do the wrong thing, you can gain weight. And it’s true, you might. You absolutely might and that's just really good information. You are doing stuff to find your thoughts. You are not doing stuff to be on the bullet train to success, because this is the right way to do all this stuff. When you know that you are doing stuff to find your thoughts (instead of doing stuff to get someplace without ever making any mistakes at all), it means that you'll be free to do anything. It means that you'll give The 5-0 Method a chance. It means that you might be eating more calories than you've ever eaten, or exercising less than you have ever exercised. It means that you might set yourself a bedtime and stick to it, because you're just doing stuff to find your thoughts. There's no right or wrong here. There's no good or bad here. There's no moral imperative, there's no have-tos. You are doing stuff just to see what you think about it. And if you find nothing but unhelpful thoughts about the thing that you are doing, for example, “I'm eating way too much. I could never eat this number of calories. This is a lot. I'm definitely gonna gain weight.” If your brain is flooded with thoughts like that, then that's really good information. It means that the thing that you are trying to do isn't working for you right now. It means that you can try something different. When I offer you, “Hey, here's this right number of calories and it's gonna get you to your weight loss goal because it's like the exact right caloric deficit,” and you have literally nothing but unhelpful thoughts and not even one shred of, “Well, we'll just see how this goes. I think this might work. I've heard good things. I'm gonna try this and see what happens,” then you’ve hit the hard bounce at the bottom and that number is not gonna work for you right now. Let yourself be empowered to do stuff to find your thoughts and recognize that you are the authority of what will work and what won’t. This means that you can do something else, too. You could pick a different number and try that. You have all the power, because you have the power of your thoughts to do anything. Recognizing that you are doing stuff for the sake of finding your thoughts, as opposed to for the sake of only getting success or heaven forbid failure, it really takes away a lot of that fear. You are doing stuff to see what you think about it. And sometimes you might even surprise yourself by having some really good thoughts about it. I've mentioned that this whole process is just gonna be you finding terrible thoughts and feeling awful, but there's actually a point where you're gonna feel pretty good! There will be a point where you're actually going to have some confidence that you're gonna get there. Step Five is the point on your journey where you actually feel significantly better than you ever thought you could, by following the Five Fundamental Truths to success. So lemme share with you what those five fundamental truths are: You are a golden nugget. The first time you hear this, lots of you are like, “McDonald's!” Here's the thing about the golden nugget-ness of you. It has nothing to do with fast food. It has nothing to do really with anything nugget related at all. I really specifically chose this phrase for two reasons. Number one, it came to me, it was the first little thing that popped into my head and I am learning how to just listen to the first thing that pops into my head when it feels good, and also because there's a really good chance that you might have a current religious or spiritual or personal belief about this thing. And I wanted to make it really clear that you can fit what I call a golden nugget into what you already think. I didn't want to use a word like soul or essence or co-opt something from a specific religion or a specific spiritual practice because this really does apply to you no matter what you believe. Being a golden nugget means that – by virtue of your mere existence – you are worthy of the things that you want, you are whole, you are lovable, you are connected, and you are capable. You are both a complete miracle and a complete mess. And that's exactly how you should be, my friend. You are a golden nugget, but also you have this flesh, this body, this human experience that is just a mess. It's a mess and it's supposed to be! We're all a mess. You are a miracle and a mess. It's what makes life fun. It means that you can't take being a miracle too seriously. You're not really all that and a bag of chips, but also it means that you can't take the mess too seriously, either. You're both and they don't negate each other. They just live together in harmony. You are a miracle, you are a mess. It's all good. It's exactly the way it's supposed to be. You have all the power all the time. This one's a really tough one for lots of us to wrap our brains around because we think that things – out there – just happen. They happen to you, they happen against you. But you always – from the minute of birth to the minute of death – have access to your thoughts, and you are the only one who has access to your thoughts. Nobody else on the earth can make you think anything. That is your power. You have the power to think about anything the way you want to, which therefore means that you have the power to feel the way you want to about anything, because your thoughts create your feelings. Your feelings are meant to be felt. Because your feelings drive your actions (and inactions), your feelings are fuel for you to do stuff. Your feelings are also never wrong. Your feelings are the compass for your life that are infallible. Your feelings are always telling you what you're thinking. Your feelings are always driving your actions, and your feelings are meant to be felt. They are natural. Your body creates feelings on purpose to get you to do stuff. You're supposed to have 'em, you're supposed to feel 'em. You can create anything you want. For reals! Lots of us try to start here with this thought, and then we can't figure out why we can't get there. These are big concepts. These take a while to really sink in and actually manifest in your life. These concepts might just sound like a really nice, “Cool story, bro.” However, as you believe them, as you feel them in your body, they will create what you want. You have the power and the capability and the deservingness and the belongingness to create anything you want for yourself. It would be really lovely if we could all start with this one because then our goal would be so inevitable. And this is the thing that I want you to know about these five fundamental truths to success, is that even if you don't believe them a hundred percent, even if they feel a little sticky on your way there, the very fact that you are here, that you are listening, that you are considering these as an even remote possibility, is one more step closer to what you want. Every time you even think about this stuff, it's getting you closer. Being an active participant in this process, knowing all the different parts to it, accepting that sometimes you're gonna feel really lousy on your way to feeling really great, and understanding that any of these concepts, all of this work, is proof that you're gonna get there. Take that in. You can get there – wherever there is, wherever you decide to go.

Listen to the full episode here, and be sure to leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.

Originally aired April 2, 2023
Wanna know how to get *any* goal? Today on the Get Your GOAL podcast, I’m sharing the proven formula that will get you to your goal weight, or anyplace else you want to go!
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Meet Your Host

Mindset expert and certified life coach Pahla B knows a thing or two about changing your mind to change your weight and your life. She’s the creator of The 5-0 Method, Amazon-best selling author of the book “Mind Over Menopause,” and former yo-yo dieter who has cracked the code on lifelong weight maintenance. Join Pahla B each week for the personal insights, transformative mindset shifts, and science-backed body advice that can help you lose all the weight you want and keep it off forever.