Welcome to the Get Your Goal podcast, the place where ambitious, deep thinking women chart their own course, exploring the mindset, emotions, and daily practices that help you get your goal your way by being unapologetically you. I'm your host Pahla B, master certified life and goal coach and creator of the
Daily 3 journaling framework. On this podcast, you'll learn to navigate your unique path to success by using the most powerful tool in your kit, your own internal compass. Ready for the adventure? Let's go. Hello, friend. Today's topic is something that might be top of mind for you today, this week, this month, this lifetime,
right now. You might be wondering if now is a bad time to get your goal, because you're looking around you and you are seeing that there are all kinds of people in the world who are struggling with real problems, and you [00:01:00] don't wanna be tone deaf. You don't wanna celebrate while other people are in pain.
You think that you shouldn't be selfish or greedy or self-absorbed when there is so much going on in the world. And before I answer this question for you, I actually wanna take a, a brief little step outside of the topic. And I wanna mention that I've been podcasting for a long time. I started this podcast in October of 2017.
I have seen some things over the years. There have been global events. There have been world changing, life changing, personally changing things that have happened to me and in my community and in the world in those years. And generally speaking here on the podcast, I don't address those things. During 2020,
I think I had. I'm, I can picture I think three episodes where I addressed the pandemic, [00:02:00] if not directly, at least obliquely, talking about, you know, how you might be feeling and what's going on and what you can do. At the time, it was much more of a, a health and exercise focused podcast. It was much more about
like what you can do quite literally for your immune system as well as your mental health. Those are the episodes that I specifically remember. And I want you to know that while I absolutely, as a person, as a human being, have all kinds of opinions about things that go on in the world, i've made a decision here on the podcast to approach the way I talk about things from my place of being a life coach.
One of my most deeply held values for myself as a life coach is that you can tell me anything. That while we are coaching that you are always, always, always allowed [00:03:00] to be you. That you get to have your opinions, that you get to express them. You get to be yourself. You get to make your way in the world, in the way that feels the most like you. And therefore, I, even though I have opinions, want to publicly remain
outside of opinions, for the purpose of being the kind of life coach for you personally, that has a safe space to talk about anything. One of, one of the biggest difficulties I had when I first started even remotely doing any kind of mindset work was feeling like everything I said, whether I said it out loud or not, or even just in my journal, that everything I said was available for
dissenting opinion. [00:04:00] It was something that I really struggled with and it's something that I hear a lot about. I don't, from my audience, like I don't want to write something down in my journal that somebody else could read. I don't want to express myself because what if, you know, what if I hurt somebody's feelings or what if somebody reads it and they know something about me personally?
Like I absolutely understand what that feels like, and it's why I choose to not remain neutral. That that sounds ridiculous. Like there is no such thing as actually neutral, but I choose to publicly address very little about what is going on that would, that would be clear about my personal opinions.
Here's, here's what I wanna tell you about today's topic. It is not nearly as immediate as it sounds. The truth of it is that as [00:05:00] long as I have been thinking about and talking about goals and working with men and women, back in the day when I used to do such a thing, now I now I very specifically work with women.
But back in the day when I was a personal trainer, I used to do in-home personal training. I had quite a few male clients. As long as I have been working with humans at all this question of "Is now a bad time to get your goal?" has always, always come up. And let that inform you at least a little bit as we start this topic that therefore it's not really about world events.
It's not really about what's going on right now. It actually is about you and your brain and the human condition. The the truth of it is that this question of whether or not it's a good time or a bad time to get your goal, [00:06:00] in my opinion, so here I am expressing an opinion today. In my opinion, it is always a good time to get your goal. I believe,
deep in my bones, that the reason you have a goal is to understand yourself and to heal something within yourself. The reason you have a goal, no matter how ridiculously selfish or shallow, or... Here. Let me tell you something cringey. For the longest time, honestly, my goal was to be rich and famous. And I did not say that out loud for this exact reason.
It felt shallow. It felt like, oh my gosh, there are people in the world who actually want to like save the world, and here I am with this deeply cringey goal of wanting to be rich and famous. And what I have found on my route to quote unquote being rich and famous, is that that was never what I actually wanted.
What I wanted was to heal things inside of me [00:07:00] about whether or not I was likable or lovable. Whether or not I fit in with people or was a weirdo or a freak, or whether or not I truly have what it takes to create what I want. At the heart of your goal, again, no matter how shallow or surface or self-absorbed it sounds, you have something to understand about yourself,
and about human nature, which inevitably will help you show up in the world as a more compassionate, more empathetic, kinder, more well-rounded and more understanding human being. There is no such thing as a truly shallow or surface goal that does not help you personally, you, my deep thinking, ambitious friend who wants to be a good person.
You [00:08:00] help the world when you go on this path to get your goal. And. I know that, I know that hearing that, like so many times when I answer your question right here at the beginning of the podcast, it sounds great. Thank you. Awesome. And also, and also, I don't feel that just yet. I hear you, I understand you intellectually, but I don't feel it in my bones.
So let's talk about how to feel this in your bones. Because here's what you're probably doing right now. If you are wondering if now is a bad time to get your goal, you are looking around at the circumstances that you see around you, you are listening to your family, your friends, your neighbors, you are on media and social media, and you are just thinking, oh my gosh, now isn't the time.
So what you're doing right now is probably shrinking yourself, your goals, your happiness, the things you're willing to say out loud, the things you are willing to [00:09:00] do publicly, because you are trying to match the tone of what you perceive around you. Now, having nothing to do with any kind of global events,
I will actually tell you the story about me and my journey to being an entrepreneur. I, I have not always known that I was going to be entre an entrepreneur, but I have always shown the signs. I have always, always struggled to, well, I have not struggled to have jobs. The truth of it is I've had a job, one kind of a job or another since I was 15 and a half, since I could get my work permit.
As soon as I could work, I did. I had very, very, very strong socialization in my family of origin that having a job and having a steady paycheck was the path to safety. That that was the only thing you should do, that you get a job, you keep a job, you have a [00:10:00] paycheck. I also got socialized that you should hate your job and that it should be unsatisfying on many levels and that you will never make enough money.
Like there was, there was a flip side to that coin, but. But it was absolutely, the, the messaging was that having a job is simply what is expected of you. And, and it was fine as far as that went right up until, actually, right up until I had my first son. I, I knew almost immediately that I didn't wanna go back to work.
And I also knew that I needed to contribute to the household. I, again, due to deep socialization, I had a lot of thoughts about how much money we had and whether or not we could afford for me to stay home and, and things like that. And I almost immediately, gosh, how old was my son? Oh, he was just a couple months old,
when I started dreaming up this, this business that I could [00:11:00] do at home, that I could, I could stay at home, I could be a stay at home mom, and also I could, at the time, I could write resumes. That was, that was the business that I dreamed up. It was called the Write Resume Service, W-R-I-T-E. But also, it sounds like the right choice.
I thought I was so clever. I. I'm gonna put air quotes around calling any of this an actual business. I had an idea. I talked to like three people about it. I wanted to make it a thing. I went to the bookstore because, I mean, this was 1998. So I went to a bookstore and I bought books on how to write effective resumes and I, I did my best to become a resume writing expert.
And I started to understand, and it's very interesting to me now actually, how I started to understand like the words that you choose and the conventions of it, like. In so many ways, even though that business went absolutely nowhere, I literally never had a paying [00:12:00] customer. I did have lots of free customers from my family and friends who wanted, you know, free help while I was getting my business off the ground.
But I think so often about how, how formative that experience was in terms of, first of all, learning how to write in a specific way for a specific purpose and how to write for other people for a specific purpose. And also just how I thought about myself. At the time. At the time, it was not a source of, it wasn't a source of like deep
difficulty between my husband and I at all. We had conversations, certainly. We had conversations that might have had some tension in them, certainly. But it was never, it was never an argument. It was never a problem. And, and my husband received the same kind of socialization that I did. My husband absolutely believes [00:13:00] that having a good, steady job with a paycheck and insurance and all of the, the trappings of safety, he really, truly believes that that is the way to go.
He has zero desire to be an entrepreneur. I, on the other hand, have quite literally, even if I didn't recognize it, always desired to be an entrepreneur. And I'm actually gonna, as a a little podcast, within a podcast, I'm gonna show you what it actually looks like in your life if you are kind of designed to be an entrepreneur. You won't have trouble getting jobs, you will be enthusiastic about getting jobs because you actually deeply enjoy working.
You find work in general to be very satisfying, but while you are at those jobs, you will not enjoy them. You will find yourself, as I did, constantly complaining that things could be better, that things could be run differently, and you won't necessarily know like the exact [00:14:00] path to how things should be better, but you will have some ideas.
What I have come to understand is that every job that I complained about and spent time in my brain thinking, why isn't it being run like this? Why aren't we doing things that way? Why does the paperwork look like this? Why do we, you know, why are these procedures what we do? I was always thinking like a founder, like a president, like a CEO, like the one in charge.
And because I wasn't in charge, I was complaining about it both out loud and in my head almost constantly. Again, it wasn't about the work. I loved, I loved the work. I've always loved the work. I've always loved working with people, with clients. I've always loved being busy. I've loved having processes.
Like there's, there's so much about working that I enjoy, and the piece that was missing all those years that I had a JOB was that I wasn't doing it my way. [00:15:00] This. This could be your permission slip to see yourself as a natural born entrepreneur, if any of that landed. But here's where I'm going with this.
Here is the point of why I'm telling you this story about me and my entrepreneurial journey. The truth of what's really going on with you right now if you are looking around and thinking to yourself, oh my gosh, is now a bad time to get my goal? You are, you are a human being. I diagnose you as human. Thank goodness,
right? Also, I will tell you that this is your brain being a brain. Your brain, literally, naturally, 100% is created to normalize the behavior of the people around you. This is a survival technique. It goes way back like this is, this is part of your. Okay. I was gonna say, it's part of your caveman brain. It's part of your lizard brain, and I want you to know that that science has been 100% debunked.
There is no single part of your brain [00:16:00] that holds old stuff. There's no, there's no single part of your brain that holds new stuff. I, I've been wanting to say this for a long time because I'll, if you go back many, many, many years, I did used to talk about like the prefrontal cortex and the lizard brain and stuff like that, and it was before I had done any actual research.
I had heard people talking about it. I was simply parroting what I had heard without knowing more myself. And now I know better, so I do better. Anyways. Your brain still, in spite of it not being a lizard brain, your brain is always going to normalize the behavior to the people closest to you. The people that you spend the most time with,
and you've certainly heard this, and I believe we just talked about it in, if not the last episode, the one before that, 'cause I know these words just recently came out of my mouth, that you are the sum of the, the five people that you spend the most time with. That's not entirely true, but, [00:17:00] but your brain is hardwired to look around you and behave in a similar manner to the people you are spending the most time with and have the most emotional resonance with.
And that's fine. Honestly, that's fine. The problem, and the reason I'm even bringing this up is because you feel the tension of that. Like, you have this question in your head, "is now a bad time to get your goal" because your brain is normalizing you to the people around you and also you still want your goal. Like you still have that deep drive, you know in your bones that there's something you want for yourself and your brain is like kind of arguing with you.
And that's actually what it sounds like, that that is the hallmark of, of being in this place is that this question is literally a question in your mind. Like on the [00:18:00] daily you are asking yourself, should I or shouldn't I? Is it okay or is it not okay? I see on the one hand, and I may or may not be actually consciously acknowledging what people are saying and the people I love around me are behaving this certain way,
and also I want this. I want this thing for myself. And it feels like such a struggle. It feels like such a question. It feels like this open loop of, not even curiosity, but this open loop of an undecided, where am I going with that sentence? An undecided decision. I, you know, you know, sometimes my mouth starts talking before my brain has finished the sentence in my head.
This, this is how, what it feels like to be an ambitious woman with a busy brain, and I'm gonna leave it there. You have an undecided decision in your head that feels very difficult. And so that is, I, [00:19:00] I mean, I know it sounds so, so simple and so like, can it be that easy? But the truth of it is that you decide.
And you don't decide to like, go for your goal or not go for your goal. It's not quite that binary. It's not like I belong with the people around me, or I don't. It's actually a, I'm gonna call it a gentler decision. You choose what you want to normalize yourself to. You choose. And the truth of it is that that can be really difficult and that is part of why it feels like such a struggle.
If it felt easy to just go against the grain, then you would. I mean, I have spent, let's see, my son is [00:20:00] 27 and a half years old now, almost. So in 1998, I made this choice and it felt like a choice. I'm going to be an entrepreneur, I'm going to work for myself. I'm going to do this thing. And it felt hard. It felt like I couldn't talk about it, and it wasn't that I couldn't, I could, it just felt abnormal.
The people in my, my family of origin, my husband, my neighbors, my friends, nobody I knew was an entrepreneur. Nobody I knew wanted to create a business for themselves. So I went back and forth on it for years. I ended up finding like work from home jobs where I was working for somebody else and then thinking to myself constantly, why aren't you running it this way?
Why aren't you doing it that way? Why does training look like this when it could be like that? Like like I went back to work. [00:21:00] In small ways mostly I had like part-time, again, mostly like things I could do from home. I went to jobs. I had a couple of like in-person actual part-time jobs. I started another business with my mom and my sister.
That's when I was a preschool teacher. And then, I went back to work after that at another job, at the last job I ever worked at, which was, which was actually the worst of the internal grind. Like I felt the internal struggle so strongly there because we had had some success in the preschool with my mom and my sister.
I knew what entrepreneurship really could feel like. I had had a lot of creative freedom. I had had a lot of, not necessarily financial freedom, we were just really starting to make some money when I left the preschool and went back to work. I had had a lot of that taste of what it really could feel [00:22:00] like to successfully work for myself.
And so the year and a half that I had that final job was absolute agony for me emotionally. I mean, it was physically, it was perfectly lovely. I enjoyed, again, I enjoyed the work. I had such a great time at the job, but not having a job. And one of the things that I did after that when I started my own business was that was when I really started
considering what, what I wanted for myself. Like who I wanted to be around, and who I wanted to be in the world, and what kinds of media and social media I wanted to take in. I did not in any manner consider it in the way that I'm, I'm talking about it with you today, that you choose what you normalize yourself [00:23:00] to.
But there was a part of me that understood that I was looking for other people like me, that I wanted to hear stories and talk to people who do what I do. Not necessarily exactly what I do, but I wanted to, I wanted to normalize for myself what entrepreneurship looked like. Right around that same time when I was, um, when I quit that job and became an entrepreneur, I became an in-home personal trainer, and that was actually right around the time that I started on YouTube and the conversation on YouTube opened up my brain
to exactly what I'm telling you here. The conversation on YouTube. There were a lot of people at the time, back in 2012, who were talking about how to be good at YouTube, and so they were talking about entrepreneurship and I felt like, I felt like somebody who had been starving for years finally, you know, coming up to the buffet. [00:24:00] Like here were people who
got it. These were people who were my people. It felt amazing. It also felt really hard as these things do, like when you first start coming into yourself and understanding that you can create what you want, you can be who you wanna be, that there are other people just like you. There's still that that period of adjustment where you've got a foot in both worlds where you've got people who are very close around you telling you this is the way to go,
you should have a job and. Don't hear me wrong. Like if you are not an entrepreneur, if you have any kind of a goal, surrounding yourself with people who, first of all just have goals in general, and second of all, have your goal or something like it in mind for themselves, that is what I'm talking about.
I'm telling you the story of my entrepreneurship journey, but don't hear it through that lens. You don't [00:25:00] have to want to be your own business person in order to understand what I'm saying and help it. Uh. Have this help you in a way that I want it to help you. I mean, this really is this, this feeling that I had when I first came to YouTube, and then after that, gosh, when I joined memberships with people who were entrepreneurs and who were not even just entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs thinking and using mindset tools for themselves, for their goals. Being surrounded by people
who were doing what I was doing and better than I was doing was inspirational, aspirational, and so deeply satisfying. It's why I created a membership, honestly. That that feeling of being surrounded, of being held, of having not just one person to support me because [00:26:00] I've certainly. I've certainly had like one-on-one support in lots of ways.
Gosh, way, way, way back when I started my very first business, do I even remember the program I went through? I had one-on-one mentorship from a man who had been in business, who had been an entrepreneur for like decades, and he, he let me pick his brain. I asked all kinds of questions. At the time, I was so deeply intimidated.
I, I did not make use of that the way that. Well, here, let's talk about that. I didn't make use of it the way that I could have, because I personally didn't even know what questions to ask yet. I, I really feel like this is part of what can feel so amazing about a membership or a group, that there are other people who are at your same place and further along, because somebody who's a little bit further along is asking better questions than you.[00:27:00]
They are asking questions that you don't even know you need to ask. So it was very difficult for me in that one-on-one mentorship to even know what I needed. I was so new. I had never thought about business before. I really, I had no business being in business for myself except for that deep, deep craving down in my bones.
I knew I wasn't meant to work for somebody else. If that's what this feels like for you, that deep craving down in your bones where you know you want a thing for yourself, that not a lot of women your age or women like you seem to want for themselves. This, this is the answer. To choose what you normalize yourself to, and you also get to choose how you do that.
I mean, I have solutions. I have the, the membership. I have this podcast. I mean, [00:28:00] let this podcast help you normalize who you want to be and how you want to show up in the world. Let yourself be drawn to things without necessarily knowing why. This is one of the greatest lessons of my life, of my entrepreneur journey, of everything that I have ever done.
I'm able to look back and see that the seeds were always there. I was always curious about my thoughts and my feelings. I was always, well, no, I wasn't always willing to hear them and feel them. I did need to learn those things as skills, but I have always been available, at least in very small measure, to being a little bit different.
And it's why, it's why I know you are here. You feel that too. I know you do. I know you feel the call. You know there's something [00:29:00] else. Even if right now, even if right now it feels shallow or surface or like, why in the world do I have this goal? Who in the world am I to have a goal like this? Who in the world am I to
be trying to get a goal at a time like this in the world when what I see closest around me is people who don't want for themselves the things that I want for myself? And I wanna pause on that for just a really brief moment because I wanna tell you the story of how my husband and I have a very successful, happy marriage wanting different things for ourselves.
I. I know exactly who I want to be and how I want to show up in the world. It's where we even started this podcast in a different way. I want other people to be themselves. I deeply want my husband to [00:30:00] be the kind of person who wants a steady job with a steady paycheck and insurance, and a pension, and a nice, safe, cozy, easy life.
I want him to be like that. I have no interest in judging people who have different opinions than mine. And I offer you that as an option. That you can be different and feel different and have different ideas and choose, like choose, to normalize yourself by being with other people who want the kinds of things that you want, who want to do the kind of mindset work that you wanna do, who want to do the kind of journaling that you want to do, who want to have the kind of life that you want to have for yourself, and you can still fit in with other people who don't want that. There is a place for you [00:31:00] inside yourself to be accepting and understanding
of people who choose different things than you, to allow yourself to spend time with them, to love them, to be with them, and not entirely normalize yourself to them. You can feel safe being different.
The path there really is some version of what I offer. I offer you the Daily 3. You can watch the masterclass. There's a link in the show notes or the description. Where you can start to ask yourself the kinds of questions where you can see your future. You can see yourself with your goal. You can untangle yourself from the socialization, from your current normalization.
You can watch yourself succeeding at being the kind of person you want to be. [00:32:00] I offer the guided journaling experiences where you can practice those. The, the guided journaling experiences are, it's a, it's a digital download that gives you 30 days of metacognitive questions for you to start using this work in a way that that can move you forward slightly easier.
It's not. It's not easy, but it's also not hard. It helps you start to see the skills that you will learn by journaling this way, by journaling for success, by rewiring your brain for success instead of normalcy. I also offer the membership where there are other women our age doing amazing things, that allows you the ability to have a foot in both worlds, to have a place that is completely safe to talk about your big ambitions, your goals, your dreams, the things that [00:33:00] you believe are holding you back right now, to share your successes, to find who you want to be in the world, and also still live your regular life.
The thing that will happen when you choose what you normalize yourself to is that you will stop having that constant internal struggle. This question of is now a bad time to get your goal will literally not even cross your mind anymore. You will not struggle to see your place in the world. You will understand on every level that who you are becoming
is still you, and it's a version of you that is more compassionate, more kind, more understanding, more caring, and don't hear that as judgment for who you are right now. All of a sudden, I just had this big flash of like, okay, I'm not telling you that you are not a [00:34:00] kind person right now. What I'm telling you, what I'm telling you is my story.
I have always, I've always been kind on the inside and sometimes the things that came out of my mouth didn't sound kind. I've always been empathetic on the inside, and sometimes the way that I showed up in the world did not appear like that at all. What I'm telling you is not that you will be a different human being, but that you will actually show up in the world the way you have always felt inside.
It is amazing. It feels so good to have that alignment with your internal and external world. That is what happens when you choose what you want to normalize yourself to. When you choose to normalize yourself with other people who are working on that alignment, you will create it for yourself. My friend.[00:35:00]
I hope this was helpful for you today. Thank you so much for listening. And I'll talk to you again soon. No matter where you are on your goal getting journey, I'm here to help. Get started by watching the free Daily 3 masterclass to learn the simple journaling framework that rewires your brain for success.
Move forward with confidence at your pace with one of my goal specific guided journaling experiences. And when you're ready for immersive exploration with fellow travelers just like you, you belong in the Get Your Goal Membership. Find it all and join the adventure at getyourgoal.com.
