Episode 68: Achieving Goals without the Sabotage

Hello, it is 2022 and we are back with the Choose in Podcast. I'm your host, Roxanne Grenada. And we are going to be talking about how to get started in this new year. Now we hear so much about New Year's resolutions. But I want to challenge it just a tiny bit. It is obviously always good to set goals and to accomplish things. I mean, I'm totally on board with working and changing and doing things that better ourselves. That is the way we thrive, right. That's the way we grow and the way our perspective opens up.

But there's something that happens in our body in our makeup that when we set a goal that is really big, we naturally have defenses that come up. And I don't know the scientific wording on I don't even know the psychological wording on it, all I know is that it's something that happens to many of us, including me. So with making goals for the new year, it is better to actually make small, little changes things that we can stretch our nervous system, a little things that will enhance our life in just a small way. And then we still may reach a really big goal by the end of the year, but we don't set ourselves up for failure or to self sabotage.

Because I know with myself, sometimes when I have too big of a goal, especially if I have any sort of emotional ties to it, or reasons why I don't want to accomplish that goal, I will I will find every reason not to do it. So when we do something smaller, it allows our whole body to get on board and to say, Okay, I think I want to accomplish this. So the way that looks is, is doing something in a way that feels comfortable, but still something we haven't done. For example, if we were to set a goal to work out every single day for this amount of time, but we haven't even been working out one day a week for six months, that would be a really big goal that would kind of send our body into that flight mode, like I don't think so I would rather not do any of it.

And then we're going to be sad because we we aren't taking care of ourselves physically. So instead, we want to do something that just changes our life in a small way. So maybe something like, I am going to go outside and just walk up and down my street for five minutes, three times a week, something like that. Or I am going to just go to the gym once this week. And just try it out. It helps us to ease in so that we don't feel that we're over committed, or that it is something that is impossible to do.

So for me right now, the last couple years with COVID and quarantine and I've talked about it before with my my young adult kids living with me during that quarantine time and we made treats every night and I stayed up with them till two in the morning playing games. I mean literally, it was the greatest. But my whole normal way of taking care of myself physically changed during those months. Totally okay, not a big deal. It's all okay, but now here we are almost two years later. And I still cannot get my head wrapped around a regular workout routine or eating healthy on a regular basis, which wasn't necessarily a problem that I had before.

I used to love going to the gym I love working out I loved feeling good. I love being able to walk up my stairs really great and easy and not and not be out of breath. So so for me every time over this last probably year and a half that I have put myself in a position to okay I am on board. I'm going to go to the gym, I am going to do this and in my mind, I think I'm going to do this every single day. Well, I will do it for like three days and then and then I'm not going to do any more. And lately even it's become to the point where I am setting the goal but before I even start it I'm already done telling myself why I can't do it.

So now there's a lot to that, obviously, right, I have a lot of work to do in the emotional area around releasing weight, or working out again, or, or whatever. So you watch me come and go on my story, where I'm talking about, okay, I'm at the gym, you know, help me everybody, I'm just gonna be honest with you, I'm still not on board, I'm still not doing it. And I'm not doing a great job at eating healthy. And therefore, my physical appearance and the way I feel physically has not changed, it actually just keeps getting worse.

So with this idea in mind of doing things that will allow our self emotionally, mentally, physically, whatever it is to get on board, I'm going to do that for myself in in a smaller way. I'm going to say, Okay, today, I'm going to eat three healthy foods or, or today, I'm just going to go for a really short walk leisure, just to get out. And when I do that, I feel so good. I actually went on a walk on Sunday, and it just felt so good just to be outside, even though it was freezing to death, it was like I don't even know 20 degrees or something.

But anyway, I think you know where I'm coming from with this. So with our goals, and with how we want to show up in 2022, we want to look at our life. And we want to pick things that are just incrementally better, just in a small way. So it's almost like the idea of just doing something 5% better than we did that will help stretch that part of us, that layer of us. So when you're looking at your life, you can look at it and you can set these small, little tiny changes physically, emotionally, spiritually, sexually. Socially, I've tried to think of all the ways I can't even remember I'm right now I know there's a list.

But all of those ways to develop yourself in a positive way will be beneficial to you if you try to do it this way. So that's what I'm going to challenge you to do is look at things like that. So when we take things like our emotional growth, we may have a hard time with being a people pleaser, we may have a hard time with wanting people to meet our needs. And therefore we kind of go into like a victim mode mentality, we might have a hard time with resentment and unfairness. These are the things that can change within us in our emotional realm.

So maybe we can set some small incremental goals like, okay, so emotionally, when somebody does something that makes me feel bad, I am going to take time for myself, I am going to write down how it made me feel. And then I'm going to reframe it, and tell myself what I would like to be feeling. I don't want to feel like they don't like me, I would rather feel like that's them, that was their reaction. And for me, I'm still the same, I'm still okay and I'm going to just walk into the room and and just own the space that I'm in instead of having to make myself go smaller.

So let's look at it as some of the small things that we can do. So we can't control anybody else. We can only control ourselves. And so where do you want to grow in your life personally? Do you want to grow in your career in your personal development, your self awareness in your personal boundaries? What is it you need to identify what those are? And then what kind of things can we do to enhance those? Let's take self care, for example, self care may be right now, you take some time when you're you journal, sometimes maybe you go on walks, but maybe you need more, maybe you need to have some sort of therapy or you need to be able to read books that are self help or awareness into what it is that you're going through.

And so you need to add that to your plate. Now you don't want to add it to where I'm going to set aside an hour every day to read or I'm going to join every group I possibly can to help with my therapy work. You don't want to over exert or overcommit because then again, just like I talked about the beginning, it's going to be too much. So you look at the list of things that you could possibly add to your self care. And you choose one or two. And you just start small. And then when that becomes normal and part of your life, you can reassess and then you can add something more.

That would be the same with anything else with with other things in your life that you're wanting to change. So if you have a boundary with your spouse, and you, let's just say that you are married to somebody who struggles with addiction, which I know a lot of the people listening, that is the case, what if you have this boundary where you are, you are supposed to be doing your healing work, and you would like them to be doing their healing work. And you're not seeing that happen. So what is it that we do, because we want them to do it, and we want our relationship to be good.

But if they're not doing it, then it makes us feel stressed and crazy and in trauma, but we can't control that. So what can we do? We can look at our boundaries, we can open up our notebook and rewrite them, we can see where they're not working, we can see what is causing me to feel unsafe, and identify those things and then create boundaries around those. So maybe some of our old boundaries, we're not even following through, maybe we need the reminder of what our boundaries are to feel safe, and okay within ourselves. So reassess those and set something new. And now remember, these boundaries are for you to feel safe.

So there are several clients that I have right now that are either separated, or they are heading towards divorce, whether they want to or not, maybe their spouses choosing it, or maybe their spouse isn't choosing recovery, but there are several that are in the same situation. And it's really difficult to navigate through I want to be in this relationship, but I don't feel safe enough to have them with me, or to spend a whole bunch of time with them or to be intimate with them, all of those are, okay. So it's a matter of seeing what happens, seeing how they react, seeing, looking at the truth of what they're doing.

And if they are taking care of themselves and being adults and making the decisions for themselves to heal. If they're not, this is where you can look at your boundaries and make a change if you need to add on to them, or see why you are struggling so much with their decisions. So when we take it on, and we are in so much pain because of their decisions, the emotional side is okay. But we still have a choice to make, we still get to decide what to do from here, okay, they are not keeping their word they are not following through on their bound on their on the boundaries that they've set for themselves or that I have or their counselor has.

And now I feel unsure and unsafe. You look at that and say, Okay, what am I in safe with? Well, I'm on safe in the fact that he is wanting me to be with him intimately or just hanging out. But I don't trust him and I feel fearful around him or I feel triggered and I get anxiety when I'm around him. Okay, so this is where you go, Okay, well, what do I need? Well, it's not that I don't want to be with him, I do. But I want to feel safe when I do it. So your boundary could be something like, I do want to be with you. But I need to feel good. And if I'm not feeling good, I'm going to have to tell you that I can't be with you right now.

And that is taking care of you and you have every right to take care of you. That's just an example. There's of course big ones, little ones, but you just want to do something and change what's happening in your life to just stretch yourself a little bit more, either in your own personal safety, or either in in setting boundaries for your safety, which you will give to that person, maybe you have some maybe need more. So just stretch just a little bit, not too much. Not crazy amounts, right.

This is a line upon line, your healing, your growth progression, everything is one step at a time, you do not have to do everything all at once you do not have to solve every problem, you do not have to choose what you're going to do in your relationship just yet. You can take your time, the time is okay, where you're at right now is okay. It's all going to be fine. It's going to work itself out. And if it ends up being something hard, because you have practiced these things, and because you have walked yourself through healing, you're gonna be okay even if you don't feel ready.

So that's just something that you can do on the emotional side of things with boundaries. Another big thing that I see a lot of is self worth. We have a hard time sometimes validating our own self or seeing our worth for who we are. And this is where we can also stretch a little bit in the upcoming year to find extra healing in the way we view ourselves. We have a lot of noise, whether it's from other people social media, things we read or see that we are comparing ourselves with and that is just harmful because we are our own person.

We are great the way we are and we do not need to compare. We don't need to compare where we live, what we do what we wear, our healing our spouses. If I have a Hard life and they don't, we don't need to compare any of it because you have your life and it is, you are awesome the way you are. And so when we work on our self worth, we will be able to eliminate so much of that outside noise that actually causes us more problems than than we need.

And a lot of the times, we're just making up this stuff, and it's not necessarily even true. So with your self worth, what can you do to help you grow in the love you have for yourself. One of the ways I was just talking to a client about this is one of the ways is to write down your alignment, your core self, of everything that you are, that you naturally are because we our core self is already intact, it knows what it wants and knows what to do. It knows when it's voices outside of us that are not telling us the truth. And we get like bombarded with that stuff. But that is not our core person, our core being of who we are, that's not our true self, our higher self.

So one thing you could do is just write a list of the core things that you are, whether you believe them or not. They're all the things that you wish. They're all the things that you wish you were, well, I want to see clearer, and I want to be emotionally resilient. And I want to be able to know how to make these decisions, and I want to be able to move forward, I want to feel good about who I am, I want to love my body, no matter what it looks like, all those things your core self does, your core self does love your body, it does love your whole self, it thinks you're the best person ever thinks you're so awesome.

And so when you write those things down every time, another voice kind of tries to come in the way and tell you you're not those things, you can open up that list and just remind yourself that the core self does know who it is. She does know who she is. And those outside voices are just voices. It's like it's just noise. And the key in therapy or working with a coach like me is to be able to tune out the outside voices, and then also to address them and heal the wounds of why they're even there. So that's a way that you can help yourself worth.

The other thing is in identifying what it is about you that you feel isn't great. And then coming to me, you're your counselor and doing parts work on those on those pieces of you that are causing you harm. We'll talk about that in a later episode. Hopefully, though, this is kind of helpful in in understanding that you want to be kind and gentle to yourself, you don't need to learn how to run the marathon if you never even ran the block, right. So you have to run the block first, before you can run the marathon. It's like that with every aspect of our life.

So take one thing, one little thing, look at your life and the different layers that you have in the different you know, I can't think of the word but the different pieces like your physical, spiritual, emotional, social, intellectual in all of those areas, and look at what little small thing you would like to do to enhance your life and make it better. So this isn't about major change. Not saying that you can't do that if you're ready. But this is just about little tiny, one degree just a little bit in the change. And that one little degree will compound over time as you keep doing that.

And you're going to find that you're exactly where you want to be in your future. So you got this, this is 2022. Right? The best year, right? I'm saying that right now, because our last two years have been a little interesting. But I just think that this could be a great year, I think no matter what comes if we are looking at it with clarity, and seeing things as it comes and then just taking it one piece at a time, we're gonna make it and we're not just going to be okay through it, or we're going to not just stumble through it, we're actually going to thrive through it and we're going to get stronger and we're going to get more resilient, we're gonna, we're gonna be able to know exactly what we need to do, how to do it, when to do it, because we're taking the little steps to get there.

So every time you get overwhelmed with the future like this is too much. I do not know how to do this. This is too scary. You have gone too far past your small, one step goal. So just bring yourself back. Remember, you do not have to solve the future at the moment and just take one step in helping yourself heal, helping yourself grow and helping yourself progress. I'm excited to be here with you for this new year. We have lots of great episodes coming up so stay with me. Reach out if you need to. If you need to book a session or anything that you need, want to share something with me. Go ahead and do that you can do that. At Roxanne Kennedy-Granata.com or follow me on instagram I will see you next time

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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