Ep. 21: The Number 1 Thing You Can Do to Achieve Your Big Goal

No matter what your big goal (your big PIVOT) is - career change, weight loss, a crazy fitness goal, finding a new relationship, or anything else - and no matter where you’re at in the process of hitting it, there is one thing you should be doing to help yourself get there. In today’s episode Stephanie highlights what this #1 thing is, and how to do it even if it seems like it’s not possible for you (it is!). 

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the I'm the Problem podcast. My name is Stephanie Finigan, I am your host and coach, and I am very excited to get into today's episode, which is about the number one thing you can do to meet your goal, or in terms that we like to use around here, to make your big pivot. Obviously the topic of setting and achieving big goals or making big life pivots is hugely important to me. I've created a whole coaching business around it and I've done it a million times in my own life. So I love this topic.

As we talk about this, I want you to be keeping in mind what is your number one goal, what is the big pivot that you want to make? Do you want to leave your marriage? Do you want to write a book? Do you want to get married? Do you want to run a marathon? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to start a business? What is the thing that you really want to do and that you're scared to do it? You've been hesitant to do it. You're holding yourself back for any of the reasons that we've talked about on all the episodes prior to this one, which feel very valid in your head. They're around time or money or other people or life circumstances or your age, what you think about yourself, what other people will think.

When you are looking to hit a big goal or make a big life change, make a big life pivot, your brain is going to come up with a million and one reasons why you should not do it. It's just how our brains are designed. Your brain does not like change, your brain does not want you to do anything differently, so it's gonna throw everything it can at you in the hopes that you're gonna stay safely exactly where you are right now. So our job is to overcome our brain. Our job is to overcome the thinking that creates that challenge for us, which is the challenge of, oh shit, I really wanna do something, but I can't, I'm too old. I can't, my partner doesn't support me. I can't, I don't know anybody who's done this. It's never gonna work, it's impossible.

So how do you overcome that thinking and get to your goal, make your pivot, make it happen for yourself? There are many, many ways to do this. I coach on so many different tools and techniques depending on who you are and what the pivot is that you wanna make and what your specific thoughts and circumstances are that you believe are preventing you from doing that. But the number one thing you can do to meet your goal or make your pivot is to get around other people who believe it is possible for you to make that change.

This is key. This is it. This is the number one thing, and we'll go into why. But I promise you, if you are somebody right now that has a very big goal, a big change you want to make, you want to lose the weight, you want to run the marathon, you want to start the business, you want to leave the crappy relationship, you want to have a kid, you want to do anything that you've been trying to do or that you've been daydreaming about doing and you haven't done it yet. And I say that sentence, just get around other people who believe it's possible. You're probably thinking, yeah, but nobody in my life believes it's possible. I don't even know if I believe it's possible. I don't know if I believe it's possible that I could get married or have a kid after 40. I don't know if I believe it's possible that I could completely change my career and launch a business because I have obligations. I can't take that financial risk. Your brain is likely throwing at you all of the reasons why you can't find those other people to get around. Okay, so we're going to go into why this is so important and how to overcome your brain's excuses and objections to the idea of getting around other people who believe it's possible.

So the reason this is so important, the reason this is the number one thing that you need to do to meet your goal is that we as humans are social creatures. That is how we have evolved. There's a reason that we partner up. There's a reason that we, at least at one point in time, lived in communities together. There's reasons that it literally feels good in our body and gives us dopamine hits. When we connect with other humans, somebody smiles at us and we smile back. When somebody gives us a compliment or we pay somebody else a compliment. When we make eye contact and have a nice conversation with a stranger. There's reasons these things all feel good to us. There's reasons why loneliness is so detrimental, literally detrimental to our physical and mental well-being. It's because we are meant to be around others. It's very natural and normal to be around other people.

But here's the trick. When you get around other people, because we've been socialized to be around other people, we've also been socialized to believe that we don't want to be isolated from the group. We don't want to be voted off the island. That is very scary to our brains. That's very scary to us because we think we might not survive if we're isolated. So we want to be around other people and we really don't want to be outside of the group.

So here's the key. If we are around other people, we tend to do and think and say and believe what those other people do and think and say and believe because we want to be part of the group. That's a natural human instinct. That's a natural reaction we have. people who are around us. You've probably heard the saying, we're the average of the five people that we spend the most time with. I think I first heard it from Tim Ferriss, but many people have said that. And it's very true if you stop and think about it. We tend to be the average of the people that we spend the most time with. The reason is because of what I just said. We want to be accepted by the group, we want to be connected to other people, and we do not want to be voted off the island. So we do what's necessary to blend in and be like everybody else.

So there's a lot to be said for learning to be the individual that you are and for learning to not people-please, which I just did an episode on. Learning to not conform to others. Those are all really important skills. Certainly if you are interested in the type of work that I coach people on, which is doing things that might be outside the social norm, making a big pivot, even if it's not typical of people around you to do that, then, yeah, it's very important to practice those skills and learn how to stand outside the group. But in order to do that, it's very, very helpful for our brains to see other people doing the thing that we want to do and to experience what that's like. Because what that does is it helps our brains understand, oh, this is possible for me. And the more you're around other people who think and act and talk and believe the things that you want to believe, then the more likely it is that you're gonna pick up those traits and you're gonna do those things. You're in the group, you're conforming to the group because that's the human reaction, but you have a thought, huh, all of my friends are stay-at-home moms, but I want a job. All of my friends have jobs, but I want to be a stay-at-home mom. All of my friends work for big companies, but I want to have my own business. Everyone in my family is overweight, but I want to get fit. Everyone in my family is in debt and is terrible at money, but I want to be wealthy and be great with money.

So we have these thoughts, and then you look around you and if you don't see other people that have the thing that you want, have the life, the goals, made the pivot, if you don't see examples of that around you, it's very hard to then envision yourself doing it and help yourself learn to believe it. And it's also very hard then to get advice, to create a bit of a blueprint for yourself on how to get there and figure out how to get to where you wanna go. It's hard to do all that when we don't have a vision for it at all, when we don't see other examples of it. Let me be clear, it's not impossible to do it, but it makes it so much easier for us to make our big pivot or to meet our big goal when there's people around us that have the belief that it's possible, when there's people around us who've done it before or done similar things before. So if you're around a whole group of people who made massive career changes in their 40s, if you're around a whole group of people who have gotten married and had kids in their 40s, if you're around a group of people who changed their financial life for the better in their 50s, you know, if you're around people who've done all that, it's gonna seem less weird to you. It's gonna seem much more normalized. It's going to give you not only the ideas about how to do it and some blueprints and some guidance on how to get to where you want to get to, but it's also going to normalize it for your brain. So that part of your brain that craves acceptance from the group, which again is a normal human part of you, that part is suddenly going to be like, oh, it's not weird the thing I want to do. It is normal that I can change my life after 40. It is normal that I could start a new career or go back to school or become a friggin life coach or whatever it is I want to do. It's normal because look at all these people around me who have done it. I will tell you this happened to me when I got into coaching.

So when I first became interested in coaching I was running with a group called Back on My Feet and they are a national non-profit. Look them up if you've never heard of them. They're amazing. It's a group that creates running groups out of homeless shelters, and anybody can join and run with them. I became a part of the group, and I was running a couple days a week with them, and one of the guys that I was running with, who was living in the shelter, had formerly been homeless, and was really taking big strides to move his life forward, said to me, oh, back of my feet got me a life coach, and it was amazing, and I wish I could get more coaching and I literally had A light bulb go off in my head and I thought oh my god I would love to be a life coach for these guys. That's amazing And I didn't know anything about life coaching at that point. I thought life coaching was a joke So when he said that it changed my thinking a little bit and then I started researching life coaching and then I started hiring coaches and I started reading a lot about coaches and getting around other people who were interested in personal development and coaching. And then I went and got certified as a coach, and suddenly I was in a group with 10 other people who wanted to be coaches. And from there, I now have a mastermind group that I spend time with every single week talking about coaching. And we coach each other, and we build our businesses together. And suddenly, I talk about life coaching like it's very normal, not because it's normal in my life.

Nobody in my day-to-day life embraced life coaching. Nobody was doing it or talking about it or becoming a coach or hiring coaches. Nobody in my immediate circle had anything to do with coaching before I got involved in coaching. But once the light bulb went off in my head, I got curious about it rather than push it aside and started exploring it. Suddenly I found more and more people who were also interested in coaching. And not only that, more and more people who believed you could make a living as a life coach. And this could be a business, and you could actually do this, and you could replace your current income, and you could make actually much more money than your existing job. And all of these things that had never occurred to me to believe before, because I started getting around other people who believed it and those people normalized it for me. So now I talk about coaching all the time. I have no idea what other people around me think when I say I'm a life coach but I know it's normal. I know it's hugely helpful. I know it's something I love very much and I'm so excited to do and I know it's something that you can be successful at as a career. I know all of this because I surrounded myself with people who also believed that. I removed myself from the group of people, not entirely of course, I still have all my friends and family, but when it came to this topic, I stopped listening to people who didn't have the thing that I wanted and I started listening to people who did. And that is key to all of this.

So getting around other people that have these same ideas as you, that have the beliefs that you have, that believe it's possible to do the things you want to do, whatever it is, it's not only important because it normalizes it for you and your brain, it's not only important because it gives you ideas and gets you motivated and inspired by other people who have done this thing or done similar things, but it's also really important to take the step of closing off your brain to people trying to guide you and give you advice and tell you about your goal, your pivot, your idea, trying to tell you about it when they haven't done it themselves.

Let me be clear, if they're encouraging you, embrace everything they're saying and run with it. That's great. We all need encouragement. But if you've got somebody who spent their entire life teaching in the same school for 40 years and that was their career, and you want to leave your teaching career to go start a jewelry making business and support your family on that, that's really what you want to do and your friend who's the teacher for 40 years is saying, nope, I don't think you should do that, it's really risky and that doesn't sound very responsible. Why are you listening to them? Do not listen to them. Say thank you very much, I know you're coming from a good place, I appreciate the fact that you care about me and then you move forward and you talk to somebody else who has left a long-term career to start a business, somebody who's done something else that you wanna do. Those are the people to listen to because they've done it, as opposed to listening to people who haven't done the thing you want.

Okay, and then finally, I'm sure throughout this episode, your brain has probably been screaming at you, yeah, but I don't know anybody who's done this. I don't know anyone who has created a jewelry business or left this profession or created a successful coaching business or left their husband after 40 years or lost all the weight when they were 50 or whatever it is. So here's what I say to your brain that's giving you all of that nonsense. And hopefully this goes without saying in 2024, but I'm just going to say it anyway. You don't have to know these people personally. We have the internet, we have social media. People are extremely accessible. So you can get around people that do what you wanna do, that believe what you wanna believe, that can support you and encourage you and be models for you and give you blueprints and ideas. You can surround yourself with those people virtually. You can find their profiles, you can find those people, follow them. You can buy their products. You can read their books. You can read their blogs. You can listen to their podcasts. You can find ways to get yourself around those people that have what you want and have made the change that you want, even if you don't know them in person.

I can't tell you the number of coaches and the number of small business owners that I follow, listen to, learn from, and apply the specific tactics that they recommend to my own life and business. I also have a number of people, other coaches and small business owners, who I've followed for years and listened to their podcasts and downloaded their freebies and then eventually hired them and have worked with them one-on-one, have worked with them in groups and membership programs. I've worked for other coaches in their programs, people that I've followed for a very long time and admired and learned from, and then I started working for them as a coach on their team. So there's a lot of different ways that you can connect and learn from people and get yourself around people, even if you can't physically get around them. Again, I'm sure that goes without saying, but I'm also sure your brain has been freaking out being like, oh no, I don't know anybody. So, yes you do, Google it. I mean, one of the most popular podcasts on Apple is about fly fishing. So, I promise you, whatever you want to do, there's somebody out there who's done it, who believes it's possible, and who will be encouraging and inspiring for you.

Okay, that's what I have for you today on this topic. The number one thing you can do to make your pivot, meet your goal, is find those people online, in person, all of the above. Find the people who have done it, who believe it's possible, and who can motivate and inspire and teach you, and most importantly, who can normalize this thinking for you. Normalize the thinking that it's totally possible. I, of course, am one of those people for you. If you're somebody that wants to make a big pivot, it wants to make a big change, wants to meet a crazy goal, I am your number one cheerleader, I am your number one fan. Nothing gets me more excited and happy during the day than helping people make their pivots. It is my favorite thing. It is why I started this business.

So if you are at all interested in this, if you feel like you need motivation, if you feel like you need accountability, if you feel like you need someone to help you, if you feel like you just need a cheerleader in your corner, I am always here. There are a million ways that we can work together. You can find all of them over on makeyourpivot.co. If you wanna talk one-on-one for free, sign up for a free 60-minute consult, and we can just talk about what your pivot is, what your goal is, what your blocks are, and we'll go through it together for an hour for free, and you can get a little taste of what it's like to work with me, and most importantly, you'll walk away from that call with some tangible action items that you can then use for yourself going forward. Alright, that's what I have for you today. I hope you guys liked this episode. Go do the thing you want to do. If you need help, you know where to find me and I will talk to you guys next week. Bye!