#349: How to Stay Committed to Your Goals

Read this episode: How to Stay Committed to Your Goals

Now that you have set a goal for the new year, how do you prevent yourself from becoming a statistic? One of all of the people who decide to give up on their goal, just the first 60 days into the year learn how to beat the statistics in this episode.

 

Hello, happy New Year my friend. So last episode we really talked about how to really kill it with your goals, really do an amazing job moving through your goals. But in this episode, I wanna share with you some of the problems that come up when you set a goal because there will be obstacles as soon as you set your mind to doing anything, obstacles automatically come up and that's okay. What I wanna share with you here are the big problems that I see when I'm working with lawyers and how you can overcome them and you can have that awareness of them. So first off, let me talk to you about constraint, constraint, constraint, constraint. If you take nothing else from this episode, this is what you need to hear. A lot of us go into New Years with this whole new year, new you mentality, which is beautiful.

 

I love that. And that energy can often be dispersed in 10 different directions. So if you want to manage your time, get a new workout routine going, you want to start cleaning your house on a regular basis. You wanna make sure that you do, you know something else, you wanna take your dog on daily walks, you wanna wake up early in the morning, there's a ton of things that you wanna change and you decide you wanna do it all at once. That can be a problem because when we are creating a new habit, you're gonna get this dissonance. So we really need to focus our energy on one, possibly two things at a time. One thing that I work, see, work really well together is if you're learning how to manage your time, then you're, you can work in one other thing, maybe your workout routine, right?

 

Or some other routine. But if you are telling yourself, I need to do a million things in order to be the version of myself that I need to be, you don't, and it's going to prevent you from taking consistent action because you're gonna feel so spread out, so spread thin that you will just lose your motivation. It won't feel good. You're gonna be skipping a lot more days than you would otherwise doing the things that you wanna create a habit and it's gonna feel demoralizing. So constraint is our friend here. I also wanna say in terms of constraint, when you have set a goal, let's say you've set a single goal of a revenue goal at the end of the year, let's say that's, you know, a hundred thousand dollars or whatever it is, more than what you made the previous year, I want you to also use constraint.

 

I do this with my clients all the time using a calendar. And this is something that you can do too. When you set a goal, you wanna work backwards, you wanna have a hypothesis around what is going to help you create what you want to create and do it in a way that isn't overworking, isn't interfering with the way that you want to live your life. So if you have a regular workout routine already, you don't want to then put pressure on yourself to skip a workout routine so you can do the work towards your goal, right? Like you want to be able to constrain in a way that fits with the lifestyle that you want to create. So when you're thinking about your goal, let's say your revenue goal is 500,000 this year, let's just say, and you are starting the work. It's January, February, you're moving through your year and what your brain is gonna do is distract you with shiny things.

 

It's going to say, oh, you know what? You should start this new thing. You should, you know, instead of the business that you planned out in 2025 or whatever it year it is, when you're listening to this, you should really do this whole other thing with your life. And you should decide to do something like totally counter active to the goal that you set. And let me give you an example of how this shows up. You'll start to take action, you'll feel really good. And then you're going to hear this voice that says, you know what? Maybe I should start a whole new practice area. Maybe I should stop doing this thing that's working in my business and do something totally different to grow it. And if you don't spot it, you are gonna be making a left turn when you wanted to make a right turn.

 

And I've seen this show up time and again where, you know, I had, um, a client who had a workout routine that she had already incorporated into her life and she had a big goal for her business. We got to a call one day, and this is why mind maintenance is so important, is we don't even see this left turn and we take it and then we come to a mind maintenance call, like a coaching call, and they're like, oh, I didn't even see that's what I was doing. So my client decided, oh, you know what, I'm gonna do this 90 day glow up and what's gonna be required is that I need to do, you know, five hours of x workout and then I need to change my entire eating routine. And then my whole eating routine is gonna be centered around this particular practice.

 

And then I'm gonna need to do food planning and I'm gonna need to, you know, you know, carve out like a whole weekend to do this other thing. And I got really curious about this because it was very clear that this plan that her brain came up with was gonna take her away from the consistency that we need to have to hit any goal, the consistency that we can have, just showing up on a regular basis and reaping the results of that and taking her entirely away from her business, right? Entirely. So it was just really interesting. And so I asked her about it and it was very clear that this 90 day glow up was coming from this anxious place inside of her body that was telling her, you need to do more. You need to be more. If you do this big thing, then you're gonna get there faster.

 

And that brings me into my next area that you need to be aware of is thinking that it's going to be better when you hit your goal. Your life's gonna be better, when you're gonna feel better, when everything in your life is gonna come together. When you hit your goal, your financial goal, your workout goal, whatever it is. And when you believe that you're going to find yourself hustling harder, working faster, feeling more panicked in your body, feeling more anxiety, that's where my client was coming from. So it's important to notice if you are rushing things, if you're like, okay, today is January 1st and we are going to do everything today, that it is not going to be better when you hit your goal. It's not gonna be better when you hit $500,000. It's not, I understand that the brain thinks that everything's gonna be better when you hit your goal.

 

Simply not factual. How do you know this? Because once you become the person who has that goal, you want something else, right? That's the nature of our, our hu our human nature, right? And so instead of rushing yourself towards your goal, allow yourself to be calm towards your goal. This is a practice. And it also intertwines with constraint because when, you know, when I work with my clients, we're working on using a tool that helps you constrain, which is a calendar, and then managing your mind with constraint. 'cause our brain doesn't naturally want to constrain. Our brain wants to go to 20 different things at once and do all 20 things right now. Because if we do all 20 things right now, then we're gonna feel better. We're gonna have everything done and then we're gonna feel calm. No, you gotta feel calm now to get the things done to accomplish what you want to do.

 

And if you don't feel calm now when you hit your goal, you're not gonna feel calm because your brain's gonna be going off to the next thing and you're gonna continue the cycle. So you've got to constrain and you've gotta catch your brain when it wants to hustle harder, work longer hours, skip workouts. That was something that I've had clients do is they just totally skip a workout because they think if they do this one extra thing, they're gonna be closer to their goal. If they work up this one file, they're gonna get closer to their goal at the end of the month, at the end of the year. I'm here to tell you that is not what happens. And what ends up happening if you don't calm down and slow yourself down is you start making yourself late, right? You start making your goal further and further away from you.

 

Here's what I mean. So I had a client who, when she, she would have to travel from county to county in order to do her cases for the day. And one of the things that was coming up for her was that she was feeling really rushed. She felt really worried that she wasn't going to be able to hit all of her appoint appointments. Well, we did the math, we used the calendar to constrain and understand exactly what was going on during the day. And her brain could see it, could see that the math worked out, but she still felt really anxious. And one of the things that was happening was that she wanted to hustle her body. Her brain wanted to hustle harder, move faster through the day in order to get all of the things done because her brain said, I'll feel better when I know it's all done.

 

But in order to calm ourselves down, we need to be calm now. And in the moment, every moment throughout the day as we're doing these kinds of things, like traveling or this is what will happen, you will get a speeding ticket. You will get into a car accident, <laugh>, you will find that you forgot something at home and you need to run back to the house. And meanwhile, you've just lost 30 minutes of your time moving from appointment to appointment. That is what happens when you're not present and you're not paying attention. And if our brains are in a hustle hurry, then we are going to make mistakes. We're gonna make mistakes in briefs, we're gonna miss mistakes when we are reviewing our employees work, we are not going to make it easier on ourselves to achieve the goal. So it's going to make the goal further away, whatever it is, whether it's today's goal of hitting all of your appointments, or it's a goal at the end of the quarter to hit your billable hours.

 

So calm it down. Here's another thing that happens. Speaking of billables, you will, your brain will say, oh, we don't have time for that. We've gotta keep going, we gotta keep working, we gotta keep getting stuff done. I'll do the hours at the end of the day. I'll do the hours at the end of the week. I'll do the hours at the end of the month. What you've gotta realize is that that is a natural reaction. But you've gotta learn the power of constraint and calm so you're not hurrying towards the goal. In fact, what happens when you calm it all down and you constrain yourself to task a, your, your file, your Jackson file, let's say, and then you say, all right, I worked 30 minutes. Let me go into my calendar. Let me mark the 30 minutes done. Okay, let me go into this appointment, the Thompson appointment.

 

Okay, I've got that appointment done. I need to log it, I need to write notes. Let's do that right? When you slow it down, by the end of the day, you will have captured your hours. Then you won't be wasting time worrying about it, thinking about it over dinner, let's say like, oh my gosh, I have so many billables, I gotta get into the system. You are actually doing it. And over the period of a week and over a period of a month and over the period of a quarter, you will begin to make the, the effort necessary to hit your goal at the end of the year. That's how it works. But when you're busying yourself, when you're in that constant hustle hurry, you are not going to be able to capture all the hours because you'll say, oh my gosh, I can't go back and like, look at all the emails and listen to all the voicemails.

 

And you're gonna miss something even if you do that. So it's really important to calm it all down. If you have financial goals, you need to calm it all down because that is what is going to get you where you need to go. Another thing that I want to share with you is just because you don't bill or don't do a thing that is within your goal plan, right? Like it could be a, you know, you right now you wanna have a workout where you're working out on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and you skip Friday and then Monday you're like, oh my gosh, well I already missed last week, so whatever, I'll just do it Wednesday. And then you start into this pattern that is the old pattern that you had your old habit, which is just not going to the gym. So it's really important, this is linked with slowing it down <laugh> to notice when your brain wants to say, oh, you don't need to go to that workout, you don't need to bill right now, you can just go on to the next thing.

 

Or you can just work on one more file that is actually more productive to get you towards your goal. No, no, no, <laugh>. So I see this happen all the time with the, the lawyers I work with. Is, is that's just a natural thing our brain wants to do. And what's coming to mind right now is a client that I have who wasn't slowing everything down and wasn't thinking about how to lay out his time so that he could make the hours that he wanted to make. 'cause he was in that hustle, hurry, and he wanted to make money, but what was happening is that he was preventing himself from making money because he wasn't doing the math on how many hours he needed to bill each day. So once we slowed it down, we could do the math and then we could do this work, which is paying attention to when the brain says, don't Bill, do another file, or you shouldn't bill for that because you took too long.

 

That's one of my favorite things that lawyers tell me. But they're not paying, your client is not paying you for like, um, they're paying you for the result. And sometimes the result requires that you do research. Sometimes the result requires that you have an additional meeting. Sometimes the work requires more work than your brain says is needed. So you gotta slow it down. 'cause when your brain says that you've gotta question it, you've gotta pause it. Or what's gonna happen is you're gonna spend a lot of time doing work that you're not billing. So you're not getting paid for it and it's not going towards your revenue goal at the end of the year, let's say. Or you're doing a lot of work that's outside the scope of your original agreement and you're not having conversations with your client about another payment that's needed in order to complete the scope of work, or you're beating yourself up because you didn't have a conversation with them earlier.

 

That's okay. Have a conversation with them. Tell them, Hey, this was unexpected. I didn't realize that this was gonna be part of what needed to get done. And then have them make a payment, right? They want the result. That's what they're paying for. And if that's what's required, they will do it. Okay? You cannot take on the weight of the world and do free work if you want to be a successful lawyer, if you wanna be successful in any endeavor that you do, right? So paying attention to when your brain says, oh, I should do this one more thing, or I shouldn't build this thing right now, is something that is gonna really help you get past those times when you, um, when you're in that hustle, hurry. And then when you miss it, let's say, don't beat yourself up for missing it, right? If you, if you miss billing, if you skip billing, if you skip a workout, whatever it is that you're trying to create as a habit, I want you to just say, okay, that's all right.

 

We're just gonna do it again tomorrow. We just, as we start over, we get do overs. I tell this to my timepiece clients all the time, right? Everybody who, and all of my clients who come to me from private coaching too, it's just because you don't do your calendar one week doesn't mean you don't do it the next week, right? It doesn't mean that you failed as a lawyer, you failed with time management. All it means is that you just get back up and you do it again, right? And you make it a habit. That's how you make habits is by doing it again and again. If you think about even walking, like when you were a toddler, you didn't just have the habit. You had to get up and fall down and get up and fall down and get up and fall down and get up.

 

And then eventually you would have more time standing up than you did on the ground. And then it just became a habit in your muscles. You began to walk and then it stuck. But you've got to be able to get through that awkward period where you're gonna be falling down. That brings me to the next thing you need to do in order to maintain your habit in 2025 to hit your goal, which is to celebrate every single win. Every time you get up, when you didn't do something before, you gotta celebrate it. You gotta say, good for you. If you didn't work out on Monday and you worked out on Wednesday, say, good job. You did a good job, Dina, you did a good job, Karen, you did a good job. You know, Jennifer, what just you gotta tell yourself, good job. Nobody else is gonna do it.

 

You gotta do it yourself. And I do this with myself. When I feel down, maybe I feel down about a goal or, and I see my clients do this too, right? We get into this compare and despair where we're comparing ourselves to other people and where they are and where we think we should be in relation to them. And that does not feel good. So then I need to go in and I need to be able to direct my client's brain to go in and say, where are you not celebrating? We need to be celebrating some things. What are those celebrations? And bring the brain there. So if you notice that you are, you know, down on yourself because you didn't bill what you wanted to bill, or you, you're not doing the habit that you wanna have so that you can hit your goal, then you've gotta just take a moment and say, okay, I feel really down right now, but that just means I'm not celebrating something.

 

So let's take a look at what is going right, right now and start listing him. Okay, I didn't, I filled out my calendar for the week. Did I do my calendar work on Tuesday? And no, I didn't. Okay, that's all right. How about Wednesday? Yes, I did, I did what was on my calendar. And then you do that reassessment for yourself. 'cause if you're not celebrating, your brain is gonna say, well, I guess your failure, you're not good at this too. Better just move on. Don't do that to yourself with your goal this year. Celebrate your wins. And then the fan final thing that I'll say here about going after goals is give yourself the support you need. And that support might mean more space in your day asking for help around the house. It could be saying, you know, I had one client who we were talking about how she wanted to build a business on the side of her legal practice and at night is really the only time she could do that.

 

And she said, well, I, I gotta take care of my baby at night and I, I gotta, you know, wash my baby. I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And I said, okay, well what's your husband doing? And she said, well, I mean, I guess you know, he's doing X, Y, Z. And I said, well, do you think he'd be willing to help you? And she said, I, I do. And I said, do you wanna ask him for some help <laugh>? Because sometimes we don't even think that we can have help available to us. And so she asked her husband for some help on those nights, so if she could work on her business. And sure enough, he was like, of course I'll wash the baby. Of course I'll help. And that freed up so much time and it really supported her in achieving her goals.

 

So that's one way to get that support for yourself. Another way is to get a coach, right? Somebody who can help you manage your brain every week and watch out for those times when it wants to sabotage itself and do a 90 day glow up or do something where you, it's totally unrelated to your goal and your brain is taking you away from it. That's one way that you can do that. I do that with my clients. Another way you can do it is getting an accountability partner. I, I'm, I'm, I'm of mixed feelings about this, about accountability partners. Part of me is, is I don't have a lot of faith in accountability partners. And here's why. Because I'm very driven. And so every time I have been, you know, hey, yeah, you know, somebody asked me, Hey, can you be my accountability partner? The other person always fell off.

 

I am always the person who follows through. I am always the person who says, yes, let's go. And then I've got energy and then I have direction and I have focus and I, and I can prioritize and I know exactly what to do. And then the other person just kind of loses interest. They're like, huh? Yeah, probably because all of the things that I just mentioned in this episode, they weren't managing their mind around. So that's something to keep in mind when you get an accountability partner, if that's the direction you go, you know, whether it's for runs your goal, whatever it is. 'cause I know a lot of people have running buddies and gym buddies and all that stuff. Now there are some people who are motivated, there are some people who do have that drive. And if you know somebody like that, fabulous.

 

And then a coach can do that too. I have a client who has a running coach in addition to me as her, her coach for her work. And she uses that system in her as her running coach to help her navigate the goals that she has for her running, whether it's a marathon or whatever it is she wants to do. So she has somebody who has drive, she has people around her who have drive because they run in a group. They've all hired this coach. And so it's easy for them to say, ah, yes, we've got people around us that are all energized to go after something that is of common interest to them. That's part of the reason I love time piece is because when I have lawyers come into that group program, they all have a, the same goal. They all want to manage their mind around time.

 

They all wanna have more time, they all want to be able to do more of what they enjoy in their life and do less of the hustle, harder work, right? So those are the tips that I would offer to you constraint knowing that you don't have to hustle harder. In fact, that's a signal that you need to slow down and reassess what's going on because you're moving away from your goal rather than closer to your goal. Then also, you don't want to like fa failing one day doesn't mean you don't get up and do it again. You've gotta keep getting up, keep getting up. That's what consistency and persistence are all about. And that's how you create habits to hit your goal, billing, running, whatever it is. Those are the two examples that I use the most frequently because they're just the easiest to, to grab onto.

 

They feel the most tangible. Then also giving yourself the support you need and being able to be surrounded by and supported by people who are gonna help you achieve your goals. If you want help achieving your goals this year or any time of year, book a strategy session with me. Go to dina cataldo.com/strategy session and I will walk you through the process of how we can work together so that you can achieve your goals. How you will have the mind management and the support that you need to make your dreams reality. Alright my friend, have a beautiful rest of your week and go out there and do some big things 'cause you are 100% capable. Alright,

 

Bye.