The Secrets to Achieving Goals with More Ease

Ep: 180

Do you feel disappointed when you look at where you are in your life and career, feeling like you haven’t achieved what you set out to accomplish?

When you’re told how to achieve your goals and find success in life, there’s a common pattern of advice you’ll hear:

“Work hard.”

“Prioritize your future.”

“Success doesn’t come easily.”

But the truth is that much of what we’ve been told is actually not how the most prolific achievers have found success.

The way we’ve been taught to achieve our goals and find success is wildly flawed. 

The formula is inaccurate and full of myths that are never really going to help you get what you want. Understanding the most common mistakes people make, unlearning what you’ve been taught, and trying a different approach is the only way to achieve your goals faster.

Today on The Bridge to Fulfillment, Blake reveals the most common mistakes people make on the path to success. If you’re ready to achieve your goals faster and with more ease, then unraveling what you think you know is the first step.

With this knowledge, you might actually even find a better outcome than the one you have envisioned.

In this episode, you’ll learn the most common mistakes you’re probably making, and why the lessons we’ve been taught about achieving our goals are wrong. You’ll hear about the pitfalls of over-planning your future and why black & white thinking could be holding you back.

Achieving your goals doesn’t have to feel like a battle of willpower. You just need a different approach.

 

What You’ll Learn:

  • When what we’ve been taught about success proves to be wrong (1:29)
  • The biggest mistakes people make when trying to achieve their goals (4:06)
  • How black & white thinking holds us back (7:30)
  • The real key to achieving your goals (11:04)
  • Recognizing the mistakes you’re making (12:10)

 

Favorite Quotes:

  1. Achieving what you want doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, it might actually be fun and easy.
  2. ​​Achieving your goals doesn’t have to feel like a battle of willpower or like a thing you have to push uphill.
  3. You can only build from what you know today. And that doesn’t allow you to incorporate new information or new data in order to find a more efficient path forward.
  4. Most of us aren’t really looking at the factual truth of where we are and what’s going on. We are hoping for something and then we start building off of what we hope for instead of building off where we are today.

Additional Resources: 

Rather than hoping the grass will be greener, identify what the RIGHT next step is. 

We can help you do just that. 

Get clarity on where you are on your journey to career fulfillment, where you’re headed, optional paths to get there, and the right next step to take.

Start your complimentary, Personalized Career Fulfillment Plan by going to www.thebridgetofulfillment.com/plan

Want free resources to set your job search up for success? You can get them by going to: https://thebridgetofulfillment.com/mistakes

Transcript

Blake Schofield 0:05 Hi, I’m Blake Schofield, founder and CEO of The Bridge to Fulfillment, mom to three, USA Today top 10 professional coach, and former corporate executive who got tired of sacrificing my life for a comfortable paycheck. My mission is to expand women’s perspectives and empower them to achieve greater impact at home and work without sacrifice. This is the bridge to fulfillment. What if the way we’ve been taught about how to achieve our goals and create success is actually broken? inaccurate, full of myths and lies. And that is actually why we continuously find ourselves pushing and pushing to achieve overwhelmed with our to do lists, believing we have to do more or have every single step outlined before we can take action. What if it isn’t that we aren’t disciplined enough? That it isn’t because we don’t have enough time? Or that we have too many responsibilities? What if in fact, it’s because much of what we’ve been taught is actually not how the most prolific achievers have found success? To understand what I mean, we have to go back to the foundation of what we believe and what we do. Most of us grew up with the belief that in order to be successful, we must work really hard. We must sacrifice. And yet, have you ever seen or met someone who seems to consistently quote unquote, get lucky, who did less work than everyone else, but continued to get promoted? Yep, I have. And for years, I believed that luck. Well, it would be short lived, it was a fluke, or even more, so it was not deserved, what I didn’t understand is there’s actually an entirely different way to achieve your goals. And that you can actually achieve your goals more consistently, and with more ease day to day through a very different approach. Now, this is a topic with a ton of depth, and I certainly cannot cover it all in one short podcast. But for today, I’d like to invite you to consider that life and achieving what you want doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, it might actually be fun and easy. So I’m going to share with you today the key places I see people making mistakes, the consistent and most common reasons why people don’t achieve what they want, and start to challenge you to open your perspective to maybe a new or different approach. Every single one of these mistakes or myths I’m about to share with you are things I spent my entire life doing without maybe even understanding that I was doing them without even challenging them. Because it was the way that I had been taught. It was the common practice, it was the thing that I felt like I constantly heard was what was going to create success. And yet, I would say after spending so much time working with my amazing coach who really is cracked the code on goal achievement. It’s really shifted my perspective shifted my approach. And it’s enabled me to create and achieve more of my goals with consistently more ease in my day to day with a greater understanding of leveraging my own personal momentum.

Blake Schofield 3:35 And with an ability to understand that achieving your goals doesn’t have to feel like a battle of willpower, like a thing, you have to push up hill, like something that you’re chasing, or something that you hope can happen when you understand the fundamentals that exist to be able to achieve what you want. And like I said, I can’t go into all of that today. But what I do want to do is share with you some of the biggest mistakes and challenge you just start to look at and see are you making these mistakes in your life to never one, a focus on having it all planned and figured out in advance? Gosh, this is a huge one, I spent most of my life doing this. And I think education teaches us this, that we have to have all of these variables and things figured out before we move forward. But even more. So this is a very big corporate thing, especially if you grew up and work in large corporations like I did. And we’ve never stopped a challenge maybe what works in one domain and one situation isn’t ideal and another. So I’ll give you an example for this right? I used to run, you know, huge multi multi million dollar businesses at Target. I ran over a $600 million business with a ton of different categories and a lot of team members. And so if I didn’t have a really structured plan, I didn’t understand exactly what the steps were, which team members needed to be involved what the sequence was. It would be highly unlikely that we would have the ability need to adapt and have the resources we needed to achieve what we needed to achieve. Also in such a large organization as well, it’s important to be able to manage those resources, there are just so many people and resources that need to be ticked and tucked in order to make things work. So it would have been impossible to do something different. But what I didn’t understand was the nuance of the fact that maybe, in a really large organization, that level of detail and planning might be necessary to achieve the goal and align so many different people. But when you’re talking about an individual, it’s a very different ballgame. And when you’re moving into something new, which typically is what a new goal is, you haven’t done it before, you don’t have all the answers to all the information. And so spending all of this time and energy to plan everything out, what it really does is it actually Narrows and reduces your ability to create what you want. Because you can only build from what you know today. And it doesn’t allow you to incorporate new information or new data or find a more efficient path forward. So that was the number one mistake focused on having everything planned and figured out in advance. The second one is what I would describe as black or white or all or nothing thinking, you know, this one is a huge one. I think by and large, most of us have this black or white, all or nothing thinking that comes all the way back from our childhood. But we’re completely unaware of it, we have no idea that that version of thinking is was actually creating us being stuck getting caught in these guilt and shame spirals beating ourselves up because we’re not achieving what we want, setting these arbitrary goals and expectations and outcomes that we’re looking for without any data that actually leads us to know that that’s achievable. And then when we don’t achieve that thing, we beat ourselves up, we believe it’s not possible, instead of actually looking at each moment as a moment of progress. The third one attachment to a particular outcome. We’ve been taught to build these big, hairy, audacious goals, and that the only way to achieve it is to have all of the details and all of these things figured out. But what if there’s actually a better outcome than the one you would have envisioned? But because you’re so attached to one specific thing, you can’t even see the other options in front of you. You know, I’ll give you an example. You know, many times I’ll talk to women who are interested in this program, and I think the biggest fear is, will this work for me? What if I’m not successful, what if I do this, and then I’m still in the exact same place. That’s an exact example of black or white all or nothing thinking, I either get everything or I get nothing. And there’s no gray in between. And so we never leave ourselves open to actually what amazing things could happen. We never knew. I’ve had clients end up getting performance increases or negotiate salary increases, while in my program, they would have never been able to expect we’ve had women get 40 6080 120% pay increases moving to their next role, they could have never foreseen that outcome. I’ve had clients come back and say that their stress levels have been reduced by 70%, that their relationships are so much better that they finally have time to sit and really have quality time with their husband for the first time in years.

Blake Schofield 8:27 But likely, that wasn’t the outcome of what they expected when they came into the program. And if we get so attached to what we think it needs to look like, we actually shut down all of the amazing opportunities and other things that may come our way that could be even better than what we’re hoping for. The fifth myth or mistake, I see. Not seeing reality for what it is, instead of my coach, Dr. Jeff would describe it as bending reality. And this is a more complex one, but I share it with you because most of us aren’t really looking at the factual truth of where we are and what’s going on. We are hoping for something and then we start building off of what we hope for instead of building off where we are today. We have to understand where we are in the journey and start taking those steps first. If there’s a gap in terms of where you are, and where you’re starting, it will be very, very difficult, if not impossible to achieve what you want. And yet most of us are doing that most of us are hoping for an outcome and then building based off of that instead of saying Where am I today? And what are the steps I need to take the next one to two steps I need to take to get there. The sixth one I’d like to share with you focusing too far out in the future instead of the next right one to two things you need to do. Again, this is I think how most of us have been taught to achieve and we start projecting out the future before we even know what’s going to happen as if our brains are so good at predicting that we know exactly what’s going to happen, which is honestly laughable if you think about it. Because if we were so great at predicting what life was going to be like, or what would happen, we would probably all be lottery winners. Every one of us would have achieved every single thing we wanted in life. And yet, I talk to women and men every day who are disappointed that they feel like they aren’t achieving what they want to achieve. And so this focus on future and what’s going to happen, and how do I get there, instead of looking at where am I and what are the next one to do things I need to do. Understanding that I don’t need to know that whole path. What I need to do is be clear on my North Star. And I need to understand the right next one to two things to focus on. And then when I do those things, more clarity will come more data and information will come which will inform me of the next right one to two things to do. And through that I will make incrementally more progress than I would have ever made through a method of trying to project out and figure out what’s going to happen in the future. You know, the key to achieving your goals is having a consistent process and framework that have proven results. And learning how to overcome some of the limiting beliefs or patterns that we’ve been using, that we’ve been doing in our life, that are actually the thing that are standing in the way of achieving more of what we want in life. And so I’m sharing this with you today, because what I have learned, has fundamentally shifted my perspective on life, it has created so much more ease in my day to day. It’s enabled me to stop spending time on things that don’t matter, and really focus on the things that do. It’s given me a sense of confidence and understanding about my ability to achieve my goals. And no longer do I feel this constant frustration, or pull that I need to do more that I’m not achieving what I need to achieve. And I think for those of us that are high achievers, maybe we come to believe that that’s the thing that leads us forward. But I want you to know it’s not it’s actually the thing that’s standing in your way. And so today, my hope is to have opened your perspective in some way that if you look at the mistakes or the mistakes that I shared with you, how many of those are you doing? Is that your typical approach to goal achievement? And if so, how could you look at just taking one of those items and starting to shift? So if you find yourself in black and white or all or nothing thinking, which like I said, has been one of the biggest ones I’ve noticed for myself and for so many people? How could you stop and actually challenge yourself? Am I 100% certain that that’s the only outcome? What other outcomes might actually exist? And how can I begin to separate myself from thinking that I know exactly how it’s going to turn out or it has to turn out one way in order for me to be successful. And start opening up the perspective and the opportunity that maybe there are a lot of different ways you could be successful. There are a lot of amazing outcomes that could come and just allow yourself to be open to them. That alone, just applying that small shift can have significant impact in your life. Until next time, have a great one and I look forward to seeing you again next week.

Blake Schofield 13:23 Thanks for joining me today. Rather than hope the grass will be greener identify what the right next step is. We can help you do just that. Get clarity on where you are in your journey to career fulfillment, where you’re headed, optimal paths to get there, and the right next step to take. Start your complimentary personalized career fulfillment plan at WWW dot the bridge to fulfillment.com Ford slash plan. Again, you can get your personalized career fulfillment plan at the bridge to fulfillment.com forward slash plan. Thanks again for joining, and have a great week ahead.