As a busy mom, goal-setting can sometimes feel like just another task on an already overwhelming to-do list. You’re always taking care of everyone else, and by the time you get a moment to think about your own goals, you’re too exhausted to even know where to start. Sound familiar?
In this podcast episode, I tackle a question from a mom of four who’s been struggling with this exact challenge: how to set meaningful goals when you feel like you’re always putting yourself last. If you’ve ever felt like you’re too busy, too tired, or too overwhelmed to focus on your own growth, this episode is for you.
I share simple, actionable steps to help you shift your mindset around goals—from something you have to do, to something you want to do for fun and personal growth. Whether you’re looking to improve your health, create more time for yourself, or just rediscover a passion you’ve put on hold, I’ll walk you through my framework for setting goals that are actually achievable and don’t add more stress to your life.
Plus, I dive into common goal-setting mistakes and how to avoid them, offer tips on where to start if you’re feeling stuck, and share some personal stories about how I’ve navigated goal-setting as a mom with young kids.
This episode will empower you to set goals that align with your values and bring more joy and fulfillment into your life.
If you’re a mom, you’re in the right place. This is a space designed to help you overcome challenges and live your best life. I’d love for you to join me inside the Mom On Purpose Membership where we take this work to the next level.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.
Hello, my lovely friends. Welcome to today’s episode on goal setting Made Easy for Busy Moms. I wanna start off by saying that goal setting is harder during this season of my life than it has ever been. Sometimes I’m like, what in the actual world, working on a goal right now is crazy and I think I would feel more overwhelmed and complacent and defeated without having a goal to work on. I need it. Goals fuel me, I’m inspired by them, they keep me engaged.
So while I fully get the busyness of life, and it might be that I even work on my goals more slowly then if I was in a different season, I actually think that goals can help be north stars during the hard seasons, during the seasons where there’s a lot going on and you’ll hear more about what I mean specifically throughout this episode. But I just wanna start off with this because today I have a message from a mom of four who wrote in, she shares her struggles and challenges with goal setting because she’s always putting others first and feels just too exhausted to work on our own goals. And I can definitely relate to this and I think that there are specific strategies, specific do’s and don’ts that will really change the way that this mom and hopefully you listening, will approach goal setting so that it can be a value add to even the most busy season of your life.
So here is what this community member wrote in and asked: Hi Natalie. I’m a mom of four kids and setting goals has been so challenging for me. I feel like I’m always putting everyone else’s needs first, and by the time I think about my own goals, I’m too exhausted to even know where to start. How can I begin without feeling overwhelmed? What process should I use? Any other tips? Thanks so much. First I wanna start off by saying that your feelings are valid and common and there is another way. So I actually want to take a step back and just answer the question, why set goals at all if you are in a busy season of life? If you feel overwhelmed already, why add a goal? Well, I think mistakenly, we often think that we should be setting goals, particularly at the end of a year, start of a new year.
Everyone’s talking about kind of personal development and growth and setting goals, new Year’s resolutions. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I do think that it’s to your detriment to set a goal because it’s what someone else thinks is best for your life. It’s what society is saying what you should be doing, because the truth is that’s just not true. Goals don’t make you more worthy, they don’t make you happier. You’re somehow not more superior with the goal. It’s not that you’re going to become a better person if you achieve this goal or even if you just set this goal. So then why do it? Especially during a busy season of life. The reason to do it is because it will align you with your purpose. It will help you feel more fulfilled and it will keep you focused on your desires and your dreams for your life.
That’s why you want to make sure you don’t set a goal based on what other people think for you or what society thinks for you. It’s very personal, it’s what you desire for your life. And without setting a goal, your brain will be focused on the challenges in your life, the challenges of the every day in a way that it may magnify them and make it so much harder than if you gave your brain a goal to focus on. So let me give you an example, and this is a specific example, but this is not uncommon. I’ve heard this several times in this specific example though I am thinking of a client who was navigating challenges in her in-law dynamics and there was a lot going on. It felt very heavy and dramatic and hard, and we were working through that and she came back for coaching a few months later and she wanted coaching on a goal that she was working on a completely different topic.
But I checked in with her and asked her how things were going with her in-laws and she said, oh, you know what? I’m just letting it go. Not gonna focus on it right now. It’s fine, they’re fine. I am so much more excited about working on this goal that it really just doesn’t affect me. And I love this example so much because it really brings home my point that your brain needs a problem to solve. If you don’t have a goal, your brain will find other problems to solve and focus on. If you have a goal that you are excited about that you wanna work on, you can put your brain to work on that goal. I really do believe it’s a gift that you give to yourself. So I am very aligned with my purpose of growing my family and being the best mom that I can be, and it fulfills me.
And I set business goals and I set personal weight loss goals and I set some smaller goals, like different things around cooking. And I love having these specific other goals outside of being a mom because they really helped me during the challenging moments. So it’s really fun for my brain to, you know, go to work on how to reach more people, how to serve my clients and continue to over deliver and create new courses. And I love, love, love that, and my mind gets to be fueled by all of the possibilities and solving the challenges that come with running a business. And I just love the overlap of having both. And like I said, there are other goals, postpartum weight loss being one of them that I like to work on where my brain is so focused on it that it isn’t kind of focused on the laundry.
Like it’s fine that the laundry’s there. I’m not focused on it being a huge problem because I have directed my brain to something that’s more important to me. And if you don’t have a goal, your brain will find challenges. It will make up challenges, things that aren’t yet challenges will become challenges because your brain is a problem solving machine. So it’s always scanning for what is the current problem, what’s the danger, what’s the problem, how can I fix it? And so you wanna direct your brain so that it’s working on something that really matters to you. I do wanna add one caveat here that I do think there are times where you wouldn’t set a goal and that is when you are presented with a challenge, that is where your focus is going to be deliberately. So for example, there’s a big difference between, you know, in general, motherhood is just challenging versus okay, you received a recent cancer diagnosis.
So with the day-to-day challenges that come along with motherhood, whether that’s managing the home, navigating kids in school or tantrums, you know, you see the laundry piling up in the dishes and maybe you’re not getting sleep. I think having a goal during seasons of life that can be challenging I think is actually really worthwhile because it again gives your brain something to focus on that can really be fueling and energizing and um, helps you kind of reduce some of that overwhelm that you have in your ordinary day-to-day life as a mom. Conversely though, let’s say you are in a season where you have a diagnosis, a cancer diagnosis, or something else, that’s a really specific challenge for you right now. That might be a time where you say, okay, intentionally I want my brain to be focused on this. And all that comes with it on doing the inner work, on processing feelings, on choosing my thoughts, on allowing myself to be in this decreased capacity while managing my mind.
And there’s just so much growth. So you can grow within the challenges that are presented to you and or that you create and you can also grow within goals. So it’s just very unlikely that you’re going to say, yes, I want to focus my attention on the dishes and the laundry and not set a goal, versus you have a diagnosis. You would want to focus your attention on that and working on navigating that from a more empowered place. So assuming that you are in a place in your life where a goal would benefit you, where you feel called to set a goal, let’s dive in now to the goal setting framework that I want to talk with you about here. Now, when you join the Mom On Purpose Membership, you actually get a specific goal setting process and all of the tools and accountability from me that you would ever need to set a goal.
I help members in there on all sorts of goals with respect to their marriages, with respect to weight loss, with respect to parenting, with respect to time management, with respect to all of the tools that I teach and cover at Mom On Purpose here, what I wanna offer to you are five elements that I think are really critical to goal setting that will help you set and achieve goals. Starting with number one, which is mindset. Do you believe in yourself? That is a choice, my friend. It is a choice to believe in yourself. It is a decision. All of your thoughts are decisions, most of them are unconscious. But when you’re setting a goal, I want to invite you to choose deliberately what you want to think. Are you choosing to practice thoughts that help you believe in yourself? That is always available to you, my friend.
Number two, purpose. Find a deeper reason for pursuing a goal beyond any of those external expectations. So maybe your purpose is to feel more energized or to enjoy more family time or to grow or to be a better mom. Knowing your purpose and your why ahead of time are really helpful because then you can tell if your specific goal is aligned with that purpose. Number three, identity practice being the person who creates the result that you want. And what I mean by that is deciding the thoughts that create your identity. So your identity is how you think about yourself. I am patient, I am angry, I am fill in the blank. All of those I am statements. If you are kind of high strung in type A and you wanna set a goal to become more patient and relaxed, then working on your identity and practicing being the person who creates the result that you want might mean that you start every day with an intention or a mantra that sounds like this.
Every day I’m becoming more patient and relaxed. A huge part of my identity used to be around being type A and alpha female. And as a mom, I really transformed my identity to someone who has both sides, that ambitious side and also that really grounded present, playful side as a mom. And when I’m with my kids, I practice being that version of myself that more feminine, softer, grounded, connected, present mom that is very different than let’s say when I’m working on my business. And in more of that ambitious, determined energy and practicing identity statements around your goal will help you with part number four, which is actions create a very specific result and a very specific plan to get you that result. Do not have very general result that you want for your goal. Or if you do decide to have a general result, like let’s just say you wanna become happier, that’s kind of general, how will we know, right?
Who’s gonna be able to test you for that? Versus if you say, I wanna lose 10 pounds, that’s very specific, you know, because you get on the scale and it says a number that is 10 pounds less than you weigh right now. So the reason that specificity matters is because you can measure and track your progress and know if what you’re doing is working. So what you can do if you do want to do more of an inner transformation is just make it measurable. So going with happiness example, if you want to become happier, come up with ways that you would measure that and then come talk through it with me inside the Membership, I’d be happy to help you on that. But it’s really important that you have a specific result that you’re going for and a specific plan to get there.
And then number five, evaluate. I call it TAFO test and find out, and I have a little asterisk here, TAFO, without self-criticism, it’s so easy, I think especially as women, to be hard on ourselves, to judge ourselves for doing it wrong or not being good enough, or taking a break or slowing down or falling off the wagon and all of that is optional, you can just decide to have your own back. I was coaching someone recently and she’s working on her food journey and she wants to change her eating habits and she was really scared to try this one new plan because she was scared of it not working or her not working the plan and what she would make that mean about herself. And I said, you know, that’s, that’s optional. Even if you fail or get it wrong or mess up, you don’t have to beat yourself up.
You can be kind to yourself and have your own back and be your own inner strong coach. And it blew her mind. It completely changed the way that she related to her plan and to her goals and it made it so much easier for her to work on that goal. And now she’s able to do that and is living into changing those eating habits forever. It’s just been such a fun transformation to watch for me as a coach, to see what the power of your inner self-talk has over your real life. Like if you’re beating yourself up, if you’re being self-critical because you did didn’t, you know, get the goal or whatever it is, you missed the mark, it’s gonna make it really hard for you to continue to work on your goals because it feels so terrible when you don’t get it right, when you get it wrong, when you miss the mark when you fail.
But all of that is optional, my friend. So before I go into common mistakes to avoid, just to recap here of the goal setting framework elements that I want you to keep in mind. Number one is mindset. Number two is purpose. Number three is identity. Number four is actions, and number five is evaluation. If you are doing all five of those, you are going to set and achieve your goals. You just are. Now I wanna talk with you about four specific mistakes that come up time and time again that will really mess with your likelihood of success. It’s really hard to succeed and achieve your goal if you’re doing one of these things. Starting with number one, which is setting multiple goals at once instead of focusing on just one. I don’t know why this one is so hard, but it is the one that I get asked about the most.
It is not uncommon for a question to come inside the Membership to me that says, Natalie, I’m thinking about setting two goals instead of one. I know you only recommend one goal. What do you think about me setting two? And my answer is always the same. You can do whatever you want. You don’t have to listen to me. I am speaking from my own personal transformative experiences as well as coaching thousands of women and helping them achieve their goals. So my mentorship to you is to set one goal, but you are always the decider of your life and of your goals. And if setting more than one goal works for you, if you get results when you set more than one goal, then do that. But here is why. Based on my experience and my expertise, I recommend setting one goal at a time. Because when you set more than one goal, it’s not that there’s not enough time to do the actions.
So let’s say that you set a goal to um, lose weight and you set a goal to stop yelling at your kids. You have enough time to quite literally eat less food and feel hungry and you have enough time to do the mindset work around thinking differently when your kids are triggering to you so that you process your feelings and you don’t yell. There is enough time, it’s not an issue of time, it’s an issue of how long it takes your brain to step into the identity of someone who weighs that new weight or of someone who doesn’t yell at her kids. And that my friends takes a lot of growth internally.
So it’s not complicated how to lose weight, right? I alluded to it. We’re gonna feel some hunger, some doable hunger, some manageable hunger. We’re gonna process our feelings and we’re gonna create a plan and we’re gonna follow the plan. And that’s it. It’s very easy. It’s actually easier to eat less, right? Because to eat more, you have to go into the kitchen, you have to figure out what you’re gonna make, you have to get out the silverware, you have to turn on the oven, maybe you have to, you know, do things to eat more so it’s actually less time and takes less of you to lose weight. Then why is it so hard? It’s hard because the brain thinks about you as a certain weight. The brain has this identity, this is who I am, this is the way I navigate food, this is what I like, like my identity is that I have a sweet tooth.
So I live into that. So it does take more kind of internal work for you to shift to becoming the version of yourself who weighs less or in the other example, it does take more attention and focus and mindset work for you to live into the identity of someone who is grounded and calm, even when your kids are fighting at bedtime. Also, when you try different plans and one isn’t working, you wanna be able to put your brain to work and immerse yourself into the area of focus that you want to make the transformation in. And that’s much easier to do if there’s just one area. So ultimately having one goal just sets you up for so much more likelihood of success. And so instead of making it harder on yourself, I say, let’s just make it easier on yourself. Let’s set one goal. You wanna do weight loss first, let’s do that.
Once you achieve your weight loss goal, let’s do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. There’s no rush and you can keep setting and achieving goals. And the better you get at the process of goal setting, the more you can apply that process to different areas. And so just doing it once at a time I think is so helpful. Okay, the second mistake that I see a lot is not creating a detailed plan, winging it and kind of hoping for the best. And I think this comes from the sexiness of the start of a new year and talking about your goals and what you have going on and what you want to be doing. And it, it’s kind of fun and energizing. And what’s not as fun and energizing is sometime just doing the work. And that is where I think you wanna focus your attention on to make sure that you have created a detailed plan and you are taking intentional steps to carry out that plan because then you can evaluate and you can see what’s working and what’s not.
I coach so many women who say, I’ve been working on this goal for years, and that thought is a summary of how they’re thinking about whatever it is that they have been working on. Let’s say it’s weight loss, but the reality is maybe they’ve tried three different ways and then they quit. They just didn’t do it. So there’s either a problem with your plan or there’s a problem with you not doing the plan. It’s so easy when you break it down that specifically, and yet we make it confusing when we don’t get specific. So creating a detailed plan is so much more effective and it’s really important. Don’t try to wing it with your goals because then you at least have a way to evaluate, okay, did this work? Why? Why not? The third mistake that you want to avoid is linking your worth to your results instead of just seeing setbacks or failures or mistakes as learning opportunities.
So for example, if you have a goal to stop yelling at your kids and you yell at your kids and then you then turn around and make that mean that you are a bad mom or you’re failing as a mom, that is linking who you are, your internal goodness to your results. Instead, what you can do is still care about your results, but you can reflect more deliberately and intentionally on the actions you’re taking or in this case not taking so you can learn and change and actually get the results that you want. When you make the result mean something about your internal goodness, you actually create shame for yourself and it’s much harder to get the traction that you’re wanting. So it’s just not useful and it feels terrible. So don’t link your worth to your results. The final common mistake that I wanna talk about with you here that I recommend you avoid is self-sabotage.
Self-sabotage is when you slow down, you take breaks or you quit. And typically this is done in the moment based on the primitive brain, and then later on we say that life just happened. I’m actually all for you, quitting kind of a tangent. But I coach a lot of parents who don’t wanna let their kids quit things. And I always say, let them quit. Let them quit all the things because by quitting you get closer to the life you’re supposed to live. You can start something else Here though, when I’m talking about slowing down, taking breaks or quitting in a negative way, it’s when you’re doing it even though you still want the result. So for weight loss, if you want to lose weight, but you quit still wanting to lose weight, still having that desire, but you quit because you don’t think it’s possible for you.
That’s what I call self-sabotage. If you just decide, you know what, I actually don’t wanna lose weight anymore, then I say quit. Quit all the things and work on something else that you do want to do. But with respect to self-sabotage, it’s quitting something or slowing down or taking a break because life’s happening. You still have the desire, you are just not willing to do the work to make it happen. And I think getting really honest with yourself and only making decisions about what you start and stop out of the moment is the most helpful because out of the moment you’re much more clear minded. So make a decision intentionally. Do I want to slow down, take a break or quit and why? And do I like my reason?
Alright, now I wanna circle back to the community members’ question of where to start. So the question in part was how can I begin without feeling overwhelmed? And she said, I’m too exhausted to even know where to start. So here are my recommendations. Ask yourself where you want to start. Focus on a goal that feels exciting to you, doable and fulfilling. I like to start with the mindset. I don’t have to do this. I’m doing it because I genuinely want to. So what do I genuinely want to do? For something that feels really unmanageable? I just try to get from zero to one because often that’s the hardest. I’ll use identity work and combine it with ridiculously small actions to make some progress. And then the momentum builds. For example, if I want to work out, I’ll start telling myself, I’m someone who works out.
I’m becoming someone who works out and I might put my workout outfit and my dumbbells right by my dresser, and right when I get up, do those small exercises. Now that’s not going to turn me into an athlete or get the kind of toned look that I’m going for and change my muscle tone, but it is going to get me from zero to one. It’s so much easier once you have momentum. So if it’s really hard for you, start with that in mind. Start with the identity statements and ridiculously small actions so you can get some progress.
It is also perfectly fine to hold off on goals and revisit goal setting later. Just be onto yourself that there’s never a right time. So I tend to join programs like I did for this upcoming year, a very, very expensive coaching mastermind that I’m so excited to be part of. And there is nothing about what’s going on in my life that would lead me to think this is a good time, right? Just having a third baby, being postpartum, being the full-time childcare for my kids. There is a little bit of travel involved and then there are the added calls and the added work. And if I would’ve thought about time relative to enrolling in this program, I never would’ve done it, but I didn’t do that. I thought about how there is never a right time. Life is never just so slow and I’m looking for things to do.
Life is full and I like it that way and my goals and my desires matter. And so I enrolled in this year long mastermind and spent a lot of money on it. And that’s because I know that my goals and my desires matter and I want to keep playing the game. Keep trying. Here’s what I wanna leave you with. Embrace goal setting as a form of growth and self care rather than something you have to do. Let me repeat that. Embrace goal setting as a form of growth and self care rather than something you have to do. That has been my approach. It’s been my approach with my clients and it helps me continue to transform my life year after year. For those of you inside the Membership, I am so excited to work with you on your transformations and getting you your desired results in the year to come. I’ll talk with you next week, my friends. Take care.
Thank you for being here and listening Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose Membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.
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