Ep. 39: When You’re Ready to Level Up

You've made some changes, achieved some goals, and are feeling pretty good.

Except - there's more. You're treading water; there's more you want to do, but it's also fine right where you are. And you're not quite sure how to make the next shift, the level up, actually happen. In this episode we talk about the mindset shift you need to make in order to go from good to great in any area where you want to achieve MORE.

Okay, back with another car pod. I have the AC blasting, so I have no idea if I'm gonna keep this one or have to re -record it. It's really bad, audio -wise. But anyway, here we are. We're gonna give it a whirl.

Okay, so today what I have been thinking about that I thought would be useful to share is this idea that whatever it is that got me to where I am today isn't gonna be what gets me to where I wanna go next. Meaning, if I wanna have a different life in the next one year, two years, five years, if I wanna, and by that I mean like if I've got different goals, if I've got different things that I wanna do and accomplish, then I need to take different action. And if I need to take different action, that means that I need to feel different feelings and I need to think different thoughts, because that's what creates the action that we take.

So let me give you sort of a concrete example. I've always been a pretty aggressive goal setter. I'm not, I don't do like smart goals. I don't have like a process for it that is mapped out and clean like that. But I am very good at making quick decisions, not letting the details mire me down. And that's something I've been working on, but I'm getting pretty good at it. and then making those things happen, even when they seem sort of big or ridiculous or not really grounded in anything that is all that useful. I love a goal. I love a project. I love being like, okay, I'm reading 52 books in 52 weeks. I don't care that this is the busiest moment in my life. I like doing that, though. I like challenging myself that way.

I think about that, though, and I think probably over the last five -ish years, I've moved the ball forward in some areas. new goals in some areas of my life. accomplished them. Getting certified as a coach was one, creating my business, my nonprofit, all of that, building my family with my husband, all of that stuff. Those are some of the goals that I set out to accomplish and have.

That being said, there's other areas of my life where I've set goals that I have not yet accomplished or I've set loose ideas, but not really concrete goals. And so of course, haven't accomplished them. And I'm sort of revisiting that right now. Some of those are around different pockets of my finances. In some areas, financially, I have met and exceeded goals that I wanted to. And in other areas, financially, I haven't. And so that's one that I come back to a lot. My health and fitness, I come back to a lot. I've spent a lot of the last five years running and working out, but I haven't really improved in terms of my fitness, my times when I've been running, my weight still goes up and down in terms of my health habits. Sometimes I'm super healthy. Sometimes I'm not at all. That fluctuates. And so that's another area where I haven't really set clear, clear goals, and as a result, I kind of keep waffling back to old habits and things.

So there's other areas too, but those are two kind of concrete ones where I can look back at the last few years and say there's some areas of my life that I've really set a goal and gone after it and got it and created permanent change, and I'm a different version of myself than I was because of that. And there are other things where I'm like, I'm not really there. I haven't done that yet. And so what I've started to realize is a lot of those things that I haven't quite accomplished, they're partially because I did not make a real specific concerted effort at a very specific goal. So if your goal is fuzzy, then your results are going to be fuzzy.

But largely, I think what's happened is that in order for me to level up in those areas that I haven't yet, that are a little bit stickier for me and a little bit heavier in terms of their complexity and also a little bit more comfortable for me where I am, it's going to mean that I need to start thinking about changing my feelings and my thoughts so that I can change my actions and my results in those areas. So some of the financial goals I have, some of the fitness goals I have, things like that, for example, I can run a marathon, I can train for 16 weeks and go finish a marathon. That is not a, I mean, it's a challenge, obviously, because it's a marathon. I've done it enough times in my life that I have a lot of reason to feel confident. I know what I'm doing. I know how to follow a plan. I know how to get the run in. I know how to deal with, like, the mental hurdles, the physical hurdles. I know how to do all that. To run a marathon in what I consider to be a pretty slow, but, you know, still pretty crossing the finish line upright time. And that's what I've been doing for the last few years. My goals have been around finishing.

Now, if I want to say, hey, I want to get back to running sub -four -hour marathons, I want to improve on the times that I've done, I want to run a faster marathon now than I did seven years ago, now that I'm setting a different and, frankly, bigger and more aggressive running goal than I have in the last few years, I'm going to need to become a different version of myself. I'm going to need to change my feelings and my thoughts. I'm going to need to change my actions so that I can change my results. I'm going to need to level up. in order to accomplish that goal. Or I can just say, no, my goal is to run a marathon, and it's just to finish. And that's what I've been doing, and so that's what I mean when I say these goals are a little bit stickier, like, and I'm comfortable. I'm proud of myself when I finish a marathon. I can just kind of tread water in being somebody who runs marathons and doesn't really focus so much on the time and improving and all of that. I don't want to do that anymore.

I do have desires still to get into much better shape physically. I do have desires still around fitness and speed and all of those things. I have desires around, again, different financial goals, investing goals, savings goals, things like that, that would really level me up. financially and level my family up in a way that I've been wanting to do.

But, you know, right now, like, I make a good living. My husband makes a good living. You know, our money's pretty good. My business is doing pretty well. Like, it's all comfortable.

But I don't want to stay comfortable in those areas. I want to get aggressive, and I want to set bigger goals for myself and continue to go after them. In order to do that, I can't be the same version of myself that got me to the financial circumstances that I have now. Because the me who is investing much more heavily and much more strategically, the me who is saving much more aggressively for very specific, exciting goals, like that me is different than the me who got me here today.

And so my job now is to say, in these areas, what I have to do is be willing to not only put in the work in terms of the plan to get me to the fitness goals or the investing goals or the savings goals, but also put in the thought work and the feeling work that has to happen in order for me to become that version of myself.

What that looks like for me is that I'm an Enneagram 8 through and through. If you know what that means, you know that that means vulnerability is my kryptonite. It's very hard for me to be vulnerable with people. I have ruined relationships over that in the past because I felt too exposed, felt like people saw my weaknesses, what I consider weaknesses. So I ran the other way or self -destructed. I've done it all when it comes to this area.

And what I know now is, all right, I've worked through kind of the self -destructive side of me. when it comes to being vulnerable or emotional, and by overcoming the self -destructive. and getting to a more neutral place with being vulnerable, I'm in a much different position now than I was in the past. So that's gotten me here. But if I want to level up in all these other areas, then I'm going to have to do things I didn't do in the past, including be vulnerable.

I was having a conversation with my coach yesterday about this, and I was talking to her about some of these topics. And I'm like, I hate that I even am telling you this. I feel so exposed. I feel so vulnerable that I'm telling you these are some of the thoughts in my head around these topics. And I hate it. I feel so uncomfortable. But I'm also very aware that sitting in that discomfort and being vulnerable and expressing that to people and experiencing the vulnerability, that's something I've never done well before, something I avoid a lot. And in doing that, it's getting in my way of getting me to the next level that I want to be at financially and professionally and physically. So... It's time for me to do that.

I say all of this because if you're somebody who has goals and ambitions that are unmet or things that you're looking forward to doing or things that you really want to do in the future and that you're planning towards and working towards, then I want to flag for you just a reminder that if you want to become the person who does those things and accomplishes those things differently, that are different goals and ambitions than what you have now, you have to become somebody who has different thoughts and different feelings. than the version of you who got you to where you are now.

So this is the piece, you need to start thinking, what are the thoughts and feelings that got me to take the actions that got me the results I'm at now with my money, my weight, my career, my relationships, whatever it is, and then you gotta start thinking the version of me who has this next level goal, what is that version of me thinking and feeling? And when I'm thinking and feeling those things in that version of me, what does that version of me start to do? That's how you're gonna get those results, is by starting to think and feel like that person now. Becoming a different version of you now is how you're going to get those goals that are the result of being a different version of you. That's how that works.