Living the Real

Why goals don't stick and what to do about it

• Matt Boettger • Episode 26

Share episode

This episode is all about one of the most powerful lessons Matt has learned over the past five years: less focus on goals and more focus on cultivating the habits that manifest the life he wants to live!

Please consider supporting this podcast:

Things Discussed In Episode (some links may be affiliate links where I receive a small commission for the recommendation) :

Support the show

Matt Boettger:

I don't want to freak you out right here, because after all this whole mission of this podcast is to give you the inspiration and the confidence to be able to do what you thought wasn't ever possible until you read this platform. But if you're wondering how on earth skyscrapers remain standing after all they come together, not by magic in, by a wand, but by thousands of workers working together. And this is a unified front to make this narrow thing that goes high in the sky. And then holds tons of people, what a frightening mission to have and have it not collapsed on almost any circumstance. How on earth does it say standing? Because I guarantee you just, statistically, there are a handful of incompetent workers in the mix. You just have to believe that with thousands of workers, some of them have had long weekends and then come down the pipeline on Monday, may, will law hangover. And now working at their top level, but yet they somehow managed to do there, work enough to keep the building from going on and remaining a solid structure. Why I bring this up is because I have dealt with much smaller businesses in my five years of doing consulting who have a tendency to want to blame the lack of growth in their business, on the incompetence of their workers. I just don't think that's the case now. Yes. Having good qualified workers is an incredible, valuable resource, but there's something even more foundations we put in place to allow even the good workers to thrive in. And that is systems, systems save more than anything. This episode is all about the reason why goals just don't stick. The reason why they don't stick is because they're not a system. But there's something else that we can use a greater asset. That's like the whole orchestration of putting up a skyscraper that is much more effective and brings more value and transformation in our lives. So let's get going. My name is Matt Boettger. Welcome to living the real, and I hope this week. Is the most real weak yet. Let's get going. Are you living the most real life possible? I ask myself this question all the time. Most of the time, the answer is. I just don't know. But sometimes the answer is definitely not. This is why I have this podcast. I'm Matt Boettger and welcome to the show. Two small things. If you get a chance, please leave a review like on Apple podcasts and also check out my website, live in the real.com where I offer lots of resources on how to live the most real life possible. Now on with the show. Now I can guess right now there's some of you are probably thinking, Oh gosh, systems. This is so sterile and boring and nonsensical. I'm not gonna listen to this episode. I want you to hear me out one great quote, and I'm going to bring him up again and again, this is James clear, who is just a master when it comes to dealing with habits, which is what we're gonna talk about today. Why goals just don't stick and how habits should be the thing you should be focusing on and how we begin to do that. But I want to inspire you first actually wanting to engage habits more than goals. I read this book, atomic habits, well over a year ago, and there was one statement that he said that resonated deeply with me because it really encompasses everything that I believe. So this is what he says. He says you don't rise the level of your goals, but rather fall to the level of your systems. This makes complete sense because. Everyone has goals. And many of us share the same goals, but not everyone reaches that same end. And the reason is because we share different systems. Some of us think the goal is the system and somehow it's going to happen or just magically appear. And it doesn't, it's like new year's resolutions. We make this incredible list of ideas, how our life wants to be different this year, but we don't even give a thought towards how we're going to accomplish this. And when I say system save, I don't mean that for this to be some impersonal reality, some mechanistic, robotic reality, even though sometimes it's been applied to me in one way or another, because I'm so obsessed with systems, but it's not meant to be that way. It's meant to serve the person we don't serve. The system. It's always meant to be dynamic, always changing and growing, being removed and being replaced when no longer needed. Not to have artificial things in our life that don't serve us. That's the purpose systems are there to elevate our lives so that we can do what we want to do and do it with ease. So then we can reallocate important resources to something new and not having to constantly be in this life of routine and struggle with that's the gift of habits. Again, why goals don't stick is because they are not a system. Now what they are is like a compass. They point us to the right direction, the goal to clean your room, for instance, that gives you the direction Nim may or may not get done, but then what happens? Your room gets a mess again and again and again, because. In the end, you never address the system, the failure of the system, which keeps giving you a messy room. And so then you have to exhaust so much energy in then re cleaning an entirely chaotic room versus having the habit to maintain and keep a well tie-dyed room. And then you can reallocate those resources, something else, like maybe modifying your room, not just keeping your room at some kind of status quo. Goals are like the compass habits are like the map they work together, but it is the map that does the heavy lifting. So we need to stop focusing so much on the goals and focusing on the habits before we go any further. Let's just do a very quick defining of terms, just so we're on the same page. When I speak of a goal, I'm thinking about the traditional smart framework. Have you heard of that? The acronym S M a R T S for specific to have a goal needs to be specific, to be better as not a goal measurable, he clearly needs to have some way to measure your goal, to know whether you got there. Em, Hey attainable or appropriate. I prefer appropriate over attainable. It depends on what book you read, where they pick one of those two, because for instance, I may want to run a marathon that is very specific. It's very measurable. But it's not appropriate for me right now in my status of life, because I'm a father and a husband. And the demands for me are very intense just temporarily by which there's no way I'm going to be able to find the time to train for a marathon. That's not appropriate for my time of life right now, maybe in a couple of years. Sure. Is that realistic? Are, is it in my DNA? Can I actually genetically run a marathon? I honestly have no clue whether I can or not, but I've done half marathons and they've been awesome. Finally timely. You need to have some kind of time-based reality. I know that my goal is to do this by then. So you can actually measure and know whether you attained it. It's like a lag metric. You don't know. No, whether you one until you get to the end and then you've won, you can look back and then say, Oh, these are all a little things I did to help me get there in retrospect. Now a habit is different. It's much smaller. It's a recurrent action. That's what, it's a habit like a habit of brushing your teeth, making your bed in the morning. They move from the conscious to the subconscious after a while, because you get into the quote habit, this is the beauty of habits because once you get it into that kind of habit, reality, it frees up energy for better things. And it depends on which book you read. There's two books. I encourage you to really dive into, if you like the idea of habits. The first one is the power of habit by Charles Duhigg. He's the father of habit research and he broke the habit system into three steps. There's the cue, there's the routine. And there's the reward, right? There's a cue. I see a plate of cookies and we all know, or at least I know in my family knows that sweets. Are irresistible to me. And then there's the routine. There's a whole thing of, I haven't eaten all day. I'm starving. And then there's a reward, man. That cookie went down really easily. Now there's another book called atomic habits by James clear a much more recent book who breaks these steps into four steps, the cue craving response, and reward. The first and the last are the same as Charles Duhigg, but he just breaks out the routine into two separate steps. The craving that I like it and the response, not only do I like it, I want it. Now that we have a rough distinction between the two, which are relatively obvious goals are big habits or small habits are the systems that reach to a goal. It's the roadmap. Now to inspire you to want to be able to slowly start moving away from goal centered living and more habit centered living. I want to really expose the problems of thinking goal centrally and show in comparison, the enormous benefits of focusing on habits, how we can begin focusing on habits and some calls to action for you this week to begin living a more habit like life. So here is a number of problems. I see when it comes to goals. The first problem with goals is that they are a finite game once done. Now, what, what do you do this it's unsustainable by definition, right? It comes to an end point. It just ends. Life can still be a mess because you are a mess systemically. That's one of the big problems about gold because you focus on an end result and you never quite you're able to release or even encouraged to maybe do the deep work on the underlying systems that are causing the failure. Going back to that example, I gave about the messy bedroom or for us, it's a messy house. You can have the goal to do a deep clean of the house and then mission accomplished. Bam. We did it the next month. The place is a pit and we had to spend a whole weekend doing again. Why waste our weekends every month on redoing the entire house and cleaning when we could have a system or focusing on better habits. So we don't have to waste so much time on weekends when we'd rather spend it with our boys. Another big problem with goals and it reduces happiness because what happens is achieving the goal defines the happiness. It's the end result. That actually is about the happiness, which then delays the gratification forever. It focuses on the gap rather than the gain in life. So we're more focused on, man. We still got this much further to go. And not necessarily on what you've gained so far and your progress towards it. It's always a distance from the goal versus the growth toward the goal. Goals can even lead to unethical behavior. The fact that we have so long to go until we reached this goal can lead us to make maybe decisions to short tracker goal. That are unethical that are maybe not healthy for us spiritually, physically, emotionally. So we could get the goal again because we're some were achieving something other and we're willing to sacrifice even ourselves. Sometimes for the goal. These have twisted, that is goals. Use extensive willpower. It's constantly on our mind because we're looking for ways to complete the goal, right? It's not a system. It is simply a compass. It doesn't give us the answer. It just gives us the direction to go. So then goals, leave the next step, open over and over and over again. And we're constantly cycling through what's next. What's next what's next goals rely on factors that can be outside of our control. Life gets in the way of the goal, like an injury sickness, personal emergency. And and then we have to maybe put it on hold or change all these things because the uncertainties of life gets in the way of the goal. The fact that we have to stop striving for that goal becomes another emotional, spiritual difficulty let down. We set ourselves up for even emotional letdown goals that seem separate from us. Going back to what I said, this idea, it's something other than ourselves, we can't Amelie identify with a goal because it's so far removed. There's a big gap between me and the thing that I want. And as I mentioned earlier, it is a lag indicator. Focused reality. Success comes once you get there, the journey is not important. It's the goal. So you can see all these problems that arise from goal centric thinking and focusing. We almost set ourselves up for failure. It's not that goals. Aren't bad. They're incredible. They're indispensable. We need to be, go have goals in our mind because we need to know these what direction we want to go. But the focus, the main part of our life. Our plan and our lives should be centered around habits. Why? Because there's so many benefits of habits. Habits can accomplish the same thing as goals. But without the pressure and fact, oftentimes when you are a habit focused and not so focused on the goal, you oftentimes overshoot the goals. Why, how do you do this? Let's take writing a novel, for instance, that sounds like a daunting project. I have no desire to do that right now because it sounds like it would take forever. You can set a goal to write a novel in six months, which sounds ridiculous to me. Anyway. Sounds like impossible, but I'm sure you can, clearly people have done it. Or you can have a habit of write 200 words a day. Now, if you did this, if you set a goal for writing a novel in six months, it's going to be really stressful, but you've, you're just go. If you're now going to set the habit of simply writing 200 words a day, it's going to take about 250 days to get to that novel being completed. And bite-sized because you know what, you're going to do it in less than six months, because some days you're going to write 250, 200 words. And some days you're gonna write a thousand and you're going to blow past your goal just because sometimes you're just cruising and you go past your habit. Do you see the power of habits? If you just stay consistent, habits are mainly directive. There's no open-ended questions. It reduces willpower because you know exactly what you're going to do. You have the habit in place. It's now moving from consciousness to the subconscious habits are all about slow, small, sustainable changes. What we can do that is accessible. I'm all about that. That is living the real habits or identity based rather than goals, which Phil, so other lead out there and not part of me, they become part of me immediately. This great quote that is oftentimes attributed to Stephen Covey. So a thought reap an action. So an action reap a habit. So a habit reap a character. So a character reap a destiny habits are about identity. And this is what we need to, if we want to be motivated about something, we can't get motivated by something that's other way out there, but I can get motivated by some that I believe that is part of who I am as a person. One of the problems with habits is that it can feel boring and monotonous. You do the same thing over and over and over. So it's not like it's this reality, that habits are just pure benefit, but we can also easily overcome the boringness of habits by connecting a vision to the habit. We'll talk about that in just a second, or encourage yourself to keep the habit alive by like a habit tracker. Go and try and go on a streak of day after day, doing the little things and keep moving forward. I heard about the story about Stephen King, who writes a thousand words a day every day and has not missed a day. Yay. You can tell he's been such a prolific writer. He calls it a kind of creative sleep, which sounds brilliant. It's where it's now so much a part of his life that he just does it every day without having to think about it's almost like sleeping, but also at the mitzvot creativity, what a powerful image to have. So let's talk about examples for a few minutes. Examples of goals would be to lose 20 pounds in three months. That's a common one, or maybe not the exact numbers, but that kind of goal to write a novel in six months to save$2,000 for a vacation by August all willpower. Now you'd be into exchange that instead of writing a novel in six months, write 200 words a day, that seems so much more accessible. So much more part of who I am as a person. Save$2,000 for a vacation by August, depending on what your income level is. That sounds a really incredibly daunting for us, but transfer$50 a week to savings automatically. I can do that. That's more accessible, eat salad for lunch, which is something I'm going to talk about in a second, which I'm going to start because of this episode, a 30 minute walk each day during lunch break, go to the gym for 45 minutes after work, right? These habits are the things that bring sustainable change to our life in. Oftentimes go way beyond our intended goals. So we have to change our focus. The focus needs to be on habit formation and the goals be secondary. And we encourage her habits by incorporating a particular vision for a life that we attach her habits to. That is a part of who we are and who we want to be. Now you may ask yourself how long does it take to build a habit? Some say 21 days, by the way, that is an utter myth that came out of some random book. There's no science behind it. James clears unfolded this a little bit, unpack the, to show us that generally takes between 18 days and 254 days to build a habit of pending on how big it is, how daunting it is. The average is about 65 days. It all depends on consistency and difficulty. We need to get the reps in. To be able to make something turn into a powerful habit. I want you to begin thinking in a way that you are habit focused rather than goal focused. And I want you to start small, do it for one minute. If you're trying to go on a workout, started to get an exercise. Just say your clothes out the next morning, the night before, just set them out. Small things read for five minutes. You want to read more and read for five minutes a day. You're not flossing floss. One tooth cleaned for five minutes. If a place is a mess, Nick, you want to get into the habit of cleaning for me, I'm introducing a salad for lunch, bring to work. This is part of my health motivation goals are not sticky. I mean, with me at all, when it comes to my own health. So I'm introducing the salad for lunch. To bring to work. Now, James clear talks about the breakdown of a habit from a cue, a craving response reward, these four steps of a habit. And so for my cue, I'm going to stack a couple of things together to help me, encourage me to bring a flipping salad to lunch. So before I make my coffee the night before, I'm going to go ahead and prep my salad. Because I love prepping the coffee, so I'm gonna get my salad ready for the next day. And then probably cardio coffee for the next morning. I'm going to stack, I'm going to stack with an already existing the habit, my new habit. So I make sure I do it. And then the craving, I want to crave eating the salad. I'm going to bundle it with something I already crave, which is podcasts. I love to listen to an audio books. So I'm going to pick my favorite audio book and only listen to it while you my salad at lunch. Now I crave it. I can't wait for my salad. Now, my response, I want to make it easy for me to eat this. So I'm already gonna prepare it, salad, dress and everything. So all I have to do is take it and eat it super easy. And then finding the reward. I'm a guy who loves checklists. So I downloaded this app called streaks. I've used it before. I'm gonna use it again right now to help me check that off. Every time I eat a salad for lunch, checkoff, and that's to be my reward, to be able to keep on going. So what's it for you. I want you to really strive to build a new, good habit. That's going to surpass any goal you could possibly imagine for yourself. And don't forget to give yourself a break again. Think about it this way. It's okay to break your streak once. Just don't break it two times in a row that gives you plenty of grace. How many of us end up choosing to do a diet? We blow it once and then we just fall off the wagon. Completely. No more license blow in at once. Totally. Okay. Just don't do it two days in a row. Give yourself a little bit of grace. And when planning for something, I want you to really focus on habits versus individual actions. This really helps when I'm trying to work on my living, the real Academy. I could put all these individual actions in place to try to work in and move this whole thing forward. Or I can just set the habit of 30 minutes a day that I, that I commit myself to working on living the real Academy, build that habit. That every day I'm constantly moving the needle forward 30 minutes, at least someday I'll do 45. Some they'll do an hour, but at least. 30 minutes. So here's your homework. Step one. I want you to take a section of your life and figure out which one you want to work on the most is that God self care, marriage dating, fairly friends, maybe your finances, maybe your physical environment is just a mess. Spend five minutes writing the ideal life in that particular area for you. What would the ideal life look like for you in self care with your friends and family or finances? Step two, ask yourself this question. What habits would that type of person have in their life? That ideal person, that vision you have, what kind of habits would they have to be able to live that out and make a list? However many you want? Don't worry about it. You're going to pick one. Now step three, pick one that resonates most deeply with you. Remember that? One thing principle, I talked about episode 25 justice. Last episode, if you don't know what I'm talking about, an excuse for you to go back, download and listen to it, to the very end and use that one thing principle, to find that one habit in this one area that you want to focus on. Step four, consider the habit stacking. I just talked about cue. It was something that you already have so that you don't have to build a habit out of nothing. Find a habit that already exists, stack it on top of it. Consider a habit, bundle to make it more enjoyable. Consider making an easy as possible to enjoy the habit. Maybe it's just doing it for two minutes, exercising for two minutes. All you're going to do. Because once you get there, you might actually want to do three minutes or six minutes or 10 minutes and go beyond what you actually asking yourself to do, and then make it rewarding. Give a small prize, download that habit app, make it real. And again, give yourself license to miss one, but just not two in a row. And finally let me know what habit you've chosen to commit to for the next 18 to 254 days. You've got this begin thinking like habits. Because systems truly save and surpass any goal you could possibly create for yourself. Okay. I hope you have a wonderful week and I will see you next episode. Take care and bye-bye. Thank you. Listen to this episode of living the real. If you want to check out more information, go to living the real.com and sign up for my newsletter. Okay. If you want to support this podcast, you do that at patrion.com/ltr as well as one time. Payments at Venmo and PayPal in the show notes. See you all next episode. Take care. Bye-bye.