Alessandro Sciaraffa, a former tennis player turned coach, says don't set 2026 goals until you examine the beliefs driving them. He traced his own coaching career to a false belief that he lacked access to money. When you spot these hidden lies and flip them, he argues, you'll set goals that actually matter instead of ones born from fear.
Chapters
How's it going, guys? So today, before you start setting your goals for 2026, I want to give you a little bit of guidance and a little bit of a framework to actually help you make congruent goals. So I'm going to start off by sharing with you a concept, right? The place that we set goals from is going to be the place that we actually end up in. Now, you might need to rewind that and replay that again. So when I'm going to use a story, when I was younger, when I decided to become a coach, obviously for the reasons about giving back to a generation and changing the world in terms of being more in a more empowered place to live, for children to live out their dreams, obviously children turn into adults to live out their dreams. Besides all that, one of the other deciding factors that led me to be a coach at the time was I was actually a professional tennis player. That's what I wanted to be before a coach. even though they were kind of side by side. And I had taken on a belief that I didn't have access to money. Now, how relevant is that in most of our lives? We don't think we have access to the right clients, to the right network, to the right industry, you know, people that will give us an advantage or whatever. So I took on a belief that I didn't think I'd have the access to money to play professional tennis because I couldn't see it happening from on my family side. So I was thinking, where am I going to get this from? Now, that led me to say, okay, well, I don't want anyone else to be in this situation. So that's going to drive me to become a coach and help other people. At the time, it was with professional athletes only. However, years later, looking back, it wasn't actually true that I wouldn't have access to money. Why? Because look what's happening now. I could have started a brand, could have reached out to private sponsors. All of these things I had concluded back then, because I wasn't educated about money, was the reason why I came to that goal. But it's not education about money. What's more accurate to say is that thinking and believing that you don't have access to money is a byproduct of feeling like you're disconnected, that you're not in a resourceful, not worthy, not good enough. These are all actually core reasons. The law of cause and effect. This is the cause of having such ideas about I don't have access to money. And obviously the irony now is that One of the reasons that drove me to be a coach, just one of them, there's many other great reasons, but that one, the irony is that now every day with my clients and people I speak to, I'm leading them out of creating goals from a lie, basically from this lie about that they don't have access to things, which is ironic because it's why I actually got into coaching, because I thought I didn't have access to things. But that's how the circle of life works. beautiful. So before you set your goals, we want to ask, why do we want these? When I was working with a professional athlete, they wanted to become a doubles tennis player, professional doubles player. But, you know, they had a mentor that, you know, inspired them to be a doubles player. But when I asked them why do they want to be a doubles player, it was because one of the reasons was they didn't think they could make it as a singles player. They didn't think they had the tools. They thought it was too difficult, and thereby they chose something secondary Because they thought that was off limits to them. And so this is where we start to create goals that we don't really want, and we end up creating a life that we're okay with, but we never really wanted it, which leads to uninspired lives, difficulties, resistance, a lot of stress, a lot of effort. Because why? We're not actually inspired by the things that we're doing. We're going for things that aren't truly aligned with our true nature, our soul, our imagination. So before you set your goals this year, ask some questions about why do I want this? And when you go through about— when you go through and ask yourself, why do I want this? See if you can spot any lies. There's a great quote from one of my mentors, Peter Crone, that says everything is real, but not a lot is true. Meaning at the time I thought it was a reality that I didn't have access to money. And it was my reality because I bought into it and I behaved like that. And I spoke from that place and I didn't access the people that did have money. So it was a very real experience. But was it absolutely true? No. Why is it not absolutely true? Well, there's loads of people that seemingly don't have access to money from their family, but they still go out and create it, generate it, connect with the people that do. So this is a really good invitation before you set your goals this year to ask why you really want it, reveal some of the lies, challenge your own lies, and see if you can actually flip them into the opposite. So if you think you don't have access to— Just talk to yourself and see what it feels like to have access to money. A little thought exercise there where you can start to live in an unfamiliar world, which is going to generate and have you receive more ideas to do with the unfamiliar than the familiar world that's causing you a little bit of limitation or fear or stress or pain. Now, if you do this exercise, it could potentially— actually, take out the potentially— it's going to shift the course of your 2026 because you won't be driven by something you don't really want. You actually would have gotten to the crux of what you truly want. which is going to feed into the types of ideas, people, and circumstances you come across rather than being informed by, you know, the lies about what we think is accessible to us and not. So this is just an adventure right here, an adventure to step out of the container that you've previously been living in and just try. It's free to try and see if you could begin to experiment what it would be like to live in a world that's the opposite to what your limitation would be. In my case, it was when I was younger, I don't have access to money. Okay, what would it be like to live In a world where you do have access to money, what types of things might come up? Who might you contact? What resources do you have access to?
