248. How to Set, Achieve & Exceed Brainy Goals (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 248 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is all about brainy goals. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is all about brainy goals, how to set them and think about them to put you on a path to success instead of inadvertently setting yourself up to fail. Now, you would never intentionally set up goals that won't work out, but our brains are programmed in a way that makes it so we consistently stack the cards against ourselves.

We try to do too much, spread.

Ourselves too thin, rely on willpower to get us through, and don't understand the importance that tiny habits play in our ability to accomplish big things at this time of year. This is the second to last episode before we close out 2022.

Most people are thinking about planning and.

What the next year will bring for them, how things will be different, what they want to accomplish, what habits they want to change, if they will plan resolutions and if so, what they are and and things like that. That's why I decided to refresh this episode from 2019. Right now, it felt like the perfect way to end the year, especially in light of this coming Friday's topic. That episode is a panel of sorts that is incorporating expert advice on how to have a happier 2023 and set your year and really the rest of your life up for success. The panelists for that episode are Ayelet Fishback, professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicag and author of Get It Done, which came out earlier this year. Ayelet's episode that actually kicked off this year. So it's kind of fun to have her back on the last episode of the year. But that very first episode of this year quickly zoomed its way up to be the fifth most downloaded episode of all time on the podcast. So I knew you would like to hear from her again, and she was gracious enough to join me for this conversation, along with our other panelist, Cassie Holmes. Cassie is a professor at UCLA who wrote the new book Happier Hour, which is so beyond fantastic. She specializes in the science of happiness and talks about time, poverty, and so many other amazing things. Don't worry, we have a full interview that's all about Kassy and her work coming out in early 2023.

Those two are going to be talking.

About happiness and motivation and resolutions and goal setting and achievement with lots of tips for you in Friday's brand new episode. If you aren't already subscribed to the Brainy Business podcast, now's a great time to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss that episode when it comes out in a coup days. So to get you in the right mindset, preparing for that, and just because it's probably something you're already thinking about right now, I felt like this was the right time to talk about goals. I'm someone who gets a lot done. Two podcast episodes a week, a weekly newsletter, two books in less than two years, teaching and creating my courses for Texas A and M and through the brainy business, directly speaking, consulting, and still having time for an enjoyable life with my family. The only way that is possible is by tackling and thinking about goals in a brainy way. This episode includes my tips and tricks for you to do that yourself. And yes, one of my courses, which you'll hear me mention throughout the episode, does give you the step by step on doing this yourself. And there's a link for you in the show notes for everyone who wants to learn more. Those show notes also have links to books, including of course, both Ayelets and Cassie's, as well as related past episodes and articles, and a link to the courses. It's all waiting for you within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 248 all right, let's jump right in on how to set, achieve and exceed brainy goals.

We all have goals and are all optimistic we will achieve them someday. Links to the episodes on optimism, bias and time discounting in the show notes for you, of course. But the truth is, if you don't set your goals up correctly, there's a good chance life will move too fast and you won't achieve what you're capable of. There's good and bad news about the advice I'm going to be giving you on goals. It's super simple to explain and understand, but our brains are wired to rebel against the tips in action. Let me explain. There are three main tips for setting and achieving brainy goals. 1. Define your goals and limit them to no more than three. 2. Break down the path to achieving those goals into small steps and three Say no to everything else. Step three is the hardest part and where most humans get hung up, we want to do a little of this and a little of that. Multitask, not limit ourselves. I've got plenty of time and I can achieve them all. Well, this opportunity presented itself, so this must be the time. That other goal will still be there next year. I care about this too, so I don't want to completely forget about it. No, no and no. If they aren't in the top three, they're a Distraction I'm bringing Nir Eyal on the show in a few weeks to talk about his new book Indistractable, which I've linked to in the show notes and also an article I wrote about some of my learnings from his book for my column on Inc. Com. One of my favorite insights from his book is that you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it's distracting you from. And he shares a point that seems so obvious in retrospect, but it was eye opening for me when I read it that the opposite of distraction is traction. As I outline in my INC Article which is called three ways you can limit everyday distractions, one of my goals is around being a thought leader and a tactic on the way to that is to increase my social media following, which is needed for book publishing deals and just helping more people to hear about behavioral economics. Being on social media is key for me to reach my goals and I need to be there personally to gain traction toward that goal. But this is also something I can get sucked into super easily and when it turns into productive procrastination, something I can pretend is helping me get to my goals but is actually distracting me from writing a column or pitching a speaking engagement or something else, it has become a distraction. It's a fine line and one that can be far too blurry and eat into your productivity and ability to reach your goals if you don't properly define them and their boundaries. Again, I'm super excited to interview near in a few weeks and share that episode with you in the interim. There's a link to Indistractable in the show notes if you want to pick up a copy. It's really fantastic and I highly, highly recommend it. As I've outlined for you here, when it comes to goals, you need to limit them. You can't have 85 goals or even 10 or 5 because you just can't achieve them. It's too much for your brain to handle. To limit them to 3, use the worksheet I've created for you in the Master your mindset freebie, which again is linked in the show notes for this episode@the brainybusiness.com 70 this worksheet is based on advice from Warren Buffett on setting and achieving goals, someone we can all agree has hit some major achievements in life. And as you heard in the conversation with Scott Miller last week, Franklin Covey has similar advice about limiting goals to what they call wildly important goals or wigs, which are similar to advice on behags or big hairy, audacious goals. You've likely heard some of these tips before, but I'm adding in the extra and very important layer of explaining why your brain doesn't want to adhere to those rules to help you fight it when it tries to rebel against you. So step one is to limit and set your goals. To do that, you first need to list out every goal you would like to accomplish in the next five, 10 or 50 years. If you think about your life and what you want to have done, what they'll read at your eulogy, what would those things be? List them all out, everything you want to do, and then look at how they might combine together into an overarching goal. Say you want to write a best selling book. Visit every continent, make it to every one of your kids soccer games. Run a marathon. Start that business. Launch an innovative product. List them all, every amazing thing you want to accomplish in your life. The worksheet from the Master your Mindset mini course has lines for 15, so let's say that's what you come up with. I bet it's an impressive list, a life well lived and one you would be proud of. Now that you've listed everything, you have to pick three. A total of three. And no, I don't mean three for personal and three for business and three for family. Just three. As I said, you can combine or tweak a little to make the goals bigger if needed. If it makes sense, for example, write a book is a goal. For me, that's part of being a thought leader in behavioral economics, as is growing my social following. They're more like tactics underneath the overarching goal of being seen as a thought leader. Each of those might have been goals on their own when I first created my list, but in looking at my whole lifetime and what it all sums up to, it's bigger than that. So it's okay to massage these a little, but know that you don't get to say something like live an awesome life as a goal because it's just too generic. If they make sense to combine and make the goal a little more amazing, that's okay, but make sure it's logical. This part might take some time, and it should. These are the top goals for your whole life, after all. You should make sure you're happy with them, but don't get caught up in perfectionism or analysis. Paralysis. That is a mindset block set up to keep you stuck because of your brain's tendency towards status quo bias. Your brain doesn't like change. It's scared of it. Keeping you stuck and dwelling on making things perfect or being really sure are tactics by your brain to delay change permanently if it could. It's your life. And if you want to look back and be proud of the goals you accomplished, you need to prioritize. All right, so now you have your top three goals. Good for you. This next part is where people get derailed, where your brain is wired to keep you stuck and not challenging the status quo, not achieving those dreams and and goals. Your inclination is to have the top three be most important, but still let goals four through 15 take up mental energy and be out in the world as things you're interested in. But they can't. I know that's hard to hear. Your brain wants to fight it, but you're stronger than that. You can fight this bias. I promise you can. To use Warren Buffett's explanation, items 4 through 15 are now your avoid at all costs list. And using near's words, goals 1, 2, and 3 are the priority. So anything getting you closer to them is traction. Items 4 through 15 are a distraction keeping you from achieving those top goals. You need to avoid those items no matter what. Now, if going to every soccer game for your child didn't make the top three, it doesn't mean that you can never go to a soccer game. But if being at every single event the family may encounter is isn't in the top three, then you may miss a soccer game to give a TED Talk. To achieve your goal of being a recognized thought leader in your space, you could potentially make it to 8 out of 10 games. And family still matters. But when there's something really important to reaching the big three, it could prompt some big conversations. This is where it's important to declare and own those top goals. So everyone in your life knows what's most important and is on board with that. My husband needs to know and support my top three being my top three, and we've talked about what that might mean for family time. There are sacrifices and I know his top three and where I need to help make that happen. And we can have conversations when those are in conflict because both of our top threes matter. So this is actually really funny timing and I want to share a story of what just happened as I was writing this and how it relates exactly to everything in this episode. Episode as you've heard me say, thought leadership is the core of one of my three goals. My other two involve healthy lifestyle and a balance of meaningful time with the family. They're in that order for a reason, as thought leadership is my ultimate goal and it sometimes circumvents time with family and Aaron is a big piece of family. Meaningful time is travel and creating memories and being part of important milestones when I can, but knowing that big work things will often come first for me and we've agreed to that. We know that that is a piece of what our life will be. And at least right now, my life includes a lot of travel and time for me to be away and we've built our life around that. So I've been working pretty long hours over the last couple months getting courses out, which means lots of content and still having to produce regular weekly podcast episode weekly articlesfrink.com and traveling for some really awesome opportunities. And these are all in line with my top goal. I try to be ahead on episodes and things so that I'm not pushing the line, but today just had a bunch of deadlines all sort of line up together and so my episode has to be in by the time the editing team gets up tomorrow morning. Thank you Mike and Karen and Emma. I appreciate you all. So I really had to push against the edge on this one to get it out the door on time. I'm tired, but I've made a commitment to you and my goals to never have an episode not publish on Friday when I say it will. So I'll be up as late as I have to in order to get this recorded and posted before I can sleep. It was apparently 8:57pm when I wrote this line and as I said then, it'll be later when I record these words and get it posted. As the official Update. It's now 10:19pm so that's the backstory to say my husband came by about 30 minutes before that, so I guess 8:15 or so to say he was going to walk to the mailbox because a piece of our daughter's Halloween costume was delivered. Our mailbox is about a quarter of a mile from the house and because time with him and health are also priorities for me and I haven't walked today, I decided to go with him. That's balancing While we were walking, I was telling him about where I'm at in the episode and the content so far and I had just finished about balancing our top threes with each other and he said like Puerto Vallarta. Something I had completely forgotten about while writing this, but it's such a fantastic example. We've both been working hard. I finished my master's a while back and like I said, I've had a lot of content I've been working on. My husband is also in his second to last quarter on his master's in data analytics, which is a difficult. I can't even imagine getting a master's in that. So, you know, shout out to him. So anyway, we had planned a vacation to Puerto Verda last month that we were really looking forward to. It was just the two of us, a true vacation that we both needed in many ways. It was already paid for and we had gotten a good deal on everything. Three or four weeks before the trip, a potential client I'd been speaking to for months finally gave dates that would work to bring the teams together for an in person workshop in London, which, you know, I went to. This project is one I'd been looking forward to and really important to my business for a lot of reasons. Of course, the dates that they chose, the ones that worked for the teams, made it so my husband and I would have to postpone our Puerto Vallarta vacation to some undetermined time. We could not do both. This was a tough, tough decision and don't misunderstand, it was painful. Even though we knew what had to be done and how the priorities laid out in this case our trip had to wait. Aaron knew and was the one to suggest it and insist upon it to help me stick to my goals. Because in the end, those are good for our family too. We've agreed upon them. Puerto Vallarta will always be there. We'll go sometime and we'll get to go on a lot of amazing trips. We do that already. We find the time to spend together when we can, like going on these little walks. But sometimes one of us has to go to bed while the other is up working, recording episodes or I travel for work and miss an opportunity with the family. But we're sticking with goals and priorities we set in a cold state because they are what matters for our life. These are my goals and I'm lucky enough to have the most supportive husband ever. Maybe this is making up for all those baseball stadiums I've been to. Now on the path to his dream and big goal of seeing every single stadium. We went to 11 together last year and finished them off for him. Even though I don't even like baseball. Some of you know that already. I've shared it pretty openly on social media, but that's important to him, so it's important to me. And family time and all that. Again, knowing what's important to each of us and balancing those priorities. I got family time with him on those trips, even when it was driving nine hours in a car between stadiums. And yes, that is true, we did a lot of that. Anyway, I think you get the point and hopefully my story helped to show that it isn't always easy. Sometimes something really exciting toward one of your goals can make it a difficult decision still in something else. But setting the three goals in advance and communicating them with those around you, understanding what's on the avoid it all costs list and having someone that can support you in that is so important to help you actually achieve one through three instead of just lightly chipping away at 15 top goals and once you know what those top three are, the next step is to break each of those big goals into the small steps it will take to get there. I already talked about what some of those could look like throughout this episode. Getting my social following up to 10,000 is a step to getting a book deal with a traditional publisher, which is a piece of my goal of being seen as a thought leader. Having regular podcast episodes that go out every Friday is also a piece of that, and each of those gets broken down into its smaller steps. Early on, creating content on a weekly basis for the podcast was more difficult than it is now. I'm just used to it, even sometimes where occasionally I'm up a little bit later than I would like to be. And then I added in the goal of the weekly Inc column and things like that. There are things that I can add on until they become a habit, and I'll talk about about how to break those down with tiny steps here in just a second. When it comes to that big top overarching goal, all these other things are steps on the way to get there, and I had to add them in one at a time. And pitching to write for Inc or other publications or speaking at events, those are all tactics and steps toward achieving the ultimate goal of thought leadership. And I do have a more precise definition of what being seen as a thought leader is that's not quite that vague, but for our purposes here, that's enough to explain that to you. That defined goal is supported by all those steps I've prioritized and mentioned here. Similarly, I've been sharing a lot on social media and previous episodes of the podcast, specifically the one on motivation about how I'm getting back into running. That's because health is on my top three, as you heard me say. And running a 5k at a certain pace is a tactic when within that eating better and walking more, not drinking soda and all the chai tea lattes of the world. Those could all be steps toward the ultimate health goal. But again, you can't do it all at once. There are a few ways you can break those down, and one thing I recommend is breaking the big lifetime goal into sub goals for the year. So getting a publisher for the book is a goal I have for 2020. That's a single goal to drive my behavior for the year. Until I hit that book goal, I don't move on to the other thought leadership sub goals. I recently read the book Friction by Roger Dooley, another author you'll be hearing from soon on the podcast, and I love one of the tips that's toward the end of the book about breaking goals into their smallest possible component. He gives the example of tiny habits from BJ Fogg, which we didn't even get to on our interview. There's so much great stuff in the Spirit book. If you want to learn more about this, it's on page 198 of Friction, chapter 13 on Habits and Productivity. So with the tiny habits, you break your big goal into the smallest possible component to the point that it's basically impossible to say no to. And then you do that. So if you have a goal of great oral hygiene, which is an example in the book, which would include flossing twice a day, it's easy to fall out of the habit quickly when you lose motivation. Maybe about two weeks after your dentist appointment. And then amazingly, it comes back, you know, two, three days before your next dentist appointment. If instead your goal each day was just to floss one tooth, it's pretty easy. And you can do that. It takes two seconds. Eventually you might floss two or three and build on the habit. But you start small with the thing that's impossible to justify not doing. I also really love the tiny habit he talks about about doing pushups regularly. Instead of saying I'm going to start doing 50 push ups a day right now, a plan that's destined to fail. If you go from 0 to 50, you can instead plan to do 2, just 2, and habit stack to help you achieve it Fog's example was to stack pushups with going to the bathroom. His statement became every time I go to the bathroom at home, I will then do two push ups. It's quick, easy, and you can't use the I'll be too tired for the rest of my day excuse and maybe eventually you'll do three, but you don't have to. And it isn't about hitting that point of exhaustion. Over the course of the day, who knows how many you'll do? Maybe more than 50. Personally, I've started doing five push ups on the top stairs, so sort of at an angle when I go upstairs. Since I work from home, I have the luxury of incorporating this in pretty regularly. It's a tiny habit I can add into my day and stick to. That's helping me to get toward that overall goal of being healthy. So now that you have your three goals, how tiny can you make the steps to reaching them, knowing you want to start super super super small and build upon that to eventually hit those big goals? Perhaps you have a tiny goal to go live every day on Instagram or post something to your stories. Or if you need motivation to write the book you write one paragraph a day, or one sentence even. Every goal is reached in lots of small steps. Goals are a sum of all the effort it took to get there, not the simple end result. And if you don't plan for those small steps, they won't happen and you won't challenge the status quo your brain loves and you won't reach your goals. It takes effort at first, but quickly these can become habits you can build upon. As I've talked about, it gets easier, I promise, and it's worth the discipline. One last thing that can help you achieve your goals. Making them brainy is reminding your brain of the top three as much as possible in as many different ways as you possibly can. This is where visualization and audio cues and mantras come into play. And they're all are lots of tips for you on that free worksheet and video in the Master your mindset mini course. You know from listening to this podcast that the subconscious brain is the filter that determines what your conscious gets to focus on. You need to be incredibly particular about what it sees all day to help guide the filter. You've heard me say before that the subconscious can process 11 million bits of information per second and that the conscious brain can only do about 40. What that means is, to put it in a different context, would say for every single piece of information that your conscious brain gets to focus on. Your subconscious is filtering through 275,000 other things that it's registering and seeing and just not consciously flagging. So if you think about all the other stuff you're letting in, if you're surrounding yourself, your environment, with visual cues and things that are against what your goals are, what's important to you, it can be throwing you off track without you consciously realizing it. Again, you need to be incredibly particular about what you surround yourself with in your life, in your office, everywhere. The people you talk to, the conversations you have, the things you let yourself say and think. You have to, have to, have to get all of that aligned with those top three goals. Let's take running as an example and being healthier. I talked about some apps on the motivation episode. Many of those have reminders built in that pop up on the phone. In my case, they'll say, time to dust off those running shoes. Or Yesterday you said this would be a good time to run. Remember, those reminders are really important to keep my brain notified that health is important, that these matter, that I want to do these things, even if it might be easier to come up with an excuse in the moment. Also, while funny and sarcastic sayings can be humorous from time to time, they aren't always serving you on the way to your goals. And even if you don't realize it, they could be detracting. So recently I actually got rid of two workout shirts that I really liked the look of but didn't agree with their message. One said, dear cardio, I hate you. And the other said, my life may not be perfect, but my hair is. As I said, I never really liked either message, but I love the style of both of those shirts and the only choices that looked like them were with those sayings on them. So I bought them, you know, a year or two years ago. I don't even remember at this point. I've had them for a while and I chose to get rid of them because I don't want my subconscious resonating with those messages. They don't serve me or my goal of a healthy life. I don't want or need to hate cardio. I don't need to think it's bad. And while I'm a big fan of my hair, my life is perfect in so many ways. I choose it and set priorities. No negative messages here. I don't need those. So no. Mondays are the worst signs in my office. Only strong visuals that remind my subconscious of the goals we're working toward and why they're important to me. You should do this too. Use reminders on your phone, set an alarm that repeats your mantra back to you or that you read when you look at it. To turn off the alarm, put sticky notes on your bathroom mirror, or paint a picture that reminds you of your goal. You it doesn't have to make sense to anyone else. It's for you. And reminding your subconscious of your goals as often as possible to keep you on track to get as many pieces in that filter in the right direction. And that's why you can only have three goals at a time. Ten big goals and all their subtasks at any one time would be overwhelming and confusing and driving your brain to distract itself with Candy Crush or whatever the big game is these days. Determine what three things are really important to you, shout them from the rooftops and put every single egg in their baskets. That's how you set, achieve and exceed brainy goals.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about brainy goals today? For me, I love talking and thinking about goals, both for myself and when I work with clients and students on this. The part that's always so eye opening is when you break the big goal into its small parts. Taking the time to create the plan with the smallest possible details is so critical in actually getting things done instead of just thinking about and planning a bunch of really great stuff. Overcoming time, discounting optimism, bias, bike shedding, and planning fallacy are key to tackling goals. Yes, all those past episodes are linked for you in the show notes. And if you want support in setting yourself up for goal exceeding Success, visit the brainybusiness.com courses to see if it's a fit for you as we close out the year. I want to thank you for being a listener of the Brainy Business podcast. I know you have lots of ways you could spend your time. Whether we're getting together at the gym on Saturday morning, walks with the dog while you're driving in your car out on the beach.

It's my honor to be with you.

Every time you listen. And as you look to next year, what's the first thing you're going to do based on what you learned about in this episode today? What's one thing you can do right now to set your next year on the right track? Or close this one out with a bang? Whatever it is, come share it with me on social media. You can find me as the brainy biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina.

Palmer on LinkedIn, I can't wait to hear about it.

And to support you in your goals. And of course, don't forget about the links to related past episodes, books, articles, information on courses and more all waiting for you in the show notes at the brainy business.com 248 and just like that, episode 248 on setting, achieving and exceeding brainy goals is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Ayelet Fishback and Cassie Holmes on how to have a the Best year Ever. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.