In this solo episode of the Own It Podcast, host Nicole Hollar presents the eight principles she uses with her coaching clients to achieve success in any life area—whether fitness, career, wealth, or weight loss. She begins by urging listeners to set goals 20% beyond their target to prevent the natural tendency to coast as the goal nears. She then stresses the importance of getting out of one’s own way by releasing limiting beliefs, modeling successful patterns, and accepting where you are without self‑punishment. Action is the next pillar: start now, because taking any step creates momentum and clarifies what truly works. Awareness and accountability follow, urging listeners to regularly assess their current position and adjust direction when needed. Flexibility is highlighted as essential; the path to a goal isn’t a straight line, so being open to alternative methods expands possibilities. Quality feedback from trusted, vested sources is presented as a way to stay aligned with the goal. Determination is the seventh principle—persist through obstacles, remembering that time passes regardless of effort, illustrated with a wooden‑spoon metaphor. Finally, operational excellence is defined as acting from whole‑self congruence, avoiding perfectionism, and pausing when necessary to maintain authentic performance. Nicole wraps up by reiterating the eight principles, encouraging listeners to apply them, and directing them to her social media, website, and speaking‑engagement services.
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Welcome to the Own It Podcast with me, Nicole Hollar, where we're going to talk about stuff to help you get out of your way, take charge of your life, and, well, other stuff too. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Own It Podcast with me, Nicole Hollar. Today I want to talk to you guys about the 8 principles of success, which I like to share with all of my clients. It doesn't matter if we're working in fitness, personal development, what area of life. We could be talking about career. Maybe you're talking about wealth. Maybe you're talking about weight loss. It doesn't matter. When you are thinking about goal setting of any type, I want you to consider these 8 principles to make you most successful. And the first one is look 20% past your goal. Let's say you have a goal of earning $10,000 this month. Instead of seeing $10,000 as your goal, make it $12,000. Add 20%. And the reason we do this is because it's a normal part of our psyche that as we get closer to the goal, we tend to back off. We tend to start to coast. Now, if you look at people like sprinters, people running through first base in baseball, they understand the importance of continuing the same speed and acceleration through that goal. In life, however, most people tend to back off. And start to coast a little. They're like, oh, I'm getting close. I can sort of let up on the gas pedal. Well, don't do that. And if you are going to do it and you're like most people, what we need to do is just adjust that goal a little. So again, if that financial goal is earning $10,000 this month, make it $12,000. That way you're sprinting right through $10,000 as you approach $12,000. And even better, as you get to that number, when you're about 10% before it, Move the bar 20 more percent, and that's going to allow you to continue to add and add and add onto the goal. This can also apply to weight loss. If you have a weight loss goal, instead of saying, I want to lose 10 pounds, maybe you decide, I want to lose 12 pounds. So you're sprinting through it, then you're like, you know what? I'm going to move it another 2 pounds as you get closer to that goal. If you have a deadline, that deadline I have is 4 weeks from now. Make it 20% sooner. So now I'm going to try to get that project done with a 3-week deadline rather than cramming till the end. You'd rather have the ability to have a little bit more flexibility at the end. The second thing is really important when it comes to being most successful, and it's getting out of your way. You know, most things have been done before that we want to achieve, which means That there's a pattern, there's a strategy in order to do it. You've heard me talk about modeling before. We want to find models of success that we can emulate to help us get to our goal. Now, keep it in mind that we all pedal at different speeds. You aren't going to compare yourself to somebody who's been doing this forever. I talked about this in the very beginning when I started my podcast. If I decided to compare myself to somebody who's been doing podcasts forever, That would be unfair and I'd probably never start. What I need to do is start and I can refine along the way. Because if you think that you're going to be the end product in the beginning, it's very possible that you're not going to start. So it's important that we get out of our way by letting go of limiting beliefs, all the reasons that we can't, why it's too hard, and also to let go of any of the baggage that punishes you. Using weight again, maybe you've gotten to a point, or debt, you're like, I can't believe I've gotten myself to this situation. So many times I've heard people punish themselves. They're like, how have I gotten in this place? They're beating themselves up. It doesn't matter. You're there. You're there. It doesn't matter how you got there anymore. You can learn, right? Take the lesson from how you got to that position and now move forward with it. Now detach that energy of where you're at and how you got there and say, here's where I am. Accept and own where you're at, because everything's about really accepting and owning where we're at and getting out of our way so that we can set up a strategy and a process in order to move forward. The third thing is to take action. You've got to start. You, you have to make the call. You've got to start writing. You've got to, whatever your goal is, just start. Because action creates momentum and emotion amplifies all of that. And sometimes just starting helps us really become aware of what it is we want or don't want, or see the picture a little bit differently. When I began writing, I just started. I started a book years ago, by the way, it was 44 pages. I gave it to a friend. I said, can you just read this for content? She had so many questions and her questions all made sense. It was amazing. And it just made me stop. And I, I didn't touch the idea of writing. And that book was real different from Feeling Stuck, my very first book. I just started, I took action and it put it in my mind like, okay, I can do this. But then I tabled it. And then when I was ready again, I moved forward and I had a concept. I knew what I wanted and I found somebody. That would help me shape it into what I needed. But I had to take action and I had to know where I am, where I am, where I was. And where I was at that very first time was not in a space to be able to really move forward because I didn't have the knowledge or the skills or the process or the understanding of really how to— I'm gonna say how to write a book, how to create a book in an organized, coherent fashion. So number 4 is know where you are. Like, you have to use your awareness and accountability. I took action, but what it did was help me realize this wasn't the path, and it helped me realize where I was. And while I was moving closer to my goal because I was starting to write, I was actually moving farther from it because it was getting me in the weeds. So what I needed to do was stop and reevaluate my direction, and I did, and I tabled it, like I said. And then I learned from it and I went, okay, I have the ability to do this, but I knew where I was. And then, like I said, when I decided to move forward, I was able to do that. So you want to, again, first step is look 20% past your goal. You want to get out of your own way, and then you want to take action and know where you are. The 5th principle Is be flexible. Be flexible in how you're going to achieve it. Success isn't a straight line. It's like our stock market. Do you ever look at if you guys have investments? Do you ever look at your portfolio? You want it to trend the direction you want to go, but it's not a straight line. There might be times where you're having small heart attacks along the way, right? And that's okay. Sometimes we have to be flexible in our method and how we're going to get there. When I when I work with breakthrough coaching clients. When we set achievable outcomes in the unconscious mind and we place them there, what I ask them to do before we come back to the now, because it's a whole process of floating above your timeline where you're at, which is a different conversation. But what I ask them to do is to let go of how they're going to achieve their goal. You might've had this $10,000 per month goal because you were going to get 10 new clients all paying you $1,000. Well, are you flexible enough to reach that goal in a different way? Because if you aren't, you might find that your goal is a little harder to achieve. And when you're flexible, you see different possibilities and opportunities. And when you're in this process, being flexible is super important, but also is seeking quality feedback. Like, is what I'm doing working or is it not working? So you want to seek this feedback along the way, like I said, when I initially took action and starting to write a book, I just dove in. I, I didn't have any modeling. I didn't know anything. I just started writing 44 pages, 44, like normal 8.5 by 11 pages. That was a lot of words. I would sit there for hours and it all sort of made sense to me in my mind. But what I did was seek quality feedback. I sought feedback from somebody who I know would provide me with good, coherent Questions and feedback telling me what she liked and didn't like. And that feedback was really important because it let me know if I was more or less in alignment with my goal. And at that time I wasn't. So you're going to want to seek quality feedback. That doesn't mean you're just asking anybody who has no vested interest in you or what you're trying to accomplish, who has no understanding of what it is you're trying to accomplish. If they don't get it, it's not going to be quality and that's going to be a problem. And sometimes we do that in order to, again, give ourselves these limiting beliefs of why we can't move forward because it might have been too hard. And that feedback is going to give you the opportunity to think of it as brainstorming for you to see things in a way that you may not have seen before. Generally, when goal setting, you're going to get to this sticky point. You're going to get to a point where you realize, wow, this is really hard. Because obstacles are normal and they are what help us determine if this goal we're trying to reach is that important. And it's going to teach you what's not working. So you have to stay determined. That is principle number 7. Stay determined. You want to adhere to these principles because time passes anyway. You have to stay determined. You know, years ago I was talking to a fitness client who had quite a bit of weight to lose. And I said, listen, it's going to take you years to get to the goal you want. So we're going to put it in bite-sized chunks, which the unconscious mind can grab onto. And it had already been years where she had tried different diets, different things in her mind. She had wanted to achieve a different weight goal, a weight loss goal, a weight destination goal. And then I said, here's the thing. Time passes anyway. Time is going to pass whether you do the work or you don't. So I gave her a wooden spoon. I said, look, I said, you can get through my wall. We were sitting in my office with this wooden spoon. Eventually, it's going to take a little time because it's just drywall and a spoon. But if you look and go, man, this is hard, I'm not even going to try, then you're never going to start. That's the getting out of your own way part. But then as you start to see progress happening, or that wooden spoon is starting to whittle down and wear down the paint, the drywall, and getting through. Then you're going to see that there's some possibility here, but it's going to take some time. You must stay determined to reach your goal. Even when we have setbacks, it's normal and it's okay. And the final thing is work from a place of operational excellence. And what that means is you want to operate from this place of whole self congruence. Meaning it has to come from you. Be the best version of who you are at that time. And if you know who you are in that moment isn't helping you reach that goal, you're gonna have to do some work to change your mindset or pause for a moment because you don't wanna add things to the recipe, if you will, that aren't going to help the final product. So it's okay to pause. To allow yourself to operate from this place of excellence. And by the way, excellence is never perfection. I have yet to meet what perfection is. Perfection is whatever you determine it to be at this moment, because what you thought was perfect last year may not be perfect today. I'm going to leave you with that— those 8 principles of success. Remember, you've got to set goals that are 20% past where you are. You want to take action. You've got to be flexible. You've got to know where you are, be accountable, seek quality feedback, stay determined, and have operational excellence. You are absolutely capable. This is your time. And as always, you can follow me @NicoleHollerCoaching on most social media platforms. And you can always check out more about fitness and breakthrough coaching, as well as find books that I've written and all the other good stuff. Request me for speaking events and workshops at my website, nicoleholler.com. Have an awesome day.
