In this solo podcast episode of Lead with Confidence Now, coach and reinvention specialist Travia Steward argues that many people sabotage their own progress by setting goals that focus solely on outcomes. She explains that goals should be anchored in the emotions people want to feel—secure, invigorated, powerful—and then broken down into daily or weekly actions that move them toward those feelings. Travia shares personal stories, from driving for Lyft while sick to her early coaching business where she aimed to book 20 clients at once, illustrating how fixating on the end result caused stress and disappointment. By shifting to an action‑oriented approach—e.g., networking with five new contacts each day, practicing a pickleball serve for 30 minutes daily, or eating at a new restaurant weekly—she began to see progress, lower stress, and more enjoyment. She emphasizes celebrating small wins, treating personal growth as a marathon, and consistently showing up for oneself and others. The episode ends with a challenge for listeners to reassess their goals, incorporate feeling‑based criteria, and add concrete micro‑actions that accumulate into larger achievements.
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Have you ever felt like you were doing all this work, putting in all this effort, but you're not still seeing the results that you really want? What if I told you that the way you're setting your goals might be the very thing holding you back? So stay tuned because today we're diving into something that could be a game changer for the way you set goals that could actually transform your life. This is Lead with Confidence Now, the podcast dedicated to helping you grow your confidence and live your best life. I'm Travia Steward. Travia Steward, and for the past 27 years, I've been on a mission to help you reinvent your relationships and career. My goal with this podcast is to show up for you so that you can rock your own world with the confidence to make that big change in your life you've been wanting to make. And today I'm gonna convince you that sometimes the very goals we set for ourselves can hold us back instead of moving us forward. Let's explore why this happens and how we can change it. Yo, what's up, my peeps? Here we go. This is Podcast Thursday, and I'm recording this while I'm actually sick. And you may be able to tell from the sound of my voice, but, you know, I'm still driving for Lyft. And so I've been driving all these people around, and some people get in the car and they're coughing their asses off. And, you know, there are times, you know, because I'm in Arizona, we're already over triple digits now. It's already over 100 degrees. So you don't wanna have the window down because it doesn't matter how fast you're going, it's still blowing in hot air. And so, I've just noticed that I had, I started feeling bad about the end of last week and then it got into my chest and then now it's in my head, it's affecting my voice. And so the thing about it is I have a commitment to my peeps that unless there is, you know, worse than the way I'm feeling right now recording this podcast episode and there's something that happens that I can't do this, I have a commitment to show up for you because I want each and every one of you listening to this podcast to have the tools to show up for yourself, to show up and make the changes that you want to make. Because so many times we just are still settling in our lives. We're settling in our relationships, we're settling in our careers. And so today I want to start by talking about my experience as a reinvention coach. And, you know, guys, I went full time with this in 2020, and since then I've seen so many people set ambitious goals for their personal and professional growth, right? And for their life. Now, I know that we all want to achieve significant milestones, whether it's reaching, you know, getting a promotion at work, whether it's, you know, going, you know, on more dates or, you know, finding the love of your life so that you can actually get married, you know, or maybe it's making some kind of lasting and meaningful impact. But here's the thing that, you know, having goals isn't enough. And at the beginning of each year, I talk about setting goals going into the new year. And at the beginning of this year, I talked about really setting the goals based on how you want to feel. What are the emotions that you want to experience which will help you drive the actions that you're gonna take. And I shared with you at the very beginning of this year that my 3 emotions that I wanted to feel that was going to guide my goal setting is I wanted to feel secure, I wanted to feel invigorated, I wanted to feel powerful. So what were the things I wanted and needed to accomplish so that I could feel and experience these high-level emotions and feelings that just fulfill my life and, you know, basically they light me up. And so I want you to think about when it comes to goal setting, right? Let's think about, you know, like let's say you wanna learn a new sport and, you know, you, you guys have heard me talk about pickleball a lot on this podcast. I love pickleball. And let's say you want to take up the sport of pickleball. And you've always dreamt of being, you know, a pro, proficient pickleball player, you know, and your ultimate goal is to win like the national tournament or whatever, you know, or you wanna win, you know, this, you wanna go on tour, right? Well, we all know that's a great goal, that's a great aspiration, but focusing solely on this end goal, you know, frankly can be overwhelming and discouraging, especially when you're just starting out, when you're trying to win the pro-am right from the beginning. And so I remember when I first started my business and, you know, I left teaching, I went full-time into life coaching, and my initial goal was I wanted to be fully booked with 20 clients at a time, and I wanted to get all 20 in that first year, you know, because I was passionate and motivated and I was doing the work, but it just wasn't happening. I just kept focusing on the 20 clients. And so I realized that as I was focusing on this end goal, this was causing me a shit ton of stress and, and, disappointment because I was just focusing on the 20 and discounting everything else that it meant in order to reach the, the 20. And so after months and months and months of struggling to hit that target, I had to shift my focus. And I recognize, and I, this is also something that I've recognized in my clients, that I needed to shift my focus from instead of fixating on the number of clients I wanted to coach, and then I started shifting to concentrating on the actions that would lead me to acquiring these clients. And so what happened was I made a goal to network with at least 5 new people every day, whether it's reaching out to people on social media or doing speaking engagement, reaching out for other podcasts, you know, people that I come in contact with, you know, while I'm driving for Lyft, you know, Shelly calls it Lyft life coaching. That kind of thing. And maybe it's a way of providing free value through workshops and my speaking and just being engaging and on social media and just having a presence. And so by focusing on these smaller actions that I wanna be able to do, that doing these things every day going, I'm gonna hit this smaller goal of reaching out to 5 new people every single week. And, and maybe not new people every week, maybe it's former clients, but it's taking the smaller actions so that the 20 clients isn't so overwhelming, so that winning the Pickleball Pro-Am Tournament isn't so overwhelming. And so by focusing on these smaller steps, I started to see a significant change in how I was going about, and actually I started hitting my targets. And so not only did like my stress level decrease, but I just began to enjoy the process more. And it took away that huge amount of overwhelm of going, I gotta get 20, I gotta get 20. And so each new connection, because I love to talk to people, you know, each person that, you know, that was, you know, at my speaking events, you know, each engaged follower on social media, You know, my social media is growing very slowly, but you know what? Every person that clicks that follow for my podcast, subscribe on my YouTube channel, follow on Instagram, on LinkedIn, those are small victories for me and I celebrate each and every one. And over time, over time, these small victories have added up. They're continuing to add up in order for me to surpass my goal. Of being fully booked with 20 clients at one time. And so this shift from the result-oriented to an action-oriented mindset and format process made all the difference for me. You see, because I was no longer discouraged and disheartened by not hitting that big goal. Instead, I was motivated by the progress I was making through taking consistent action. And so going back to the pickleball example, imagine instead of focusing on winning the tournament, we wanna set a smaller goal because how do we wanna feel? You know, if you're me, you wanna feel from pickleball invigorated, like you can go out and be that athlete that you wanna do. An athlete is one of my identities. And so we wanna set smaller actionable goals like, Maybe you're gonna set a goal of practicing just your serve for 30 minutes every day. Maybe you're going to attend, you know, get a, attend a pickleball clinic once a month, that kind of thing. You know, maybe you're going to commit to playing with one other person or three other people twice a month, you know? And by concentrating on these daily and weekly actions, you'll improve your skills gradually, stay motivated by your progress, and eventually become that pro-am and tournament-ready player that you dream of becoming, right? So the principle that I'm talking about applies to any goal, whether it's you personally reinventing yourself, whether it's leadership development, whether it's becoming more confident in your speaking, becoming more confident and how you interact with people. It's like I'm gonna set a goal if I'm, you know, someone who wants to grow my confidence in interacting and getting out of my comfort zone and, you know, shifting from introvert to extrovert. I am going to, you know, hypothetically set a goal of once a week I am going to leave my house and I'm going to eat at a place that I don't normally eat at, and I'm going to interact with 2 people at that establishment. Maybe that's gonna be something that is going to be actionable that you can do every single week. And so again, if your aim is to become a more confident person, introvert to extrovert, we don't wanna just focus on the, on the end result. We wanna set action-oriented goals. By doing the smaller things, practicing, implementing, and integrating it into your everyday life so that these things become secondhand. And so when we shift our perspective from outcome to action, imagine that you wanna lead, you know, a successful team at work. And if all your focus is just on, the recognition, the completion of the project, well, again, you'll feel disappointed with the slow progress. It's not happening fast enough, right? But instead, instead focusing on those smaller steps, like regular team meetings, one-on-one check-ins, continuous development, celebrating the small victories that will keep you, you know, motivated, you know, and, and moving towards that, that, that bigger goal. But you're celebrating the small actions that you're taking in order to get there. Because reinvention and becoming more confident in your person, in your relationships, in your careers, they're marathons, they're not sprints. And setting these action-oriented goals based on how you wanna feel and then the actions that you wanna take ensures that you can stay focused because now we're thinking about the smaller actions that we can take every single day. Not just at the end of the month, not just, oh, that big goal I had set for the end of 2024. And then we have to remind ourselves to celebrate each step because no matter how small and, or, you know, no matter how small the action is, it all adds up. And then before you look, the big goals would just take care of themselves because you've been doing all of this consistent action every single day. So today my challenge to you is to reassess your goals. Are you thinking about it from the perspective of how you want to feel for that goal in order to do it? You know, for, again, for me, something like pickleball makes me feel invigorated. So I go out and play more of it. It helps me to fulfill my identity of an athlete. And so again, I challenge you to reassess your goals. Are you solely focused on the end result, or do you want and need, and can you right now begin to include smaller actionable steps that you can take every single day that add up in a week, that add up in a month, that add up every quarter of the year? And so we're shifting our mindset, peeps. We're focusing on the actions that will transform your days which would transform into weeks, which transform into months, into years, and then that goal happens. So that's what I'm talking about, my peeps. And so you'll notice that today's, uh, podcast episode, there's no video. Like, I'm committed to you, to this podcast, but I was not committed to getting on video today because I'm looking some kind of way. So that's why I'm not on video today, and I just basically still wanted to show up for you because I love doing this podcast and I love how you share with me how it's helping you with these little tips that you can use and implement in your life. So there we have it. That's it for today's episode, my peeps. Again, I'm Travia Steward, your coach, your guide on this journey of transformation, of becoming the confident you to make big changes in your life. Thank you for joining me, and remember, focus on the actions, celebrate the small wins, and lead with confidence now. Until next week, my peeps.
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