#370: Goal Setting: How to Do It & My Personal Goals for 2024

Intro:

Welcome to The Healthy Catholic moms podcast where we make moving and nourishing our bodies the priority so that we not only fulfill our vocations, but excel in our callings. I’m Brittany Pearson, a Catholic wife, mom, personal trainer, and I’m here to help you build healthy habits that actually fit your life. I am here to teach you how to get the results that you want and maintain the results that you want without spending hours at the gym, or meal prepping all weekend long. I understand I am right here with you getting my workouts done in the nooks and crannies of time, looking up recipes, while nursing babies and trying to prioritize my own health amidst everything else going on. But I have really good news for you, you can get the results you want. In less time without doing hours of cardio and restrictive dieting. I am going to teach you how to use strength training and eating in a macro balanced way to get you feeling so good and your skin full of energy and strong to carry out your life. Okay, on this podcast, we’ll delve into how to lose fat in a simple, sustainable way. What your workouts and nutrition should look like during different seasons of life, like during pregnancy and postpartum times. We’ll also discuss healthy quick meals, and how to get them on the table make food that kids will actually want to eat. Mom hacks for making your day run more smoothly and so much more. All the while with continuous encouragement to stay the course and live with discipline. This is a place where we’re striving to steward our bodies well, in order to joyfully serve. I am so happy you’re here. Let’s dive in.

Main episode:
Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to today’s episode, thank you so much for being here and for spending your time with me so many podcasts you could listen to. And I’m really happy that you are here, whether it’s your first time or you’re here all the time. Thank you. Alright, today we’re getting into goal setting for 2024. I love goal setting. I love New Year’s, I love all this. I love the energy of it. I love that this year. I’m double guessing it as I say it, but I’m pretty confident that we start actually New Year’s on a Monday. Pretty sure that’s true. So I was like, Oh, wow, that’s exciting. It’s also the start of week. So I am just gonna walk you through and I have other episodes from previous years, you can go back and listen to what my goals were, for those different years or various goal setting tips. But hopefully this is a little bit different. A little bit of recap, maybe for some of you, but I don’t know about you, I like to revisit it every year anyway. So I’m gonna kind of go through the steps that I think are important and that I like there’s so many methods to doing this. There are i and I’ve tried different ones there have been, you know, I’ve listened to podcasts where people have done it in seven categories, and they’ve given everything a number first and blah, blah, blah, I’ll get into that and kind of just tell you what I do. And then you can take what you want leave the rest just like I do from other people’s podcasts and methods that I listen to.

So first and foremost, I think it’s really important to start with having some kind of reflection or recollection. And this is not a huge deal. Like I typically what I used to always do is go to iteration on New Year’s Eve, like early New Year’s Eve, not you know, when everybody’s at a party, then I went to iteration, but I honestly from whatever however long I can remember being 1817, whatever, dragging myself to iteration at like 6pm or something. And somewhere where there’s perpetual and sitting down, taking a second to kind of reflect on the past year, and then set my goals for the next year.

Now I am recording this earlier than new, you know, Christmas Eve, or New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Eve. And I don’t always make it to adoration. Exactly on New Year’s Eve. That’s a great part of this, that, you know, I think bringing it to adoration at any other time would be awesome, as well. But this year, I just took some quiet morning time. I really value and cherish that time, at the time of recording this I’ve been in a really good groove with it because it’s before baby comes. I think I just know how fleeting it is that I’m about four weeks out, hopefully, at the time of recording this. And, you know, I really do look forward to having that quiet time where I can wake up and it really is just me two year olds pretty much. You know, I’m confident when he’s going to sleep until so if I wake up early enough, I get that time. So I just sat in some quiet prayer and thought about you know how things went last year? What asking the Lord to like what do you want this year to look like? For me? This is where sometimes I kind of land on a word of the year. I didn’t focus on that yet. I think because we are so far out still from New Year’s at the time of recording this. But last year, I was really focused on it Words like nurture and joy. Joy was a really big one for me all last year, I might have mentioned that in the three things that went well for me episode. But that was just something I really have been focusing on. So anyways, um, I also did this, I will say like in October, it was like, end of October, beginning of November, I sat down, when I realized it had been about a month of homeschooling. And it’s, you know, I’ve been, quote, unquote, homeschooling from the beginning, but I have an actual first grader this year, which I know some of you have, like a bunch of kids, you’re homeschooling, but I only have, I have a verse grader and a preschooler, and then a two year olds, but I sat down and wrote down, I mean, stay at home moms could do this to just anybody who’s, you know, I think it’s good for anybody and working moms and stuff. But just for me, this was like the first month of kind of making of the school routine and whatnot, you know, and doing it in this setup. And I sat down, and just took that morning, time to write down and I wrote down, like, in a journal, what is going well, in homeschool? What is or in our days, you know, what is not going well? What feels stressful? What are the like, what is a good day look like? And that kind of thing. And it was really nice, instead of doing this at the end of the year, a month in to be like, Okay, this, this and this are going really well, this this and this or not? Do I need to, like come up with a different plan for them do I need to drop it off, like for example, I realized, like my language aspirations for them or to learn taylean, which, if you’ve been with me, too, is been an aspiration of mine. So I think I’m just trying to double whammy that. And to teach them sign language. And we’ve done the whole sign language thing, since they were babies alongside like, what a lot of people do the baby signs and this that, but then I kept it going pretty well with Josh, I checked his basic sign language in college, but I love it, I really think it’s great to have, you know, to be able to communicate with those who are hard of hearing. And it had come in handy for me at previous jobs and stuff where I was the only person who could at least to basic, you know, if you know, just some key phrases, and you can fingerspell you can get pretty far with that. So anyways, I had done this really well with Josh. And then as things go, you do like 900 things with your first kid, and then things fall off. So I really wanted to make that part of their like, kind of curriculum or schedule or whatever this year. Anyways, sitting down reflecting, like, okay, morning, Tim is going super well. We’ve been doing our kettle pieces are a couple other subjects. They’re, they’re all really into it. We’ve started incorporating some things too, for my two year old because I realized like, hey, yeah, I don’t do any fun songs with him. Like, you know, so our morning time is going super well. For example, however a month in we have not done one single thing for Italian or sign language. Like each week, when it came to something had to go. That was seen as an extra we didn’t fit it in or I didn’t have a plan. I don’t the so whatever. So I had to walk through them, like, do I have a plan for this, like, I’m not gonna just cut it out because it’s too much,  or my empty action steps like make it happen, like what’s going on. So it was really helpful for me to take that time to just even reflect on like, what’s going well, what’s not. So some people like I said, have had a planner like that this year, the Horatio planner, where it had you, like shade in a pie chart for how well you think you’re doing in various areas before you set your goals. And I listened to podcasts before I don’t remember her name. And I do not remember the podcast. It was like a couple years ago. But she suggested like there were seven or 10 categories that we set goals and, and before setting a goal and them to give yourself a number on a scale of one to 10 of how you felt in that area. Like friends like whatever, I think it’s really helpful to take stock of where you are, before you even make a plan for where you’re gonna go. Because you need to know like, if you’re killing it, if you feel like you’re killing it in one area, but one area is really down, maybe you’re not going to make new goals in that in the area that you’re killing it in, you know, if your health and fitness is super automated, and you’re just really happy to just keep rockin what you’re doing. But you feel like your friend category could be a lot better, you don’t make time for that maybe this is the year, you just keep things pretty automated on health and fitness. I know it’s me, the trainer saying that. And then, you know reaching out more in the friend department and worrying about that stuff more. So, you know, it’s very personal, I just encourage you to take stock of where you are first.

So I went through personally my goals from last year, which I think I talked about on here, but like daily rosary, outside walks, those kinds of things, reading 23 books, blah, blah, blah. So I kind of reflected on what went well, what didn’t, what I did achieve what I didn’t because I can always put it on this year if I want to if it’s even applicable anymore, you know, that kind of thing. So start with recollection. And then when you want to get into the next year’s goals, I encourage you to pick some categories and I have just for this Hear spiritual, physical, personal, oh five. Oh, I think I didn’t, I didn’t write down any personal yet. That’s why spiritual, physical, personal family and business, okay, so those are the five areas I pick. If you do not, you know work outside the home, maybe that’s going to be just wrapped up in personal I’m not saying again like, that’s Oh, you’re just a stay at home mom. But it means maybe you want to put things that you want to improve on in your work your vocation under personal instead, or you could have a category that says, you know, motherhood, that would be a great category, I don’t have it on here, I kind of just roped those into personal or family. So I very much encourage you to only make one or two goals per category. Again, other people might say differently when we have 567. I remember last year, we did this, I talked about on the podcast. And we shared our goals in the chasing greenest group, which I would love to do again this year. So maybe this year, we’ll do that on Slack or in the Facebook group. And we did in the Facebook group last year. And there were still people who posted their goals. And we’re like, I know this is too many. But this is my list. And it was like seven things in each category. And I was like oh man, like woof, we are going for it. But for most of us, that’s just going to lead to us like spinning our wheels really hard for two weeks and then dying out.
Everybody’s different. And I think I think that high goals are a good thing. So something we hear a lot is smart goals, right? Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and time measured, I think is the last one, I might have paraphrase some of those. And if you’ve never heard of this, some of there’s some really good takeaways. You do want to be specific, you don’t want to just say if you have the goal of losing 50 pounds, which may or may not be a good goal for you. But we’re not here to talk about that today. Say that is your goal to lose 50 pounds. And then we’ll see that was even more specific than most people get if your goal is just to lose weight. That is not specific. That’s not attainable. Like what is what Wait, what this, if you say I want to lose 50 pounds by December 31, then we can work with that we can break that down into little goals each month and we can make a plan for it and asked to be specific that is for sure. Now, the difference the difference. I’ve heard in differing opinions about how realistic Our goal should be is that some experts or whatever personal development, people believe that you are playing it safe. A lot of times if you’re realistic, if you’re like I’m gonna shoot for getting one workout in a week, you know that you are actually capable like three, four or five. And if you set loftier goals for yourself, you’d rise to the occasion and meet them. I kind of err on the side of this thinking. And we’re going to talk about that in a couple of weeks about leveling up and making sure you’re pushing yourself and I think because the culture tends right now in my opinion, so much toward the take a break leniency you’re doing your best kind of a vibe, I tend to push back with the like, no, like look to people who are doing, you know, not necessarily more than you are but like who are setting the bar high like striving for excellence essentially right? Everything I say on my website and all our tagline is chasing greatness made for greatness, you know, the world offers you comfort you were not made for comfort you were made for greatness, Pope Benedict 16 All of that were like we should not be settling for mediocrity, we should be striving for greatness. So it’s a fine line, you don’t want to set yourself up for failure. But you also don’t want to just set really low hanging fruit goals that you can very easily hit and then you just feel like you’ve accomplished it and you’re good, you know. So I think there’s a happy medium. And I would just consider that when you’re setting these to now say you set your goals for whatever categories you want. Again, mine were spiritual, physical, personal, family and business. To actually go about achieving these again, I would do one or two per category. First of all, put them down somewhere, visuals help so much. So whether it’s notes on your phone, it’s a posting, you’re gonna see every day, it’s a journal, I do kind of all the above of this, I always have them in the notes on my phone. I also put them in my journal like that’s where they’re started out right now. That’s what I did the other day when I was just kind of sitting with these and getting lists started. And then you need to keep them front of mind. So ideally, I did not review mine every day. But I’ve heard that as a tip too. And I’m going to try that this year. Just to like not a big dramatic thing. But when I do my morning prayer to just look at the list after so that I you know it’s front of mind I’m reminded what I’m shooting for this year, and that’s motivated that keeps you on, on task and on track. I also would encourage you as another tip to break them down into mini goals or micro goals. Lots of ways you can do this. And this is why to like, I wouldn’t make them a million per category, because you ideally should do this for every single goal. Say we’re back to the 50 pounds example, I want to lose 50 pounds by December 31, you would want to break that up into months. And then you’d want to break it up into weeks. Now, there’s other action steps that are gonna go with that, right, because you’re not going to lose the weight just by thinking about it. So you’re going to need to get on a nutrition plan or start incorporating workouts or work with somebody or whatever. But you are going to have micro goals that go along with it. Now like say last year, one of my examples was one of my goals was to read 23 books for the year. Now I know, for a fact. Okay, previous years. So this is now not like always a voracious reader. I’ve totally gone through seasons where I realized I think it was when I hit the two little ones that I was just not reading, like at all. And I love reading. I wasn’t reading fiction, I was reading nonfiction. I don’t know, I’ve probably always been reading nonfiction. But I go off and on with fiction because I get annoyed when I can’t find something new when I start a book and have to put it down and whatever. But I do I think I’ve always enjoyed nonfiction books, even in that rotation. But still, I there have been times where I’ve been like, Okay, I’ve read three books this whole year. Now, probably two years ago, I was realizing I was not reading that much. And thought like, I can definitely bring this back. Like I feel like I have no time but I could do this. And last year set the goal to read 23 books, and I blew it out of the water, I probably read at least 50 I was just, it was more like I needed a goal to stop reading so much last year, because it’s like, you know, was like neglecting other things to finish a book and staying up late like reading all through the night, those kinds of things that have I told you, I’m an all or nothing person like yeah, that’s that’s what happened here with that. But say that goal, okay, say I was setting the goal to read 24 books this year, which I’m not. But say that was the goal, I would want to break that down then to that’s a pretty easy one to do. Because there’s 12 months in the year, that’s two books a month, if I have to read. So under personal I’d write read 24 books, then I would write down read two books a month, that’s super easy to track, that’s super easy to keep friend of mine, you could go as far at the start of the year as assigning your two books to the month for the entire year, if you already have a whole like list that you want to get through, or just that kind of fun the start of each month, like picking your books that you’re going to like I’m going to read these two, it helps keep us on track. Okay, and then from there, I would like I said about the looking at your goals daily, which I didn’t do, what I do already do and will continue to is to look at them quarterly. So during February, March and March, checking in on your goals, and April, May June, checking in on your goals, end of June, and so on and so forth, to see where you’re at. See, again, what needs to be eliminated what needs to be added what you smashed out of the park and you could up level, you know, if you totally met all your personal goals for the year or your say like your spiritual, one of your spiritual goals was to read two spiritual books to spiritual reading things. And you’ve already read them, you could change that you could add something different, you know, there’s total flexibility in this. So I encourage you to at least look over these quarterly. Alright, so without further ado, the best I got for the coming year. So like I said, I just spent a little quiet time in the morning doing this. I didn’t do the personnel yet. So that was the category that I was missing. I have a running bucket list of things that I want to do, I don’t call it a bucket list. But I put essentially the exact same thing. Things to do before I die. It’s probably the most boring list you’ve ever read. But for example, it’s like, make wine. What else is on there like things that were on there that I’ve done or like learn how to do sourdough, learn how to hand letter, whatever, then many of these things I’m mediocre at, which leads me to actually, I’ll talk about that in a second. Probably what my personal will look like this year. But it’s a very boring list. But I’ve listed probably like at least 30 things on there. So I pull from there each year to make sure I’m like doing these things and learning things and having fun things to focus on quilting is on there. That is definitely not going to make it on for this year because they don’t have a sewing machine. Currently I gave mine to my niece. I do not have the time energy or like I will not have the time and energy with a newborn to learn to quilt that’s down the road. If anybody wants to teach me how to quilt I would love that. Let’s do it. I’ll bring the coffee or the wine whatever time of day it is. But that one’s not going on personal this year. So you know that it can be fun things for that category. So I can’t share that with you today because I have no idea what I’m doing there. But I’m actually I have a kind of an idea but spiritual. I put daily scripture reading and reading five spiritual books. So this past year I cheered like well wrote really well for me was making sure I had daily silent prayer time, and a daily rosary. And on the whole, those went well. So they don’t need to be a goal anymore, that should just stay in the rotation. And then I can add different things in have different goals. Physical, I did write on here to get back to my pre baby weight. And I think it’s attainable because I have pretty much an entire year to do it. And that’s pretty much always been. The benchmark for me is I’ve talked about this a lot on postpartum episodes, but that it feels like an uphill battle for me to lose fat while breastfeeding until about nine months. And then nine to 12, I start getting some traction, and about 12, I usually start feeling a little more like myself, this is baby number four, and it might take longer, but I would love to end the year of 2024. Feeling back to my normal weight range,
ideally, normal body fat range, but I’ll still probably be breastfeeding right up to the end of the year, Lord willing there. So you know, it is what it is, we’ll see. But I did want you to know and be transparent that I put that on the list because I talk a lot about performance goals. And I don’t really have, the only other goal I put in there is to move daily, that might surprise you, I don’t have other performance goals on there. Because the postpartum recovery takes a while and with each subsequent baby, it takes longer and longer. So I’m not going to put a physical goal on there, like or performance goal in there, like doing five pull ups again, or running 20 miles or whatever, because I don’t know what the recovery is going to look like. And I don’t want to put those kinds of benchmarks on there. I do know that I can, you know, lose fat while breastfeeding, if I’m paying attention to it. So that did go on there. And again, in transparency of I do talk a lot about performance. And like, Oh, is that extra matter, but I do, you know, prioritize getting back to ideal, and healthy body weight and body fat too. And I’ve talked about this before. So I want to show you that I do practice what I preach of, you know, when you’re having babies and babies and babies, the compounding effect of the weight is difficult when you give a big time gap and getting it off. So I think it’s a balance of wanting to get quote unquote, the weight off not as quickly as you can but you know, with some urgency, but also not, you know, being a maniac and treating mistreating your body in the process or, you know, you guys know what I mean? So it is on the list for me as well as moving daily have got some business goals on there. And then family, I did write on here, which is funny because even since I wrote the list, I was like, Okay, I actually don’t feel bad about this anymore. Under family of weekly net, this is not the one reading aloud more. And then weekly, daily mass. Now reading loud, more is not a great goal. So it’s not very specific, I need to say like daily read alouds actually didn’t put in parentheses daily. So there you go daily read aloud, and then weekly daily Mass now, I was in a good groove of going to daily mass with the kids one day a week, not daily, one day a week. That was a big win for me. And it has since fizzled as the I don’t know why I actually have no excuse for it. But it has fizzled and I need to get back to it. Because I know with a newborn, it’s just going to become more of an excuse for me to not do it. And I want to do it. So that’s kind of be in there. But the funny one of the more reading aloud daily is once I wrote this, I was I wasn’t you know, this was in my reflection about homeschooling. And I was like you know what, Britt like? You never read aloud to them blah, blah. And I was like yes, I do every single day with morning time. It’s just not always sit down, read a bunch of picture books and things like that. It’s a lot more like we read science, we read catechism like we do read a lot. So I am getting more intentional even at recording with this, which is before the New Year with reading specific cute little board books with my two year old and stuff like the Sandra Boynton once we like pulled those back out. We’re like, oh, yeah, you’ll think these are funny now that kind of thing. But I’m not beating myself up that much about the spunks life is just changing and seasons. And turns out we do read to our kids. But um, yeah, and then I, you again, might want to listen back to other episodes, because I’ve had others that have been, I think might have even had like a marriage category. And it’s one of those things that I know, in no way think that we’re doing things perfectly or that we’ve arrived in any of these things. But that once something is a routine or as a habit, they don’t need to take up space on my list anymore. So like, for example, there was a time a couple years ago, I realized we were not doing regular date nights. And we wanted to have those in so under like family, your spouse or whatever. We had weekly date nights in there, and we had like a joint prayer thing. So that was when we started doing our theology nights one night a week and doing date nights. Most Saturday nights unless one of us has like that’s what we do is Saturday nights at home date night, very occasionally. like twice a year, right now, which could stand to go up out of the house date nights. But and then we find another night if some of like we have a girls night or a guy’s night or some other obligation, but like, these things are already pillars in our lives. Now, we always have weekly date night, we always most days, pray the rosary, I always or whatever, like drink 80 to 100 ounces of water every day. So those don’t need to be on the list. And that’s the idea is to challenge ourselves a little bit to grow in the areas we think are important are worth it and make sure like it’s it’s even valuable to you if you’re just throwing it on the list because like oh no everyone’s reading I’ll throw like read books on there. But you don’t personally love reading or it fits your life better to listen audiobooks sometimes or listen to podcasts, sometimes like this and short snippets, that’s fine, like find something that does fit that is exciting to I’ve also shared before that I tried to make these goals like especially the personal ones. Oh, that’s what I was gonna say my personal I pull things from my list, right that are random things I want to learn before I die, ideally. But I’m a huge starter and not a huge finisher. So there’s a lot of things that I will do for 20 seconds and become mediocre at and then move on to the next thing like I have super shiny object syndrome where your shiny object over there, okay, squirrel over there, you know, I will walk into Hobby Lobby and decide I’m gonna all of a sudden make jewelry and vile stuff to make jewelry and I make like half an earring and then I’m done. And I’m on to the next thing that’s a fault of mine. So this year, I didn’t write these down, and I will. But in the personal category, I just want to get better at a couple of the things that I have going. Like, I do have basic knowledge, ability, whatever you want to call it for handlettering sounds on my goal is couple years ago, but it’s like very, very probably my six year old will pass me so in it. Okay. So I could stand to focus more on that designate more time to that. I could, you know, I know how a couple variations of sourdough I want to get into more like interesting loaves, cuter scoring, that kind of stuff. So I am looking to enhance things have already taken on more than just add add add. Alright, I hope this was helpful. I hope it was fun to you today. I always have fun being with y’all. And next episode, we’re going to talk about five tips for getting back on track after the holidays. It is going to be our first episode of 2024. So seems appropriate. All right, I will talk to you then have a great rest of your day. And also don’t forget if you are looking into what your plan is going to be for 2024 to go check out all of those options on my website. All right, talk to you next time.

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