Hey there and welcome to season two of the Worthy to Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristiana Corona, and I'm really excited that you decided to join us again. I want to kick off this season by talking about something vulnerable, but it's probably very relatable to many people. We're going to talk about what to do when you fall off the wagon with your habits or goals that you set for yourself.
So let's say in January, we start off the new year with lots of enthusiasm, ready to do big things. But most of us follow a pretty predictable curve when it comes to motivation. And according to one study, only about 6 to 9 % of people follow through on their New Year's resolutions each year. Not 69%, that's 6 to 9%. So it's far more likely that within a month or two, we'll be feeling a bit dissatisfied with our progress and we'll have to make some uncomfortable decisions like,
Do I keep going with this? This year, instead of being part of the 90 % or more of people who quit on their goals entirely, I want to offer an alternative. What if you could find a consistent and reliable way to get yourself back on track, no matter what? What if you could use this approach to tackle any goal at any time? Today's episode is full of strategies to reset your mind and help you get back on track.
I've made a free downloadable guide called getting back on track, which will help you to take action on what we talk about today. And you can find it in the show notes for this episode at worthytoleadpodcast.com/13. Okay. Let's dive in.
So first I have a confession to make. I fell off the wagon with podcasting for a couple months. You maybe didn't notice, but I sure did.
I had made a commitment to myself to podcast two times a month. And then when life came up, as it always does, I let everything else take priority and I didn't do it. So here's what happened. I was doing great with the bi-weekly publishing of podcasts. It was a lot of work to produce, but it was giving me energy and it felt very aligned to my goals. Then a series of events happened. I started traveling more for work.
Then my husband's health took a hit and I needed to support him through those challenges. And then finally, I made the transition to going back to the office three days a week, which definitely added a long commute. And as someone who prides herself in problem solving, I thought, okay, these are just logistical problems. I can solve this. So I tried shifting my schedule around. I tried writing and recording podcasts on the weekends, early in the morning.
But surprise, surprise that didn't last very long. I tried doing it after everyone went to bed, but with the added driving in my days and my energy being depleted a lot faster from the commute, my tank was on empty. And once I got off track with one thing, I found all my other great habits started to spiral. The consistent workouts I was doing in the morning, eating well, planning ahead for my meals, getting sufficient sleep.
I found myself snoozing the alarm, rolling out of bed groggy and staring at my to-do list, wondering how in the world I had ever thought I could accomplish all of this, let alone be a podcaster on top of it. Trigger the shame cycle and lots of self judgment and disappointment. Getting started again seemed like such a huge mountain to climb. How was I ever going to get that momentum back?
So at this point, I just want to check in. Can anyone else identify with this story? Thankfully, this is not how the story ends because here I am podcasting again and we have lots more goodness coming. I did eventually get through the rough patch and rebuild my momentum. And today I'm going to share what I did to get out of that awful feeling of stuckness and to start moving forward.
I know that there some of you who are going through this very same shame cycle right now, and I do want to encourage you that you can get through it too. The most important thing that I looked for in my own thinking, and in the clients that I work with, is where are we taking a missed up or a failure and turning it into an identity statement? These statements sound like I never follow through.
I'll never be able to accomplish this. This is too hard. I might as well just give up.
When we have a self-sabotaging thought like that, it's really important to take a pause and notice it. There is great power in the statements that we tell ourselves. Limiting beliefs like these can put up invisible walls around us, cutting off our creativity and our sense of empowerment. And that is just going to ensure that we will stay stuck right where we are.
So how do we get a hold of our thoughts and stop turning every little slip up into an identity crisis that ends in failure? Well, first, we need to reset our expectations. The reality is we're never going to be perfect, and we don't live up to the ideal, nor should we expect to. Life is messy. Progress towards our goals does not go in a straight line, and it always takes longer than we think.
Sometimes we fall off the rails for very good reasons, things that are outside of our control. And if we go into a new habit or commitment, knowing that this will happen, we can mentally prepare ourselves and not use the ideal state as a measuring stick.
Kristiana Corona (06:17.304)
What is important is not that we fell off the rails, but it's about how we get back on track. Knowing that we will slip up, our goal instead of perfection is to strengthen the thoughts and habits that can help us bounce back faster. I would invite you to try this four step process to help you get back on track. I like to call it the four I's. Investigation, importance, integration. and inspiration.
So the first I, investigation, is talking about instead of rushing past the failure straight to judging ourselves or having a pity party with a bucket of ice cream, to rather to slow down and take a moment to inspect what happened, like an investigative journalist would. You know, what was it that triggered me to fall off? What changed in my environment? What was in my control and what was out of my control?
How did I react? And what is currently causing me discomfort about the situation? So as an example, in the case of my podcast rhythm getting derailed, what realities did I need to account for? Well, I fell off the wagon in podcasting because of circumstances beyond my control. And it's not what I wanted to happen, but that's life. And so I need to account for that.
My personal life is going to require more of my time than it did in the past. And that's a real constraint, which has nothing to do with my efficiency or ability to do good work.
Another insight is, the amount of time needed to produce podcasts is probably greater than the time that I have.
And finally, figuring out the logistics of going back to the office and managing real life was harder than I thought it would be. And I need to adjust my expectations about what is actually realistic in the time that I have. So just getting curious and seeking to understand all the factors and the perspectives of the situation can really provide some important insights. And we can start to see patterns in our thinking and our behavior that we may not have been aware of.
It can be helpful to do this exercise in writing so that we can come back to it again. And the next time something happens, we can look through this and understand how we can overcome that challenge.
Number two, the second I is importance. So once we have a clear picture of what happened, then we want to get honest with ourselves about the importance of this habit or goal. Do I want to get back on this particular track? What is important to me about it? This is sort of what is your why? And how does this connect to the person that I'm becoming?
If our why isn't strong enough, maybe this is an indicator that we wanna try something a little different. We don't wanna waste energy chasing a goal that we don't care about. If this isn't something that's leading us to the person that we wanna become, then maybe it's a distraction and we're better served not spending time on it. For me, sharing leadership insights and coaching with this community is deeply important and it's something that I wanna do even more of.
So coming face to face with having to give that up was a good reminder for me to double down and find a way through the challenge. If you care deeply about a goal but can't imagine starting to do the same thing again exactly the same way, this is where you can start to tweak and experiment with things differently.
So that leads us to number three, which is our third I, integration. James Clear, who is one of my favorite psychologists and author of the book, Atomic Habits, has some great tips on building sustainable habits into our lives. Here's a few things that have always stuck with me. The first thing is break it into smaller pieces.
If we can make it less effort and make it easier, we are more likely to stick with it. So for example, I used this when I started the podcast because I had no idea what I was doing. So I signed up for Jenna Kutcher's Podcast Lab, which is an online course. And it gave me the step by step process for how to set up the technology, what the platforms were, the services to use, how to produce it.
This saved me so much time and wasted energy and it took the overwhelm out of learning something new. So whenever you can have that step-by-step process or find a way to make it less effort by learning from someone who's already done it or just breaking it into simpler steps, this is always a win.
One of my favorite podcasts is called Let It Be Easy by Susie Moore. And something that she teaches is that instead of thinking about how hard something is going to be, she teaches us to trick our brain by asking, what if this was easy? What if this was fun? And it immediately takes the weight off and gets us into brainstorming mode and into this place of positivity and excitement.
And it just shifts all the energy from like, my goodness, this thing's going to be so hard to do. It's so many steps. It takes me so long to imagining it being fun and easy. What would you do differently?
What are small ways you can reduce the friction, reduce the steps and make it feel easy on yourself? The more you do, the more likely it is that you're going to stick with it.
The second piece that James Clear talks about is making it visible. And I have a great example of this. I love this story. So, my teenage son is currently in culinary arts class and he's learning how to cook. He's learning how to use all the different tools in the kitchen and how to organize everything. And he comes home one day and he's like, mom, in order to be an efficient cook in the kitchen, you need to have everything mis en place.
And I was like, okay. Well, he taught me the French term, mis en place, is about having everything in place. And so if you set up your cooking and everything that you're doing and put out all the ingredients and the utensils and the tools that you're going to need and have it right there, it is much more likely you're going to be successful and that you're going to actually complete the activity. And so as you think about that from a habit standpoint, you know, giving yourself a time and space to set things up in advance.
So whether that might be laying your clothes out before you work out or putting your equipment near where you're going to be doing the thing. Like each little moment where you're doing this preparation, you are reducing the friction in the actual moment of doing that activity and doing that habit.
Another example is, let's say, a visual reminder. So you might put out a photo. You might have an inspiring quote, you might put post-its. Like I mentioned, you might put your workout clothes so you can see them first thing in the morning. There's tons of examples of this, but essentially when you make it visible and you put things in their place, then all of that friction is reduced.
One of the ways that I did this for my podcast was by really putting my office in order. So having all of my equipment ready to go, having it set up nearby, there was zero friction. I could just plug everything right in and I didn't have to wonder like, where are my headphones? Where's my microphone? Do I have everything I need? It was just right there. Super easy.
Another example is to pair an existing habit with either something you love or something you already do. So in this example, like maybe if you're doing something but you don't really love it or you're not motivated to do it, add music. If you can make something more beautiful, how could you take something and add beauty or joy to doing something simple?
Like maybe you just need something colorful around you. How might you turn it into a fun game so that it feels like you're being rewarded for doing this thing? One of my favorite things about pairing is that you can trick yourself into saying like, I love doing cardio by pairing it with watching your favorite show or listening to a great podcast or audio book.
Maybe for you, it's like finding new flavors. So, you know, if you're gonna drink a shake every morning or something like that, how do you pair those flavors differently? How do you offer yourself variety so that you continue to stay interested? So I think this is really helpful, especially when you're thinking about adding something new to your life.
And if you at some point in time have some sort of negative association, like I don't like it, it's hard, reinventing that by adding something beautiful or fun or joyful or interesting. or something else you already love to do or something else you're already doing just to make that whole thing feel more enjoyable so you start to look forward to it, that can be a really big shift.
And then finally, building the habit into your calendar instead of creating a deadline for your goal. So say, you wanted to lose weight or something like that and you had this deadline or this number, it's really much less important to have a big end goal or end deadline. That puts a lot of pressure on us to get it right and to not lose our step along the way.
But what James Clear talks about is it's much more important to build a habit into your calendar and to have regular time and talk about like, is the daily discipline around what I'm doing here? And how many times am I doing it? And so as you're measuring your success, thinking about consistency over, you know, having a final deadline and have I made that deadline yet? In fact, James Clear has a fun app. I don't know if you've tried it. It's called Atoms and it's free that you can start using just to track daily habits.
And it's a fun way that alongside some of his articles and tips, you can really start building that into your life in a simple way. And I love the app because it just has really simple visuals and it's got some haptics in it that make it fun. It vibrates. so it's just a little bit of joy and a little spark when you're thinking about tracking your progress.
And then finally, I would say one of the most helpful things that I have found is finding an accountability buddy. So, you know, we show up when there's homework or an expectation of showing up. So for example, if you have a trainer, you are much more likely to do your workouts because you don't want to go there and have that trainer say, you didn't do anything. If you are podcasting, you have an accountability to your audience. Like you want to show up. People are expecting to hear from you. And so it's good to have that accountability. If you have a teacher, you're much more likely to turn in your assignment or your test than if you didn't.
And then from a coaching perspective, this is another area where if you need accountability and you feel like you just need that extra push or that extra momentum, getting an executive coach or a professional coach can really help you create that added commitment that you may not have otherwise to your goals.
So as I worked through the tweaks and the experiments that I wanted to make with my podcast journey, I ended up really looking at ways to become more efficient. And some of those ways were getting support and getting help with the production, with getting help with putting social media posts out, finding ways to streamline the process or templatize the process.
There were just a lot of ways where I was being inefficient in the way that I was doing it. Like I was being too perfectionistic. I was trying to make everything super unique when really I could take one thing, reuse it. For example, if I had a transcript or I had show notes, you know, taking those notes and using AI to make them more efficient, break them down, use them in different ways. So there's just a lot of ways in which we don't have to do everything the hard way.
And so as I was reflecting on my own process and what was making it feel hard, I recognized that there were several opportunities within the flow itself where I could take things and really dramatically reduce the time. And so that's what I've been doing this year. And I'm so grateful that I didn't give up. I'm so grateful that I stuck with it and really started to think about, you know, habits along the way that could make me successful and make this sustainable.
All right, so the final category, an I, is inspiration. So when we find ourselves measuring our success against an impossible ideal or against everyone that we see around us, we always feel like we come up short, right? So rather than measuring ourselves against a future goal, we can instead measure ourselves against our past progress. So what have you already done that's inspired you?
In Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy's book, The Gap and the Gain, they talk about how living in the gap is about measuring your performance by looking ahead of you and seeing the big gap between where you are and where you want to be. The gap shows you the ways that you're failing and falling short of your standards or the standards of everyone else.
On the other hand, if you're living in the gain, which is about looking at your past performance, and all the places where you've already experienced growth and success, studying and celebrating those past successes help you to rewrite your story and then to see the right path forward. It also provides a lot more motivation towards your current goal because you're constantly reminding yourself of your own capability instead of the ways that you are deficient.
So if I was measuring my podcast goal in the gap, so that would be measuring against my future goal, I would be really focused on my goal of producing podcasts two times a month. And the fact that I did not live up to the standards that I wanted for myself. I would be comparing myself to other podcasters who are producing weekly and saying, I will never live up to them, you know, and feeling defeated. But if I instead measure success based on my past performance, I could look at the last seven months or eight months of podcasting and say, during that time,
I learned how to write, to edit, produce podcasts, which I had never done before. Now I have that skill set. I learned all the technology and how to make it work to put a podcast out in the world across multiple channels, which is complicated, but I figured it out. I've created 12 episodes that did not exist before. And I have gained so many amazing connections by putting these messages out into the community.
And it has just expanded. My network has expanded in ways that I could never have imagined. And it is such a net positive thing for my life. So do you see how different it feels to measure backwards versus celebrating your progress as you go? It's just so much more inspiring and optimistic. And so that is why we can really thrive and grow to become our best when we measure backwards versus measuring forwards.
That's it folks. There you have it. That's my four step process for getting back on track. Investigation, importance, integration, and inspiration. So to sum up, we all fall off the rails and we need to stop beating ourselves up. Instead, we can slow down and inspect what happened like an investigative journalist to identify the trigger or the root cause for why the habits stopped.
We can ask ourselves how important this habit was and whether or not it still aligns to our goals. Then we can start experimenting with tweaks that we can make the next time around to be more successful. Do we need to make it easier? Do we need to integrate it better into our life or make it more visible? How can we make it more fun? And who will be our accountability buddy?
And finally, instead of dwelling in the gap or the failure, we can measure our success by looking backwards and seeing all that we've accomplished and can be proud of. And this will motivate us and inspire us and remind us of our own capability.
If you need more help or accountability in staying consistent with your goals and habits, or overcoming the mental blocks or spiral of shame that are happening when you fall off the rails, please come talk to me. I would love to help coach you towards becoming the person that you want to be and finding habits that stick.
I hope you enjoyed this episode and got a few ideas for how you can work through failure and get back on track. The show notes and the resources for this episode, as well as the free downloadable guide can be found at worthytoleadpodcast.com/13. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to subscribe so that you get all the new episodes as I release them. You can subscribe at worthytoleadpodcast.com forward/subscribe.
And I would really love it if you would share this with your friends and any other leaders in your life who need to hear these messages. With that, I wish you all a wonderful day and best wishes on your journey to being the worthy leaders I know you are. Bye for now.
