Ep.34: Career, Money, Health...Making Multiple Big Changes at Once

Setting one goal and going after it with laser-focus is usually what most coaches tell us to do. Even if you have multiple goals/resolutions/things you want to achieve or change (which many of us do), a one-at-a-time approach is usually considered the best approach. But that’s not how I like to achieve my (multiple) goals or coach my clients to achieve theirs. In this episode I’ll walk you through the Phased Approach to setting and achieving multiple goals, and introduce you to a new 1:1 coaching opportunity I’m offering for those of you who want to go all in on yourselves this year. It’s 2025…what are you waiting for?

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the I'm the Problem podcast, and Happy New Year. As I record this episode, it is January 2nd or 3rd. I've sort of lost track because it's that week where no one knows what's going on and what day it is.

I love New Years. I know a lot of people kind of roll their eyes or go to bed earlier. We get sort of jaded after a couple of like lame New Year's Eve's in our 20s or whatever and we're just like, never mind, we're not doing this anymore and we don't care. But I actually really love New Year's. I love a clean slate. I love a chance to like look back at the past and sort of see what worked and then really focus on the future, set new goals, make new lists, all of those things. I love all of that, which is probably not surprising, seeing as I'm a life coach. But I really do love the opportunity to do that. And New Year's really is a great opportunity to do that. I'm excited to be recording this episode in particular, because this episode is, it's about making changes in the new year.

It's also just about making big changes in your life at this time or at any time in the year. You can, of course, make changes in your life at any time. It's mostly about what do you do when you have a bunch of things in life that you want to change, a bunch of big pivots that you want to make. How do you prioritize that? How do you move forward with all of them? How do you make all the changes you want to make at the same time? So we're going to dive into that right now and then at the end of the episode I'm also going to give you a little more information on a new coaching package I have called The Power Pivot. It is a one-year program that addresses multiple different goals. So if you are somebody with goals in a number of areas in your life and you're not quite sure how to prioritize or begin to address them, this episode is gonna help you with that. You can also check out The Power Pivot if you're interested in diving deep into one-on-one coaching on any and all of your goals in the year ahead.

All right, so with that, let's get started. So when we're talking about goal setting in the new year or honestly any time of year, most of the goals that my clients work on and frankly most of the goals that I work on at a very high level come in at one of four categories, career, health, wealth, or relationships. Anything else that seems more on the personal growth, personal development side of things, which is certainly an area people want to work on. Any personal development work you want to do, any personal changes, let's say you want to just be, you know, more grateful or more mindful or have more patience with your kids or have more confidence, anything like that, all of that work will come out inevitably when you are working on those bigger goals, even if that's not your intention. And that will certainly happen if you're working with a coach or working intentionally on that. If you're not paying attention, what will likely happen is that you'll go to make your career pivot, or you'll go to change your savings habits, or you'll go to change your diet, or you'll go to improve your relationship with your partner. And even if things work, it won't work sustainably, it will be much harder to get there and it'll be much harder to hang on to the changes that you've made if you haven't done the mindset work underneath it.

So I wanted to mention that because as we walk through today's episode and any other work you and I might do together or any work you might do on your own, it's just important to keep that in mind that making big changes in any of these four areas is really key but it's not sustainable unless you've got some personal development work under it, which is the whole reason I created The Power Pivot program in the first place. So career, wealth, health, and relationships, those are the four areas that most people come to me for coaching in. So think right now about the things that you want to change in your life. It's likely if you have one goal, you probably have a couple others. And if you can imagine sort of career, wealth, health, and relationships in like a Venn diagram with four circles, there's like a certainly overlap. So money and career tend to overlap pretty heavily in terms of changing one impacts the other. And then career and health tends to overlap because again, changing one can impact the other. And you can sort of see how each of these circles tends to impact the other one.

So it's not surprising that these are the four big areas that people come to coaching for because these areas, if you change one thing, they likely have a domino effect on other areas of your life. Even if you aren't somebody who wants to change all four areas, it's very likely that there's some relationship to the things that you want to change and those other areas. So if you're very happy in your personal relationship, that's great. And you want to change your career. Okay, I can totally see that. But also, if you change your career, that might impact your personal relationship. Or maybe it won't impact your immediate home life, but maybe it impacts your social life with friends, right? Maybe your career is going to actually require you to move, and you're going to be further away from your current social circle. And how is that going to work? And again, you can see how all of these things are related. If you're somebody who has big desires to make changes in two or more of those areas, so you want to change, you want to lose a bunch of weight, and you want to change your career, or you want to pay off all your debt, and you want to start eating a vegan diet. If you're like the typical person, including myself, you're going to think, okay, I want to change everything at once. I'm going to start off with my hair on fire in January running towards all of these changes that I want to make, all of these pivots. And obviously, we logically know that that usually doesn't work and certainly doesn't work sustainably to dramatically change everything in your life, right? Or to aggressively go after multiple goals at once. That doesn't stop many of us from still doing that, even if we know it hasn't worked for us in the past. But if you are somebody like that, especially if you're somebody who's done this in the past, it would be helpful to stop and think about, is that the approach I wanna take again this year? And if it hasn't worked in the past, what would be different this year?

I have had coaches in the past tell me, only tackle one goal at a time. And once you complete that goal, you can move on to the rest. I have had other coaches that believe in tackling and attacking multiple goals at the same time. And I've got still other coaches, I've had a lot of coaches, that talk about a more phased approach. That last one, the more phased approach, is the approach that I have found to be the most successful for myself, and I've also found it to be the most successful for my clients. And so I'm going to focus on that for the rest of this episode.

So let's say you are somebody, if you look at career, health, wealth, and relationships, and you think like, okay, my relationships are in pretty good shape. I've got a good group of friends. I've got pretty good relationships with my extended family, my parents, and like my immediate family, my partner, my kids. We're overall, I'm pretty happy in that area. However, we're in a lot of debt and I want to figure out how to get out of it. And also, I'm really unhappy in my career. I feel like I'm just hitting a wall and I can't advance the way I want to. And also, I've been carrying around 15 extra pounds for the last few years and I just can't seem to get it off. So I just want to change all of this this year. So I'm setting a goal to lose 15 pounds, to get a new job and to pay off our debt. So if this is you, if you have these multiple goals like that, first and foremost, there's absolutely nothing wrong with having multiple goals and certainly there's nothing wrong with believing that you can accomplish all of those goals, particularly if you're giving yourself a healthy runway. Twelve months, a full year, is an awful lot of time and you can change an awful lot of things in a year. We can really get excited and I think you should try and get excited about the idea that accomplishing multiple goals at once is possible.

However, what I've found to be the most strategic way to do that is to choose one of those goals, get the party started on that one, get yourself somewhat down the road, and then once you are into a rhythm or into a routine with that goal, then you can build on the second goal. Then after that, when you're in a routine with that one and you're feeling like you're in good shape with the first one, then you can build on a third one if you want.

So let's break down what that might look like. Let's say in the example I gave, we've got somebody who wants to change their career, lose 15 pounds, and also pay off debt. And we decided we're gonna do this in a phased approach. Okay? So the first question that comes up is, okay, well, if it's a phased approach, like which one are we doing first? And there's two things I want you to keep in mind here. Number one is remembering that just because you're starting one goal, it doesn't mean you completely neglect or go ham on the others, right? So if you decided, you know what, I'm going to start with the weight loss goal and I'm going to put off the career and a money goal for a while. Okay, that's fine, but that doesn't mean that you completely take your foot off the gas at work and like torpedo your career or like don't bother ever looking on LinkedIn just to see what's out there until your weight loss goal is moved along or doesn't mean that you continue to run up the credit cards or keep overspending because you know you're going to fix it down the road. Like I'll get to that. That's goal three and I'll get to that in six months. You know, I'm not going to worry about that now, or I'm not going to worry about that until I've lost a few pounds. And you know this. Imagine you've got like an old school radio with like multiple dials, and you just want to turn up the volume on the weight loss dial while leaving the other dials as they are for right now.

So what this looks like practically is I am going to focus on my weight loss goal. I'm going to set a goal to lose 15 pounds by the end of the year. And the way I'm going to do that is you break down the action items that you know you want to take. And there's many, many ways to do this. I'm eating, you know, dessert every night. I'm going to immediately stop doing that or I'm going to start working out more, whatever the actions are that you want to take to get you to that weight loss goal, right? Maybe it is hire a weight loss coach. You make the decision that that's your first goal. You want to focus on that. You write up the action plan for that, okay?

And alongside, asterisk here, that action plan, I really hope you're also setting up some sort of way to check in with yourself mentally and emotionally and some sort of way to work on the mindset side of things. Because without the mindset side of things, it's very, very hard to sustainably change habits. So with that, you start by attacking your weight loss goal and you work on that until you feel like you're seeing progress that you want to see. What that means is different for different people. So for some people, that's losing half the weight before you move on to a second goal. For some people, that's just losing a couple of pounds. It doesn't really matter. You just decide for yourself, you know in your body when you start to feel like okay. I'm in a rhythm. I'm in a routine I've noticed like oh I used to eat dessert every night I don't anymore and I don't even think about it right or oh I woke up the other day and didn't I haven't weighed myself in forever and I stepped on the scale and I did see I lost weight or oh I am down a pant size or whatever it is and it starts to feel once your new habits, your actions start to feel normal and routine for you, once you're feeling calm around them all, once you're doing them sort of on autopilot, meaning that it's not a stress to you to make these changes in your life, but you're making them because you genuinely want to and you're doing the mindset work behind them, great. You have some momentum there. You have some rhythm there. So when that's happening, that is the time to ride the momentum for other goals that you have.

So at that point, you're feeling like it's becoming somewhat effortless to meet this goal. Now I'm ready to take on another goal. It doesn't mean I'm ignoring my weight loss goal, but it doesn't need quite the hyper focus that I've been giving it. So I'm going to move on to my second goal, which is paying off the debt. So you're keeping an eye on the first one, but you're actually putting more energy now and turning up the volume on that second one. And then it's same for the third one. So as you move forward in your goal, and maybe you've even got a fourth one towards the end of the year. So that's how you do the phased approach.

Now the thing I want you to focus on in addition to not letting the phased approach be an excuse to go crazy on the goals that you're not yet focused on, I want to really emphasize how you go about selecting the goal because you might also have a couple of goals under career or a couple of goals under money. Let's say you want to like pay off your mortgage and do a kitchen remodel. Like you might have a couple of goals that you want to do under each category or you might think gosh you know what the weight loss goal and the relationship goal are both so important to me and I'm not sure which one I want to do first. How do I prioritize that way? Rather than get stuck and overwhelmed and try and race forward and do all of them at once, which is what we have a tendency to do, you want to take this phased approach. Choosing what order in which to start working on each goal is pretty straightforward. I want you to sit down, write out your list of goals, and then ask yourself, which one of these is the most exciting? Which one of these sounds like it's the most fun? Which is the one that to use kind of like woo-wee coachy terms but like which one of these lights me up the most? Which one of these gets me the most excited? And it doesn't matter what it is and it doesn't matter why. And the reason is whatever your emotion is that is what drives your actions. Okay your feelings drive your actions and your actions drive your results. So, if you have the feeling of fun and excitement about a goal, that is going to translate into taking a lot more actions than feelings of like dread or anticipation or insecurity or I don't know if I can do this. If something feels fun and light and energizing, you're going to be a lot more likely to take actions and take a lot of actions and continuing to take action when things aren't working, that's what's going to get you the results that you want. So it also helps because when you start to see results, it can really have a snowball effect, right? You start to, you see a few results and then you can get excited and you can build on that momentum.

It's also really why the phased approach works and it also, and this also happens when you're just focusing on one goal where it's like you see that you've saved a little bit of money and it feels so good that you start wanting to save more, just to watch that bank account grow. Any goal that you have, breaking it down into smaller parts that are achievable and then letting yourself achieve that, celebrate those wins and build on that, that momentum is hugely important to carry you forward, particularly when you have a goal that spans a long amount of time, like a 12-month goal.

So that's why it's really important to have goals that get you excited and light you up. You're gonna see success faster when that's the energy you're approaching with. You're gonna handle failure and setbacks, which are inevitable. You're gonna handle those a lot better. You're gonna get back up again and keep trying things more often. You're gonna start to see results faster. And the results that you see are gonna be momentum that you need to help you keep going forward. So that's another really important element of the phased approach.

Okay, so that's it. It's not overly complicated and I just wanted to say this because if you're at all like me and you have multiple goals that you want to accomplish, I don't want you to get frustrated by thinking you can only focus on one at a time. You certainly can set multiple goals and this phased approach to doing this is one way that again I found very helpful for myself and my clients as I've accomplished multiple things in the time span of a year as have many of my clients. And that's all the reason I created this program called The Power Pivot. So The Power Pivot is aimed at one year of full transformation. So if you are somebody that has multiple goals that you want to dive deep into the coaching mindset, personal development work of it all, this program might be a really good fit for you. So it's a year-long program where you work one-on-one with me and we work together in this phased approach. We're looking at attacking three to four goals, likely under those categories that I just noted, so career, health, wealth, or relationships, and mapping those out for the year. We'll select them together, we'll prioritize them, and we'll work on developing the phased approach together so that you start right away addressing one goal while still, again, maintaining or even quietly adjusting the others. But we really focus on one, and once there's momentum to one, then we pick up the second and then the third, and then if you have a fourth, we do that as well. So we map that out together and we work together one on one for a year and we do this so that you get to the end of your calendar year having made significant movement in those four areas of your life. The whole goal is I'm really looking to work with people that really want to dedicate themselves to making massive change in their lives in multiple areas. And if that's you, if you're interested in working with a coach, in making big changes in multiple areas, if you're willing to do the work over the course of a year, and if I would love to be with you on that journey.

So you can find out more information over at makeyourpivot.co under the Coach With Me tab and you can sign up for a consult where we can talk through what this program is, what your goals are, and if this is a fit for you. I also have another package on there, so we might get on the phone and we might decide, you know what, like it actually doesn't make sense, you want to accomplish things faster or your goals are more narrow. There are some shorter term packages I offer that we can discuss too. But if this is something that's at all piquing your curiosity and you are interested, let's get on a call and we can talk it through. I also do offer payment plans and we can talk about all of those options on the consult call as well.

So that's what I have for you today. I hope that this idea of a phased approach has started to get you excited if you're somebody that wants to attack multiple goals in the year. And I do hope that if you're interested in making big change in your life this year, if you really are ready to dive in and do the work, that you sign up for a consult and we can talk one-on-one about the Power Pivot and see if this is a fit for you. All right so once again happy new year and I will chat with you guys on the next episode.