Goals Without Guilt: The Mindset Shift Every Mom Needs

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:00]:

For me, it has been so powerful to say I am on a journey of losing £10. I don't know if that will take me eight weeks, 18 weeks, or 28 weeks. I don't know. Because the context that that goal has to live in is changing all of the time.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:00:18]:

I'm a small town kid, born with a big city spirit. I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life. Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, and mentor. Seventeen years ago, I founded a marketing consult. And ever since, my husband JR and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline. Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered I could purposefully embrace all of these ands in my life, it unlocked my world. And I want that for you too.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:00:53]:

I'm Tiffany Sauder and this is Scared Confident.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:01:00]:

Hey there. And welcome back to another episode of Scared Confident, the podcast where we tackle the big, beautiful challenges of life and try to do it all, you know, live this life of. And I'm Tiffany Souder, and today we are going to dive into a topic that is really personal to me. And I think in this season of just the first quarter and fresh starts and sort of in the new year and goal setting, whether you're doing that in your personal life with your family or inside of work in lots of different places, I had this big epiphany that I want to unpack with you in this episode where I started to realize, I actually think that there's a part of goal setting in my personal life that I've learned in my professional life that does not apply in my personal life. And when I put that ingredient in my personal life and in my goals, it actually turns into this, like, failure cycle that creates this, like. I don't know why the word sabotage is coming up, but I think the failure sabotages my intentions. And then I get back to restart mode. And being back at the beginning over and over and over and over and over again is exhausting.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:02:08]:

It's exhausting. So I want to unpack that with you today. And I know if you're listening to the show that you are an ambitious person who is literally trying to fit everything and the kitchen sink into life. It is the Rubik's Cube that I am so obsessed with solving for. And so I think we're gonna have a big epiphany here today as we kind of unpack this. So if you are somebody who embraces pressure, needs some flexibility, is trying to get a lot of things happen into, like, the fast current of life. I had lunch the other day with a guy I work with at Element Three, and he has six kids. We have four, obviously.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:02:43]:

And I said, I know what your life looks like. The current is moving fast every day. Every single day. The current is moving quickly because you've got kids with a lot going on. You've got a big career that's taking you a lot of places. You've got your marriage that you're working on. Like, the current is just moving quickly. And I know yours does too.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:03:00]:

I know it. If you are attracted to the show, I know it is. So, okay, let's get started. I want to start with kind of this backdrop, at least for me, that I think we all kind of learned that construct of goal setting through this construct of smart goals. Right? Smart goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Is that right, Sam? Is it relevant? Okay, she's here with me, and I'm like, did I get that right? The T is what I really want to talk about. Being specific, I think, is really important.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:03:31]:

I talk about moving things from implicit expectations, something that's implied a lot of times. I think we as women will say, I need more me time. And my question to you is always going to be, what does that mean? And then somebody will say something like a hobby. And I say, okay, what does that mean? And they'll say, I want to read more. I'll say, okay, what does that mean? It's like, I want to read. When? How much? What? Like, how do you make it explicit? Because saying I need more me time is like this big gushy thing that you can't actually activate around and you can't articulate to your spouse, here's what I want. And you can't share with your kids. This is how I feel seen and loved is if I have time to do these things, it just becomes this thing that, like, becomes this implied weapon between you and everybody who's trying to do life with you.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:04:23]:

Because you're just carrying around this, like, big moldy turd of I need more me time, you know? And it's like, nobody knows what to do with it. And actually you don't either, right? And so when we move something from being very implicit, this kind of big squishy thing, to being very explicit, it's very powerful. Start somewhere. Last night I was with a group of about 50 women just sharing life event, just content with them. I was speaking and I had a woman say, I want to write a children's book, that was the thing that she wanted to have time for. And I said, that's amazing. How do you activate around that? Because maybe you could write the whole thing one day and illustrate it and publish it, but probably not. And I was like, how do you break that down into something very explicit? Like I'm going to spend 10 minutes, two days a week working on my children's book.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:05:08]:

In 10 minutes it might be on the car pickup line, it might be while dinner is finishing up in the oven. Like a 10 minute increment of time you can find almost anywhere in your day. And making it explicit and making it bite sized and making it small makes it wildly digestible. Because our goals as moms have to live in the context of our family. They have to, right? My goals have to fit in the context of our family. So like when we have a week basically of two hour delays, the context changed. My kids were in school less, the morning routine was totally different. And so the way that I had to get my goals done had to change.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:05:48]:

And candidly, I made less progress towards them. On a week that looks like that then I do in a quote unquote normal week, whatever that means in my life. I don't actually know what normal looks like, but you get the point, right? So making it explicit is so, so, so important. We use implied expectations, meaning I have implied from my family that I need me time, but they never actually agreed to that. It's just an expectation that I have. It's very one sided. Nobody understands what I want and nobody has agreed to it. When you can move that into an explicit agreement, meaning to say when you sit down quarterly with your family and go through your priorities and say, hey, I really have this dream of writing a children's book.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:06:33]:

Can you as a family help me get in 10 minutes two times a week to work on my children's book? Can you help me manage that explicit agreement? Is that something that we can do as a family? Like absolutely, mom, no problem. I don't know if we'll go like that for you, but at least if they can't support it, you know, ahead of time and you're not mad about it, and the people who are doing life with you understand what's important to you. Cause that's really critical. It actually came into, I would say, really view for me this week. Junior is out of town literally the entire week, left Monday morning and won't be home until Friday at like 9:30 or 10pm so the whole week I'm running solo three nights this week I have events that are getting me home late. Dinner out, speaking event. I forget what Monday was and it's only Thursday, but I forget I got home late, meaning between 8:30 and 9, like bedtime I was coming home. And so my big girls had to step up in a way that like, they don't totally love in a school week because they've got their homework, they're tired, they're doing practices, they like need a mom in those busy weeks for them too.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:07:41]:

And so when they have to be home after school and kind of like boss up a little bit and like watch their little sisters and clean up dinner and just do more, they don't love it actually. And I don't love that they don't love it. I don't like having them to do that. But they understand what I'm trying to build with this life of an stuff. They understand why it's important to me, and they understand that me needing to be away was fitting into the bigger picture of what I'm working on. And they understand why that's important to me and why that's important to our family. And so because they had context and because it was explicit, they were able to say, I get it, Mom, I can support you. And I was able to say, hey, how can I make it easier? Like making dinner super easy to warm up instead of something they have to like, boil noodles.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:08:25]:

I don't know. So we're partners in it. That's the point. We're partners in it. When it's an explicit agreement, your partner's in it. What you want doesn't become this accidental weapon in your relationships because that's like super silly. Like you're a team and that's how we want our family to feel. And I know that's what you want too.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:08:43]:

Okay, I don't know if this is a tangent or this is relevant, but I feel like this is relevant. So in the smart girl world, they say specific. I use the words explicit agreements. That to me it just feels more actionable. But use what you want. The word I don't like or the letter I don't like is the T the time bound. And I want to walk you through why. If I say I'm going to try to lose 10 pounds by spring break, that is setting a very specific slope of the line that my weight needs to go down on.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:09:16]:

Right? I have like eight weeks from when I'm recording this or something like that that I need to lose 10 pounds. And so there's a Very specific number of things that I need to execute on from a fitness perspective and from a food perspective if I want to hit that time bound goal. But you know what? The context of my life changes almost weekly. Like I was just saying, the the context of this week right now is that JR is gone. So that means all of the coordination, all of the things need to be me and the amazing team of people who support me. But I'm kind of like Grand Central Station to the max. And so I have less personal capacity on the weeks when he's gone. That's just true.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:09:53]:

So the context that that goal is living in in this week is less personal capacity. Last week we had a thousand two hour delays, so the goals had to fit in the context of that smaller cabat. So I don't actually know if that's my goal is to lose 10 pounds when I'm going to hit that target. And when I push the time bound aspect into forces a compliance to a program that may or may not be feasible in the context of everything else going on in my life. And when I can't execute on that plan a hundred percent, I kind of throw my hands up and say, holy crap, I can't do all five workouts for an hour this week. So I kind of like go to nothing if I'm not careful. And then things kind of go to crap and then you don't work out for a whole week and then you realize there's no way that I'm going to lose £10 by spring break. And so then I'm like, I guess current self will just go on spring break and I'll be a little grumpy because I didn't hit my goal.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:10:52]:

And it kind of starts to spiral because I had this goal of losing 10 pounds by spring break for me has been so powerful to say I am on a journey of losing 10 pounds. I don't know if that will take me eight weeks, 18 weeks or 28 weeks. I don't know because the context that that goal has to live in is changing all of the time. And I don't always get to choose the complete execution of my plan because there's a lot of other roles that I play in my life. There's a lot of other goals that are getting facilitated in my life. And as long as every single day I am making some progress towards the goal of losing ten pounds and it could be something simple like I decided I'm not going to have five bites of the brownies on the counter today, maybe nothing else happened, but I was like, I'm going to step away from that choice. And that was part of me pushing me towards my goal of losing 10 pounds. I have just found removing the time bound aspect of it is so freeing.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:11:54]:

So then I can solve for progress every single day. And some days I make lots of progress towards the goal I'm going at. And sometimes I make the tiniest increment of progress towards where I'm going. But that freedom to say, I really don't know how long it's going to take me to get there, but as long as I'm moving forward, always, I know with certainty I'm going to get there. Which means I don't have to have this start over thing that happens where you kind of devolve to the lowest common denominator of your behavior. You're like, I guess I'm going to wait for a Monday. Even better. If you can find a month that starts on a Monday, it's like the best fresh start.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:12:35]:

It's like the second thing after New Year's, you know, it's like, oh, look at fresh month, first week. Look what we're doing, you know, in that restart culture, or that re not even culture, that restart habit, maybe I'll call it that. I had for so many years kept me from saying even the tiniest bit of progress is progress, and that's incredible. But when you're an achiever and you're used to experiencing big moments and big things that happen and awards and big financial milestones that are crossed and sales quotas that are met and I don't know, like, I guess maybe I'm the only adrenaline junkie on the call today, but I just want it to be like kind of big and fancy and cool. And what I have found is that when I'm moving towards goals in a family that has a current that is moving so quickly and things are moving so fast, and there's so many other things that are happening simultaneously in our home and in the people who are living life beside me in their lives, that the context that my choices, my goals have to fit in is changing constantly. And so as I'm having to pivot and kind of know how much progress can I make today? As long as I'm making some progress, I am winning. And that reframe has been a really, really, really powerful part of me taking control, I think, of my life and taking control of my decisions and taking control of my behavior in a totally, totally, I don't say new way, maybe just more Mature way. I think it's been really helpful.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:14:12]:

So anyway, death to the smart goals. Also, what was funny at the end of the session, there was a VP who was there and she had some of her team and she's like, legitimately I have everybody's smart goals are due to me tomorrow at work. And I was like, what I will say is I do think this is contained to my life as a mom. Like my personal goals I don't put time bounds to, but I operate pretty differently in my professional life. I think that's just because there's a financial component to that. If there's not some level of velocity, then the financial part doesn't work. Like, you can't just say, hey, I spent money on this for 10 months, but I only got two months of return on it. Like it doesn't work.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:14:50]:

Just like practically won't work. So I am more time bound in my professional life. You know, this is a game where you get to pick up whatever you want or don't want from this episode. But to me, it has been so freeing to say, I don't know when I'm going to get there. My goal this year is to become best shape my life. You come see me speak right now. It's like my example for everything. I'm, I'm like low key, not obsessed.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:15:13]:

I would say I'm very serious about it because I don't want to let myself mentally off the hook because when excuses slip into my belief, then my discipline begins to slip because I'm like, oh, you know, I got a lot going on. There's a lot of reasons why I can't make that happen for myself right now. It's like, well, I don't know. I don't actually think that's true. So I'm practicing my belief so sternly with myself that I feel like sometimes it comes out that way when I talk about it. But I am, I'm just like practicing my belief. You can make this happen. You deserve for this to happen.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:15:48]:

Trust the process. Like, I don't know, just like practicing this in my head. So anyways, this episode maybe could be called Tiffany's Journey to actually Being Good at Goal Setting, goalkeeping and goal delivery. Because as much as I talk about it and obsess over, it is actually not easy for me because I'm easily distracted. I'm very intuitive. I have ridiculous outsized expectations of returns for like every ounce of energy that are just not realistic. And so I think that's why this whole goal setting, goalkeeping goal delivery, goal achievement is so acute for me because I'm actually terrible at it in my own space where, like my husband, he can be like, you know what I'm going to do? Like, he will just in his head be like, I'm gonna lose 20 pounds. And it's like eight days later he's done it.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:16:33]:

It's like, well, congratulations. You know, it's not how it works for me. I have like post it notes and spreadsheets and, you know, alarm bells going off and a scale measuring chicken. I don't know. This is where we're at, people. So, okay. I hope that this year is awesome for you. I hope it makes you laugh a little, I hope it makes you smile at yourself, and I hope it helps you get a little more clear about how to be successful in and around this crazy life that we have all chosen and what a joy it is to figure out how to build a vibrant life event.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:17:13]:

As always, thanks for listening. If this episode was helpful to you, please share it with someone. And you guys, I'm trying a new set, so if you want to go on to YouTube and see if you like it or not, Casual Tiffany is on the mic today. I don't know, we're experimenting. We're figuring it all out. It's so fun to just sort of be bad at things before you're good at them. And so we're, we're learning lots. And I like, my team is so amazing.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:17:37]:

They're so helpful. So, okay, go do your week. Go be great. Thanks for listening.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:17:44]:

Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling fear. You will not decide what happens in my life.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:17:53]:

I will.

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