You are listening to episode 118 of The Maisie Hill Experience. We’ve got all sorts of juicy things to get into today. We’re going to be talking about goals, believing in yourself, all the things. Let’s do it.

If you want to do things differently but need some help making it happen then tune in for your weekly dose of coaching from me, Maisie Hill, Master Life Coach and author of Period Power. Welcome to The Maisie Hill Experience.

Alright, we have officially switched seasons. It’s spring here in the UK. If you’re in the southern hemisphere you transitioned into autumn. And with the change of seasons that means that my membership, The Flow Collective, is open for you to join until Thursday March 23rd at 9:00pm UK time. So it’s the start of the season and I want you to set a goal. What’s something that you would love to create in the next 90 days? It can be part of a bigger goal, or it can just exist on its own. This is something that I invite our clients to do at the start of each season.

And all it means is having a focus. It doesn’t mean pressuring or rushing or anything like that because that’s not how I teach goals. But goals cannot create pressure or harm you in any way, your thoughts about them certainly can though. And this is why I’ll be teaching you over the next few months in the membership how to have a great relationship with your goals. So, what do you want? What would you love to focus on for the next 90 days?

And when you set a goal, remember it can be anything. Anything. It can be an external goal or an internal one. So external goals refer to what you create in the world, friendships, dating, a pay rise, space in your schedule for rest and play, getting a new job, writing a book, having a solo exhibition, moving, travelling. They’re all external goals. They all require internal work of course, but the result is tangible. It exists in the world. We can see evidence of it.

Internal goals relate to your experience of yourself and the world. And that could be something like learning how to make decisions and trust yourself, collaborating with your nervous system, being able to take risks, not people pleasing, giving boundaries, not letting your inner critic run the show. They’re all great examples of internal goals. And all these things are things that my clients are currently working on or have worked on successfully. This is what we get up to inside the membership.

My goal for autumn was to create a new relationship with the wind. And I spoke about this in detail in a recent episode, episode 112 but basically the wind has the ability to really dysregulate my nervous system. Windy days historically have really messed me up. And just when it’s a windy day my capacity for dealing with anything else would just plummet. And this is just part of my experience as an autistic person, but it was getting worse. And I decided that I wanted to create a different relationship with the wind.

And now I’m able to be outside on windy days without it derailing me and impacting me like it used to. And what’s so cool about that is that it’s just created so much belief in myself because if I can do that, if I can change my relationship with the wind I know I can do anything. So you can truly pick any goal but what would be fun, what would be meaningful to you in some way? And what would help you to step into the version of yourself who can, the version of you that can do these things, who can make it happen, who can love yourself the whole way there?

And something that I like to consider and offer to you is that you don’t even have to do it. The whole idea is that you do it but it’s a great way of freeing yourself up to be honest about what you really want. What do you really want? You don’t have to do it but what is it that you want. Let’s just be honest. Now, I’m going to get into something today that a lot of you have been struggling with when it comes to goals. I’ve received a lot of questions about it.

But before we dive in, please remember that whatever your goal is I can help you. I know I help you here every week through the podcast, but the membership, The Flow Collective, is designed to help you with whatever your goal is and to overcome perfectionism, people pleasing, any fear of failure or fear of success, whatever else is standing in your way. We’ll coach you on all of that. We’ve got group coaching calls.

You also get individual written coaching included in the membership. It’s not any extra. So, it’s currently £69 a month. If you’re listening in the future it might be more but I teach you how to coach yourself on top of all of that. How to partner with your nervous system, to work with your menstrual cycle if you have one, many of our clients don’t. Because once you know how to coach yourself and we can help you with all the places that you’re blocked and you can work with your nervous system, your life will never be the same, I guarantee it.

And I’m a really great teacher and a really great coach so I make it really simple for you. I share a lot here on the podcast, but it is truly nothing compared to what happens inside the membership. So if you love listening to the podcast and it helps you with your life, I want you to think about what getting access to coaching and all of my trainings will do. Because we’re always hearing from people who join and they get started and they say, “I wish I joined sooner. Why did I do that to myself?” Because they just can’t believe what we do in there.

So, take their advice and join now. Don’t make your life harder than it needs to be by waiting for something that’s really helpful. So, speaking of things that are really helpful, I just hosted a free masterclass called How to Achieve Any Goal. It was great to have so many of you there. I covered a lot and part of what I taught was about how to set goals. And so many of you asked me about how to set a goal that’s realistic. So, I want to really tease that one apart today because my question to you is why do you want to set a goal that’s realistic?

Really answer that for yourself because I don’t set goals that are realistic. I looked up the definition of realistic and it means a sensible and practical idea of what can be achieved or expected. Have you met me? I don’t think anyone has ever described me as sensible. I can certainly be practical, but I don’t want to think that way with my goals because I know if I do that I’m immediately limiting myself because being realistic means you are settling for less than what you actually want. And we’re going to get into all the reasons why you might be doing that in a moment.

But really think about that. What if you didn’t limit yourself by thinking about what’s sensible, practical or if you just scrapped that at least whilst you’re in the kind of desiring and wanting something for yourself. So way back in, it must have been 2017, I set a goal at the start of the year of getting a book deal. At the time my son was nine months old. We’d just moved to Margate. We were renting a cottage. And I was just starting to work again after being on maternity leave. Paul was at work all day. We were just kind of surviving, I guess.

At that point it would have made a lot more sense to set a goal of creating a blog for example. Writing a book just kind of seemed ludicrous because at the time I was just struggling to treat someone for an hour, let alone get any writing done. But a blog would have meant settling. I didn’t want a blog. I wanted a book. And this is why I always bang on about not letting the how stop you because if I’d allowed myself to get caught up in the how on Earth am I doing to do this or being prescriptive in how it would happen then it wouldn’t have happened.

I had no idea how it would happen but I just decided in advance that it would and I believed in myself. This also happened to me in master coach training which is just advanced training as a coach. So, a large part of that was coming up with our individual projects and we had three months to work on and complete our projects. And they were all different types. Some people were creating courses, writing books, creating a certain amount of money, processing their emotions. They were really varied.

And the way it worked was that you had to submit your proposal for your project to the instructors and they would approve it or reject it and then you’d have to come up with another idea. One of my friends, I won’t say their name, but she had to put forward six proposals before they approved it. But my project was to write my job description and then only do my job because my tendency is to do everything myself. I’m very resourceful.

I love figuring things out but as my business has grown there are things that other people can do and that I shouldn’t be doing so that I can focus on the things that only I can do and the things that really help people like making the podcast. I was also at the time about to hire more people so this project was really all about me changing my view of myself and getting better at delegating and communicating. So, at the time I was thinking, great, 90 days is perfect to make these kinds of changes. I can do this, I can do that, put these processes in place blah, blah, blah. I had this plan.

And the instructors approved it on Thursday, but they said that it had to be implemented from Monday. So not just starting it on the Monday, it being fully implemented by the Monday. So they were asking me to do something in three days that I had anticipated taking three months. This is the value of coaching. My coaches could see what was possible for me when I couldn’t. Because I had a set of thoughts about doing it and everything that would be involved and how long all those things would take. And none of those things were true. None of those thoughts were true.

All that was standing in my way of what was really possible, what was really available to me was the thoughts that I had about it. And that’s all that’s standing in your way too. This is the best news because you can change your thoughts. And this is exactly what I teach you how to do inside the membership because we all have limiting beliefs. You’ve got limiting beliefs about yourself, about the world, what’s possible for you.

And it’s so much fun to get to work on all of those limiting beliefs and explore them, shift them so that you can see what is possible because it’s far more than you can imagine right now. One of the best things about my job that I love is seeing this all unfold in my clients.

So, someone in the membership just posted about how the goals that they’d set at the start of the year for 2023, they’ve actually already accomplished them all. They thought it was going to take them all year but by mid-March they’re all done. So they’ve just completely blown their own mind and that’s really shifted the level of belief that they have in themselves, that’s happened along the way but now their sense of what’s possible is completely different.

And possibility is one of the qualities of spring, it’s a great quality to tap into at this time of year. You’ve probably noticed around you, plant shoots are emerging from the earth, they’re starting to pop out, we’re noticing them. And then over the next couple of months they’re just going to be shooting up literally it seems from out of nowhere. So that’s what I mean when I’m talking about rapid growth.

And the same thing happened with my goal of changing my relationship with the wind. That just seemed so ridiculous to me but because it was so ridiculous it freed me up to just give it a go. And you know what, I changed it in one day. I changed this huge thing in one day and it required very little of me. I want you to just consider that for yourself, that this thing that maybe you’re thinking is going to take 90 days or a year or however long, that you can actually make it happen in one day.

But listen, I’ve got to be honest with you. There are other goals that don’t go so well. I’m not here to paint a pretty picture. I fail at things. You will fail at things. That’s good, that’s part of the process. The more failures you get under your belt the greater your success will be. And when you delay failing what you’re actually doing is delaying your success. This is why some of you will be tempted to set a more realistic or achievable goal.

And it’s just like a lot of my clients when they start working with me they have a low tolerance for failure, failing just feels awful, like their world is imploding. Even just the idea of it puts them into freeze mode or they just don’t move towards what they want or need to do. And they just procrastinate, delay taking any action, or they do take action, but the approach is I have to get this right. And it’s just so tight and tense and pressured.

And then they get trapped in a cycle of perfectionism even when the results they want are being created, it’s been created through perfectionism. It just creates more evidence for the brain that things have to be done perfectly. So, one of the skills that we focus on in the membership is the ability to fail. And you can do that when you use mindset coaching and when you have an awareness and ability to work with your nervous system because failing is no big deal. I had a massive fail last week. It sucked. I can laugh about it now. I kind of was able to laugh about it a bit when it was happening, but it sucked. And there were ramifications that I had no idea were coming. It was just completely unforeseen. And I got through it using all the tools that I teach my clients. And I’m stronger for it.

I’m a completely different person to who I was one week ago. Think about it like this. When you’re going through adversity you become unstoppable. That’s what I tell myself when I’m in it, when I’m in the thick of it and I’m not liking it and it’s the messy middle. I’m like, “When I get through this I’m going to be a completely different person. I’m already becoming a different person. I’m going to be unstoppable.”

You know how when you see blacksmiths, like we live in ye olden times and we always see blacksmiths. But you know when you see maybe in a science documentary or in a film from yesteryear, when you see a blacksmith forging metals. When they’re pounding the metal, that’s what makes them stronger. So failure doesn’t make you weak, it makes you stronger but you need to learn how to love yourself through that failure and not make it mean awful things about you.

The other reason that you’ll set a realistic goal is that your brain will tell you that smaller goals are more receivable. And I do think there’s value in chunking up a larger goal into smaller parts. I do that in all sorts of ways. So that’s true, that can be useful. But I want you to also consider that smaller goals aren’t necessarily easier to achieve. So, I have had the same goal for two years or so. I failed at it multiple times, kind of lost count how many times I’ve failed but it doesn’t mean anything that I failed repeatedly.

And it’s been really worthwhile for me to fail again and again but now it’s time for me to change the goal because I’ve failed so many times, it’s like, okay, time to change the goal. And you might be thinking, yeah, well, if you failed again and again and again then it makes sense to make the goal smaller and more achievable, but this isn’t what I’m doing. I’m actually making the goal even bigger because all a smaller goal would do is mean that I get to feel better about myself which isn’t actually even true because I still know that I haven’t created what I want to create, doesn’t change anything.

But a smaller goal just means that I stay in the zone of what’s familiar to me. I get to stay in the cave instead of exploring new territory and seeing what else is out there. What else is available to me and who do I need to become in order to get there? So, if I scrap my goal and create a bigger one then it’s like I have to kind of build it from the ground up. I have to approach it completely differently. So, there’s some dismantling and then rebuilding. And this is just where I’m at now. I’m like, “Okay, what I’m doing, doing these tweaks, doing this, doing that isn’t making a difference.”

It’s time to go back to basics and go from there and build something completely different. So, your life is a result of your most repeated sentences. All the thoughts that you have about your life and about yourself, they’re determining what your life is currently like and what you deem is possible for you. But don’t make the mistake of going to your past for evidence of what’s possible because when you do that, you’re limiting what’s available to you now and in the future.

Everything that you’ve already done in your life, you already believe that you can do it again because you’ve done it once. You might not choose to do it again, but you know that you can because you have. Think about taking a holiday, do you doubt that you’re going to get to your destination? This is aside from any travel anxiety, airlines and trains striking and pandemics, things like that, forget about all of those things. When you book a trip, you arrange your travel, you assume that you’re going to get there one way or the other.

Do you have the same belief in yourself? Why not? I want you to find the thoughts that are standing in your way because when you set an unrealistic goal all of that shit is going to come up. That’s why I love a big goal, it’s so helpful because it shows us what you’re really thinking. Small achievable goals don’t do that. You can just continue as you are, make little tweaks to get there. New results, especially larger ones require you to do things differently. And you could even keep the same results you currently have in your life but do them differently without any pressure and stress and all the rest of it.

So how do you need to think differently, act differently, decide differently, behave differently? When you do this, you have to decide to focus more on your future than on your past. Your brain is going to keep reverting to the past because that’s the evidence it has. That’s the level of belief it has. You have to steer it to where you’re going instead. And if you don’t believe that you can yet that’s okay. I’ve got goals that I don’t believe I can create yet because if I did believe at that level I’d already have those results, they’d already be there.

And for me this is really fun because I can just sense how much space I have to expand into, how much more is available to me, what I’m actually able to create. I’ve got no clue how it’s going to happen. I don’t need to know. I just need to know that I want it. So set goals that you don’t believe in. I really encourage you to do this because then you get to work on becoming the person who does, the person who makes it happen and you build belief in yourself before you have any evidence of that being true.

Because currently you have a level of belief about yourself, whatever that is and then because you have a human brain you then find evidence for how that thought is true. So you have a limiting belief, like I said, we all have them. And then your brain gets to work on finding all the proof of how that belief is true. This is just what brains do but we can work with this because you can pick other thoughts to think, more kind ones, more helpful ones. And then your brain will find evidence that proves those thoughts are true.

A belief is just a thought that you’ve thought a lot. It’s just been on repeat for a while. The trouble is that you believe that thought to be true because it’s been going on, on repeat in your brain for however long. And it also may be that other people have offered you their opinion about you and you’ve taken onboard especially if you’ve been told it repeatedly or at more impressionable times in your life but who cares? Are you going to let that stop you? I’m not.

If you don’t believe in your ability to achieve your goal yet, that’s perfect. Don’t let not believing in yourself be a reason to avoid getting down to business, to avoid taking action. Don’t wait until you believe to get started. You don’t have to do that. Our community is filled with people who are doing things that you currently don’t think are possible for you and that in the past they didn’t think was possible for them. Whether that’s getting a promotion and successfully negotiating a salary increase.

Whether that’s overcoming your fear of heights or working with your fear of heights or telling your mum that you’ve said all you want to say about something on the family WhatsApp and you’re not available to talk about it anymore. Those are all real examples of things that my clients have been celebrating just this past week. When you come in as a new member you can see all of these things happening. And you might use that against yourself and use other people’s success as a way to put yourself down. I don’t recommend you do that.

Please remember, other people’s wins and celebrations cannot make you feel bad. It’s only your thoughts about them that make you feel bad and because you make other people’s successes mean things about you. But we’re going to address all of those things. Instead, you could just think, wow, that’s incredible, that person is amazing because it is amazing, and they are amazing just like you but they’re just further along than you.

And especially if you’ve just joined us, just pay attention to how you’re interacting with what you’re seeing because what you’re seeing is the end result of everything that’s come before. And trust me, that person who is celebrating today was in the thick of it before. They were in the messy middle. They’re just on the other side of it now or coming out of the other side. They’ll be in it again with something else just like you will, just like I will.

This is the amazing thing about doing this together in community. You’re surrounded by people who are all working on this kind of thing together. Everyone in there is challenging the limiting beliefs that they have, setting ambitious goals, building a new set of beliefs. And the impact of doing that together is huge. When you challenge your beliefs about yourself you’ll redefine what’s possible for you. So be ambitious, be unrealistic, be impractical and let’s get to work. Come and join me in the membership, the doors close on Thursday, March 23rd at 9:00pm UK time.

If you’re listening after that then see if the doors are open or get your name on the waitlist and I’ll see you in there. Alright my loves, have a cracking week and I will see you next time.

Hey, if you love listening to this podcast then come and check out my membership, The Flow Collective, where you get my best resources and all the coaching you need to transform your inner and outer life. Sign up to the waitlist at theflowcollective.co/join, and I’ll see you in the community.