This is episode 278, and I have a big announcement for you.

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, folks, welcome back to the podcast. This is the big one because I am here to tell you that for the first time ever, I am running a 30-day goal challenge inside Powerful. I had this idea over the Christmas holidays. I’m not entirely sure how I’ve managed to keep it a secret until now, but I have, and the doors to join are open right now.

They close on Friday, the 15th of May. We are starting the challenge on Sunday, the 17th of May with the Goal Setting Intensive, and the challenge runs until the 17th of June, so just before solstice. The link to join is in the show notes, or just head to maisiehill.com/powerful.

So, inside the membership, we normally work with seasonal goals. So you have 90 days and one focus. And we’ve been doing it that way for years, and I love that structure. I don’t think that’s going to be changing. But I’ve been thinking about what happens when you compress the timeline, because I have worked on lots of goals. I’ve achieved lots of things, and I’ve just been reflecting on all the goals that I have set out to do and what the conditions of those goals were, as in the conditions that were going on in my life when I was working on them. And I’ve thought about those times when I’ve had a shorter timeline, because I really love a shorter timeline, because it means you can’t hide. And that’s the perfect situation you want to be in when it comes to your goals.

Because it just flushes everything to the surface. A shorter timeline ups the ante. It removes the opportunity to defer things until next week or the one after, because you know, there’s always plenty of time with a longer timeline. Whereas 30 days removes that option whilst also giving you enough time to do something that is truly substantial.

So that constraint of 30 days, which might initially sound like a limitation, it’s actually what makes things move. Because a tighter timeline creates focus in a way that a generous one will never do. And you don’t need me to tell you, there is a huge difference between 30 days to do something and a year to do something. I love the anticipation that bubbles up in me when I consider that, when I consider it for me, when I consider it for you. 

But this isn’t necessarily about doing more, okay? For some of you, it will be about doing more. You are going to have to do some things for this challenge. But for most of you, it’s not about doing more in the way that you think it would be.

Because typically, when we think about setting out to achieve a goal, we think about all the things we have to do, and we make a very long list of things that need to be done. And then we start thinking, well, that’s going to take me this amount of time. And then, before you know it, these mental calculations have led you to a place where you’re thinking, well, that’s just not possible for me right now. I don’t have that amount of time. 

But really, setting out to achieve a goal is more about having courage and just doing the things that you fear, doing the one thing that matters inside a container where everyone around you is doing the same thing. Because often, we take the longer, convoluted route that takes more time and is actually less effective in terms of achieving your goals. And instead, I want you running towards the thing that fears you.

And that’s what this goal challenge is set up to enable you to do. Everyone’s going to be doing it. I’m going to be doing it. I’ve experienced and witnessed the energy of that in this membership for years over a seasonal timeline. But this time, we are building an entire month around it. 

Now, a word about what kind of goal you can pick for this challenge, because I want you to pick something that is what you want, something you’re curious about, something you’ve been longing to do, or maybe just something that you just need to get done because it will make a difference to your life. And then you pick that thing and then you just back yourself. You bet on yourself to go after it for 30 days. And you have all the coaching tools and the coaching team behind you in order to do that. 

So you can pick an external goal. That would be things like getting a new job, a promotion, making or saving a certain amount of money, creating something, writing something. It could be decluttering your home. It could be getting a personal best in a weightlifting competition. These are all goals where you can measure the outcome. They’re tangible. You either have the thing at the end of the 30 days, or you don’t.

But you could also pick an internal goal. They matter just as much. So that could be things like creating a respectful relationship with yourself. Imagine if you spent 30 days rewiring your inner voice so you don’t talk to yourself like crap. Imagine the impact that would have on your internal experience of your life, but also the ripple effect of that self-respect on every other external aspect of your life, all of your relationships. 

You could also spend 30 days being decisive and addressing all the stuff that comes up when you want to avoid or delay making decisions. Or you could decide to improve your relationship with time or money or your body. There’s so many things that you could pick. And what’s great about doing this in a community is you get to be inspired but not distracted by what everyone else is doing. But I am going to set you up so that you can make that decision for yourself. But it is definitely really cool to see how other people are approaching things. 

The way we usually do this in the membership is that we pick four goals a year, one for each season. And I recommend that they are a mix of both external and internal ones. But whatever you pick for this challenge, your goal does need to be specific enough that you will know when it’s done. Because vague goals are a very effective way to just avoid committing to anything.

So what you’ll do in the challenge is use my goal-setting formula. But what I request is that whatever you end up picking, it is yours. It’s not what someone else wants from you, not what you think you should want. It’s your desire, your direction for those 30 days. And if you’re not sure what your goal is yet, that is not an issue. Okay? So please don’t make it one. That is what the pre-challenge materials and our kickoff call are for. 

But here’s something that I want to offer you to sit with in the meantime. If I could somehow magically remove every obligation from your life in an instant and told you that these 30 days were entirely yours, all responsibilities, all obligations, they’re just removed. What would you do with it? What’s the thing that comes to mind before your brain starts telling you why it’s not possible or it’s not the right time? That’s a very good place for you to start in terms of you imagining and coming up with a goal. 

Now, I know that some of you are going to be thinking, well, but May is already busy. This isn’t a great time of year for me. I’ve got this happening. Oh, there’s this too. I’ll just wait until things are calmer or less intense, and I’ll do the next one.

Firstly, I don’t know what’s going to happen with this. I’ve been wanting to do this. I am satisfying my curiosity and instinct in doing it, but I don’t know when we’re going to do it again, if we even do it again. But also, please hear me when I say that there is no version of your life where the conditions are going to be perfect for this. And I say this from experience. I’m going to tell you a story in a moment. 

But it is never a good idea to delay things until things are calmer. Because what happens is a couple of months go by and you’ve still got the same challenges, or maybe those ones have been sorted, but there’s an additional one. And then the next month, this happens instead. Life is always going to life, right? That’s not going to stop. It would be far more valuable for you to be like, oh, I’ve got all of this happening right now, but life is always happening, and I want to learn how to prioritize the things that matter to me in the midst of all of this. 

Because that’s what this is about. It’s not just about achieving the goal. It’s about what having that goal forces you to address in your life that you are already unsatisfied and unhappy with. So it is in your interest to do this now rather than say, well, it will be better for me to do this in six months’ time. Because you are going to be dealing with the same stuff then, I guarantee it, unless you figure out this stuff now. 

So, I said that I would tell you a story. When I started writing my book proposal for Period Power, my son was doing two three-hour morning sessions at nursery a week. That was it. And we didn’t have a car, and the nursery was a mile and a half away. And the buses weren’t particularly reliable, so it was better to walk it. I was treating people at the time, so I was seeing acupuncture and reflexology clients in the evenings.

So once you take away the time walking to the nursery and walking back from the nursery in order for me to do some writing, I had like five hours a week max. And if I’d waited for more time, if I’d done what I’ve just told you is not a good idea to do, Period Power wouldn’t exist. It still wouldn’t exist. And none of you would have read it, and I probably would still be treating people. And there would be nothing wrong with that in that I love doing that work. But I would have been doing it whilst also thinking about the book that was in me that I had ignored. I would have been living incoherently, and that’s not a great place to be. 

So I didn’t wait for this perfect set of conditions in order for me to start writing. And as welcome as they would have been, they just weren’t going to rock up. So I had to decide that I could do it in those conditions and just at least think, well, what if it were possible, right, rather than thinking it’s not possible. And I’m telling you this because as busy as your life is, I want you to think about the time that you do have. Like me, maybe there’s five hours a week somewhere, or maybe there’s 15 minutes a day somewhere. And if you don’t believe me, look at your screen time, not as evidence to beat yourself up for scrolling, but to just see, oh yeah, I do have some time. So how do you want to use that time? 

Having a goal is going to require some reorganisation of your life. I don’t know anyone for whom that wouldn’t be the case. But as I said, doing that is in your interest because it’s going to get you to address all the kinds of things that are bothering you all the time anyway. But now we have this 30-day container, and by setting a goal, we get to look at all of that. It all comes up to the surface. We get to look at it and deal with that, and then your life will be changed. Because you’ll have actually addressed the things that have been bothering you probably for years. And if your life is very busy, you could also set a goal of creating some space for yourself.

That would be a fabulous goal to spend 30 days on, because not only will you have to make decisions and confront things like potentially letting people down or spending less time on things and addressing any perfectionist tendencies you have with it, and instead trusting that what you’ve done is actually good enough, you will have worked through all of those things, but you’ll also have created time for your future goals and removed that time issue.

But I’m going to be honest with you, time is typically a superficial excuse not to do this. Because yes, time is a very real constraint, and there are some goals that do require chunks of time, like writing a book. That takes time, no matter what way you cut it. But for a lot of goals, you think you need lots of time, but you probably don’t actually need that much.

If you release yourself from perfectionism, if you pick the most direct route to your goal, which will probably be more uncomfortable than the convoluted route, but it will be more effective, both in terms of the results you create and in terms of flushing out all your insecurities and fears and addressing them with coaching. That’s what I mean. By the end of these 30 days, you will be a different person, no matter what happens, because you will have used coaching to address all of this stuff. 

But back to me and my kind of magic wand. If I said, okay, you’ve got free time for the next 30 days, and again, there’s no responsibilities of any kind. You’ve got a completely free schedule. When you think about working on a goal, what comes up? How do you feel about the idea of working on a goal? What thoughts and beliefs are there? What are the concerns and fears that come up?

Because although that superficial reason of, oh, I don’t have the time, there can be elements of that can be true, but often what it’s covering up is the fear of failing. So either not finishing or maybe not even starting, or just falling short in some way and experiencing embarrassment, rejection, humiliation, or anxiety. All of those are optional, by the way. Right? You can fall short and not experience any of those things. That’s what I want to teach you how to do. 

But what would you make that failure mean about you? Because lots of you make it mean terrible things about you rather than just seeing it as a step on your way to success. Because really, who cares if it takes you 31 days or 41 or longer? I really want you to aim for within 30 days. That is what the challenge is. I want you to commit to that. But I have zero thoughts about it taking longer, but what are your thoughts about it taking longer? These are all the fun things we are going to be coaching on and addressing once and for all. 

But I would far rather you set a goal and, quote unquote, “fall short” than never set one in the first place. And this is why. In I think it was 2017, I set a goal to write a blog post every week. My son was a year old, and we had just moved to Margate. We had no childcare at this point in time. I was in the process of returning to work. Paul and I were very much in the thick of figuring out who we were as individuals and as a couple and as a family, as in figuring all that out once you have a child. And all of that whilst running on interrupted sleep, and then it turned out that I was actually severely anaemic on top of all of that. 

So there was me thinking, well, I really want to write. I want to get a book deal. And you know, so I need to just write blog posts. And my weekly blog posts did not happen. I think I wrote like six or seven blog posts that year. It was definitely fewer than 10, nowhere near the goal of one blog post a week. I fell tremendously short. But the goal did exactly what goals are supposed to do. And this was before I was doing any of this kind of work, by the way. This was just me figuring it out for myself. 

Setting that goal and attempting to do it, trying to do it, woke something up in me. It showed me how much I really needed to write and how much my work mattered to me. It really forced me to figure out how to prioritise my own creative needs when there was like no financial gain from it within our family unit, which meant I had to stop waiting for Paul’s stamp of approval for me to do things. And that had nothing to do with him. It was all to do with me.

I was just waiting for him to be like, “Oh, Maisie, you know, you’re doing such a good job of being a mum, and but why don’t you go and do something for yourself?” And he would say those things to me, but it was the fact that I was waiting for him to say that and needing his permission in order for me to do this. 

So I had to confront a lot of things that had nothing to do with the actual writing, and it was everything to do with who I was becoming in order to write a book.

So then at the end of that year of failing my way through this, I sat down to write my book proposal at the end of that year, and I wrote two chunky chapters and the rest of that proposal in the space of like four, maybe six weeks. So that was the equivalent of a year’s worth of blog posts all at once. And then my agent edited it and we took it to the publishers and we got my book deal within a year of me setting that goal of I want to get a book deal.

But I set that goal thinking that I needed to build my writing skills and that I needed a collection of blog posts in order to not just improve my writing, but to actually show to a publishers or to an agent in order to get a book deal. But actually, what I really needed was all of the internal skills and like the relational work with Paul, that setting that goal actually flushed out. That’s what I needed.

And if I’d never set it, if I’d never set that goal because of some reasonable understanding of time and thinking, well, I just don’t have the time right now, if I just decided that it wasn’t possible or that I wouldn’t be able to do it, then none of that would have happened.

So the reason I was able to write that book proposal and the reason I was able to write Period Power in the space of four months, I think it was like 126,000 words, and we cut a 10,000-word chapter out of it. That’s a huge amount of writing that I got done in four months. But I was able to do it because of what I’d worked on the year previous, all that time that I was, quote unquote, “failing.” 

So if you do this challenge and you don’t reach your goal by the 17th of June, that is not a failure. I’m going to train you to not see it that way. It is information. What comes up for you along the way is what you actually needed to work on. That’s what the goal is for. 

So here’s how the 30 days is going to work. You join Powerful now. You’ll get immediate access to Design Your Decade. This is a three-session workshop where you’ll create a ten-year vision for your life, a three-year picture, and your one-year plan. You will get clear on your direction, and as a result of that, choose a goal that matters to you for some reason. The process will guide you through this.

I have been loving how the members have been continually referring back to Design Your Decade as their reference point for their coaching and checking in on how things are going for this year. That’s exactly what I had in mind when I created it. It is a resource that you will go back to time and time again. So when you join, that’s the most important thing that you can do. Go through Design Your Decade. 

And then we have got our goal-setting intensive call on Sunday, May 17th. I’m going to be teaching all sorts of fun stuff related to goals, specifically for this challenge, about how to coach yourself through the experience. You’re going to be getting coached as well, but a big part of this is about you building the skill of coaching yourself.

And I have actually been looking back at my self-coaching from years ago and just picking apart how I coach myself, how I think about things, how I negotiate challenges so that I can teach you all how to do the same. And I’ve been looking back at all the goal coaching that has happened inside the membership, whether it’s at Ask a Coach, which is our written coaching service, or on our goal coaching calls and just thinking, how can I set you all up for success with this? So that’s what the goal-setting intensive is going to be about. 

We will also be having weekly coaching calls, all focused on the 30-day challenge. I will be answering questions that come up along the way. You will also be able to use Ask a Coach to submit your written coaching at any point, and then the amazing coaching team will get back to you within two working days with your coaching.

There will be a lot of focused energy in the community throughout the challenge. You will be sharing what’s coming up, asking questions, sharing the coaching that you do. You will be celebrating the things that are shifting in you all along the way. And I will be keeping a close eye on what’s happening in there and bringing what I’m seeing to the calls and just continuing to support you all the way through the 30 days. 

If you’ve tried to work on goals before and it hasn’t worked, I want to make a distinction. If you’ve set goals in the past, but you’ve either set a dirty one, meaning the motivation underneath it was rooted in not-good-enoughness or in trying to prove something or trying to fix yourself rather than creating something, or you’ve just lacked the self-coaching skill set of managing your mind, feeling your feelings, working with your body’s stress responses and your hormonal cycles, that is very different from what this is.

Because what happens when you set goals from that place or without having those skills is you either white knuckle it, you get through it, right, you achieve the goal, but once it’s done, you collapse, you’re exhausted, and you’re not even able to enjoy and celebrate what you have achieved, what you have created. 

Or what happens is you set the goal, and you feel motivated for like a day, and then life happens, things get challenging. So you just put your goal to one side and then probably use that as evidence of how you’re a failure, how you never finish things. You never start things. You’re just not organised enough. You don’t have the right personality. You’re not this, and you’re too that, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

I’ve been doing this a long time. I have no idea how many people I’ve taught and coached on their goals, but I know that what you’re getting inside this challenge will set you up to do this in a completely different way. I only wish that I had it when I was trying to write those bloody blog posts and failing to get out the house.

Imagine if, instead of trying to figure it all out on my own, while sleep-deprived and anaemic, I could have submitted a coaching request and had a certified coach reply to help me work through how I was thinking at the time. 

That I could have come to live calls whilst Nelson napped or listened to the replays. I would have been part of a community where I got to see everyone else working on similar things, that someone else, maybe even without kids, was encountering the exact same mindset issues as me, just in a different life context. That’s what this is all about. And I want us all to finish this season strong. Whether it’s spring for you right now or autumn, we have got solstice coming up on June 21st. We are going to be wrapping up this challenge just before that. So you get to finish this season strong. 

The entire membership is going to be going after their goals simultaneously with every call and every coaching resource focused on that one thing. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while and it has helped you, I strongly encourage you to join the membership now in time for the 30-day challenge. Make this month the one where everything changes.

Powerful is open for you to join now, and the doors close on Friday the 15th of May. Head to maisiehill.com/powerful to sign up, and I will see you on the inside. 

Hey, if you love listening to this podcast then come and check out my membership, Powerful, 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 maisiehill.com/powerful, and I’ll see you in the community.