125. Setting Goals When You Don’t Know How You'll Reach Them
Have you ever had a goal that you really wanted, but had absolutely no idea how you were going to make it happen? Maybe you’ve thought about quitting your job, starting a business, or creating a different kind of life, but the path from where you are now to where you want to be feels impossible to see. That doesn’t mean you’re not ready to begin.
In this episode, I share the story of a goal I wrote down almost a decade ago: hosting a retreat for my clients in Colorado. At the time, I had no business, no clients, no program, and no idea how I would ever make it happen. I also talk about what happened when the timeline I gave myself came and went, and why I’ve learned that taking longer than expected doesn’t mean you’re behind or that you need to give up on the goal.
I also help you think differently about the goals you’re setting for your own life. We’ll look at why your goals should be connected to how you want your life to feel, rather than simply what you think you’re supposed to accomplish, and why you don’t need to know the entire how before you take the first step. Sometimes the next step only becomes clear once you start moving.
Ready for clarity and a simple action plan to get your business started? Schedule a free 1-hour consultation with me here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why you can set a goal before you know exactly how you’ll make it happen.
How to choose goals based on how you want your life to feel, not just what you think you’re supposed to accomplish.
Why an estimated timeline is just a prediction, especially when you’re doing something you’ve never done before.
How to keep pursuing a goal when it takes longer than you expected.
Why missing your original timeline doesn’t mean you’ve failed or need to abandon the goal.
How to focus on the feeling behind a goal, rather than becoming attached to one specific form it needs to take.
How to take the next step even when you can’t see the entire path yet.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
Click here for step-by-step instructions to leave a rating and review to let me know what you think, and don’t forget to share the podcast with others who you think would benefit!
If you're looking for the right environment to start your networking journey, look no further than my group, the Mom Entrepreneur’s Circle. Sign up here for mutual support, advice sharing, and the tools you need for both you and your business to thrive.
Episodes Related to Setting Goals When You Don’t Know How You'll Reach Them:
Full Episode Transcript:
I know there are things in your life right now that you want. You have absolutely no idea how they're going to happen. Maybe quitting your job is one of them. Maybe starting a business is one of them. Maybe you know you want freedom and flexibility. You want more time with your kids, you want work that still uses your brain and your experience and your ambition, but doesn't require you to organize your entire life around somebody else's schedule and goals. And you can see the thing you want. You just have no idea how you're going to get there.
I want to talk about that today because this past weekend, I did something that I first wrote down as a goal almost a decade ago. At the time I had no business, no clients, no program, and absolutely no idea how it was ever going to happen. And this weekend, it happened.
Welcome to How to Quit Your Job, the podcast for moms ready to ditch the nine-to-five and build a life and business they love. I’m your host, Jenna Rykiel. Let’s go.
Hi mom friends. This is episode 125 of the How to Quit Your Job podcast. This podcast is for moms who are feeling confused, feeling stuck, feeling like they don't have options because their career, the 9-to-5, whatever industry that might be in is demanding in a way that takes away from the mom you want to be and how you want to show up for yourself and your kids and your family.
The reality is that priorities shift when we have kids, whether we like it or not, whether we expected it or not. I know I never necessarily yearned to be a mom. I thought I'd be more blasé about it. I thought I'd be more unattached, but here we are. You become a mom, you bring life into the world and your priorities change. And suddenly the career you spent the last decade building can feel like it's in question. For many of us, we've always had an identity in our career and as a working human, so the idea of giving that up is really, really challenging for a lot of reasons.
And I'm here to say, I don't think you have to. I don't think you have to give that part of you up. That's what this podcast is really about, finding other options where you are not giving up the expertise and the identity and the value that you are able to bring into the world. But you're also tapping into part of yourself that maybe you didn't even know existed, a part of you capable of creating something that doesn't currently exist. And bringing value to the world in a way that's actually aligned with you, your family and what you want your life and your day-to-day to look like.
Because the 9-to-5 world was not designed around motherhood. We all know that. School ends at three for me. The math isn't mathing. There are the sick days and appointments and school events and summer breaks and a million invisible responsibilities that we're carrying. And for a lot of us, the way we want to be there and be present for our kids just does not fit neatly into a traditional 9-to-5 role.
But that's actually not entirely what this episode is about. That's who this episode is for. And I encourage you to follow the podcast if any of that resonated with you because that's what we talk about every week. We talk about things that will move you forward, help figure out alignment in your life and your career and to show you that you don't have to be confused. There are answers out there. I promise, and you are capable.
This episode, episode 125, is personal. It's a reflection similar to the episode I did about creating a rich life, episode 119. This episode is personal and there are tons of lessons woven into it because apparently I can't just tell a story without turning it into a life lesson, but I want to talk about this past weekend and I want to talk about what I learned that I think is valuable for everyone.
This past weekend I hosted my very first retreat for clients in Estes Park, Colorado, right in Rocky Mountain National Park. And you guys, it lived up to the hype in my head. It was so special. And part of what made it so special is that this retreat existed in my head and in my notebook long before this business existed in real life.
I recently pulled out this old little notebook completely by chance. I've actually started reusing it as a climbing notebook because it still had empty pages and it was a perfect fit for what I needed. And I was flipping through it and there it was, in 2017, I had written down that I wanted to host a client retreat. I actually wrote down that I wanted to host a client retreat by 2021. Then in 2018, in this notebook I wrote down host a client retreat again, except that time I had moved it to a lifetime goal, which I find really funny now because 2021 came and went, no retreat. 2021 is actually when I officially left corporate. I officially had my business as the sole career of mine. And actually, I didn't host my first retreat until almost a decade after I originally wrote down that goal.
But I want to go back to where that goal even came from because that's important too. So in 2017, one of my very best college friends came to visit me in Colorado. She was living on the East Coast at the time. And this was before kids, before the chaos of motherhood. And I took her hiking. It was just the two of us and we walked and talked. And I'm pretty good conversation, no matter where I am, but there is something different about being outside. There's something different about being in the mountains for meaningful conversations.
And Colorado isn't just mountains. These are aggressive mountains, aggressive landscape. These are 14,000 foot mountains. The Rocky Mountains make you feel small in the best way possible. In a world that can feel so fast and noisy and disconnected, you go into the mountains, you go into nature, and suddenly you feel grounded again. You feel connected, connected to the earth, to nature, to yourself, to things that are actually important.
And I remember finishing that hike with my friend who she was going through some stuff in life, and having this feeling that I wanted to create more of that experience. I wanted to bring people to Colorado. I wanted to bring women into the mountains. I wanted to have conversations there. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know that I would eventually become a business and life coach for moms. I didn't know what kind of clients I would serve. I didn't know what kind of program I would create. I didn't know the how at all. I just knew the feeling.
So I wrote it down. That's the first thing I really want you to soak in from this episode. Write the thing down. Okay, I know that sounds so basic. But write down your goals, the crazy ones, the outlandish ones, the ones you have absolutely no business knowing how to accomplish yet. Put them somewhere.
I started doing this more regularly when I started using a notebook called the Passion Planner, which I've talked about before on this podcast. I absolutely love Passion Planner so much. It instructs you to write down one-month goals and three-month goals and one-year goals and five-year goals and lifetime goals, which I especially love. And starting around 2016 I began capturing these goals.
But here's the thing, and this just came up in a coaching session this morning that I want you to also make note of. Make sure when you're writing down these goals, when you're coming up with these goals, you don't write down goals just because it's what society wants you to do. Don't write down goals that you should do, write down goals that make you feel alive, even if, or especially if, I guess they are countercultural. Okay, don't just write down make more money, get a promotion, be successful, lose weight. Choose goals that fit into your vision of what you want out of life and how you want life to feel.
If you write down goals that don't feel in alignment with who you are and what you want out of life, you'll take lots of actions and maybe create lots of results, but nothing will feel good. And worst case scenario, you'll avoid going after those goals, right? Because you don't really want them. It's just what society has made you believe you want.
So be discerning and honest with yourself about your goals. For me, this retreat and when I wrote that goal down, it was because I felt so alive and I felt so good about being able to give my friend this experience and this feeling that she had, and I knew I wanted more of that in my life.
The next really important thing, when we write down a goal, we almost always attach a timeline to it. And that timeline is basically an educated guess. It's a prediction. It's a guess about how long we think something that we've never done before is going to take us. And then we get to that deadline, and maybe it hasn't happened that goal. And instead of thinking, hmm, apparently my timeline prediction was wrong, we never say that. Instead we make it mean something about ourselves that we didn't hit the goal.
We think I'm behind, I'm failing, maybe I'm not capable of doing this. Maybe this business isn't working. Maybe I should have figured this out by now. I do this too. So I'm right there with you. There's a part of me that looks at that 2021 date, the original timeline that I made for the goal and actually feels disappointed. There's a little part of me that's even embarrassed. Like, girl, you were off by five years. It took you five years longer than you predicted to reach that goal. What a failure.
But what has helped me tremendously is realizing that missing the timeline doesn't mean you miss the goal. It means you simply underestimated how long it would take. You were trying to predict the timeline of something you had never done before. Of course you didn't know how long it would take. This comes up constantly with the women I work with and constantly within myself too. I didn't even have a business that was fully functioning and I didn't even have a full client load in 2021. I had just fully committed to my business in 2021. Of course it would have been challenging to host a retreat for my clients in that year. I was still figuring out the business stuff, but we don't give ourselves that grace.
So maybe you decided or you've picked a goal like, I'm going to quit my job by next June or I'm going to have this business running in six months or I'm going to replace my salary by this date. And then the date comes and you're not there yet. I don't want you to immediately make that mean you can't do it or that something's wrong with you or that something's wrong with your goals. I want you to make it mean that you just underestimated the timeline. That's it. You didn't know how long it would take because you've never built a business before. You've never quit this job before. You've never created this version of your life before. How could you possibly know exactly how long it takes? The goal itself doesn't need to disappear. The journey of fulfilling that feeling or going after that feeling doesn't have to disappear. But let's make sure the pressure does, the pressure around timeline disappears.
At some point, my client retreat moved from a 2021 goal to a lifetime goal, and I actually think that's really powerful. If there's something you know you want and repeatedly putting a deadline on it is making you beat yourself up, make it a lifetime goal. Keep moving toward it. Keep responding to what's in front of you. Stop using an arbitrary date as evidence that you're failing. Because here I am almost a decade after I wrote that, I wrote down host a client retreat in 2017. And today, I'm sitting on the other side of actually doing it. And oh my goodness, it was everything I wanted it to be.
A quick digression, or maybe not quick, but this retreat was amazing. We had very slow mornings sitting around a puzzle drinking coffee. And can we talk about what an absolute luxury it is as a mother to complete a puzzle without a little person stealing the pieces, with nobody needing anything. We had nowhere to be. We could sit there and work on something that had absolutely no productive value whatsoever. That was amazing.
But we also moved our bodies in the mountains every morning. We saw some of the most beautiful landscapes of Rocky Mountain National Park. We painted ceramics, again, just sitting and creating something beautiful for no other reason than we wanted to, which by the way, my son devastatingly broke the skull ceramic that I painted for him within 30 minutes of me handing it to him, which was sad but also an opportunity to teach him Kintsugi, which you can look it up. I'll put a link in the show notes. But it was devastating.
We did archery, which was amazing. We got to learn something completely new and maybe tap into our primal nature a little bit, let out some frustration. We nourished our body with healthy meals, we prepared dinner together, sat around the table talking. There was so much talking, life, motherhood, business, challenges, celebrations, there were laughs, there were tears. And there were moments when we just sat silently and stared at the mountains. We had the most epic view of the mountains. And for moms, how often do we get that? How often do we get to be in a beautiful place where nobody needs anything from us, where we aren't responsible for everybody else's experience, where we can just be.
So that was amazing and it scratched this itch, this feeling that I so wanted to recreate from 2017. It was amazing. We also, of course, got into business. The first couple days of the trip were definitely more getting to know each other, comfy clothes and hoodies and being together, like a cabin weekend with intentional conversation. And then on the last day, we went deeper, right? We were still moving our bodies, we were still creating things, but the conversations shifted. How do we want our businesses to grow? How do we want to be better moms? How do we want to be better humans? How do we become more grounded and less reactive? No topic was off limits, and they were all topics that helped us to step into a better version of ourselves.
So it was so special, so amazing. And I'm so glad that I didn't let an uneducated estimate and guess about how long it would take me stop me. There's a world where 2021 comes and goes and 2022 comes and goes and the next year comes and goes. And if the retreat keeps not happening, we can get really down on ourselves. But there's also a world where we stick with the knowing that this is something that we want to create. This is something that is important to us. And we stick with it.
Okay, so back in 2017, I had the vision, right, host retreats. I knew the feeling I wanted to create. It's hard to even put into words, so I'm not going to try, but you know when you get these feelings and you're like, ah, I want more of that in my life. I knew I wanted to bring people to Colorado, help them get into the mountains, create meaningful conversations. And that sometimes is enough. We don't need to know the whole business model. We don't need to know who the women will be. We don't need to know how we're going to make this happen or what programs need to be created to align with the retreats. We don't even need to know where we're staying or how much it's going to cost. We don't need to know the how in order for these goals to live within us.
Okay, in 2017, I didn't even know I was going to become a coach. I just knew how I wanted to feel. And then I kept living, right? I kept these goals kind of in the back of my mind on the back burner, but I kept figuring things out. I started a business, started coaching women. I created group coaching. In group coaching, my clients got to know one another. They started cheering each other on. They knew each other's business. It was a community that formed. And eventually the thing I had written down almost a decade earlier, suddenly made sense. The how started to reveal itself once all of these other puzzle pieces were there.
I remember we were in a group coaching session and a client had just returned from a retreat that she went to, and it was an outdoor retreat and there was forest bathing and all that fun stuff. And everyone in the room agreed that being in nature helped us to be more creative. And that's when I knew it was time to make this retreat happen. It became so obvious that the retreat was needed. Not only because of this feeling that I was after from so long ago, but because it was going to be so valuable for my clients, for them to get together, meet each other in person, meet me in person. Of course we're going to do this retreat. Of course my clients are going to come to Colorado. I couldn't see any of that in 2017.
And I'll admit that was a little stressful and worrisome, okay? So I know that me just sitting here and saying, don't worry, you don't need to know the how. I know that doesn't necessarily put you at ease. But I do want you to trust me a little bit. I want you to plant the seed. Write it down, just like I wrote it down. I wrote it down and it lived on in my notebook while I spent 10 years seemingly not working on that goal. But actually, I was creating the foundation for it, which I didn't even realize. And then this weekend, of course, I got to see it come to fruition. And that's pretty freaking cool, and I want that for you.
And I think that's why also I will admit I have mixed emotions about accomplishing this goal because yes, there's pride, there's awe, there is this holy crap, I actually did that. My husband was in awe as well since he has known that so long ago, I wrote this thing down. But there's also this real feeling and awareness around it taking longer than I thought.
And so I want to normalize this for all of you. I want to say that's okay. It's okay to feel a little bit disappointed that the timeline was off and it took you longer than you thought it would. Some things worth creating take longer than our ambitious beautiful brains think they should. That doesn't make the accomplishment less meaningful. I think sometimes it makes it even more meaningful. If I really reflect and tap into the kind part of my brain, the fact that it took me 10 years actually makes it more meaningful because I didn't give up on it, because it was so important for all of the foundational pieces to be in place for this to work so well this past weekend.
I want you to think about all of this for your own life. What have you decided is taking too long? Okay, starting a business, leaving your job, making money, figuring out what you even want to do. What if you're not late? What if you are right on time? You're not behind. What if you're learning things right now that the version of you who eventually creates that thing is going to need? And what if you don't need to know the entire how for this to come to fruition?
Here's something else that became really clear to me this weekend. I don't think the goal necessarily was ever actually host a retreat. That was the form it took. That's what made sense. That's what was tangible. But the real goal was the feeling I had on that hike with my friend years ago. Connection, nature, meaningful conversation, feeling small in front of something enormous, being reminded of what matters. That was the goal. The retreat was just the container.
And that's something I want you to think about when you look at your goals. Don't only ask what do I want, the clean tangible goal that you can write down, right, the smart goal. Everyone's always saying write down a smart goal. Specific, measurable, attainable, RT, whatever it is, timeline, all those things. And I probably have a podcast episode about setting smart goals. But I don't want you to only ask what do I want, what's that clean tangible thing? I also want you to ask why do I want it? How do I think I'll feel when I have it? How do I want to feel in the future? What part of me comes alive when I'm thinking about this goal?
Because maybe you don't know exactly what the next chapter of your life looks like yet. Maybe you don't know exactly what your business is going to look like yet. Maybe you don't know your offers or you don't know how much money you'll make. You don't know whether it'll take one or five years. But what do you know?
Maybe you know you want to pick your kids up from school and drop them off every day. Maybe you know you want slow mornings where you're not rushing around. Maybe you know you want to use the expertise you've spent the last 15 years building and accumulating without sacrificing your family for it. Maybe you know you want to make a certain amount of money. Maybe you know you want work that feels meaningful or that you want to build something that's yours. You know you want to finally be able to look at life and think, yes, this feels like me. This is the life that I was meant to live.
I know that all of that feels a little bit grandiose maybe, but start there. Write that down. And then allow yourself to take one step at a time, allow yourself to take action without knowing exactly how it's going to come to fruition. Some of the most beautiful things I've created didn't happen because I knew exactly what I was doing or how it was going to happen. They happened because I knew enough to begin or I knew enough about what I wanted to start. And then we take action, we fail, we try something else, we pivot, we keep going. And you can too.
So write down that goal, write down that feeling, even if it sounds ridiculous, even if you don't know the how, even if you write 2027 next to it and it doesn't happen until 2034. Keep it alive and keep working towards it and know that you very well could underestimate how long it's going to take, but that doesn't mean it's worth abandoning. Again, this retreat took me almost a decade, and it was worth every minute for me to spend a decade figuring out the how.
What is that goal that's worth going after for 10 years for you? What is the feeling that's worth continuing to try and reach even if it takes 10 years? Write it down. Share it with me, put it into the universe. You've got this. I believe in you. I know that there's a vision and a feeling that you want to create in your life, and you are absolutely capable and worthy of making it happen. I love you all. I'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
I want to talk about that today because this past weekend, I did something that I first wrote down as a goal almost a decade ago. At the time I had no business, no clients, no program, and absolutely no idea how it was ever going to happen. And this weekend, it happened.
Welcome to How to Quit Your Job, the podcast for moms ready to ditch the nine-to-five and build a life and business they love. I’m your host, Jenna Rykiel. Let’s go.
Hi mom friends. This is episode 125 of the How to Quit Your Job podcast. This podcast is for moms who are feeling confused, feeling stuck, feeling like they don't have options because their career, the 9-to-5, whatever industry that might be in is demanding in a way that takes away from the mom you want to be and how you want to show up for yourself and your kids and your family.
The reality is that priorities shift when we have kids, whether we like it or not, whether we expected it or not. I know I never necessarily yearned to be a mom. I thought I'd be more blasé about it. I thought I'd be more unattached, but here we are. You become a mom, you bring life into the world and your priorities change. And suddenly the career you spent the last decade building can feel like it's in question. For many of us, we've always had an identity in our career and as a working human, so the idea of giving that up is really, really challenging for a lot of reasons.
And I'm here to say, I don't think you have to. I don't think you have to give that part of you up. That's what this podcast is really about, finding other options where you are not giving up the expertise and the identity and the value that you are able to bring into the world. But you're also tapping into part of yourself that maybe you didn't even know existed, a part of you capable of creating something that doesn't currently exist. And bringing value to the world in a way that's actually aligned with you, your family and what you want your life and your day-to-day to look like.
Because the 9-to-5 world was not designed around motherhood. We all know that. School ends at three for me. The math isn't mathing. There are the sick days and appointments and school events and summer breaks and a million invisible responsibilities that we're carrying. And for a lot of us, the way we want to be there and be present for our kids just does not fit neatly into a traditional 9-to-5 role.
But that's actually not entirely what this episode is about. That's who this episode is for. And I encourage you to follow the podcast if any of that resonated with you because that's what we talk about every week. We talk about things that will move you forward, help figure out alignment in your life and your career and to show you that you don't have to be confused. There are answers out there. I promise, and you are capable.
This episode, episode 125, is personal. It's a reflection similar to the episode I did about creating a rich life, episode 119. This episode is personal and there are tons of lessons woven into it because apparently I can't just tell a story without turning it into a life lesson, but I want to talk about this past weekend and I want to talk about what I learned that I think is valuable for everyone.
This past weekend I hosted my very first retreat for clients in Estes Park, Colorado, right in Rocky Mountain National Park. And you guys, it lived up to the hype in my head. It was so special. And part of what made it so special is that this retreat existed in my head and in my notebook long before this business existed in real life.
I recently pulled out this old little notebook completely by chance. I've actually started reusing it as a climbing notebook because it still had empty pages and it was a perfect fit for what I needed. And I was flipping through it and there it was, in 2017, I had written down that I wanted to host a client retreat. I actually wrote down that I wanted to host a client retreat by 2021. Then in 2018, in this notebook I wrote down host a client retreat again, except that time I had moved it to a lifetime goal, which I find really funny now because 2021 came and went, no retreat. 2021 is actually when I officially left corporate. I officially had my business as the sole career of mine. And actually, I didn't host my first retreat until almost a decade after I originally wrote down that goal.
But I want to go back to where that goal even came from because that's important too. So in 2017, one of my very best college friends came to visit me in Colorado. She was living on the East Coast at the time. And this was before kids, before the chaos of motherhood. And I took her hiking. It was just the two of us and we walked and talked. And I'm pretty good conversation, no matter where I am, but there is something different about being outside. There's something different about being in the mountains for meaningful conversations.
And Colorado isn't just mountains. These are aggressive mountains, aggressive landscape. These are 14,000 foot mountains. The Rocky Mountains make you feel small in the best way possible. In a world that can feel so fast and noisy and disconnected, you go into the mountains, you go into nature, and suddenly you feel grounded again. You feel connected, connected to the earth, to nature, to yourself, to things that are actually important.
And I remember finishing that hike with my friend who she was going through some stuff in life, and having this feeling that I wanted to create more of that experience. I wanted to bring people to Colorado. I wanted to bring women into the mountains. I wanted to have conversations there. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know that I would eventually become a business and life coach for moms. I didn't know what kind of clients I would serve. I didn't know what kind of program I would create. I didn't know the how at all. I just knew the feeling.
So I wrote it down. That's the first thing I really want you to soak in from this episode. Write the thing down. Okay, I know that sounds so basic. But write down your goals, the crazy ones, the outlandish ones, the ones you have absolutely no business knowing how to accomplish yet. Put them somewhere.
I started doing this more regularly when I started using a notebook called the Passion Planner, which I've talked about before on this podcast. I absolutely love Passion Planner so much. It instructs you to write down one-month goals and three-month goals and one-year goals and five-year goals and lifetime goals, which I especially love. And starting around 2016 I began capturing these goals.
But here's the thing, and this just came up in a coaching session this morning that I want you to also make note of. Make sure when you're writing down these goals, when you're coming up with these goals, you don't write down goals just because it's what society wants you to do. Don't write down goals that you should do, write down goals that make you feel alive, even if, or especially if, I guess they are countercultural. Okay, don't just write down make more money, get a promotion, be successful, lose weight. Choose goals that fit into your vision of what you want out of life and how you want life to feel.
If you write down goals that don't feel in alignment with who you are and what you want out of life, you'll take lots of actions and maybe create lots of results, but nothing will feel good. And worst case scenario, you'll avoid going after those goals, right? Because you don't really want them. It's just what society has made you believe you want.
So be discerning and honest with yourself about your goals. For me, this retreat and when I wrote that goal down, it was because I felt so alive and I felt so good about being able to give my friend this experience and this feeling that she had, and I knew I wanted more of that in my life.
The next really important thing, when we write down a goal, we almost always attach a timeline to it. And that timeline is basically an educated guess. It's a prediction. It's a guess about how long we think something that we've never done before is going to take us. And then we get to that deadline, and maybe it hasn't happened that goal. And instead of thinking, hmm, apparently my timeline prediction was wrong, we never say that. Instead we make it mean something about ourselves that we didn't hit the goal.
We think I'm behind, I'm failing, maybe I'm not capable of doing this. Maybe this business isn't working. Maybe I should have figured this out by now. I do this too. So I'm right there with you. There's a part of me that looks at that 2021 date, the original timeline that I made for the goal and actually feels disappointed. There's a little part of me that's even embarrassed. Like, girl, you were off by five years. It took you five years longer than you predicted to reach that goal. What a failure.
But what has helped me tremendously is realizing that missing the timeline doesn't mean you miss the goal. It means you simply underestimated how long it would take. You were trying to predict the timeline of something you had never done before. Of course you didn't know how long it would take. This comes up constantly with the women I work with and constantly within myself too. I didn't even have a business that was fully functioning and I didn't even have a full client load in 2021. I had just fully committed to my business in 2021. Of course it would have been challenging to host a retreat for my clients in that year. I was still figuring out the business stuff, but we don't give ourselves that grace.
So maybe you decided or you've picked a goal like, I'm going to quit my job by next June or I'm going to have this business running in six months or I'm going to replace my salary by this date. And then the date comes and you're not there yet. I don't want you to immediately make that mean you can't do it or that something's wrong with you or that something's wrong with your goals. I want you to make it mean that you just underestimated the timeline. That's it. You didn't know how long it would take because you've never built a business before. You've never quit this job before. You've never created this version of your life before. How could you possibly know exactly how long it takes? The goal itself doesn't need to disappear. The journey of fulfilling that feeling or going after that feeling doesn't have to disappear. But let's make sure the pressure does, the pressure around timeline disappears.
At some point, my client retreat moved from a 2021 goal to a lifetime goal, and I actually think that's really powerful. If there's something you know you want and repeatedly putting a deadline on it is making you beat yourself up, make it a lifetime goal. Keep moving toward it. Keep responding to what's in front of you. Stop using an arbitrary date as evidence that you're failing. Because here I am almost a decade after I wrote that, I wrote down host a client retreat in 2017. And today, I'm sitting on the other side of actually doing it. And oh my goodness, it was everything I wanted it to be.
A quick digression, or maybe not quick, but this retreat was amazing. We had very slow mornings sitting around a puzzle drinking coffee. And can we talk about what an absolute luxury it is as a mother to complete a puzzle without a little person stealing the pieces, with nobody needing anything. We had nowhere to be. We could sit there and work on something that had absolutely no productive value whatsoever. That was amazing.
But we also moved our bodies in the mountains every morning. We saw some of the most beautiful landscapes of Rocky Mountain National Park. We painted ceramics, again, just sitting and creating something beautiful for no other reason than we wanted to, which by the way, my son devastatingly broke the skull ceramic that I painted for him within 30 minutes of me handing it to him, which was sad but also an opportunity to teach him Kintsugi, which you can look it up. I'll put a link in the show notes. But it was devastating.
We did archery, which was amazing. We got to learn something completely new and maybe tap into our primal nature a little bit, let out some frustration. We nourished our body with healthy meals, we prepared dinner together, sat around the table talking. There was so much talking, life, motherhood, business, challenges, celebrations, there were laughs, there were tears. And there were moments when we just sat silently and stared at the mountains. We had the most epic view of the mountains. And for moms, how often do we get that? How often do we get to be in a beautiful place where nobody needs anything from us, where we aren't responsible for everybody else's experience, where we can just be.
So that was amazing and it scratched this itch, this feeling that I so wanted to recreate from 2017. It was amazing. We also, of course, got into business. The first couple days of the trip were definitely more getting to know each other, comfy clothes and hoodies and being together, like a cabin weekend with intentional conversation. And then on the last day, we went deeper, right? We were still moving our bodies, we were still creating things, but the conversations shifted. How do we want our businesses to grow? How do we want to be better moms? How do we want to be better humans? How do we become more grounded and less reactive? No topic was off limits, and they were all topics that helped us to step into a better version of ourselves.
So it was so special, so amazing. And I'm so glad that I didn't let an uneducated estimate and guess about how long it would take me stop me. There's a world where 2021 comes and goes and 2022 comes and goes and the next year comes and goes. And if the retreat keeps not happening, we can get really down on ourselves. But there's also a world where we stick with the knowing that this is something that we want to create. This is something that is important to us. And we stick with it.
Okay, so back in 2017, I had the vision, right, host retreats. I knew the feeling I wanted to create. It's hard to even put into words, so I'm not going to try, but you know when you get these feelings and you're like, ah, I want more of that in my life. I knew I wanted to bring people to Colorado, help them get into the mountains, create meaningful conversations. And that sometimes is enough. We don't need to know the whole business model. We don't need to know who the women will be. We don't need to know how we're going to make this happen or what programs need to be created to align with the retreats. We don't even need to know where we're staying or how much it's going to cost. We don't need to know the how in order for these goals to live within us.
Okay, in 2017, I didn't even know I was going to become a coach. I just knew how I wanted to feel. And then I kept living, right? I kept these goals kind of in the back of my mind on the back burner, but I kept figuring things out. I started a business, started coaching women. I created group coaching. In group coaching, my clients got to know one another. They started cheering each other on. They knew each other's business. It was a community that formed. And eventually the thing I had written down almost a decade earlier, suddenly made sense. The how started to reveal itself once all of these other puzzle pieces were there.
I remember we were in a group coaching session and a client had just returned from a retreat that she went to, and it was an outdoor retreat and there was forest bathing and all that fun stuff. And everyone in the room agreed that being in nature helped us to be more creative. And that's when I knew it was time to make this retreat happen. It became so obvious that the retreat was needed. Not only because of this feeling that I was after from so long ago, but because it was going to be so valuable for my clients, for them to get together, meet each other in person, meet me in person. Of course we're going to do this retreat. Of course my clients are going to come to Colorado. I couldn't see any of that in 2017.
And I'll admit that was a little stressful and worrisome, okay? So I know that me just sitting here and saying, don't worry, you don't need to know the how. I know that doesn't necessarily put you at ease. But I do want you to trust me a little bit. I want you to plant the seed. Write it down, just like I wrote it down. I wrote it down and it lived on in my notebook while I spent 10 years seemingly not working on that goal. But actually, I was creating the foundation for it, which I didn't even realize. And then this weekend, of course, I got to see it come to fruition. And that's pretty freaking cool, and I want that for you.
And I think that's why also I will admit I have mixed emotions about accomplishing this goal because yes, there's pride, there's awe, there is this holy crap, I actually did that. My husband was in awe as well since he has known that so long ago, I wrote this thing down. But there's also this real feeling and awareness around it taking longer than I thought.
And so I want to normalize this for all of you. I want to say that's okay. It's okay to feel a little bit disappointed that the timeline was off and it took you longer than you thought it would. Some things worth creating take longer than our ambitious beautiful brains think they should. That doesn't make the accomplishment less meaningful. I think sometimes it makes it even more meaningful. If I really reflect and tap into the kind part of my brain, the fact that it took me 10 years actually makes it more meaningful because I didn't give up on it, because it was so important for all of the foundational pieces to be in place for this to work so well this past weekend.
I want you to think about all of this for your own life. What have you decided is taking too long? Okay, starting a business, leaving your job, making money, figuring out what you even want to do. What if you're not late? What if you are right on time? You're not behind. What if you're learning things right now that the version of you who eventually creates that thing is going to need? And what if you don't need to know the entire how for this to come to fruition?
Here's something else that became really clear to me this weekend. I don't think the goal necessarily was ever actually host a retreat. That was the form it took. That's what made sense. That's what was tangible. But the real goal was the feeling I had on that hike with my friend years ago. Connection, nature, meaningful conversation, feeling small in front of something enormous, being reminded of what matters. That was the goal. The retreat was just the container.
And that's something I want you to think about when you look at your goals. Don't only ask what do I want, the clean tangible goal that you can write down, right, the smart goal. Everyone's always saying write down a smart goal. Specific, measurable, attainable, RT, whatever it is, timeline, all those things. And I probably have a podcast episode about setting smart goals. But I don't want you to only ask what do I want, what's that clean tangible thing? I also want you to ask why do I want it? How do I think I'll feel when I have it? How do I want to feel in the future? What part of me comes alive when I'm thinking about this goal?
Because maybe you don't know exactly what the next chapter of your life looks like yet. Maybe you don't know exactly what your business is going to look like yet. Maybe you don't know your offers or you don't know how much money you'll make. You don't know whether it'll take one or five years. But what do you know?
Maybe you know you want to pick your kids up from school and drop them off every day. Maybe you know you want slow mornings where you're not rushing around. Maybe you know you want to use the expertise you've spent the last 15 years building and accumulating without sacrificing your family for it. Maybe you know you want to make a certain amount of money. Maybe you know you want work that feels meaningful or that you want to build something that's yours. You know you want to finally be able to look at life and think, yes, this feels like me. This is the life that I was meant to live.
I know that all of that feels a little bit grandiose maybe, but start there. Write that down. And then allow yourself to take one step at a time, allow yourself to take action without knowing exactly how it's going to come to fruition. Some of the most beautiful things I've created didn't happen because I knew exactly what I was doing or how it was going to happen. They happened because I knew enough to begin or I knew enough about what I wanted to start. And then we take action, we fail, we try something else, we pivot, we keep going. And you can too.
So write down that goal, write down that feeling, even if it sounds ridiculous, even if you don't know the how, even if you write 2027 next to it and it doesn't happen until 2034. Keep it alive and keep working towards it and know that you very well could underestimate how long it's going to take, but that doesn't mean it's worth abandoning. Again, this retreat took me almost a decade, and it was worth every minute for me to spend a decade figuring out the how.
What is that goal that's worth going after for 10 years for you? What is the feeling that's worth continuing to try and reach even if it takes 10 years? Write it down. Share it with me, put it into the universe. You've got this. I believe in you. I know that there's a vision and a feeling that you want to create in your life, and you are absolutely capable and worthy of making it happen. I love you all. I'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or RSS.
