91. Achieve Every Goal You Set Part 2: The Success Triad and 3 things you need to achieve every goal

Vanessa 00:00
Welcome to the Empowered brain, the only podcast using science, psychology and coaching to help you rewire your brain and create a life you love with your host, Dr. Vanessa Calderon, a Harvard grad physician, master coach, and mother of two.

Hello, friends, welcome back. So we are doing our three-part series on achieving our goals. Because I want you to achieve every goal that you set, I want you to feel proud of yourself, when you achieve them, I want you to believe it's possible to achieve the goals you set. And I want you to not quit on yourself and not quit on your goals. It's so important for me because I know what's possible when you start to believe in yourself.

I know how, how much bigger you set your goals. I know the beautiful things that you can do in life when you believe in yourself when you set your goals and when you achieve them. And that matters so much to me because I realized that a lot of us have been socialized to believe that the things we want to achieve aren't possible. And we've been told over and over again, to think smaller to be realistic that that's crazy. Why would you do that? And again, what I want to say is that that is just bananas, you are totally possible of achieving every goal you set, it is 100% possible, which is why I'm doing this series because this the three things I'm teaching in part one, by the way, we learned all about how to set the right goal for you. Today, we're talking about the success triad, which I just love so much. And I think it's just a helpful visual for everyone to have.

And then next week, we're talking all about procrastination and how to stop procrastinating on our goals. Okay, so before I start, though, a quick life update, yes, we are still moving to Atlanta, and we're super excited about it. We've been packing up our stuff. And we get to move out of our place as we get ready to sell and move into a little Airbnb down the street, which is going to be so fun that we get to downsize and the kids get to have a new experience in life. So that's happening. So next time I record, I hope the audio still sounds good. So we're going to be in a whole new place. All right, so let's talk today about the success triad.

Okay, so I love this so much. And this is something I created because I realized that I was missing part of this, that I was missing part of this, that I was really good at part of the success, like what I need to be successful, but not at all of it. And so I created this to remind myself of what I always need to be successful. And then I started teaching it to my students, and realize that they were having these big aha moments, every time that they would learn this, they'd be like, Oh, holy smokes, I didn't see that. I missed that. Alright, so what is the success triad? So I want you to visualize kind of a triangle. And at the top of the triangle at the pinnacle is your intention. Now success is in the middle, that is what you're achieving. And your intention is at the top of the pinnacle. Now the three things that you need to achieve your goal or intention, which again is at the top, are self-discipline and self-compassion. Now I'm going to talk about all three of those intentions. Why is that important? And why do I keep that at the top?

Now the intention is the most important thing because when we practice intentionality, what we're doing is we're priming our brain to do what we're telling it to do. We get super clear on our goal, we set our intention, and how we're going to achieve the goal. And now our brain is ready to go to work. When we set our intention, we're able to use our muscle of commitment, we are able to commit to our goal, and recommit to our goal when it gets hard.

Commitment is so powerful because there are going to be days when things get hard. When you feel unmotivated. And you don't have the energy you need to achieve your goal. But what you do have is commitment and the power to recommit to your intention. So that's why intention is at the very top of the success triad. The intention is so important. Now, the second part here is self-discipline. Now, self-discipline is super obvious. And it matters because we are not magicians, we can set our intention, and get super clear on what we want to create. We can open ourselves up to manifest what we want by setting our intention. But it's not just going to happen if we do not go to work to create it. And that's where self-discipline comes in. Again, we're not magicians we can't just hope for something to happen. We need to take aligned action towards our goal to achieve our goal. And that's where self-discipline comes in. self-discipline helps us set a very clear plan. self-discipline helps us get to work self-discipline.

Make sure that on the days that we don't feel like it, we do it anyway. Because we said we were committed to achieving our goal. That's self-discipline. Now, for a lot of us self discipline is easy. I know for a lot of my students, they're at high achievers, they're professionals. They're lawyers, they're engineers, they're physicians. They're directors of these large nonprofits. And self-discipline is easy. They've relied on self-discipline a lot to get to where they are. And intention, I think, is something you can also kind of, you know, it's tangible, it makes sense, I got to be clear on my goal, I got to set an intention.

Now, this third part is what so many of us are missing. And I know I was missing and it's self-compassion. And you know, what's so interesting is, I have always been a disciplined person. So self-discipline has been sort of just like something I was born with. I'm super grateful that I was gifted with it. And it's a muscle I've continued to strengthen throughout my life. And it's the reason why I think I was able to achieve so much is that I was so disciplined. the intention was new to me, an intention I learned probably about a decade ago when I first started all of this work, the intention was new to me. And once I was able to pair intention with self-discipline, holy smokes, everything opened up for me, people started asking me like, how do you do so much? How are you able to get so much done?

Remember, once my older sister asked me that question, how are you able to do so much I was a mom, at that time have two young kids, my youngest, had just turned six months, and I had just finished this really wild fellowship, I was the department chief of the super busy emergency department. My marriage was thriving, and things were going well. And my sister's like, how are you able to do all that? And at first, I thought she was joking. But when she wasn't, I was like, Oh, I just, I'm super clear, I just set my intention of what I want to do. I already have self-discipline, I just set my intention. So once I paired those two things together, I was soaring, I was achieving so many things in life with just intention and self-discipline. But I didn't have this third party yet, I didn't have self-compassion, which means that I was super hard on myself, which means that, yes, I had self-discipline. And yes, I had intended. But when my inner critic would get really mean and loud and judgmental, I would try to push it down by working harder, I would just work harder, work harder, work harder. And I would just try to like, you know, all of every time I felt stressed, every time I experienced any of that, I just kept trying to work harder to make it go away, which meant I was achieving a lot, but I wasn't loving myself or enjoying my life along the way.

I wasn't doing the things that actually mattered, you know, like, I wasn't sitting down and really celebrating myself celebrating my accomplishments. I wasn't noticing, you know, every time somebody gave me a positive accolade, or positive affirmation, or told me like, what a great job I was doing, I would brush all of that off. That didn't matter, because I wasn't at my next goal yet. Self Compassion is so important. And once I learned how to start practicing self-compassion. And, again, this isn't like I'm not at a final destination. I'm not like perfect with intention or self-discipline. And I'm definitely not perfect with self-compassion. It's all a work in progress for me. And I know it is for most of our students, you know, so what I want to share with you is self compassion is so important. And it's part of the triad because self-compassion is what you need to continue to keep going. So again, self-compassion might be new to you.

And why it matters is, as you can imagine, when you're working towards something new, something different a goal. And you realize that it gets a little hard, maybe you had a bad day, maybe you made a mistake, maybe you're working towards a weight goal, and you had an extra brownie, you know, for dinner, what happens? What ends up happening is that we start to get really down on ourselves, and it triggers our inner critic to say things like, this goal was so stupid, I should have never done that I'm never going to achieve this. This was never possible, to begin with, I should just quit. And in those moments, we slowly start to quit on ourselves, we slowly start to quit on our goals. And when you slowly start to quit on your goals, then you start becoming apathetic, like that goal doesn't matter anyway. And that's your ego, by the way, showing up to try to protect your tackle doesn't matter anyway, just go focus on something else. Or I'm so busy with all these other things over here, I should be doing this instead.

And that's why self-compassion matters so much because it's in those moments, when your inner critic gets so loud, and when your inner critic starts to take over. And when you start thinking that it makes more sense to quit and to keep going. That's when you need to lean into self-compassion. Because what self-compassion does is self-compassion allows us to see these moments As, as just a human moments, to separate that from all of the baggage that our inner critic wants to throw on top of it, you know, that we're failures that we're stupid that we should quit. Self Compassion allows us to see this as just a hiccup and not make it mean anything else. Of course, we're going to make mistakes, we're human.

Of course, things get hard, we're human. Of course, things didn't work out the way we thought we were, they were going to work out, we are human. That's what self-compassion allows us to do. It allows us to be super kind to ourselves when things get hard. And it allows us to recommit to our goals and to keep going. Self Compassion also helps us love ourselves on our journey. When we achieve something beautiful, something big, something awesome, or a small, new difference, a small new change in our lives. Self Compassion allows us to sit and celebrate ourselves in those moments, to really love ourselves in those moments. And this is probably my favorite thing. Self Compassion allows us to detach ourselves from the goal, and focus on the journey. And I think that that is just so key and so important.

Last week, on the episode, I talked a lot about the importance of detaching yourself from what you're making the call mean because for a lot of us, we set these goals thinking that we're going to be happier, more successful, more beautiful, whatever it is, we think we're going to what's going to happen to us when we achieve that goal, which means that we're not that now we're not successful. Now. We're not beautiful. Now, we're not worthy, or we're not lovable. Now. That's why we get so stressed out about achieving our goals and why we work so hard to achieve the goal. Because we think that that goal is going to mean something to us. But self-compassion lets us understand and detach ourselves from that, and lets us see that today, we are actually lovable.

Today, we are actually worth. Today, I am actually successful, I can celebrate my successes. Now. I can celebrate my weight. Today, I can celebrate how beautiful I am today, I can celebrate my relationship today. And so many of us are afraid to do that at this moment. Because we think that if we celebrate ourselves, today, we're going to get lazy, or we're going to stop focusing on our goal, we're going to stop working towards it. But that is not at all the case, my friends, I want you again to visualize the success, triad, intention at the top, self-discipline and self-compassion, all three of those work together to help you achieve the goals that you're setting, you get super clear on your intention, you have the self-discipline to take the aligned action towards your goal. And you have self-compassion there so that you can actually enjoy your day-to-day, enjoy the journey, enjoy your way towards the goal, and not quit on yourself when things get hard.

Instead, you see those moments when things get hard as just a human moment and you recommit to your goal. It's so important for you to understand why self-compassion matters so much. And I'm harping on this because this was something new to me. And I know it's new to so many of you out there. But it was new to me because I didn't actually think I needed self-compassion. I thought it was silly. I thought it was like, I thought it was just a kind of like a roll my eyes type of thing. People would talk about it. And I'd be like, oh, so annoying. I don't need self-compassion, I'm good. I have discipline, I have intention. I mean, I'm kind to myself, I'm nice to myself, whatever. I didn't realize how important it was for me to actually start embodying self-compassion, practicing it every moment, and how much easier it made my life. And this is the one thing that I found.

So just It blows my mind that once I encompassed all three of these things into my goal setting, I wasn't just achieving my goals and enjoying my life. I was achieving my goals faster. I was achieving my goals faster because when things would get hard, instead of wasting my time being hard on myself, I would notice those as human moments love myself, and recommit again, and I would just recommit again and I would keep going. Instead of feeling like a failure, I would see those moments of failure because yes, of course, I fail all the time. I fail at my goals all the time. But instead of seeing those moments of failure, as you know, I'm so disappointed. I'm so stupid, I should just quit. I would see those moments and be like, alright, well what can I learn? How can I get back up again? What can I do now? And I would just stop wasting time in all of the negativity and just recommit to my goal and love myself when I recommitted and celebrate myself and be so proud of myself for loving myself in those moments.

That is what's available to you when you practice the success triad and these three things, again, are the three things you need to achieve your goal. Again, you got to be super clear set an intention, you have to have self-discipline, you have to take that aligned action. Many of us are great with self-discipline in so many areas of our lives. But there are one or two areas where we're not sort of meeting the mark. And then we need self-compassion. All right, my friends, if this is resonating with you, and you want support with either the clarity and the vision setting and set your intention, with that self-discipline, muscle, getting really good at setting that muscle, setting those healthy habits, making sure that you are taking that aligned action all of the time staying accountable to yourself, or that self-compassion piece, which is so key and so important, is really seeing yourself loving yourself, celebrating yourself every day. I want to invite you to join us on the journey because these are the things that we do on the regular these things right here. I help my students get clear on their goals. I make sure that they're taking the right aligned action to achieve their goals. And we practice self-compassion.

Every time we have an opportunity to do it. We build that muscle every time because it doesn't come naturally. It does not come naturally to us as human beings. We are not born with that self-compassion muscle. It doesn't come naturally. We are born with compassion. It's easy for us to be compassionate toward others, but it's hard for us to be compassionate toward ourselves. So if this is something that you are finding that really resonates with you and you are ready to start achieving every goal you set, then come and join us in the journey. Vanessa Calderon md.com backslash journey. I'm sorry, backslash. Join, come and join us in the journey so that I can help you achieve your goals.

Okay, sweet friends. I will talk to you next week when we talk about all things procrastination, how to know when you're procrastinating, how to stop and how to start taking that action to achieve your goals. Alright, I will see you next week. He's sweet friends.

If you love what you're learning, then you've got to join us in the journey. It's my all inclusive program and the best community out there giving you the education you never knew you needed to help you create a life you love. Join us at Vanessa Calderon md.com forward slash join. I'll see you there.