Ep #71: Are Your Goals Big Enough?

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who is midlife and plus sized and you want to start running but don’t know how, or if it’s even possible, you’re in the right place. Using proven strategies and real-life experience, certified running and life coach Jill Angie shares how you can learn to run in the body you have right now.

Hey rebels, you are listening to episode number 71 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and we need to talk about some very big issues today. Specifically, the size of your goals, and why I think they should be bigger. A lot bigger.

Like, huge. Like, take what you think you can do and then double it, and then double it again until you want to barf. Then it’s big enough. Actually, I have a funny story about that. I have a few coach friends and we have a small mastermind group that meets once a month and we talk about our business and our personal goals and we really encourage each other to think bigger and to drop the bullshit stories we have as to why we can’t do something.

And at the end of each meeting, we have to set our goals for the next one, and we call it Barf Club. As in, if we don’t want to barf when we think about the monthly goals that we’ve set, then they’re not big enough. And it’s really a fun way to make something scary seem a little more approachable, and we just call it #barfclub.

So why on earth would you want to make yourself so uncomfortable on purpose, right? I mean, it sounds kind of stupid. Like, what’s wrong with just living a life where you’re kind of relaxed all the time and you get to watch a lot of Netflix and go out with your friends and just do fun stuff and like, why would you want to push yourself out of your comfort zone on purpose?

And unless you’re somebody that maybe really likes feeling squeamish and terrified, like, you’re that person that can watch The Ring without covering your eyes and screaming when that creepy girl climbs out of the hole, like that – I still have nightmares about seeing that movie. But I couldn’t watch that movie. I had to cover my eyes, but also, I couldn’t look away either.

And seriously, I think sometimes that’s what big, bad, audacious goals feel like. They’re so scary you don’t want to look but you also can’t not think about them. But why would you want to choose that instead of a really comfortable life? A really easy way of being where you don’t have to feel scared all the time, where you just get to be happy and relaxed all the time.

Well, there’s a good reason for that. I’m going to talk to you all about it in today’s podcast, but honestly, the bottom line is if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you. So if you are somebody who’s like, I want to be different than I am now, big goals are the way to make that happen. If you are 100% like, all in with the exact person you are right now and you’re like, I have no desire, I have no need to change who I am, how I approach things, then maybe this isn’t the podcast for you, and that’s fine.

But if you are somebody who’s like, I want to become a different version of myself, big goals are the way and we’re going to talk about it today. And so I actually did a Facebook Live on this in the Not Your Average Runner community the other day, and by the way, if you’re not in that group, you need to be because I do a lot of teaching over there for free.

So just look up on Facebook, Official Not Your Average Runner Podcast Community, that’s the title of the group. Request to join, fill up the questions. By the way, if you don’t fill out the questions, you won’t get approved for membership. And the questions are not hard. It’s not like a test. It’s just three simple questions to show that you’re not a robot, that you’re not like, a Nigerian spammer.

So go to the Facebook group, it’s called Official Not Your Average Runner Podcast Community. I do Facebook Lives in there all the time. I teach all the time in there, and also, I announce really fun stuff usually earlier in that group than you will hear it on the podcast. So if you want to be all in for the latest news and everything, join that group.

Okay, anyway, what I taught in that group this week was why it’s important to set crazy ass goals and then I thought, hey, let’s do a podcast too. Of course. So naturally, the very first thing I did was look up a bunch of quotes about doing epic shit. I found a ton of really, really good ones from Zig Ziglar, who was one of my favorite motivational speakers, and if you don’t know who he is, just look him up, I promise you won’t be sorry.

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to sprinkle the quotes that I got from him throughout this episode because really, when I read through it, when I read through all the different quotes that I found from him, they pretty much nail – like, he’s all about setting goals and going after them and becoming a different person as a result of them. So I’m just going to sprinkle them in today’s episode where they seem appropriate.

So we’re going to start with the first one, which is, “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every single time.” In other words, you need to think bigger to get anywhere. So progress does not happen by accident. If your goals are small in relation to what you’re already capable of, you won’t have to try too hard to get them and it’s not going to be a stretch and you’re not going to learn anything new.

Like, if you can do a 5K right now and your big crazy goal is I’m going to train to run four miles, that doesn’t challenge you. It doesn’t change you. Because honestly, if you can run three miles right now, you actually can already run four miles. You could do it tomorrow. It’s not much farther.

And your brain of course might disagree, but I promise that your body can do it. But if you are the 5K right now, 5K mark right now and you set a goal to run 13 miles, well, then four miles seems a lot more doable. It’s pretty much a done deal. Thinking much bigger than where you currently are at means that you hit a lot of other smaller targets along the way, and you can celebrate them like crazy. I highly recommend it.

But if your ultimate goal is to run four miles, you’re going to take your time getting there. If your ultimate goal is to run 13 miles, you’ll get busy tackling that four miles pretty fast because you know after that you need to do five, and then six, and then seven, and all of those means that four miles isn’t nearly as scary.

Now, setting enormous goals also gets our creative juices going. So imagining what has never been done before and then deciding you’re just going to go figure that shit out, like, it makes you think a whole different way. So think about the iPhone. Before we had the iPhone, it didn’t exist. Nothing really like it existed. I mean, somebody had to think it up and then create it. There was no template, no plan to follow. There was no Pinterest video like this is how you make an iPhone.

Somebody had to dream it up, somebody at Apple had this crazy idea. They dreamed it up, they made it happen, and now we have smartphones all over the place that do amazing things and we totally take them for granted. I mean, I was born in a time where we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have any of that stuff.

I had a computer, I think I was – gosh, it was 1985, I got my first computer when I went away to college. Like, little freshman, my first computer. But I grew up in a time where a smartphone was not something I could even conceive of. But somebody out there had this idea that nobody else had ever created and they made it happen and now we have them.

So here’s the thing; what if Steve Jobs had said, “Yeah, I mean, that’s a cool idea like, buttons that you can push and it’s a phone, but it’ll never work.” What if he’d said that? We wouldn’t have smartphones. We wouldn’t have iPhones.

Or what if Thomas Edison – think about him and the light bulb. I mean, seriously, who thinks this shit up? Yeah, candles are great and all but I want something that doesn’t drip wax everywhere or start fires or go out when the wind blows. I don’t know what that thing is but I’m going to create it.

And so he thought it up and he made it happen and it took him like, 10,000 tries, and here’s what he had to say about it right before he finally got it figured out. He said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” And that is really badass, right?

So this actually brings me to another one of Zig Ziglar’s gems, and that is, “Remember that failure is an event. Not a person.” Because here’s the thing, whatever your big goal is, whether it’s a half marathon or a marathon, or going back to get your degree or losing weight or whatever it is, you’re going to fuck shit up on the way to get there.

You’re not going to be perfect. You will fail along the way. Now, most people avoid failure because they think it means something awful about them. Either they’re going to have to be angry with themselves if they don’t get it right or other people are going to have opinions and they worry about that. They worry that they’re going to be judged for not being perfect or they’re judging themselves for not being perfect.

And it’s weird. We have this weird belief in our society that there is shame in trying something and not achieving it the first time or whenever. So I like to say I just haven’t figured it out yet, instead of I failed at it. Because we can always try again, we can always adapt and change and so on. And failure means you are in the arena. You are participating, you are trying, you are learning. You are making a difference to yourself. And I would so much rather be the person who went for it than the woman who spent her entire life not doing anything different because she might fail or she might be embarrassed or people might laugh at her.

Would you rather just not even start to train for a half marathon on the off chance that you might come in last? Would you rather just hide, not even try? I mean, that’s actually experiencing the failure ahead of time before it even happens. Literally, if you’re thinking like, oh, I couldn’t do that because I might feel bad if I came in last or if I didn’t finish, you’re actually creating pain and suffering in the present moment out of an imaginary future that you don’t even know if it’s going to come true.

That is crazy. Come on. You are so much better than that. And here’s the thing; I totally failed at my first half marathon. As in, I signed up, I told a bunch of people I was doing it, I did some of the training, and then I just sort of bailed out on race day because I was embarrassed at not doing what I set out to do.

This is what I told people when they asked how my half marathon was going. I was like, “Well you know, I’m not going to do it. My training didn’t go well. I know I can walk 13 miles so I don’t even want to show up to that race unless I’m going to be running it.” Such a cop out.

So instead of showing up, trying my best, and failing honorably, failing in a way that I could be like, hey I showed up and I did what – attempted to do what I set out to do, I just hid and pretended like it didn’t matter to me. But it did matter to me, and that morning of the race, I lay in my bed thinking about all the other people, like, 20,000 other people running my race, getting my race medal, crossing my finish line.

All because I was scared of being embarrassed. I was scared that I would have to walk most of it, and spoiler alert, even if I had done the proper training, I still would have been walking a fair amount of it. There was no way I was going to be running an entire race anyway. But I had this whole bullshit story that allowed me when I was telling people to sort of “save face” because I was like, well, I can walk 13 miles, I can do the distance, I just don’t want to show up unless I’m going to be perfect at it.

Such a bullshit story. So after that morning, when I was thinking about everybody else running my race and how I wasn’t embarrassed. Like, nobody else cared that I didn’t run the race. It was me. I was mad at myself for letting myself down, and I swore there was no way I was going to do that again.

So as soon as that race opened up again, I signed up and this time I trained for it. And some of my training runs were a disaster. I missed a few. Let’s be honest, but I gave it 110%. I showed the fuck up for myself. Even though it wasn’t perfect, even though I was slower than I wanted to be and I messed up my nutrition and my hydration, I had to take a freaking porta potty break at mile three because I drank too much that morning. Like, a girl on crutches passed me as well as a guy who was juggling.

He was running and juggling and he was running faster than me. I mean, come on. And when it happened, when both of those people passed me, I did just laugh in the moment because I was like, you know what, it’s all good, I’m out here, I’m doing my thing, but I was like, jeez, the girl on crutches. Oh my god. But I did cheer her on because she was kind of amazing.

But anyway, I did my goal my way and it was amazing and I can’t tell you the feeling of pride and accomplishment I got from crossing that finish line, especially because it was my second attempt. Because I hadn’t shown up the first time. Actually, you can’t even call that an attempt, but really, knowing that I fucked it up the first time and I came back around and I did it again, god, that felt so good.

It was just like, such a feeling of redemption. So what I’m trying to say here is that failure is what you make of it. I didn’t meet my goal time during that race so you could say that was failure. I wanted to come in under three hours, I came in at like three hours and three minutes. It was close but I could have spent time going, “Oh, if only I’d done that one extra training run or if only I hadn’t quit on that other training run.”

I could have made that mean that it was failure because I messed up a couple training runs. Or you could say because I set a goal time of three hours, I actually trained harder and went faster than I would have if I didn’t have that goal. In other words, having that big goal out there made me do more than I would have done if I didn’t have the goal.

So I didn’t fail. I succeeded. So you get to decide what you want to make failure mean about yourself. So for me, my half marathon that I didn’t show up to, and it took me a while to do this work on myself, eventually I decided to make it mean that I figured out one way not to train. Now I know what happens when I skip more than half my training runs, or when I wait too long to get started on my training plan.

But the bonus is there’s always going to be another race, there’s always another chance to succeed, and not hitting your goal on the first attempt or the 10th attempt is simply the circumstance. Your thoughts about it, whether you beat yourself up or you decide it’s just one more step on the path to success are where you have all the choice, and that’s what really matters.

So in my opinion, setting big goals that you might not succeed at the first time around is the key to personal growth. This is why we want to set really big goals. You have to become a different person to achieve them. You have to transform from someone who doesn’t believe in herself to someone who believes so hard that just failing along the way is just one more step to success.

Being that person who is willing to fail forward, to fail as many times as it takes is a very powerful life skill. Life is not always rainbows and daisies, in case you haven’t noticed. Lots of times we mess up and setting big goals helps you prepare for those times when things don’t go right because if you do the work on yourself to achieve a big goal, you learn not to let failure derail you but to fuel you into trying again.

Now, here’s another awesome Zig quote that really drives that point home. “When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal. You do not change your decision to get there.” I’m going to say that again. “When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal. You do not change your decision to get there.”

So here’s an example. You know when you’re driving to the store and you come to a traffic light and you have to stop the car and you don’t say, “Oh no, there’s something in my way, I better turn around and go home.” You wait for the fucking light to change and you keep going. Or say you’re driving to another city to spend the holidays with family and you hit the inevitable Wednesday before Thanksgiving traffic jam and your GPS says the delay is five miles long and you’re like, crap, I’m going to be sitting in traffic for the next 30 minutes.

Do you turn around and go home? No. You check out alternate routes. You figure out the back roads, or you just wait it out. One way or another, you just don’t quit. It doesn’t make any sense. You just make another plan and this is what you learn from having big goals that you go all in on. Quitting is not an option. Failure, it’s not even – sometimes people say failure is not an option. I think that’s bullshit.

Failure is the path to success. It’s quitting that’s not the option. You learn, you adapt, you keep going. This is a life skill, people. It’s about way more than just getting that half marathon medal. It’s about becoming the god damn superhero of your own life. Having your own back no matter what.

And to quote my new best friend Zig, “What you get by achieving your goals is not nearly as important as what you become by achieving them.” What you get by achieving your goals, like a race medal or something like that, is not nearly as important as who you become by achieving them.

Big goals challenge you and they change you. They help you become a different version of yourself. One that keeps her commitments to herself, right? You know that person who says she’s going to do something. We all have that one friend. “Oh, I’m going to do something,” and then she just freaking goes and does it.

She’s like, “Oh, I’m going to sign up for a marathon,” and then she just goes and does it. And you’re like, she’s special, everything is easy for her. You know what, that’s not true. She’s just somebody who has learned not to give up until she gets what she wants, and big goals make you into that person.

And once you achieve one, then you set another one, and another, and pretty soon you’re kind of blowing your own mind with all that you can do. So alright, I got one final Zig quote that I think sums up everything we’ve talked about today. “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”

Nobody expects this to be easy for you. You are going to suck at whatever it is for a while, and I think I said this in one of my early podcasts. Be willing to suck at running when you first start. It gets easier and you get stronger but you have to be willing to suck at it to start. No perfectionism allowed. You have to be willing to suck at it in the beginning to eventually achieve greatness. You can’t be amazing at something until you start by sucking at it.

Okay my friends, now here’s what I want to tell you. I can support you in making that half marathon goal your bitch. Here’s how I’m going to do it. It’s called the Rebel Runner Unleashed program and I want to talk a little bit about what it is because I know we’ve been talking about the race-cations and we’re going to New Orleans and Seattle and Savannah and it’s going to be amazing, but it’s so much more than just a race-cation.

And so I kind of want you to really understand what’s involved and see if this is kind of the thing for you. So here’s what the program is. First of all, it’s a transformative experience where you will chase down and achieve a really big goal. In this case, a half marathon, and become the superhero of your own life.

It’s five months of total badassery, culminating in a race-cation with a dozen other women who have been working on the same goal with you every step of the way. It is a chance to run your dream race in a super fun location and create memories that you’re going to have forever. And learn the skills to fail forward, learn the skills to like, stop quitting and keep pushing on when things get hard.

You’re learn how to motivate yourself when things are tough, or when they stop being fun. So many times, I have people who say, “I don’t want to do this half marathon thing anymore, it’s not fun now.” Right, it’s not supposed to be fun. It’s a half marathon, you’re running 13 miles, it’s fucking hard. It’s worth it even though it’s not always fun.

You’ll also learn how to be an example to others on what is possible for them, which I think is just so powerful. You will learn all of the skills from a master certified life coach, that’s me, on how to manage your inner mean girl so you can get the F out of your own way and make some epic shit happen for yourself.

And to top it all off, you’ll also learn all of the finer points of running and training for an endurance race so you’ve got all these life skills and now you’re going to finish this race feeling strong and really, really proud of what you’ve done.

So that’s what the Rebel Runner program is and I want to tell you also like, here’s what it is not. So if this is something you’ve been thinking about and you’re like, “I wonder if this is for me,” it’s not for you if you’re just looking for some kind of show up and party kind of race-cation. Those things exist, they’re amazing, I love them, that’s not what this is.

It’s also not a program that you can do half assed. You need to full ass this shit. So don’t apply if you’re not 110% sure you want to transform yourself into a superhero. This is also not a solo exercise. You are in this with me and with all the other women in your training group and with the entire Not Your Average Runner team. We are here for you. The women in the group are here for you, I’m here for you, my team is here for you, we all will have your back and you will have your training buddies backs as well.

So this is a two-way street. I’m there, the team’s there to make sure everyone stays on track and applies what they’re learning so that they finish their race and feel amazing. And here’s the deal; I have a 100% success rate in training people for distance races. I have not lost a single client yet who’s been training for a half marathon or a full marathon. I am tough on you but I’m also loving and compassionate because I have been where you are, which is how I know what you need to get across that finish line.

So you’re going to get the tough love and the love love from me as well. And I don’t want to sugar coat this either. This experience is an investment. It ain’t free. It’s an all-inclusive event that includes me personally training you the entire time and then the race-cation itself is a beautiful, beautiful thing. But if you’re up for the challenge, if you think you’ve got what it takes to go through this program, become that superhero, that badass superhero of your own life, to be a rebel runner, if you think you’ve got what it takes, you’re interested, I want to have a conversation.

So just head on over to talktojill.com, fill out your application and then set up an appointment with the team for a free consultation. My amazing and beautiful assistant Lauren will talk with you to see if you’re a good fit and then we’ll go from there, and we do have spots open in New Orleans, in Seattle, and Savannah. They’re going to book quickly. There’s limited spots available so for real, if you want do this, get on the phone with us soon and we’ll figure it out.

Alright rebels, that it is for this week. Everything I mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com/71 and I will talk to you next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to www.notyouraveragerunner.com to download your free one-week jumpstart plan and get started running today.