(01) The Magic of Goal Setting with Austin Bollinger

Goal setting & Performance

Video of the episode: The Focus Bee Show - episode 1
Katie Stoddart, host of the show, website: www.thefocusbee.com

With Austin Bollinger, best selling author of 'Crush your goals', we go through: 

• The most common struggle with goal setting
• Balance between realistic and challenging goals
• Processes vs goals
• Intrinsic & extrinsic motivation
• Goals and high performance

Mentioned in this episode:
Tony Robbins, Brendon Burchard, John Maxwell
Michael Hyatt - planner
The one thing by Keller & Papasan

You can find Austin at:
https://www.dailynewyears.com/

On LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/austinjbollinger/

Transcript

[00:01] Katie: Welcome to the Focus B Show, where Katie Stoddart, high performance coach, interviews experts around the world in performance and mindfulness. Now here's your host. Katie.

[00:33] Katie: Welcome to the Focus B show. This is the very first episode. Very excited. I'm Katie Stoddard, the host of this show, and today I'm here with Austin Bullinger, an expert at goal setting, bestselling author of his book Crush Your Goals and a Success Coach. Thank you for being with me today.

[00:53] Austin: Hey, Katie, thank you so much for having me, especially on the first episode, no less. So thank you so much.

[00:59] Katie: Yeah, thank you. I'm really excited to have you here. The first question that comes to my mind in terms of goal setting is, what is the most common struggle that you see with people when they set goals?

[01:13] Austin: That's a great question. I think it can vary from person to person. I personally think one of the biggest culprits that derails our goal setting is setting too many goals or not acknowledging how many unspoken goals we have. I refer to this as goal competition. It's when all your goals are competing for your time, your resources, and just your mental capacity. So a lot of times we'll write down our big picture goals. Like, I want to write a book this year. I want to read twelve books this year, goals like that. But then we also have spouses, partners, family members. We have careers, we have all these other things that are vying for our time. And a lot of people don't think of those types of things as goals. But I go to work 40 hours a week, and I have loads of goals that I have to fulfill for my career, for my boss, and so I make sure to remember those. I have this house that I'm living in. My wife and I have been renovating it for several years. So I have goals that I set with my wife. I have financial goals, I have fitness goals. So I think a lot of people fail to take stock of just how many goals they're pursuing, because oftentimes those other things we have going on, we wouldn't label them as goals. And so when we start trying to achieve the goals we do write down and we struggle, and we're like, where's all my time going? Or, why don't I have enough time or energy to complete this? That's when it's when you should really step back and take stock of everything else that you're doing as well.

[02:51] Katie: Nice. I really like this. I love the fact that there's loads of unspoken goals that we're not aware of, and that can contribute then to the sense of overwhelm, because you want to add goals on top, but you're ignoring all the ones you're already working on.

[03:05] Austin: Exactly.

[03:06] Katie: That's a great point. And I think people aren't necessarily aware of the fact that they have goals they don't really realize. For example, like you said, renovating their house. They might not think of it as a goal, but technically it's something they're working towards. So technically it is a goal.

[03:23] Austin: Yeah. So my wife, if she were to ask her, she would say, I don't have goals. She's not bought into this stuff hook, line, and sinker like I am. So if I ask her, babe, what are your goals for this weekend? She'll be like, I don't have any goals for the weekend. But if I say, what do you hope to get done this weekend? Then she'll have a laundry list of things. And I'm like, those are goals. Whether you want to label those as goals or not. You want to get the front door painted this weekend, you want to go for a walk with the dogs. Those are goals. They're things that you're saying you hope to achieve. Call them what you will. I call them goals.

[03:58] Katie: Nice. You like to formulate everything in the setting of goals, which is really nice. Different words work for different people. One thing that comes to my mind in terms of all these different goals is so you have your weekend goals and objectives and the things you're working on at work. But if you're setting yourself, let's say, a very challenging sort of business goal, how do you find a balance between realistic enough that it's not discouraging, but challenging enough that it pushes you? I always find that this balance between realistic and challenging can be tricky. What has helped you?

[04:33] Austin: It is I've had other people, some of my coaching clients, and some other just people, friends and family ask me questions very similar to that. For me, it's trial and error and patience. So with anything, you have to establish a baseline, and until you establish a baseline of what you are capable of, it's hard to know when you're overextending or underachieving. So for me, I really try to stay in tune with how I'm feeling. Do I feel stressed and overwhelmed? Do I feel like I'm not getting everything done? Perhaps I've set the bar too high? Do I feel a little bit bored and kind of complacent? Maybe I'm not shooting high enough? So I really try to stay in tune with how I'm feeling. I journal daily. Part of my daily habit is to wake up in the morning, I review my big three goals for the day, which should get me closer to my big three goals for the week, for the month, for the quarter, and so forth. So I really like to break things down. I review my previous day, and I try to write down several wins. What can I feel good about for the day before? Sometimes I do this as the day goes on, like, hey, I got a new lead, a new sales lead at work. And I'll write that down as soon as it happens. But reviewing my wins can help give me energy in the morning. And then I also like to start my day with gratitude. So I write down a few things I'm grateful for and why I'm grateful for those things. So starting my day off this way really lets me get in tune with how I'm feeling. And if I am so busy and so stressed that I want to skip my morning journaling, that's a good indicator that maybe I'm trying to do too much. So I think it's just different for everybody. You set some goals, and if you feel like you're overdoing it, kind of throttle down a little bit. Or if you feel like you could be doing more, push yourself a little harder and find that zone of I don't want to say comfort zone because I think you should just be a little outside of that, but find what works for you.

[06:35] Katie: Yes, I love that. I definitely think that a challenging and an easy goal depends on the person, because something that's very challenging for someone might be totally in the comfort zone of someone else. And tuning into how you feel and your intuition to help you sort of guide how you set your goal, I think is really valuable advice. Also love what you said about your morning routine, the fact that you set your three goals for the day. That's exactly what I do based on my weekly goals, also on my monthly goals. But breaking it down, the way I see it is it helps you to see that every step you work on each day has a future. It goes towards your monthly goal or towards your vision for the year. So I like that.

[07:20] Austin: Absolutely. Yeah. Begin with the end in mind. And when you do that, I don't know where you picked up the big three. I picked it up from Michael Hyatt. I use his full focus planner. The whole planner is built around what are your annual goals, what are your big three quarterly goals, what are your big three for the week and then what are your big three every day? And so I've been using his planner now for almost two and a half years, and it keeps me so on track. And just like you said, every day when I set my big three goals, I know I am building momentum to much bigger things. I think the first question you ask is kind of what's a big hang up people have with goal setting. The other one is setting the bar way too high, one huge goal, and then not breaking that down into manageable pieces. I started my blog Daily New Year's with the idea of what if every day was New Year's Day? That same energy and motivation we get on New Year's Day, what if we applied that to our daily lives? Because on New Year's Day we've spent most of the year procrastinating or postponing things we want to do in our lives, and then we try to do it all at once and we try to do it as fast as humanly possible. And that's why so many of us fail. We set ourselves up to fail because we try to do one huge thing. And so the big three really allows me to take something big that I'm working towards and break that down into daily tasks. So every day I know that I am building towards something amazing.

[08:53] Katie: Yeah, I love that. And I love that idea of having the same energy as you do on New Year's Eve and breaking it down I think is true. It's probably one of the mistakes I used to make in the past, before I even was in the world of coaching, was setting these big ambitious goals and not breaking them down into achievable steps. So I can relate to that. It's really interesting how just changing and tweaking that into manageable steps that you work on every day can totally change the outcome. Can totally change the results.

[09:23] Austin: You get 100%. You mentioned my book. I wrote that last year. Writing a book is a goal, but there are hundreds of smaller goals inside of that. And so if you set out to write a book and don't think about what do I need to do today and tomorrow and the next day, because you're not just going to wake up in a year and have a book unless you break it down first. And the same is so true for so many of the things that we do in our lives.

[09:51] Katie: Interesting. This makes me think of how you see, for example, the difference between processes and goals. So habits, like James Clear talks about habits versus goals.

[10:04] Austin: Yeah, I love writing about habits and routines. So some goals, I think, are so unique it's hard to build a habit around them. But I try to use habits and routines to almost make some of my other achievements automatic. So going to the gym five days a week, that's kind of automatic at this point. It's kind of a habit. And so I have fitness goals in my life, but they aren't a mental drain on me because I don't have to use my willpower and my decision making, because we only have so much of that daily, I don't have to use those resources up to make myself go to the gym. When I was writing my book last year, I tried to build a routine, a habit around that goal, almost to make it second nature, so that it didn't start my day off with using up all my energy. So I get up at 04:00 a.m. Generally last year I would get up at four and write until about six before I would go to the gym. And after a few weeks of doing that, writing my book was just an automatic process once I got it going. So to me, I think habits, processes and goals are different, but they all work in harmony if you build them to do so.

[11:18] Katie: Absolutely. And in some ways, I sometimes see habits as, like, mini daily goals. Like that's what you're trying to achieve every day?

[11:26] Austin: Yeah, I track my water intake. I'm trying to get 115oz a day. That's a little habit, a little goal that I track. And that goal is part of one of my fitness goals. And so that's more habitual than, say, going to the gym. I do that every day, but it's just once, and then it's over. Whereas tracking water, I'm doing that all day long. Trying to keep that habit going.

[11:51] Katie: That's really interesting. And I'm fascinated with the fact you get up so incredibly early and then do your writing. How do you sustain that motivation?

[12:00] Austin: Motivation is a huge topic. So I think there's two kinds of motivation. There's extrinsic or external and intrinsic motivation. So I think a lot of times we look for external motivators to keep us going, and that's where we can kind of fail sometimes. Whereas if you're intrinsically motivated to do something for yourself because you want it, it's so much easier to keep that motivation going. A lot of people go to work to get a paycheck. That's an external motivator. If they didn't have that paycheck coming, they would probably stop going to work because they're not intrinsically motivated to do the job they're doing. Some people are. Some people love their job so much, they're basically working their passions. But for me, writing the book, I was so intrinsically motivated by it because I want to be a keynote speaker someday. I want to have a huge business like Brennan Bouchard or Tony Robbins or guys like that, or John Maxwell. And I started looking at it and I'm like, what do they all have in common? It seems like most people, before they make it to the big stage, they've written a book. They've studied a topic so in depth that they know it forwards and backwards, and they become an expert in what they're talking about and then they start speaking to people about that topic. And so last year I decided I've been blogging for two years. I wonder if I know enough now to write a book. And so I set out on that journey. And writing a book was a three to five year goal for me last year. And I decided to just go ahead and dive in. It's something I wanted to do someday. And I said, what am I waiting for? So I just dove in and started writing it. And as I started writing, I thought, man, it'd be great if I could write a 30,000 word book. Because a lot of personal development books are about 30,000 words. And I ended up writing 65,000 words. I didn't know that that was there. I didn't know it was inside of me. But I was so passionate about the topic that I didn't really need motivation I was intrinsically motivated. And so as you set goals for yourselves, those of you who are listening, I always encourage people to really if you've read Simon Sinek, start with why. It's very much the same thing. What is motivating you to set a goal? Not how do I stay motivated for the goals I've set, but what is motivating me to do the things that I'm doing. And once you connect with that, it's so much easier. If you know why you're doing something, it's so much easier to keep following through with it.

[14:37] Katie: Absolutely. I love this. I think why the big one is the root of all motivation and sustainability in terms of goal setting and performance. And if you don't have it, you can feel like the foundation is trembling and then you can't keep it up. And that's when your why is really challenged. Because when you can't manage to keep it up, that means that you don't actually care about it as much as you thought, or you don't know why you're doing it in the first place.

[15:06] Austin: Yeah, you'll hear a lot of people say, man, I should write a book. And a lot of people say that, but they don't know why they want to write a book. Maybe they just know a lot of crazy stories and think it would be fun. But I'm here to tell you, writing a book is a huge task. A lot of work goes into it. And I think 90 some OD percent of people want to write a book. Less than 1% actually do. And I think that's because it's such an undertaking, you have to have a pretty strong reason why you want to write that book. And I did. I wanted to put something out into the world that would genuinely help people with this thing called goal setting. And I hope I achieve that. I hope that my book is something that people can dive into and really master goal setting for themselves.

[15:57] Katie: Wonderful. I think it's so interesting how having such a passionate topic in mind, something you're so passionate about, can be the source of such a motivation. And then the result follows. And this leads me to sort of my next question. It's a bit of a tangent, but because I'm so passionate about high performance, how do you see high performance being related to goals? How do they tie together in your mind?

[16:22] Austin: Yeah, that's a great question. Let me think about that for a second. I think people who tend to be high performers tend to set goals whether they know it or not. They have a lot of ambitions in life, they have a lot of things they're shooting for, and so they generate energy and momentum. And every day they're out there working and grinding, trying to build towards something for themselves. I know for everyone it's so different. But I think high performance is kind of built on goal setting among a lot of other things, too. Passion, heart, grit. I think goal setting is kind of the process for high performance, I guess, if you will. So, I don't know. I love high performance, too. When people refer to me as a high performer, I tend to shy away from that because I wouldn't label myself that way, but I love Brendan Burchard's book, High Performance Habits and stuff like that. But a lot of those types of things have led me to realize that daily goal setting is the thing that is building towards that high performance. That's why when you see so many people who seem to be overnight success, they're not overnight successes, they've been slowly building one domino at a time, one brick in the wall at a time for years, and they finally get to that level that people notice and it's like, wow, how'd they just jump to this level. And so for me, high performance isn't something that you get to someday, it's daily action. High performance is daily action. It's maintaining that momentum, keeping your energy up along the way, keeping your passion up and keeping your life in balance. I don't think anyone can achieve high performance without also achieving balance. You can't over invest in career without investing in family and friends. You can't over invest in one area or you're going to fall apart.

[18:19] Katie: Definitely. That's such an important point, the fact that high performance has to take into account all the different areas and if you focus too much in one area and the other ones lapsed out yes, it's a mess.

[18:32] Austin: Yeah. I think that's why people burn out, because they overinvest in the hustle and they're not recharging, they're not spending time with family and friends. They kind of forget what they're even working towards or working for. A lot of people want to be huge success so that they have money to support their families and their loved ones, but then they kind of neglect those areas in trying to achieve that end goal. So it's very difficult to step back and keep things in balance. But to achieve high performance balance is so critical.

[19:04] Katie: Absolutely. And I'm curious why you shy away when people call you a high performer because you seem to be doing all of the things right. The exercising five times a week, the getting up at four, writing a book that's twice the length that you originally set out for.

[19:20] Austin: Yeah, that's an interesting question. We'll dive a little bit into my psyche. So growing up, I always had this issue with people. There's a huge difference between confidence and arrogance, and I always want to be confident, but I want to stay humble. I want to be very humble. And so when people start saying, man, you're doing all the things, you're such a high performer, how have you achieved so much? I don't want that to sink into my mindset and start thinking, yeah, I am awesome. I have achieved all these things. A, I don't want to become arrogant, and B, I never want to stop shooting for more. And so I don't know, all the stuff that I'm doing and achieving is just part of my daily life. I haven't made it yet. I never will. I want to keep striving. And so I don't want to be labeled as a high performer because I don't want that to sink in and slow me down. I want to being a high performer someday is one of the things that keeps me going.

[20:21] Katie: That's wonderful. I absolutely love this, to stay humble and not be arrogant and continue shooting for more. And it's true. If you get the label, then you think, oh, I've made it, I can relax. No, you're still striving and also, like you said, to stay humble. So in general, maybe we shouldn't label people high performers because maybe we slowed them down or make them arrogant.

[20:41] Austin: Yeah, I don't know. It's something that goes back to my early teenage years. A couple of times I was called arrogant, and that was something that really bothered me because I didn't want to be perceived as arrogant. Yeah, I want to be confident. I don't think you're doing yourself any justice if you're not confident, because your self esteem suffers when you're not confident. Those things are all kind of tied together. But I don't want to go so far as to become arrogant or be perceived in that way. It's just something that's deeply rooted into I guess it's one of my belief systems, one of my internal beliefs that's just always running in the background. But yeah, that's why when people say it, I'm like.

[21:22] Katie: It'S good that you understand the reasoning behind it and you keep yourself in check on those perspectives. I think that's great. To come back to goal setting, what would be a few tips you'd give to the listeners as to how they can, for example, measure the progress in their goals?

[21:38] Austin: Measure the progress in their goals? Yeah. So I guess the first thing I would challenge the listeners to do is really, if you're not writing your goals down, to sit down and really write those out. Take stock, as I mentioned before, on just how many things that you're hoping to achieve. Maybe reconnect with why you're hoping to achieve those things. Some people set a goal and they won't quit it because they set the goal and they want the stubborn pursuit to finish it. If you're no longer interested in the goal you're pursuing, it's okay to let that goal go. So just really take an audit of the things that you're trying to achieve, and once you get a solid list of goals that you're working towards, try to identify when that goal will be done. Some things are pretty clear. The book is published. It's for sale on Amazon. That's done. Some things like my fitness goals, I always use this little mantra fitness is forever. That can never be done. So how do you measure success in the gym? For me, it's going five days a week and incrementally, getting stronger, feeling better, feeling healthier. And so try to come up with a system to measure your goals that works per goal. For my water goal, I track it in an app. When it hits 115oz for the day, I know I've won. And in my journal, I have a little habit tracker. Each quarter, I get a new journal. So it's got three rows of 30 boxes, and you just put an X or an O for a hit or a miss. And so every day, I sit down and I X out my water goal, my reading goal, my gym goal, and I keep a tally, and I just try to continually do better and stay on track. So measuring success really depends on the goal itself.

[23:34] Katie: That's very true. That's a great point. And how do you feel if, for example, there's a couple of days where you just don't do your habits? It can be a billion different reasons. Maybe you're not feeling very well. Maybe you had a terrible night's sleep that night for whatever reason. I mean, stuff happens in life. So how do you feel about it when you're tracking it and you're on a great sort of, like, stride of doing it all perfectly, and then you have a few days out?

[24:01] Austin: I love this question because I know we connected on LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, I started this little hashtag called Winning Wednesday. So, as I mentioned, I write down my daily wins every day, and I encourage people to really think about that because it's easy to go through a day and feel like you haven't done much. But I always say that if you really look for the good, it's there. And so I'm always journaling my daily wins. They don't have to be these huge, crazy things. So to your point, monday morning I was working out in the gym, and I strained my lower back, so I worked out Monday, but I didn't work out the rest of this week at all. And it would be really easy for me to get down on myself and say, well, man, you only went to the gym once this week. You didn't get to walk the dogs at all because your back has been all pinched up. But it told me that, okay, I might be trying to rush things in the gym because I've been trying to get my numbers up. And Monday I decided to throw on extra weight and just kind of force it, and I hurt myself. And so when I wrote down my daily wins, I wrote, hey, had a great lift at the gym today. I upped my numbers, but I hurt my back. And I learned that I need to be patient with myself. I need to listen to my body you only get one body, you only get one spine, so you got to take care of it. And so I said, you know what? This week I'm going to take a rest week. I'm going to rest my backup, and hopefully next week it'll come back better and stronger. But I try to look for the positive. I try to look for the win in everything I do. If I don't get up at 04:00 A.m., I don't get down on myself and say, you didn't get up at four today, I write down, hey, you slept in today. You've been working hard, you needed a little bit of a recharge, that's okay. And so I don't think goals should be this rigid thing that you etch in stone and it's pass fail. I think that's what resolutions are. We say, this year I'm going to do this. The definition of a resolution is a firm commitment to do or not do something. I think goals are the opposite. Goals are a tool for self improvement. But if we don't have a little grace and a little patience with ourselves, then again, we're going to burn out, we're going to give up, we're going to throw in the towel. So I think as long as you're getting a little bit better every day and you're focusing on the things you are doing well, the wins that you are experiencing in your life, then you're doing all right. And I just try to remind myself of that daily.

[26:32] Katie: That's absolutely wonderful. I love it because this also includes self compassion, like you realizing this limit towards your fitness in this week and how you needed to be more patient, perhaps. And it also means that goals then motivate you and don't demotivate you. Because if you punish yourself when you don't continue or keep track, then you're going to end up demotivated. And that's when, like you said, you throw in the towel and you give up. Right.

[27:01] Austin: I love how you put that. Yeah. If you punish yourself for maybe not hitting your goals 100% or missing a day or two here and there. Yeah. I mean, if you're focusing on the negative side of that and how you're losing, you're not going to be able to keep your energy up, your motivation up. And so always focus on what's going well.

[27:20] Katie: Absolutely. I love this. And we have a few minutes left, and I think it's a lovely way to finish on always focus on what is going well for you. Before we finish, is there any particular book, aside from your own book, crush Your Goal, that you would recommend as a complimentary read towards people that are interested in goal setting?

[27:42] Austin: That's a good question. Let me look at my there's been so many books that have impacted me over my life. Yeah. So the perfect book that I think that would complement my own is the one thing by Jay papasan and Gary Keller. If. You haven't read it, it's phenomenal. I think as soon as you open the book, there's a two page spread of, like, rabbit tracks all over the page. And there's a Chinese proverb there that says, if you chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither one. And so for me, goal setting. I have multiple goals going on at once, but I tend to not overlap per category because I think if we try to achieve too much if we try to do too many things, we will achieve nothing at all. Or our progress will be so slow that it's almost imperceivable we won't notice it. So therefore, we won't get to feel the win. So whether it's a home renovation project, a goal at work, a side hustle goal such as a blog or a book, I try to focus on one thing at a time. So I actually put my blog and podcast on hold a couple of months ago because I'm working on an online course right now. That's my one thing. At this current moment, I don't allow anything else to derail me. I'm not thinking about the blog posts that I could be writing or the episodes of my podcast that I could be recording, because I'm so focused on this one thing. Last year, my one thing was the book. It took the whole year, but I stayed focused. And so that book is incredibly powerful if you feel like you're being tugged in too many different directions.

[29:19] Katie: I love this, and Focus is one of my favorite topics, hence my brand, the Focus B and the Focus B show. So I'm all about focus. So great recommendation. Where can people find you? Where can the listeners find you?

[29:33] Austin: Yeah, so the blog that I started back in 2017, Dailynewyears.com, that's kind of my central hub. I don't really have an Austin Bollinger site yet. I do have Crushyourgolsbook.com, if you're more interested in the book itself. But Dailynewyears.com is where all my articles are. It's where all my podcast episodes are, and there's information about me and my book there as well.

[29:56] Katie: Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Austin. I'm thrilled about this interview. I thought it was absolutely fascinating in many different ways, and we touched on lots of different topics. So thank you so much for being with me today.

[30:09] Austin: Thank you so much for having me on. And again, for your first episode, I feel so honored and humbled.

[30:15] Katie: My pleasure. Thank you.

[30:17] Austin: Thank you. Bye bye.

[30:22] Katie: Thank you for listening to the Focus B show. We would love to hear your feedback. Let us know in a review how this episode inspired you. Keep buzzing.