Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success Podcast, episode fifty-three. I’m your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way. 

In order to achieve our goals, we need to understand what is expected of us. Sometimes we focus exclusively on the expectations of others. As you get older, you realize that the expectations that others have for you are far less important than the expectations that you have for yourself. Are you willing to challenge what you think is realistic and be open to more possibilities? 

In this episode, we look at ways to examine what it is you are expecting of yourself. In order to lay the proper foundation for achieving great things in the future, you have to start small and prove to yourself that you can be trusted to do the things you say you’re going to do. This starts with having clear direction and understanding what is expected of us and when it is expected. 

We can do anything we put our minds to, but not all at once. Direction includes a combination of two long-term elements, purpose and vision, and two short-term elements, key objectives and prioritization: 

1. Purpose is often synonymous with mission. It’s your why. It clearly defines who we serve, what we produce, and why we matter. 
2. Vision is your plan for the future that helps you achieve your purpose. 
3. Objectives are measurable goals that get you closer to achieving your vision. 
4. Priorities are the daily or weekly expressions of your work.

Each element cascades to the next. Purpose leads to vision, which leads to objectives, which all lead to ruthless prioritization. Your priorities are a function of the level of ownership you have to your outcome and your objectives. There’s a relationship between your objectives and your long-term vision because your vision and achieving your purpose every day are also priorities. Really, they all inform your priorities because they’re all connected and interrelated. There’s a through line, but over time things do change, so it’s your job to keep them aligned as best you can. 

As overachievers, we often confuse volume of work produced with impact, so having the necessary clarity will give us permission to do less. Prioritization is an exercise in subtraction rather than addition. It’s important to articulate your weekly priorities as well as your daily priorities, and both should be limited to just a few, otherwise, it’s just another task list. Because it’s important to focus on a very small number of things that matter, and then to be as effective as you can at doing those things. 

It would be naive to think that you only have to do a few things in a day as there are so many things vying for our attention that need to be done. But deciding what absolutely needs to be done, right now, today, requires doing the hard thinking about what’s most important. And when we complete those few priorities, it feels like a good day. 

We need to celebrate those small wins. Otherwise, we can easily get discouraged because we all know the work never ends and there’s so much more that didn’t get done. It can also be helpful to ask the question, which objective does that priority support? If the work you’re doing isn’t reflected in your key objectives, it’s time to rethink how you’re approaching those goals. 

Prioritizing is hard and that’s why most people won’t do this. Sometimes you have to force yourself to do it, to do that hard thinking about what is most important that you need to get done today, and this week, to support those ultimate goals that you have for yourself.

Recognize your wins. I can’t stress this enough. I highly encourage you to recognize a job well done. Stop waiting for other people to notice. You’ve got to do this for yourself. As with most things, it gets easier with practice. I invite you to give it a try, to understand for yourself why it’s such a powerful thing. 

Focus on finding the work that should be done instead of the work that might be easiest to do. 

Realize the interrelated nature of these long-term and short-term elements as they should always be linked. If they’re not, there’s a process breakdown somewhere. 

It’s all about having the right mindset and committing to doing it regularly, and that requires paying attention. Set your guidelines for what makes for a good amount of progress that will keep you from burning out or failing to get the right things done.

When we embark on ambitious new projects, we often fail to pace ourselves. It can be very exciting at the beginning and we tend to take on more than we can handle, but this pace is not sustainable. While having motivation can be powerful, it’s variable and unreliable. After a while, it might disappear entirely. Leaving us feeling completely uninspired to tackle the work we have in front of us. And a few days of doing nothing quickly add up, then it’s much harder to get restarted. 

I want to offer an alternative. Establish upper and lower bounds, “never less than X and not more than Y”. Leaving a bit on the table on the good days will help you feel more capable to hit at least the lower bounds on the bad days. You’ll never feel completely tapped out. Establish that lower bound low enough that you can always muster the effort to get over that bar.

If your goal is writing a book, set a guideline for yourself to never write fewer than five hundred words and not more than a thousand words. Make and keep this promise to yourself. You will then be able to map out when you’ll hit your word targets, within a range. Slow and steady progress will get you there much quicker than that initial burst of excitement that fizzles. You will know there won’t be long days of nothing that you then have to work unsustainably hard to recover from. 

Setting an upper bound can keep things from becoming draining. This rule can give you permission to do the minimum baseline while still keeping your commitment to yourself. Finding the right range keeps us moving forward at a steady pace so we can make consistent progress.

Set the lower bound just high enough to keep you motivated, but low enough that you can still achieve it on the days when you’re dealing with unexpected chaos. Set the upper bound high enough to constitute good progress, but not too high as to leave you feeling exhausted. 

Think of a goal that you’d like to make regular progress toward. Figure out what would be a good pace, something that you could commit to hitting even on the worst days. Decide what feels like maximum sustainable progress for the upper bound. That’s the key. Figure this out and you’ll stop making excuses and instead you’ll get stuff done. 

There are those people who create expectations, believing that it’s going to happen. They are the ones helping to create that adrenaline rush. Build it and they will come.

Then there are those people who manage expectations, making sure no one is getting too excited, reigning things in, making sure your expectations don’t get too high, because they want you to stay more realistic and not get disappointed. 

In our careers and in life, we deal with both kinds of people. There are characteristics of both that we need to draw on and they are positive in different ways. It can be really powerful to be creating expectations because it can create momentum. You can get caught up in the excitement, but some people want to help you manage your expectations so you’re not crushed when it doesn’t happen. 

Maybe it’s about finding that middle ground between creating expectations and managing those expectations. But without having some expectations for yourself, you’ll never aspire to achieve great things. And even if what you produce or achieve falls short of that original goal, you might be surprised in a good way with your results. You have the advantage of going into this knowing you might not deliver on the results you’re aiming for, but still doing the work to make it happen. 

Similarly, it can be very important to manage other people’s expectations to ensure they are aligned. People don’t like surprises. Even if the results are great, but they aren’t what was expected, people will be upset. It’s your job to identify all your stakeholders and set their expectations, and in case you were wondering, you are one of your stakeholders. Then manage those expectations throughout the life of the project. Your job is to meet all the requirements, while also managing their expectations at the same time.

If you’re having a hard time meeting your goals, consider adjusting the scope or the schedule, or both. Sometimes you can accomplish more when your goals are ambitious, but you might begin to feel overwhelmed. It might just be the fact that your calibration of what is attainable and realistic might be a little off. 

Do you find yourself setting goals each day that seem doable, but you haven’t achieved all of them by the end of the day? That can be discouraging, where you feel frustrated and wonder what’s wrong with you. After a few days or weeks of this, you may stop caring about your goals altogether. 

If you’re consistently falling short of your daily targets, they become more like daily wishes, which then leads you to believe that, while they might be nice to accomplish, you’re no longer expecting to reach them, so then you don’t hold yourself accountable. And eventually, your to-do list becomes meaningless. It’s more of a placeholder of things that might get done someday. It’s no longer what you’re going to do today. It’s just a list of stuff, and that’s not a productive approach. 

Instead, when you find yourself discouraged because you’re not meeting your goals, consider lowering them, shrinking them, extending the timeframe, doing what you can to decrease your resistance, and make them easier to achieve. So ask yourself, how can I make this easier? What is the lowest reasonable expectation I can set for myself? Then aim for that. Make it really small. 

Instead of putting a hundred things on your to-do list for tomorrow, start by only putting two things. Do one in the morning, and another in the afternoon. Aim low and don’t hold yourself to completing anything else. When those are the only things on your list, how could you not get them done? You are more than likely to complete them because it seems so easy to meet those expectations. 

Less can be more. If you had six things, you might not get to any of it because it can feel too overwhelming, but by expecting yourself to do just two things, you will do them. Maybe that sense of satisfaction will nudge you onward to do other things, or maybe it won’t. You will still be better off than if you didn’t accomplish any of it. As you go, you’ll become more confident in your ability to do things you set out to do.

It’s important to start treating your to-do list like a contract with yourself. When you begin to trust yourself, that’s a real breakthrough, where you are able to put things on your list for three days from now, knowing that you will still get them done, and you won’t feel badly that you’re not doing them today. They will have been captured and scheduled and you will trust yourself to follow your plan.

What gets scheduled, gets done. But the only way to hold yourself accountable to your to-do list is to make it short. You are not superhuman and things tend to take way more time than we estimate. 

Start by breaking things down into more manageable tasks. Lower your expectations of yourself. Achieving those things in the short term lays the foundation for achieving far greater things in the long term, because you’re now able to keep moving forward. 

Allow some space to surprise and delight yourself. If, by chance, you’re able to do more than you have planned for your day, but that should be more the exception than the rule. And it can also be a slippery slope, especially for me. 

Once I get on a roll, getting my priorities done on a consistent basis, instead of allowing myself to celebrate the fact that I met my own expectations, I just keep raising the bar again, until it gets to a point where I’ll never be able to meet it. But this ends up minimizing the progress I’ve made, and I’m back to square one. 

It’s about learning when it’s okay to aim really high and when to take it easy on yourself. Reaching your full potential is not something that happens by mere chance. It’s the result of putting in the work, while believing that where you’re headed is beyond what you would typically try to achieve.

Most people settle for very average goals because they seem reasonable and realistic. They aren’t willing to challenge themselves in that way because they are more afraid of coming up short. If you aim for something totally out of the ordinary, you’ll find very few people doing the same thing. 

There’s a certain magic in choosing very difficult goals for yourself, but not every goal you set should be unreasonable, otherwise you’ll get into the same problem again, where you are so overwhelmed that you don’t even try. Most of the time, we should focus on building repeatable daily tasks. This is especially true when you’re trying to do something new. 

Setting extreme performance goals rarely works as well as focusing on building this new identity for yourself by proving that you’re capable with these small wins, which lay the groundwork for achieving better results later on. So start by building a new identity for yourself by starting small. Give yourself time to adapt to this new you. 

When we fail to reach those big goals we set for ourselves, we tend to feel disappointed because we failed to achieve our intended outcome. But even if we never reach those big goals, we are much better off than we were before. It’s very hard to fail completely if you aim high enough. Although this can be a challenging mindset to adopt, it takes practice. 

It’s all about balance, finding the right combination of appreciation and achievement. Reaching for high goals can be disappointing when you only make it halfway, but this is often further than you would’ve made it had you set your sights lower to begin with.

You can’t have a success or failure outlook. It’s no longer all-or-nothing. It’s more of a continuum, a focus on the progress you make. 

Do your best and be grateful for what you achieve along the way. 

And that’s it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide for Making Progress at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode fifty-three.

Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch, I’m on Instagram @cindyesliger and my email address is info@cindyesliger.com. And if you liked this show, please tell a friend. Subscribe, rate, and review. 

Until next week, I’m Cindy Esliger. Thanks for joining me.