Thinking About Quitting Your Goals? Read This First
How to keep moving toward your goals for the rest of the year
This post is for high-achieving, driven women who are feeling discouraged about the goals they set for this year and are contemplating quitting.
You are not alone in this.
It is safe to say many of us are feeling exactly this right now.
Around this time of year, many of us start losing the energy and motivation we had in January.
Reality sets in.
The goals begin to feel unattainable.
Why?
Because the patterns we default to in our mindset and behaviors are persistent.
When we feel defeated, it genuinely feels like the traction we built in the first quarter has been washed away. It was there for a moment, and now it is gone.
It can feel like it never became part of our life.
Now it feels like too much effort and too much mental strain to bring it back into our already busy and stressful day to day.
This shows up across all types of goals:
Weight loss
Health
Career
Relationships
Finances
I have been feeling this too.
Recently, I caught myself feeling discouraged and even entertaining the idea of quitting.
The goals I set for myself started to feel far out of reach.
Everything I had done began to feel insignificant compared to how far I still have to go.
This is where the human brain steps in.
Your brain is wired to:
Seek pleasure
Avoid pain
Conserve energy
So it does not like this phase.
This is the phase where:
Effort is high
Rewards are delayed
Progress feels invisible
There is no immediate sense of accomplishment.
No confidence boost.
It feels like all your energy is going into a void.
When your brain senses this, it tries to shut it down.
It tells you:
The old way was easier
This is not worth it
You are wasting your time, energy, and money
You will end up disappointed, humiliated, or rejected
This is your brain trying to protect you from negative emotions.
Your brain cannot tell the difference between feeling disappointed and being chased by a tiger.
To your brain, they are both threats.
It will work very hard to keep you away from that danger.
The good news is that you are not just your primitive brain.
You also have access to your prefrontal cortex, your rational and problem-solving brain.
This is where everything can shift.
One of my favorite books, The Gap and The Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, has been my anchor when I do not feel grounded.
The core idea is simple.
How you measure your life determines how you feel.
The Gap
Measuring yourself against your ideal
Where you think you should be
The Gain
Measuring yourself against your past
How far you have come
High-achieving women who set big goals and constantly raise the bar tend to live in the Gap.
That is why you feel behind even when others see you as successful.
Living in the Gap creates a chronic sense of dissatisfaction because:
You are always chasing the next goal
The goalpost keeps moving
You never feel like you have arrived
When you shift into the Gain, you measure backward.
You:
Track progress
See how far you have come
Acknowledge your wins
Many high-achievers resist this.
It can feel like being kind to yourself will make you lazy.
But the opposite is true.
Living in the Gain creates:
More motivation
More energy
More forward momentum
More happiness
I deeply believe in challenging myself.
The human brain is wired for problem solving.
When it is not given meaningful challenges, it creates unnecessary drama and that is when we spiral.
So you do not need to change your goal.
You can keep it big.
You only need to change one thing.
The question you keep asking yourself.
Instead of asking:
How far am I from my goal?
Ask:
How far have I come?
This single shift:
Builds momentum
Reduces self-sabotage
Reconnects you to progress
Give your brain a task.
Identify at least three things you have:
Learned
Improved
Gained
In the past three months.
They can be:
Knowledge
Perspective
Skills
Achievements
Big or small.
Then keep going.
See who you become in another three months.
The real purpose of setting goals is not the goal itself.
Because once you achieve it, you will set another one. It never ends. We are meant to keep evolving.
The real purpose is who you become in the process.
You become the person who:
Overcomes challenges
Moves forward despite your brain’s resistance
Believes in yourself when others doubt you
Finds solutions to every problem that arises
That is the point.
There is no such thing as being stuck as long as you keep moving.
Even if you take:
Three steps forward
Two steps back
You still have a net gain of one step.
If you do not quit today, your future self will thank you.
If this resonates, especially in your health and weight loss journey, and you want to go deeper into what is getting in your way, take the free Perfectionist Weight Loss Audit.
It will give you clarity on why you keep starting over.