Focus on This

The new year is here, and so is the opportunity to achieve your biggest goals. But too often, common mistakes hold us back. In this solo episode, host Ken Freire breaks down four goal-setting pitfalls and shares practical strategies to overcome them.

Key Takeaways

  1. Clarity is Key: Avoid vague resolutions and define clear, SMARTER goals.
  2. Don’t Play It Safe: Risky goals inspire growth. Safe goals keep you stuck.
  3. Take Action: Announcing goals isn’t enough—daily action is the real game-changer.
  4. Find Your People: Accountability and support are crucial for staying on track.

Resources


Watch on YouTube at:  https://youtu.be/1hKiE64_YyI


This episode was produced by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound

Creators & Guests

Host
Ken Freire
From the Big Apple to Middle Tennessee, Ken Freire is the Director of Memberships at Full Focus and the co-host of the Focus on This podcast. Ken has been in ministry for 15 years. He has always been passionate about leading and developing individuals to see their God-given potential and purpose in life. He loves speaking, coaching, and scaling companies. He’s been married for 12 years and is the father of four energetic little kids. In his spare time, he loves to read books on theology, leadership, and spiritual development. He also loves Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Host
Marissa Hyatt
Born and raised south of Nashville, Marissa is the Director of Marketing at Full Focus. She is super passionate about helping people get outside their comfort zones, find their own power, and achieve their dreams. In her free time, she enjoys cooking for friends, baking sourdough bread, and hiking. She geeks out on natural wellness, skincare, personal growth, gardening, and traveling.

What is Focus on This?

Start loving Mondays! Marissa & Ken give you practical tips and proven strategies for increasing your focus so you can be more productive than ever before. Based on the proven Full Focus method used in the Full Focus Planner™, they'll help you banish distractions and get the right stuff done so you can start loving Mondays again. They also speak with guests and listeners who share their own productivity tips to help you make the most of every day. It's the most productive podcast on the internet!

[00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the internet so you can banish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. I'm Ken Freire, and unfortunately, I am not here with Marissa Hyatt because we have decided That for the next several weeks, we're doing some solo episodes.
[00:00:28] Marissa's done some, and I'm going to be doing some to just give ourselves some reprieve. Fear not, I have some great content to deliver to you, because today we want to talk about how to avoid the four common goal setting mistakes. And you know, we've all been there. We're getting so excited for the new year that's coming right upon us, right?
[00:00:50] We're setting all of our new year's resolutions. We're just super excited to hopefully start afresh. We know what ends up happening. All right. [00:01:00] We set these goals and then a few weeks later, we kind of hit them. We don't, or maybe even a week we're like doing strong. And then we start to taper off by February, March, we miss it.
[00:01:09] And what we want to do is avoid that. Why does that happen? Because there's four common goal setting mistakes. So let's walk through each one so that you could actually hit the ground running and be successful this year. Mistake number one that people make is that you stop short of clarity. This is why new year's resolutions don't work because when most people start make a resolution, they stop at an aspiration and aspiration is something like I want to get fit or I want to be less anxious.
[00:01:46] Now, don't get me wrong. That's a good start, but it can't stop there. You see, you need clearly define what you want and why. This is why our smarter goal framework is super [00:02:00] important. And there's four parts of the smarter goal framework that you want to use to actually get immense clarity on your goal.
[00:02:08] Those four are specific, measurable, actionable, and time bound. You see, the more you can do all four of these things and get real good clarity on the goal, that's going to be huge. I'll give an example, right? If you were like, Hey, I want to get fit. That's just an aspiration. But if you were like, I want to be able to bench 250 pounds, Okay, cool.
[00:02:35] Now we got a little bit specific there, but it's not actionable and it's not time bound by when do you want to lift it? So these are a couple of things that you want to make sure you look at. So a more specific goal or part of the smarter goal framework would be that like, I want to be able to lift 250 pounds by March 5th of 2025.
[00:02:56] Once you get immense clarity on what you want, [00:03:00] then we could actually move forward on our goal. But this actually leads to mistake number two, which is playing it safe. You see, what ends up happening is a lot of people use the SMART goal framework, not the SMARTER goal framework, but the SMART goal framework.
[00:03:17] And in the SMART goal framework, there's supposed to be realistic goals. That's what the R stands for. But the problem with that is that those goals End up being in our comfort zone and don't actually motivate us, right? To draw out our best efforts, we need to set risky goals because the reality is this, if you already know how to get there, it's not risky enough, right?
[00:03:41] Like you, you already know the playbook. You actually need to make it risky enough where you're like, uh, I actually don't know what I'm supposed to do and I need, and I need to think differently and I need to come into this very. differently. So going back to my example, right, [00:04:00] of trying to get fit, you might be like, Oh my gosh, how do I, how do I make this happen?
[00:04:04] 250 pounds for some people that's so unrealistic. They're like, I could barely lift 90 pounds right now. Right? That's in the delusional zone. You don't want to go there. You want to make sure that you're pushing yourself. Right? But if you're like, Hey, I want to bench the bar. I might be like, ah, I could do that.
[00:04:19] In order to get truly fit, you might say, hey, one of the measures of getting fit is that I could bench 175 pounds by March 5th of 2025. Okay. That's what you're going to work on. But that's just one part of it. Now, if we talk about fitness in general, you might be able to say, hey, I want to be able to run a marathon.
[00:04:40] That's going to be a more holistic fitness for you, right? You want to be able to define what that fitness is or, or what the fitness level is. You want to make it measurable. You want to make it specific actionable timeout, but you also want to make it risky, something that gets you out of your comfort zone.
[00:04:59] And [00:05:00] also doesn't reach the delusional zone. The way I like to think about the delusional zone is it's something where you're like, ah, you know what, this will never happen. I'll give you another example. I'm five, seven. I've never played basketball. I probably played it when I was younger, but like never competitively always like, you know, street ball in New York city.
[00:05:19] And I've only played a few times. I always kept jamming my fingers. All the time. So I hated playing basketball. If all of a sudden I came to you and said, you know what, I want to go play for the NBA in three months. That's delusional. Why? Because one. I'm horrible at basketball. Two, I'm 5'7 So three months, realistically, will never happen.
[00:05:41] But you know what? A risky goal might say, Hey, by the end of the year, I could play in a rec league, right? I'll learn the skill sets. I'll do all those things. And for some of you, it might be like, Dude, a year. You could do three months in that. Maybe. I don't know how to play. I don't even know where to start.
[00:05:56] I know the concepts of dribbling, right? But if you ask me to dribble competitively, [00:06:00] I can't do it. Even the way I'm talking about it. Some of you can tell right away. I'm an amateur at basketball, right? That's how bad I am at basketball. So you want to make sure it's just out of your comfort zone. Now, here's the deal.
[00:06:12] These are the first two mistakes, stopping short of clarity and playing it safe. But there are two other ones.
[00:06:30] Mistake number three that people tend to have and not being able to achieve their goals. They fail to act, right? You just fail to act. If you set a goal and do nothing, it won't get done. And here's one of the trickiest things that some of you, sometimes in order to motivate yourself, you post this on social media and you're like, yeah, I'm doing this thing.
[00:06:53] I'm starting this new business. I'm getting healthy. I'm getting fed. Right. And you get this euphoric. [00:07:00] Dopamine hit because all these people are celebrating you, but you've actually done nothing for your goal. All you've done is just post it and tell people that you're doing it. That's not action. That's just an announcement.
[00:07:13] You have to actually, you have to move forward in the goal. Now, here's the thing. When you are doing a risky goal, it can feel a little overwhelming at first because you're not sure where to start. You're not sure what to do. And here's, what's really important. Whenever you set a goal, you want to. Break it down and you need a system that drives you to sustainable daily action.
[00:07:37] This is why the weekly big three and the daily brick three are so essential. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you are listening to this and you're like, ah, I don't really use the planner, man. I would encourage you go pick up a planner. I'm a millennial. Okay. I, before picking up the planner, I was I was always doing stuff in digital.
[00:07:58] I was using Asana, Todoist, [00:08:00] everything that I could to try to get stuff done. But I became exponentially more productive when I started using the planner. And here's why. Most of the time, all these other great tools are fantastic. But the problem is, people use it as a task management system or a to do list.
[00:08:20] The planner is not a to do list. It's a goal achievement system. And that's what you need. You don't need a task management system. You need a goal achievement system. And that system helps you to start thinking if you have these specific goals that you want to accomplish, then every week you want to think about what are the big three things that you can do to get you closer to your goal.
[00:08:43] To that goal, once you have those weekly big three, you want to break that down into your daily big three, what are the daily big threes that you're going to do? And here's the deal. Not all of your daily big threes are going to be to your goal. Two of them should be. One of them may be something important that you just have to get done during that [00:09:00] day.
[00:09:00] And that totally happens. But now when you have a system like this, utilizing the planner, what you can start doing is quickly realizing, Hey, every week I'm making strides to actually hit my goal. And this is really important for every single one of you who have sometimes a hard time acting. And you're like, I'm really excited about this thing.
[00:09:21] The only way that you could actually move forward. As if you have a system and I guarantee you this planner could help you if you stick to it and follow the process. So mistake number three was failing to act. Mistake number four is going in it alone. Here's a reality. We weren't made to tackle hard things alone.
[00:09:48] When you think about doing a risky goal by yourself, going to the unknown by yourself, trying to figure out what's the next thing by yourself, It gets really scary and daunting. [00:10:00] You start to make excuses for yourself because everything in you wants to preserve yourself. You start to hit the survival instinct of like, ah, should I actually go do this?
[00:10:10] You know what? I'm going to go back to my comfort zone and do what I know. But when you have a group of people with you, when you have a community around you, who's like, yeah, we're going to go climb this hill. We're going to go tackle this obstacle together. Now you're like, Hey, even though it's unknown a little bit, you have someone who can fight with you and who's going to press you and he's going to support you and going to keep you accountable.
[00:10:34] So you need a community around you. My encouragement to you is find some local people, right, that can keep you accountable, whether it's at church, whether it's your family or whether it's your friends. Now, here's one of the big problems with some of those groups. And I'll readily admit it is that sometimes those groups, they want to keep you accountable.
[00:10:55] They just don't know how to keep you accountable. Something is better than nothing. [00:11:00] So go find a community, make sure you are accountable with one another. And if you can't find an accountability group or a community that can support you, check out the full focus planner community, right? We have over 31, 000 people there.
[00:11:13] They're always encouraging one another. It's on Facebook, right? It is a fantastic group of people just trying to help each other achieve their goals. All right. So there's two different types of groups, right? That you can do in person groups, family, friends, church groups, whatever you can find, or the Facebook group, online digital group that you can do.
[00:11:33] Now, here's the deal. When you are trying to tackle something hard, sometimes even those two groups may not be super helpful for you because they don't know how to help you. Right. And this is where my encouragement would be to check out the double win group. coaching program. The double win coaching program is actually designed for you to tackle your most pressing goals.
[00:11:56] And you have a community of individuals who are right there [00:12:00] helping you, striving for you to get the very best. And you have all of us on the full focus team helping you. You have Michael Hyatt, who's constantly coaching you. You have Marissa who's coaching you. You have me in the community. There are people in there who are constantly wanting to see you succeed.
[00:12:16] Imagine what would it look like when you are trying to get this risky goal that you have in your life and you're trying to say, Hey, This year is going to be the year I actually crush it. You know what I mean? You know, that one goal you have that's been on your list for years. And for some reason, other things just keep getting in the way or your fear keeps getting in the way.
[00:12:38] Well, what would it look like if now you had people supporting you to get rid of those fears, right? To overcome the limiting beliefs, to help you with the system that we've, we talk about constantly on this podcast and on the double one podcast. Imagine what that would look like, right? So if you're interested in that, I would encourage you to set up a call with me.[00:13:00]
[00:13:00] If you want to set up a call with one of us, all you have to do is go to fullfocus. co forward slash strategy. Again, that's fullfocus. co forward slash strategy. And it's going to be the best thing that you can do for yourself. So with that being said, let me, we just walk you through the full focus Four common mistakes that you want to avoid when achieving your goals.
[00:13:26] Mistake. Number one, it's stopping short of clarity mistake. Number two, it's playing it safe. Mistake. Number three is failing to act and mistake. Number four is going in it alone. If you could avoid these four mistakes, man, 2025 could be the best year ever for you. And if you haven't gone through our best year ever live, you could also join in your best year ever live, right?
[00:13:52] You can go to fullfocus. co forward slash best year ever. And it is an amazing program, but just imagine in [00:14:00] 2025. December of 2025, you get there and all of a sudden you're like, wow, I did it. All of my goals that I had, the big ones, the aspirational ones, for some of you that may be starting a side hustle for some of you that may be getting healthy and fit for some of you that's reconnecting with a loved one, or it might be to finally achieve that big career goal.
[00:14:26] Or that finance goal. Imagine if you finally hit that here in 2025, what could your life look like? What could change, man? I encourage you avoid these four mistakes and see what can be possible in your life.
[00:14:45] Thanks for joining us on focus on this. This is the most productive podcast on the internet. So please. Share it with your friends and be sure to join the full focus planner community on Facebook. So you can benefit from the creativity and the encouragement [00:15:00] from people chasing big goals, just like you.
[00:15:03] We'll be here next week with another great episode until then stay focused.