Why do resolutions wobble just when we think they should be working?

This episode explores avoidance crafting, impatience, burnout, and how goals, habits, and mental distance shape real progress especially in January.

In this episode of Psychologically Speaking, Leila explores the intricacies of human behavior, particularly focusing on the themes of resolutions, goals, and habits. She discusses the common pitfalls of New Year's resolutions, the importance of understanding the difference between resolutions and goals, and how habits play a crucial role in achieving these goals. Leila also delves into the impact of social comparison on our progress and introduces the concept of mental distance as a strategy to combat burnout and maintain motivation. The episode emphasizes the importance of community support and self-compassion in the journey towards personal development.

takeaways

• January often feels like the longest month of the year.
• Resolutions are declarations linked to identity and values.
• Goals provide structure and direction for achieving resolutions.
• Habits require time to show their impact and rewards.
• Impatience can lead to negative feelings about progress.
• Social comparison can intensify feelings of uncertainty.
• Mental distance can protect against burnout.
• Avoidance crafting can be a strategic approach to stress.
• Community support can enhance motivation and accountability.
• Self-compassion is crucial in the goal-setting process.

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We are getting so close to the end of what often feels like the longest month of the year,

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Welcome back to Psychologically Speaking, a podcast about human behaviour where research

meets real life.

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I'm Leila I'm a psychologist, and a researcher for Hire, partnering with writers,

creators, coaches and organisations who want their work to be grounded in psychology, not

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just informed by it.

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if you're curious about human behavior, interested in evidence, and you want ideas that

you can translate, you're in the right space.

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So let's get into today's episode.

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how many hours a day do you actually have?

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This is usually the point when news outlets start running stories about New Year's

resolutions falling apart.

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And you'll see headlines claiming that most resolutions have already failed, motivations

dropped off, and people have given up well before February.

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And there's actually very little robust data on how many resolutions really fail.

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So I'd like you to take a lot of those claims with a pinch of salt because they tend to

say more about our expectations than they actually do about our behaviour.

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And here is an example.

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I've had 18 working days in my calendar this year so far.

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And half of those are actually allocated to my PhD.

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So that leaves me with nine days, but those nine days actually look like a good five hours

of uninterrupted work on those nine days.

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that's 45 business hours in January.

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And here's how I've used those.

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I've spent 20 hours on billable client work in January.

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I've spent 15 hours both developing and running my Goalsprint, which is my big experiment

this year, and 10 hours on everything else.

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And I've been to a networking event, I've also do my social media, I've done bit of

billing and admin.

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So before you start to judge your resolution, think about how many hours you've actually

had in your business or in your leisure time to spend on that goal.

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I want you to think compassionately about how you feel about your progress when you know

the real time that you've been working with.

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It's also really useful to understand what's happening in and around your goals.

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And so in the warmup sessions that I've run with Goal Sprinters this year, we've spent

time unpacking the difference between what a resolution, a goal and a habit actually is.

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It's one of the first things that we looked at because when something feels off early on

in our goals, we often realise it's because we're asking our goal to do the job of

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something else.

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So a resolution is a declaration, okay?

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So it's a statement of intent.

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And it's the kind of thing where you say, from this point forward, I'm going to do this or

be that type of person.

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And it's intrinsically linked to our identity and our values.

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You know, it helps us stay meaningful and hopeful.

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And January is full of resolutions because it gives us that fresh start effect.

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But what resolutions don't come with usually is that sense of structure.

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You know, they name what we want to change, but not necessarily how that change is going

to be supported when everyday life resumes.

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A goal then is really different because a goal translates your intention into a direction

of travel and it answers the really practical questions.

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So what are you working towards?

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How will you know if you're making progress and what would count as good enough for now?

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In the Goal Sprints, we've shaped goals so they can flex and that's why I asked my

participants to do a four-week check-in and next week you get to hear from the first three

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guests about their check-in.

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And I know, because I've worked with so many people now on their goals, that rigidity is

the one single thing that causes most people to fail before they've even started.

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So if your resolution is the headline, that's your big thing.

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The goal is the working plan underneath it.

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And that's what you want to check in with right now.

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Okay.

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It's a really good time to be looking at what kind of direction you were going in and also

the plans that you had underneath that.

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So then we come to the magic stuff of goals and these are habits.

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And habits, you they are about repetition They're the small actions we need to decide,

motivate or persuade yourself to do something each day.

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And the challenge with habits though is that they're really slow to reward us.

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I can absolutely guarantee that some of those habits that you have started will not start

paying you back any return on investment for maybe a month or two.

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They can be really slow to reward us early on because they don't give us that feedback

that we're craving and that we need.

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And that's why being part of a group and talking about your progress and thinking it

through can bring you returns earlier than working on something alone.

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And that's the power of community.

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So when you assume that something isn't working, actually it might be that you've just

checked in a little bit too soon and that progress just isn't visible yet.

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So if we take my 10 available hours after me just doing that mental maths on the work in

my business, that's where some of my habits are sitting this year.

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And it's easy to see why some of my habits have only happened maybe once or twice or three

times.

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January is literally about getting into your stride and figuring out your goals.

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So if you're listening to this right now and you're definitely thinking, wow, I've not

made progress, I failed.

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This is why you're

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feeling that way right now.

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So I want you

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to do a reflection.

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And this reflection is, know, if you're feeling a little bit uncomfortable about your goal

right now, it's not because you've failed or piled on too much into your goals.

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It's either a resolution without too much structure, a goal that needs a little bit of

refining or habits that just haven't had time to show their impact.

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And underneath all of this is that wonderful human nature thing called impatience.

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And there's something really interesting happening with impatience.

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So comparison is one way in which impatience shows up for us.

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It's the one thing comparison that helps us

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to, I don't know, locate ourselves when we're feeling really uncertain.

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Social comparison is a thing that we do really automatically and unconsciously.

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We do it in social media spaces, we do it in face-to-face settings, but comparison is

really intensified by ambiguity.

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So if you imagine you're in your goal at the moment and perhaps um maybe your route

forward, your direction of travel, you can't see the next couple of steps.

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You're in an ambiguous space and you are more likely to then start comparing yourself to

the perfect version of you that was making lots of progress or to worse still to other

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people who have got different situations and probably different hours in their day.

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So you can start to see how all of these things kind of come together.

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So social comparison theory.

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is really interesting and it just basically says you know we look at others to help us

reduce uncertainty and give us a sense of who we are and our own concept of self it's that

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whole thing of who do you look up to who do you look down to and who's on the same level

as you we're all doing this every single day unconsciously consciously with bias and

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without bias

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And I want you to slow down at that point because social comparison does get a really bad

reputation, but you can use it really positively.

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And I want you to use that comparison to really reflect on, you know, is this level of

effort that I'm putting into my goal normal?

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Or is it harder than it should be?

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What's different about the situation that I hadn't anticipated when I set myself this

goal?

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Am I investing in something that makes sense to me?

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In last week's episode, I talked about sustainability and I talked about that mental

contrasting we do where we weigh up the cost of doing something and all the risky

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decisions that we're bringing in.

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The difficulty is that goals, especially sustainable and long-term ones, they do create

loads of ambiguousness.

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And if that's where you're sitting right now, you're probably in exactly the right place.

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And that's because progress isn't always visible and that feedback is never going to be

immediate.

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So when your information around you is very limited, your brain is going to look elsewhere

and that happens through comparison and you're using other people's progress as a

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reference point.

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So that's all that's happening right now is if you're feeling shaky with your goal is

you're probably either comparing against yourself and aversion that's perfect or you're

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starting to compare yourself against other people who of course have different things

going on.

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They've got different hours in their week or maybe they work more hours.

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when you start interpreting comparison as evidence instead of a personal failure, then

there's something really interesting that happens because then you start to be curious and

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you're saying what needs to change, what needs adjusting?

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And you can start to think about things differently such as do you need a bit more

structure right now?

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Do you need some clearer feedback?

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Do you need to account for things that have happened that you weren't expecting?

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And that takes you into a very compassionate space.

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takes you out of being judgmental towards yourself.

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And that is exactly what I was talking about last week when I said I want you to think

about your goals in a very sustainable way.

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So I have got a cool bit of research to share with you today.

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And this is a new paper that came out last year and the title is just amazing.

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So the title is actually called The Bright and Dark Side of Avoidance Crafting.

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I feel like that could be my memoir title actually.

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So this is a joint paper by researchers in Germany, Australia and the

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Netherlands and the lead researcher is Elisa Lopper.

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The study involved 79 German workers and the majority, 77 % were female.

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So they used daily diaries and daily surveys.

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They used some scales, the Approach and Avoidance Job Crafting Scale, I love that.

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I think that's been produced by the author.

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And they also measured burnout through an exhaustion dimension.

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And they also looked at levels of autonomy and some time measures as well.

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So this was published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychologists.

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It's a really good journal to get evidence from.

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Now lots of these journal articles are written in language which can be

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hard to interpret and takes a long time to process.

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So what I've done is I've taken the practitioner bullets in the article, which are easier

to digest, and I've simplified them even further.

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And here's what this study is telling us.

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Mental distance from any work stress or goal stress protects your energy

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And when you can't change something, trying to avoid the pressure of it just adds to

exhaustion.

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So if you think about that in terms of a goal.

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you're approaching a goal, something you thought you had, maybe time or resources

disappears.

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And when you can't change that, when you've got no autonomy or control over it, then

that's just going to add pressure.

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But here's the final thing.

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When you find yourself in a tough place with pressure, with reduced resources, mental

distancing is going to help you more than worrying about trying to change the physical

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work itself.

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And this is just so helpful, isn't it?

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Because it's really starting to say, you just need to take a step back.

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You need to step back and reflect.

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And that's exactly what I'm saying about January when it comes to goals.

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It's the perfect time.

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If we look at this as an opportunity, it's the perfect time to say you set out with your

intention, your resolution, you've put some goal and structure underneath it, and maybe

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you've started some habits, but let's step back.

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have you actually got the time you thought you had?

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Have you got the resources you thought you had?

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What now needs to change if you're being compassionate and how can you mentally adjust

there because that's the thing that's going to reduce the pressure and the burnout

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feelings right now.

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So here's how I would use this with your goal, especially if you're in that space.

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If you don't have much control over work or home circumstances and you're trying to

relieve some pressure and maybe you're trying to rearrange things, you postpone something

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or you're endlessly thinking about it, then what's going to happen there is that you're

just reminding yourself that you're feeling out of control and that's going to add to

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exhaustion.

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but there is a real difference between avoidance and mental distance.

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And that's this m avoidance crafting.

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So here's what you want to do differently.

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Narrow the time or the time window that you're using to think about your goal.

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And there was a really good session that we had in our Goal Sprint huddle a couple of

weeks ago where we talked about this concept of locking in and locking out.

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So almost time boxing how much time we think or worry about something.

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And then the next thing you want to do is reduce the emotional stakes on all of this.

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You don't have to be impatient.

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You don't have to solve your problem in a whole day.

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You don't even have to solve it this month.

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You have not failed with a goal.

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If 28 days into it, you've not got where you thought you magically might be, you know,

let's see.

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This is an endeavor that's going to last over many months and you are impatient.

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We're all impatient.

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It's just who,

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we are.

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It's so important because you have to know that if you have stalled at this point it is

not the same as giving up and you're not behind.

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You can't be behind on a goal that you're working towards because you will get there it's

just that how you get there and the timing and the pacing is going to change.

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What you're doing right now is so valuable though, because you're just learning what this

goal is actually going to cost you mentally, physically, cognitively.

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And we talked about that in the sustainability episode last week.

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You're going to hear some of this narrative from Dani in next week's episode.

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So Dani's on a big Arctic adventure, she's going on one.

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and her January of reckoning really is just looking at the resources and the time that she

actually has available.

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And you're going to also be learning that the goal might need to change and when you've

got autonomy to do that, great, give yourself permission, you'll hear from Duncan on that

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theme.

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And finally, taking away the cognitive thinking time and the pressure, there's something

really cool that Bhavini has done to her inbox that you'll hear about in the next episode.

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it's advice that we can all take about things that have held mental space or a living rent

free in our heads.

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avoidance crafting is actually a thing.

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This is like the best news I've heard all year.

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Granted we're only 28 days in, but as somebody who does love to procrastinate and somebody

who's a deep thinker and reflector, So we're talking about having this mental distance

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rather than trying to postpone and put things off and add pressure.

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is this avoidance protective?

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Is it strategic or is it fear based?

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And what would it cost you to push forward anyway?

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Is that the right thing for you to do right now?

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avoidance without compassion is not going to be helpful.

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be very compassionate towards yourself in January.

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I am so excited to share the new episode of Psychologically Speaking with you.

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We recorded yesterday, you're going to hear from Bhavini and Danny and Duncan about their

goal progress.

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they're all navigating visibility in this process, but they're going in their own way at

their own pace.

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their own time.

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As you listen I want to invite you to notice if comparison comes up for you and are my

guests using comparison and how are they using it?

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Thanks for joining me today

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You've been listening to Psychologically Speaking with me, Leila Ainge.

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I partner with coaches, creatives, writers and organisations who want to bring

psychological research, clarity and evidence into their content or thinking.

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That might look like surveys, research, thought leadership angles, or helping you

articulate ideas with more nuance and confidence.

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You can always find ways to work with me via the link in the show notes.

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I'll be back next episode with more research insights and ideas Bye for now.