Ep #70: Money Goals

Hello, Empowered Principals, welcome to episode 70.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast, a not so typical, educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy, by refining your most powerful tool: your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach, Angela Kelly Robeck.

Well here we are, you guys. It’s the last day of April. Can you believe it? And the good news is this; you’ve made it another month. And hopefully, this podcast is helping you adjust the way you’re thinking about your job and how you want to approach it.

This time of year brings up so many thoughts about the upcoming year, and whether this is your first year or you’ve been at this job for a while, the end of the school year always has our brains thinking forward to the next year. I mean, that’s what we do as school leaders, right? We want to know, we want to plan, we want to be ahead of the curve.

And I love the end of the year because we want to know what we’re going to do differently. Have you ever thought about that before? Next year, I’m going to do this, especially if it’s in your first year or two, you’re like, now I learned this, next year I’m definitely doing it differently.

So, we’re going to talk more about the end of the year reflection as we get into June and discuss ways that we can increase our influence as a leader and we’re going to talk about using a process to review the end of the year, reflect, and refine our practice. So I’m really excited to share that with you and I want you to be thinking about what you learned this year and what you’re eager to try for next year, and we will talk about that at the beginning of June, when most of you are wrapping up the year.

And speaking of next year, we are going to end this month by talking about setting goals. Now, as you know, we’ve been talking about specifically money and money goals. That’s what we’re talking about today, but as I said before, you can apply this work to any topic you wish.

Many of us avoid setting goals altogether because as soon as we set them, our brain starts to wonder and worry about how we are possibly going to achieve them. And that totally spins us in negative emotion. Setting goals and then feeling bad about them the entire time is going to produce the opposite outcome that you want.

As educators, we tend to have a really bad taste, or at least I did, of goal setting, because the experience of it in school was really negative. For one, we’re required to set goals that are outside of our control, and that makes us feel really powerless.

We used to have to set goals, 100% of students will be able to… and when you set goals like this, the first thing the brain’s going to say is, like, no way. I mean, how am I supposed to, one, make that happen? Two, I’m not in control of 100% of students, and then our brain just shuts down before we even start or even attempt to reach that goal.

That goal is a beautiful goal. We want to believe that 100% of students can make progress and can grow in the way that they’re meant to grow, but the way that the district would have us write it was so pigeonholed and it felt like you had failed before you had even started, right?

And P.S. I’m going to talk a little bit more about education goals and how we can better craft goals and have more influence on the goals that we’re required to make in a future episode, so stay tuned for that. That’s coming up towards the end of the year and into the summer.

But number two, and to some degree, we are held accountable to the outcomes of these goals that are out of our control. So, first of all, we’re expected to write goals that are out of our sphere of control, basically, and then we’re held accountable for them. So that feels really bad, right? So when you don’t meet that goal and then you receive feedback or people come down at you for not meeting the goal, that’s like double bad, double downing on feeling bad about the goal.

So, why would we want to want goals, basically? Yuck, that’s gross, right? And sometimes, when we have these goals and then we don’t meet them and then we’re feeling bad about them and the superintendent says something and then perhaps you have to, on top of all that, present to the school board or you have to have a conversation with your boss who’s berating you for not meeting the goals. That just feels terrible.

Number three, on the flipside of being held accountable – and you guys know this is true but we don’t really say it in education, so I’m going to say it here – the goals that we write, in the end, really don’t matter. I know that sounds like I’m Satan here saying bad things about children. That’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is, we write goals every year. Some of them we meet, some of them we don’t, and regardless of whether or not we meet them and regardless of how much energy we put into trying to meet them – and sometimes you write goals just for the sake of getting that job done but we don’t really review them and actively pursue them and do everything in our power to try and meet them – what really happens is we have the goals, we meet some, we don’t, we move on next year and we write similar goals year after year after year.

So, as educators, we’re not super motivated by goals because of the way the goals are used in our industry. And you see that? Goal was a negative word to me. It was like a taboo word to me. I got so sick of it.

I, today, want to offer you some alternative ways to think about goals in a new light, in a different light. And we’re going to do this through the context of money because it’s our last episode of the month and I want to use money as a context, one, to get those triggers up and running for you, but two, also as a way to kind of depersonalize it and look at it from a more neutral standpoint so that you can see how goals can be fun and be beneficial to you.

At the end of the day, you want to have goals, and we’re going to talk about that. First, let’s say a few things about the goal setting process. Number one, goals should be fun. The idea of setting a goal should be to excite you and motivate you into taking action. The goal of goal setting is to create strong energy and emotions around that goal so you don’t just sit around and think about the goal.

You want your brain to get to work at coming up with new ideas and trying all kinds of ways to accomplish that goal. The goal is meant to generate energy and positive emotion so that you want to act on it and you want to work towards it. You want to enjoy the idea of not only accomplishing the goal, but the process of figuring out how you’re going to accomplish that goal.

You’ll know a goal is fun when you feel that tickle of excitement inside, even if your brain is freaking out a little bit. You know, like when it feels exciting, a little scary, but fun? That’s what you want. You want a goal that pushes you into that zone of, like, oh my god, I don’t know how I’m going to do this or I’m not really sure I can do this. Like, how cool would it be to do this? That’s the zone you want to be in.

If you set a goal and then you think completely negatively about it, you’re poopooing it, downplaying it, you’re basically going to admit defeat before you even start and then you will never work for that goal because none of us, our brains are not going to buy into a goal that doesn’t feel fun. You want your goal to feel fun and amazing before you’ve achieved it.

As my mentor always tells us, coaches, she says, “If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.” So we have to be in check and be sure our goals are fun and exciting.

Number two, goals should be hard. Now, I just said goals should be fun and exciting and motivating. Yes, I meant that, but they also should be hard. That being said, just because your goals feel fun and the thought of accomplishing them gets you really fired up, it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to feel hard to achieve them at times. In fact, your goal should warp your brain a little bit.

It should kind of freak you out. Your brain should be thinking, like, but wait, how will I do that? That’s a crazy goal, I have no idea how I’m going to do this, but it’s going to be fun learning, right? Fun doesn’t mean easy. You have to distinguish the two. And you want some dissonance going on in your brain.

And here’s the funny thing, guys; being challenged and having to do hard things and figuring them out is part of the fun, right? Like, we love to solve problems and we love to figure things out, and that’s why people put puzzles together, they play games, they watch suspenseful shows on TV or movies or whatever. Our work in the world is to be presented with challenges, to not know how, to spin in confusion, to figure it out, to feel accomplished, and then to do it again. That’s the cycle of life.

Because, think of the flip. We’ve all set a goal that was a really low hanging fruit, one we knew we could easily accomplish before we set it up and we didn’t even really have to put that much effort or energy in. we knew this ahead of time, right? it didn’t really light us up because we don’t have to deal with it too much. We can kind of just make it happen and there’s not much effort into achieving it.

And when you think about those goals, how does it feel when you reach that goal? It’s kind of meh, right? Of course, I reached that, not a big deal. Well, we don’t feel the excitement when we’re working on it or towards it, or even when we meet the goal, because we don’t get to feel the opportunity of the exhilaration and the accomplishment after we’ve met the goal because we didn’t have to stretch and evolve ourselves in the process.

So, you want to choose a goal that’s both exciting and that pushes you so that you’re motivated to do the hard work it will take to achieve it. And through the hard work is where we feel the satisfaction of accomplishment that comes when we do finally meet the goal.

So, why set goals? Why do we set goals? I’ve tapped on a couple of things, but why not have the philosophy that let’s just let life happen as it comes? Let’s just go with the flow; there’s a lot of people out there who feel like that. Why do all this effort? Why have hard goals? Why push myself?

Well, number one, we don’t set goals to have a goal, quote en quote. We set goals because the process of achieving those goals evolves us into the human being who is capable of that goal. Every time we set a big goal for ourselves, that goal stretches our thinking. It stretches how we think about ourselves, our ability to solve problems and how we face our fears.

It molds us and shapes us into a brand-new human being, you guys. Think about that. Think back to a time when you wanted to be a school leader but you still were teaching or coaching, for you instructional coaches out there, and you had this goal. You set the goal of becoming a school leader, and in order to reach that goal, you had to take tons of actions to get there.

You had to think differently and you had to feel differently. You had to imagine yourself accomplishing that goal ahead of time, and through that process, which is the series of actions that you took to meet that goal day by day, day by day, you evolved from who you were as a teacher or a coach into the person who becomes a school leader.

But, now that you’re a school leader, you don’t really think about how awesome it is that you reached that goal. It’s just who you are now. So, what you gained by having the goal is not the achievement of the goal itself but who we become in the process.

Number two, we set goals because of the way we believe achieving them will make us feel. The cool thing about goals is that when we set them and we think about them over and over again, the thoughts about achieving that goal generate the feelings we will have to feel once we have accomplished it. And this is crazy, guys, we daydream about how we’ll feel when we get there but we actually feel that emotion before we accomplish it. And that emotion that happens before we accomplish it is how we reach that goal.

So, think of something you’d love to have right now; something really expensive that seems completely insane or crazy or out of reach. Like, let’s say a brand-new beautiful car, a high-end luxury car, or maybe a remodeled kitchen. And think about why you want those things.

Why would you want a remodeled kitchen in your home? I know this was a daydream I had for a long time. Like, my kitchen was fine, it was functional, but it was old and outdated and ugly and small and I just wanted a kitchen so badly when we lived at our old home.

We want them because of the way we believe it will make us feel once we have them. And as we think about having them, we envision ourselves cooking and having amazing dinners with our family and our friends. We think about all the fun, the conversations, the connections, the talking, the laughing, and also for me, this dream would be to have enough space in my kitchen for every kitchen item that I owned; a place for everything. And the kitchen would be new and shiny and clean and everything would work. So I wasn’t spending energy and time trying to figure out why the ice maker keeps acting up or why the dishwasher only runs on one cycle.

I envisioned my life being so much more smooth and efficient with my brand-new kitchen, right? So those images and the way we think it’s going to make us feel is why we set those goals. And you can feel them ahead of time, it’s super cool.

Three, accomplishing a goal is not what makes you feel amazing. Accomplishing a goal after you’ve worked to figure it out is why you feel amazing. So, if someone were to give you a gold medal for the Boston Marathon, like you made first place, good for you, but you didn’t run the race, you would feel really awkward.

If you were given all the accolades, you were in the newspaper, you were on whatever and you got all these accolades for finishing the marathon, it’s not going to feel the same as if you had earned all of that swag and accolades as a product of your training and running the race yourself. Yes, the moment you cross the line is amazing, but the feelings of amazingness comes from you blowing your own mind as to what you thought was possible.

So if you train for this race and you run the race and maybe you come in last, girl, who cares? But the point is this, you can’t even believe that you ran the damn marathon, but you did it. You trained, you got up early when others in your house were sleeping, you pushed through the intense weight training sessions, you ran out in the cold, you ran out in the rain, you cut back on eating and drinking so you could be ready to go first thing in the morning to train.

You became a marathon runner through the process of deciding ahead of time that you were going to qualify and run that race. Fired up, okay, let’s move on to setting money goals.

You’ve most likely been trained on how to write goals. Trust me, if you’re in education, you have been trained how to write goals. You know those SMART goals, the ones you have to write for your school improvement plan or your grade level plan. You have to be specific and measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

Now, I’m not making fun too much of the SMART goal. I’m not saying this method doesn’t work. I think SMART goals can work just fine, but I do tend to poke a little fun at the process as it’s just one of the many things that we talk about in education to ad nauseam. And I would like to offer another option, a different way of creating goals for yourself using the STEAR Cycle. And we’re going to do that by creating a money goal.

And the difference between a SMART goal and using the STEAR Cycle to steer your goals, pun intended, is that you identify the thoughts and feelings that are needed to achieve the result you want. You can create a goal with all of the SMART components in it. However, if you don’t consider the mindset that’s required to achieve the goal, the actions you choose to take will be based on your current way of thinking, which is not going to produce a new result. It’s going to produce a similar result. That is why, when we do SMART goals, we sometimes hit the goal, sometimes not, but we kind if stagnate.

I just went to a conference and we talked about how our scores, like, they kind of bumped up when we started new standards or new ways of teaching, but they kind of flat-lined. And that’s what happens with goals. If you don’t approach it in a different way then you will never be able to accomplish it in a different way. Does that make sense?

Okay, so think about it this way; if you knew how to approach the goal in order to achieve it, you wouldn’t be writing a goal for it. So, what we have to do is we have to imagine what the person who has that goal already thinks and does and feels.

So, when you write a SMART goal but you approach it the same way you always have, it’s like writing a goal to become a school leader when you’ve already become a school leader. It doesn’t make sense to write that goal because you already know how to reach the goal because you’ve already done it.

So a couple of things here, one, when we write goals without the thought process of who do I have to become to be that goal, we’re going to get the same result that we got before. Number two, writing goals in a way that we already know how to achieve that goal, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s worthless of our time, right?

So, in order to use the STEAR Cycle to create a goal, and in this case, we’re going to talk about money – it’s just the context, put in any goal that you want but today we’re going to do money – you’re going to put the goal that you want in the result line, the R-line of the STEAR Cycle. And when you make a money goal, the goal doesn’t have to be like a specific dollar amount. I think when people think in money, they think in terms of numbers.

I mean, it can be. You can put something down like, I’m going to raise $3000 for an afterschool chorus program, or something. So you can have a dollar amount, but it will also be a goal that’s just more personal in your money mindset, like I’m going to track my school budget monthly every month this year, or every week this year if you want to get crazy. Or maybe it’s something personal that you want to accomplish.

But let me be clear; the key to writing this goal is it has to be something that you accomplish, not something that you want somebody else to do. That gets into the realm of trying to control or manipulate other people’s behavior.

So, for example, a goal that states, I want to win the lottery, or I want my husband to get a second job, that’s putting the responsibility for the goal onto someone else. You’re putting the responsibility of winning the lottery onto the lottery. They choose you; you don’t choose them. Or your husband getting a second job, like, it might benefit the family as a whole, but that’s his responsibility and his choice if he wants to get a second job.

You have to own your result. So it has to be a result that you have ownership and responsibility and power over. So, let’s say you want a raise. Even a goal like I want my boss to give me a raise, that puts the ownership on your boss. What you want to do, if you want a raise, you can write the goal something like this; I’ve earned a raise through the value that I provide to my school and district.

Now, that shifts your mindset and your thinking and your feeling about what you can do and the actions that you can take and how you want to give that value to the point that you can earn or deserve a raise. Now, once you’ve decided on a goal, you need to put that goal in the R-line of the STEAR Cycle, and then you’ll fill in the STEAR Cycle as if you have already achieved the goal.

If you had already achieved that goal, how would you be thinking, feeling, and acting? So, determine those steps and just guess, you guys. Of course, you don’t really know because you haven’t achieved it yet. You’re guessing. You’re imagining what might be true because you’re tapping into a deeper source within you that actually knows and is going to try new ways of thinking.

So, determine what steps you think will make it work and then you actively practice thinking, feeling, and acting this way until you reach the goal. You just keep going. And, you guys, this process will work for any goal, even goals that feel insanely out of reach.

When I decided to leave my district in order to help school leaders, I created the goal, I have replaced my district income with my coaching income. That was my goal. At the time I left, that felt so out of reach and so crazy and so unattainable. And to be honest with you, I’m not quite there yet, but I share that with you openly because I want to make a point about setting goals, financial or otherwise.

Once you’ve decided a money goal that you’d love to achieve, the way to get there is to keep practicing and believing and working on that goal as if that goal had already become a reality for as long as it takes. Do you hear me? You need to keep working towards the goal as long as it takes.

The reason we don’t accomplish any goal ever is because we give ourselves a timeline. And if we don’t hit the goal in that timeline, it’s because we say we failed, we didn’t meet the goal in time and then we quit. We tend to view goals like a football game. We play until the buzzer goes off, which indicates that it’s the end of the game, and then we stop playing. So you win or you lose, that’s the end of it.

This is the kiss of death for goals. Achieving a goal is more like a marathon. And I’m sorry I keep using running, but you guys, I was a long-distance runner for years in my 20s and 30s, so I can’t help it. Running is an analogy for me and it’s so true, at least for me. But it is, think about it. It’s like a marathon in the sense that just because another person crossed the finish line first or before you does not mean that the race is over. It doesn’t mean you stop running.

No, you keep running, even if you didn’t finish in the time you personally had hoped, because the bigger goal is to finish the race. The same is true with money. If you knew your financial goals were inevitable if you kept trying, no matter what, would you keep going or would you quit?

Think of it this way, if a million dollars was guaranteed in your future and the only thing about that million dollars is you don’t get to know when it’s coming or when to expect it or when exactly it’s going to be available for you and the only requirement was that you had to show up fully in your career and your life to the best of your ability each day, would you do it?

Would you stay on course even though you don’t know the timeframe or you don’t know how long it’s going to take or you don’t know when it’s coming or you don’t know how it’s coming? Would you keep the course or would you give up because you don’t know exactly when it’s arriving or you’re frustrated or you expected it to arrive within a month and it didn’t?

It’s interesting food for thought, right? So, in the end, you guys, your money goals, or any goal for that matter is all about mindset. Your current money situation is a product of your current thinking. You have what you have based on what you believe you are capable and worthy of having. And the number one thing you must do in order to feel better about money and to be more comfortable with money and attract and have more money is to do money mindset work.

So, what is it that you want? Why do you want it? And how do you think it will make you feel once you have it? Those are the questions. You guys, I hope this month has been helpful. I will tell you; it has been extremely powerful for me. Please let me know your thoughts and questions about money mindset. Please drop them in my Facebook page. I would love to hear and respond to you. And if you want more support, you want individualized support, go to the website and sign up for a free mini-session. I am here to serve you. Let’s do this.

And next month, you guys, we’re going to be talking about courage. It’s going to be so good. I can’t wait. You guys have an amazing week. Let me know how money goals are going and I’ll talk to you next week. Take care, bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit www.angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.