Change Academy Brock Armstrong & Monica Reinagel

Brock and I (Monica) are taking our traditional Spring Break from the podcast and using that time to take a fresh look at our goals, objectives and commitments and do some tidying of our own.  And we’d like to invite you to do the same–and we’ve even created a special resource to help you do just that.
--Visit ChangeAcademyPodcast.com/tuneup to join us for a system-by-system inspection and tuneup (or complete overhaul, if necessary) of your health, habits, outlook, and ambitions.

We’ve talked a lot about goals in this podcast: the purpose and function of goals, how to set good ones, and how to pursue them more effectively, even your goal-setting personality! But in this episode, we want to talk about NOT reaching our goals–and why that is not necessarily a problem. 

Do you get stuck in your thoughts, even when (or maybe, especially when) they aren’t helpful? We all do. There is even a name for it - Cognitive Fusion. Well, in this episode, we are going to learn how to defuse ourselves from those thoughts that threaten to undo our hard work, make us feel unworthy or sad, and hold us back from reaching our goals.

Some new research caught recently our attention because it reinforces and expands on a concept that we introduced about 6 months ago in our episode on the Law of Subtraction. When we recorded that, we weren’t aware that our so-called “law of subtraction” had been studied by University of Virginia professor Leidy Klotz. In this episode, we explore some of that research and how we can use this insight to create better solutions to our challenges.

Motivation gaps are those times where you feel as if you are not motivated enough to do what it takes to get a particular result. In this episode, we talk about four things that frequently cause motivation gaps, plus what researcher, Julie Dirksen, refers to as a "special motivation gap."

When people fail to reach a goal that they have set for themselves, we often hear them say something like, “I guess I just didn’t want it enough.” In this episode, Monica and guest Cassie Christopher discuss what is really behind this sentiment. (Spoiler alert: It’s usually not about whether or not you wanted it bady enough.)