Episode 02: Finding Time for Your Goals: Making Small Steps Count
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
Feeling frustrated that you don't have enough time to accomplish your goals like you did before kids? In this podcast episode, we discuss how to take on those things you really want to do, like exercising more, improving friendships, job searching, or just getting your family photos organized so you can finally order that album. By breaking down your big goals into smaller, manageable steps, you'll be amazed at how much progress you can make even with a busy schedule. I'm sharing real-life examples of what this looks like in action so you can apply it to your own big goals. By the end of this episode, I want you embracing the idea that something is better than nothing and celebrating every bit of progress along the way. Tune in to discover how you can start achieving your goals today.
In this episode, you’ll learn…
00:00 Introduction and episode overview
00:13 Identifying common goals and challenges
01:17 Reframing time and how you think about goal setting
03:41 Personal example: tracking Steps - how Katelyn went from 2,500 to 7,000 daily steps
11:58 Client example: fitting in physical therapy exercises to regain strength postpartum
14:58 Client example: job searching when you're working full-time and parenting young kids
18:11 How to break down your big goal and celebration as a success strategy
21:17 Your action plan & next steps
links & resources mentioned in this episode:
Withings Watch (Katelyn's step counter)
NEAT (NPR Article about Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis)
IG Accounts that talk about strength training: Paige | Gym Nurse | Ana Katic
Apply to work with Katelyn (1:1, Group, and Strategy Sessions available)
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You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode.
Hey, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. So excited to be here with you again this week. Today I want to talk to you about what to do when you have a goal, something that you really want to do or need to do to get started on, but you just feel like you don't have the time. Who has the time to do this?
Maybe you want to exercise more regularly. That's a really common one that I hear in my practice. You want to take more walks. Maybe you want to invest more in your friendships or make some friends in this season of life. Maybe it's something Like, you want to organize your photos, oh my gosh, organize your photos and finally order those family albums that you know you would love, but just again, the time.
Or maybe you want to start looking for a job. You want to consider what is the next phase of your career, but you tell yourself as you think about these things that yes, you really want to do or need to do that. There's just no way. You could fit that in there's not enough time or this isn't the time and I want to offer or challenge or ask this question.
What if there is time but not in the way you're thinking about it. Here's what I mean. When you think about any one of those goals or something else that came to mind when I was giving those examples. Are you thinking about ultimately where you want to be? The finish line. In the new job, the album created, you are, I don't know, lifting weights three times a week.
You are walking 10, 000 steps a day, the finish line, the entire thing. So that picturing going from where you are today. And to that point, that finish line feels huge and overwhelming. Maybe you are picturing approaching this goal the way that maybe you would have done before kids, when you had lots of time and capacity to just, yeah, pick up and do this thing that you want to do and let it take however much time it needed to take.
Well, life is different now by the time, you know, we work all day, take care of kids or kid, clean up, do chores around the house, you know, catch up on email, whatever else we needed to do for work that day, just general everyday life maintenance. There is very little time left. Certainly not enough time. to accomplish what feels like this big endeavor.
But if something is important to you, if there's a reason that goal is coming up for you, how long will you have to wait until you find the amount of time that you need? If this thing you want to do can't wait, then you have to change the way you think about the goal, the way you think about progress and success.
All right, I want to give you an example from my own life, and I'll share some others too, because this comes up so often in coaching, and hopefully this will help you envision what I'm talking about. What does this mean to think about the goal, progress, and success differently, and not necessarily about the time?
So, I would say probably in the top three, maybe top five, list of maybe projects or goals that my clients come to me with is making time for health, right? Wanting to feel healthy and like we are going to be there for our kids for the long run, that we will be able to be active and have energy. And so maybe that's exercise, movement, eating more intentionally, getting enough sleep, adding in strength training or training for races and runs again, or, you know, something like that.
And, and myself included, I think every year that passes as I get older, these things become more and more important as I think about my longevity and aging well. And so it's been probably, I don't know, a year, maybe almost two years, that I decided I wanted to start tracking my steps, how much I was walking in a given day.
And I follow a couple of strength training accounts on Instagram, women in their late 30s and 40s who are, you know, really prioritizing this lifestyle. And they all talk about this term called NEAT. N E N as in Nancy. E A T. Have you heard of it? It's, I had to look it up. It's, stands for non exercise activity thermogenesis.
And Google tells me that that is basically anything you do that is not eating, sleeping, or exercising. So a gym session, you know, weightlifting, cycling, that's not neat. So it could be everything from fidgeting, like I'm talking with my hands right now, so I'm moving around my body while I'm talking and recording this, up to walking.
And so they all talk about the importance of not just strength training and eating a lot of protein and, and fueling your body, but also making sure that you are prioritizing and being intentional about this non exercise activity. So I got a step counter. I got I don't know how to say the brand actually, Wythings or Wythings.
It's like with, but an I N G S at the end. I'm on my second generation watch. I love it, but it's just, you know, a pedometer. At its core and I started to track, I had no idea where I was, what was my baseline and I was appalled at how low my number was at how little movement I was getting during the day.
Maybe you can relate, I'm sure you can relate, where I have a finite amount of time to work while I have childcare. And so I want to squeeze all that I can out of those hours. And so I sit for hours and hours behind a computer screen. I'm on zoom with my clients.
I'm writing. I'm sitting here while I record this podcast episode for you. Just a lot of time sitting and being sedentary at best. I was, you know, I, or I do walk up and down the street. a few flights of stairs throughout the day because my office is on the third floor of our house. I walk to and from the car as I go to daycare to pick up my youngest.
And on a good day, I would get slightly more steps because I walk my big kids to school two mornings a week. So that gets me an extra 2000 steps around trip. We don't live very far from the school. And all of these accounts that I was following were talking about getting 8 to 10, 000 steps a day.
Actually, you've probably heard that. That's just like a standard thing. Actually, when I loaded the app for my pedometer, it set my daily goal at 10, 000 steps a day. And I was getting Maybe on average around 2, 500, slightly more on those days where I walked my kids to school. So, when I was at the start line of wanting to change this, to approach this goal in my life, thinking about going from 2, 500, my baseline average, to 10, 000 steps a day was so overwhelming.
That's like triple what I was already doing without any intention. I'm like, who has the time for that? I am trying to get work done. I can't just get up and not work for an hour while I go walk. How do you do this? And so, of course, it's not very motivating to think about there's no way. I don't have time.
How are these people doing it that they, you know, my life is not like theirs. There's no way I can do that. But I decided instead to see what it would take to hit 4, 000 steps a day. So I even went into the app and adjusted the daily goal down from 10, 000 to 4, 000 because nothing is more defeating than seeing how far you are from the end goal.
Day after day, I was never hitting 10, 000 steps a day. Never. So every day I was seeing you didn't get your goal. You didn't get your goal. So instead I just changed the goal in the app to 4, 000. Is that what's recommended? No, but it was a stretch for me and it took me months to consistently hit 4, 000 steps a day.
Once I had 4,000 steps consistently bumped up my goal to 5,000, and I went back and forth ping ponging between anywhere in between four and five. Some days I'd get 5,000, but not consistently, and it took me time to get there. But once I did that and established it, then I moved to 6, 000. I am currently, today when I'm recording this, working toward 7, 000.
7, 000 is so much closer to the 8 to 10, 000 goal that I was reading about when I first started this, but I did it incrementally. I also find that Looking at the week is really helpful for me. So instead of I have to get 7, 000 every day, I'm aiming for 49 to 50, 000 steps a week. That allows for some days, like when I do take a walk with a friend early in the morning and I get 8, 000 to 9, 000 steps that day because of the walk, that allows for those days to be over and other days where I'm just busier and I'm behind my screen all day long with no opportunity for breaks, those can be under.
So standing at the start line questioning how to go from 2, 500 steps to 10, 000 steps, of course you'll feel overwhelmed. I felt overwhelmed. Your brain will offer up all of the obstacles. That's huge. You don't have time for that. And what happens is you stay stuck. You don't start. But 4, 000 steps is better than 2, 500.
And once you're there, increasing it little by little doesn't sound too hard. In fact, it sounds like a really realistic challenge. Here's another example, still in this sort of movement and, and health and wellness category. And I had a client who was given several physical therapy exercises to work through postpartum.
Maybe you have those as well or had those. I know I did when I saw a pelvic floor therapist after the birth of each of my three kids. And you know, they give you, you know, A list of a few exercises, nothing that's super hard, they're all short, they're easy to do at home. I remember some of mine I had to do with like a sheet I would wrap around my core or maybe some bands.
It's all very simple. It's all very doable. And this client had about four to five exercises that she was told she should be doing daily, but she wasn't doing them at all. Now, for her, she was motivated to, to want to do these or felt a little bit of pressure to do them because she wanted to get back into running and knew that these exercises would be critical in her ability to do that right in a way that felt good.
So how to fit them in looking at four to five exercises, it felt like a big undertaking. And so she was stuck. She stalled and would continue to feel. I'm sure you felt this as well, like a failure or just down on herself because she wasn't following through. If every day you tell yourself, Oh, I need to do these, or I should be doing these.
And then you don't do them, that experiences, it just doesn't feel very good. So I asked her, which one of these four to five exercises feels the most important? Like, which one do you think would be the most beneficial for your body as you start running? And she immediately said, Oh, the clamshell. Are you picturing it?
I had this assigned to me as well. You're lying on your side with your knees bent. You're kind of opening and closing your knees like a clamshell. And so we decided if we just did that one exercise we're talking, it's a couple of minutes. She worked from home. So do it right before. She decided to do it right before.
She sat down at her desk and logged onto her computer. And Literally, on the floor, right next to her desk, lying down, doing the, whatever, ten reps on each side, the clamshell, done, check the box. And she started doing that exercise regularly. Now, it wasn't all of them that she was prescribed, but it was better than none.
And so much easier once you have that momentum, that proof that you can do it to add in more of the exercises one by one. And she is back running today and still working on adding in those exercises. But she started with just one. I also have several clients who are. Coincidentally, going through a job search right now, they are thinking about their next role, the next step in their career, what do they want, and if you think about a job search, or answering those big questions about your career, It can feel a little daunting and overwhelming.
Job searching is a huge undertaking when you're already working and managing life and parenting and taking care of yourself and everything else. It's like a whole extra job. And so, of course, If you're thinking about the whole thing like that, the whole package of job searching, it would be so easy to put it off.
I'll do that later. I'll do that when I have more time, when the kids aren't as young, when I'm not up in the middle of the night, and you can certainly wait. But how long will you be waiting for a season or a time in your life when you have enough time to take this huge project on? So what would be better than nothing?
Maybe it is just finding your old resume and spending 10 minutes to brush it up and then sending it to a couple of friends for feedback. Maybe it's as simple as opening up the LinkedIn app and Hopping on there for five minutes, you know, at the end of the day, a few times a week, just connecting, liking posts, adding some comments or sharing something so that your name starts to get back on people's radar again.
Maybe that leads to, oh, the next time you're on there, you see a job posting or somebody is hiring at their company that you're like, Oh, that sounds interesting. And that turns into, Oh, well, I, I want to brush up my resume, or I wonder what it would take to apply. But it starts with just. I don't know, five minutes a day, just being back in the world of networking and looking at opportunities, just getting back into that groove, bringing this thing, this goal that you have to the forefront of your mind on a consistent basis.
I found that with walking. So now you will regularly find me like pacing walking laps around my kitchen island while dinner is cooking, or my son has books ready to be picked up at the library. I'm like, Oh yeah, let's walk down. It's two blocks to the library. I'll walk with you. I'm looking now for opportunities to get a few steps in because I have seen how all those little bits and pieces of walking really add up.
And I can tell you, I am so glad that I started when I did. I feel so much better knowing that I'm, I'm moving my body, not just knowing that, but actually the movement does feel better. I feel so tired, like deliciously tired at the end of the day in a way that is, is physical, right? Cause I've moved my body.
And I started with 4, 000 steps as my goal. So as you think about whatever goal is top of mind for you, that thing that you've been really wanting to do that you just haven't been able to find the time because it feels too daunting or overwhelming, think about how you can break it down into something that feels so small that your initial reaction is actually like.
That doesn't count. That's not enough, right? Or that's kind of laughable. It's so small, like what, why even bother? That's it. That small step that you have that reaction to is where you want to start. I have coached many clients who have gotten back into running lots of runners who want to get back to doing a half marathon or 10 Ks regularly, or one who wants to do an ultra marathon, right?
And they're used to, of course, these training programs and multiple runs a week and a really long run on the weekend. And if you have the time and space to do that, like, absolutely go do that. What are you waiting for? That's amazing. But if that plan, that approach that you used to do feels like too much that you will just stay stuck and not run again, then you need to start with something smaller.
One run a week. Where can you do that? Can you take the jogging stroller? Can you head out early in the morning? Can you put the kids to bed and run in the evening? Have a partner or, you know, a friend or someone play with the kids for 20 30 minutes while you go run just a little bit? Where can you start?
Think also about that weekly perspective, maybe rather than the daily. Think about doing it more days than not and, and give yourself that flexibility to work around the realities of life and how your schedule does shift and change based on kids and work and whatever else. Remember that something is better than nothing.
If what you're doing now is nothing, then one run a week is amazing, right? Five minutes on LinkedIn is awesome. One clamshell exercise, 4, 000 steps, wow, huge. And then celebrate your progress along the way. Celebration is a success strategy. Maybe I should do a whole episode on this, but celebrate your progress.
Find someone, a partner, a friend, who will be excited with you and be like, yay, you did that thing. Find a coach. All of my clients are encouraged to celebrate their wins, even if it's something so small as like, I took a shower today, right? That's amazing. Or I did five minutes of my physical therapy exercises, or I gave myself permission to make an easy dinner tonight because my goal is to make more home cooked meals.
Celebrate the incremental progress along the way. So as you think about your goal, I want you to ask yourself, where might you be in 90 days? Or six months, if you start today, not with the entire goal, not with, you know, the whole thing, but with a small step, who knows where that small step will lead, but it will be so much easier to reach your end goal.
If you're further along the path than where you are today, I would love for you to tell me what goal you're going to start working toward. What goal you're going to break down into a very small first step so that you can fit it in So that you can prove to yourself that you do have the time. Send me an email Send me a DM on Instagram or a message on LinkedIn I want to celebrate with you and cheer you on as you start today and make progress Toward that thing that you know, you really want to do. Alright, I will see you next week in the next episode Take care and talk soon
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