Focus On This Podcast

66. What SMART Goals Get Wrong

Audio

Overview

And just like that, it’s December. You’re in the home stretch of your quarterly goals and looking ahead at the new year. But there’s a problem: you’re not feeling motivated. Your Q4 goals feel like a grind and setting new goals for 2021 sounds like a chore.

We’ve been there. The good news is, you’re not the problem. Your goals are. After years of helping people set and pursue goals, we’ve discovered one characteristic that multiplies motivation and results. You need riskier goals.

In this episode, the Full Focus team is joined by Michael Hyatt to discuss why setting risky goals is the key to success. They’ll show you how adopting this single change will supercharge your motivation, boost your success, and help you become who you want to be.

In this episode, you’ll discover—

  • What the SMART acronym gets wrong about goal setting
  • Why doubt, uncertainty, and fear mean you’re on the right track
  • How risk sparks innovation
  • What makes quiet, confident belief contagious
  • An invitation to design your future at Your Best Year Ever

 

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Episode Transcript

Michael Hyatt: Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan Hyatt Miller: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael: And this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed at life. Today, we’re going to be talking about action steps for a more purposeful life. Megan, welcome, and tell us why purpose is important.

Megan: Hey, Dad. I’m so happy to be here, and I love talking about this topic. You know, so often, people think purpose is something that just happens to you, like it’s kind of magic or you just discover it. I feel like that’s what we tell our kids. I have kids going into adulthood right now, and I feel like if I’m not careful, that’s what I tell them. But it’s actually something you can choose to recognize and create and move toward and be intentional about.

We talk a lot about being intentional on Lead to Win. I think purpose is no different. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about how listeners can identify concrete actions they can take to increase their sense of purpose. The reason that’s important, by the way, is that a sense of purpose and a sense of incremental progress toward your purpose is really what makes people happy.

Michael: Definitely. I think most of us think it’s this kind of mystical thing. This was famously enshrined in the movie City Slickers, where there’s this conversation between Curly, this crusty old cowboy, and Mitch, who’s played by Billy Crystal. Billy Crystal is this executive who has gone to this dude ranch, and he’s just kind of lost. So, he’s having this conversation with this old sage cowboy, and the cowboy says to him, “Do you know what the secret of life is?” He holds up his finger when he says it. Mitch says:

 

[Audio clip]

 

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean [censored].

Mitch: That’s great, but what’s the one thing?

Curly: That’s what you’ve got to figure out.

 

[End of clip]

 

Michael: I think that’s how most people approach purpose. It’s like this mystical thing you have to divine for yourself. Maybe it’s going to drop out of heaven. Maybe if you pray about it enough, you’ll get a sense of purpose. But a lot of people are kind of stuck waiting to find their purpose, and I don’t think that’s how you discover purpose.

Megan: I don’t think so either, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Hey, before we get started, we wanted to share a resource with you guys that I think is going to be really helpful as you’re thinking about how to reconnect with your purpose, how to have more meaning in your life, and that is our goal setting course called Your Best Year Ever.

This is all about learning how to do hard things and making progress toward big accomplishments as being one of the most powerful means of achieving a sense of purpose and meaning in your life. So, we want to show you exactly how to do that. Honestly, we have honed this process. We’ve made it fun. We’ve made it easy. Dad, do you want to tell us a little bit more about it?

Michael: Yeah. This is a five-session course that basically gets into everything regarding not just goal setting but goal achievement. It’s basically our proprietary way that you design the future and create a future for yourself, for your business, that you’ll absolutely love. Again, it consists of five sessions. We talk about, first of all, the power of belief and possibility and, particularly, limiting beliefs. We talk about how to take care of the past so you don’t drag the worst of the past into your future, but you have to deal with the past in a very specific way that we go through in the course.

Then we talk about our specific formula, the SMARTER goals framework, which is unique to us. We borrowed, certainly, from the SMART framework, but we’ve expanded upon that, and, in fact, one of the elements of the traditional SMART framework is just flat-out wrong. In fact, if you practice that one thing, you’ll get stuck. You will not achieve goals that matter to you.

Then, fourthly, we talk about motivation, how you gin up enough motivation and why, so that when you encounter obstacles and challenges, you’re able to persevere and punch through those obstacles to get to the other side. Then, finally, we talk about how you can take concrete actions and make the achievement of those goals actually easy.

Megan: The reason we’re so pumped about Your Best Year Ever as we look ahead to 2021 is because 2020 was a really hard year. It’s probably a year, if you’re like most of the people we talk to, where you kind of got disconnected from the possibility of the future, from your own agency, from a sense of control.

You probably felt kind of whipped about by circumstances and all kinds of things that cause you to be more in a survival place and stuck in the present than thinking about the future, being excited, and looking forward to the future. We think that should change for 2021. It doesn’t have to continue to be like it was in 2020. We can take back the future, in fact, and the things we’re going to teach you in Your Best Year Ever are exactly the way to do that.

Michael: One of the things to say for those of you who have been through Your Best Year Ever (and we’ve had about 50,000 students go through the course now) is that we completely reshot it this year. It’s brand new. We do reference COVID, the challenges of this year. We help you process that, help you think differently about the year that’s to come, whether we have continuing effects of the pandemic or not. We talk about that. There’s a brand-new workbook. It’s all new. This is the best version we’ve ever created, and this is like version six.

Megan: If you’d like more information on that, just go to bestyearever.me, and you can find out all about it. Okay. So, if purpose is not some kind of magical discovery process that’s always elusive and kind of out there and we don’t really know how to get there, then what is it and how do we have more of it in our lives? One of the best places to go on this topic is Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, his famous book.

Michael: Great book.

Megan: He was, of course, a concentration camp survivor, and his experience shaped much of his thought and writing. He argued that man’s deepest desire was to find meaning in life and that if he could find that meaning, then he could survive anything. That’s powerful coming from someone who endured an incredible amount of torture and suffering and hardship. But here’s what he says about the way you find meaning. He says there are actually three ways you find meaning. First, you find meaning in purposeful work. Second, you find meaning in love. Third (and this is the most counterintuitive one), you find meaning in suffering.

Michael: I don’t like that one.

Megan: I don’t like that one either. Can we get some additional research on that?

Michael: Can I get the non-suffering version?

Megan: Right. Unfortunately, the research would confirm exactly what he says. Again, we have meaning in purposeful work, in love, and in suffering. So, that’s what meaning is. That’s where we get it. It’s not out there. It’s in our real day-to-day life, and we can be intentional about cultivating meaning and purpose in these three areas by knowing what to look for.

Michael: You know, we’ve said this so many times, but this is really true here. This kind of is a mindset issue. You have to decide, first and foremost, that you’re going to experience meaning at work regardless of what the work is. I’ve had jobs where I wasn’t always working in my Desire Zone, where I was doing something I felt like was menial, something that wasn’t very rewarding, something that was repetitive.

Even in those situations, I think we can find meaning if we’re intentional. Maybe, at the very least, there’s character development. Learning to do hard things is very rewarding. There’s a very famous quote from Dean Karnazes. He’s an ultramarathoner. His book on that topic is fantastic. I read it a couple of times. He says, “We equate comfort with happiness. And now we’re so comfortable we’re miserable. There’s no struggle in our lives, no sense of adventure.”

So, before you dismiss your current work as something that leaves you flat and uninspired, maybe the work needs to happen on your part to make that work more meaningful. Maybe you have to take the initiative and consciously articulate to yourself the value of that hard job you don’t like. What are you gaining? What is it making possible for your future by learning to endure even that hard job?

Megan: Well, when we were talking about these three ways of finding meaning, the purposeful work, love, and suffering, and we were joking about how much we don’t like the suffering way of finding meaning… The truth is, if I think about my own life, that has been one of the most significant ways I have found meaning in my adult life.

Really, that comes through parenting kids with special needs. There has been significant suffering as a part of that. If you have children with special needs or know someone who does, you know that’s true, and everybody has their own version of that. I mean, it’s not unique to me to have suffering in my life. Every one of us has had some part of our story where there’s significant suffering. I think the redemptive possibility of that is where so much purpose and meaning comes from.

I think about what I have gotten out of learning how to love kids with special needs and from hard places with histories of trauma, for example. That has been incredibly meaningful to me. It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it has also been the best thing I’ve ever done. It has changed me more than anything. I can see my progress. I can see how I’ve grown. You can probably hear one of my children crying in the background right now. That’s just something that when we understand suffering through the lens of purpose and meaning, it transforms it for us.

Michael: It does. I’ve experienced a little bit of that this year myself, because I’ve been struggling with chronic neck pain for almost the last year. My dad, who’s almost 87 years old, has lived with chronic pain since he was 18 years old. He was severely injured in the Korean War, and he has had chronic pain ever since then. I’m not proud to admit this, but there was a time when I thought, “Gosh! Can’t you just buck up and endure the pain?” Then all of a sudden, I’m dealing with chronic pain, and there are days it’s debilitating.

By the way, before those of you who want to send me an email that maybe I need to try acupuncture or chiropractic… I appreciate the sentiment. Look. I’ve tried everything out there to deal with it. One of the things I’ve resolved myself to is there is value in experiencing pain. I really think it has made me more empathetic, not just to my dad but to other people who have to live with chronic pain. It sounds trite, but there’s a silver lining. There’s purpose if we choose to see it.

Nick: That reminds me of… One of my favorite movies is Finding Nemo. We’ve all seen that movie. The whole premise is that this fish Nemo gets lost in the ocean, and his dad is all concerned about him because he has been protecting him his whole life. He’s talking to Dory, and he’s all upset about it. He says:

 

[Audio clip]

 

Marlin: I promised him I’d never let anything happen to him.

Dory: Hmm. That’s a funny thing to promise.

Marlin: What?

Dory: Well, you can’t never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.

 

[End of clip]

 

Megan: Oh, that’s so good.

Nick: I think about that all the time. When I was a teacher and as a parent now, you sit there and you go, “Well, yeah. What kind of goal is that for anybody?”

Megan: Nick, I had forgotten that part of that movie. I’ve seen it so many times, but I’d forgotten that. Gosh, it’s so true. I actually kind of wonder if God feels like that about us sometimes. That’s not the point of this show, but like at an existential level, I just wonder if sometimes that’s part of why God allows hard things to happen: because it opens the door, ultimately, to more life, more purpose, more meaning. Anyway, we could go way down that rabbit hole, and I don’t think God causes bad things, but I think that is an interesting way of thinking about it.

Michael: Yeah. There’s just huge value in adversity. I think finding meaning in our relationships is the same thing. People are looking for that one love, that romantic thing. Or as somebody once said, they think love is a feeling you feel when you feel like you’re getting a feeling you’ve never felt before. Love is not really a feeling. We choose to inject meaning in that.

Even in the hard things… I think so much of what happens to us in life… The ultimate purpose is that our character would be developed, that our potential would be realized. That only happens when we encounter difficult things. So, it’s not the easy things that make us stronger. It’s the hard things that make us stronger.

Megan: So, how do you think our lives change when we experience purpose, Dad?

Michael: Well, I think we have a subjective sense that our lives are being directed, that we’re not just aimlessly drifting on the sea with nowhere to go and just kind of waiting for the next thing that comes up, and then we react to it. It makes us more intentional, and having that sense of direction, that we’re actually going someplace, that there’s a destination to it all…

I think that affects everything. It affects the way you get out of bed in the morning or if you do get out of bed in the morning. It affects the way you show up for work or for the people you love. If you have a sense of purpose, that you’re essential, that you can make a difference, that has an impact on the way you show up for other people.

Megan: Yeah. I also think it makes the day-to-day, mundane activities, whether it’s cleaning the kitchen or feeding your kids dinner or going to care for an elderly parent or grandparent or walking the dog, or whatever… All of a sudden, these daily activities have meaning, because somehow they fit into a bigger story. They’re puzzle pieces in a bigger story. They’re not just random. They’re not meaningless. They have some inherent value to them. I think that changes how we experience our lives.

Michael: What’s really subtle about what you said is I don’t think we wait for purpose to find us. We create the purpose. Two people could be experiencing the exact same thing and find different purpose in it. You know what I’m saying? Purpose is something we create. It’s a lot about the story we’re telling ourselves about why this matters, whether it’s staying in a difficult relationship or enduring some physical suffering or working in a job that’s less than optimal.

The story we’re telling ourselves about ourselves and about the situation and what we mean to it is something that I think we have the privilege of creating. Not just finding our purpose but creating our purpose. Do you agree with that or do you think that’s too existential?

Megan: No, I do agree with that. I don’t necessarily like it, but I agree with it. In fact, yesterday, we were talking about… We always have lunch together on Mondays. At the time we’re recording this it’s Tuesday, and yesterday you and I were having lunch. We were talking about some challenges we’re having with one of our kids.

As we were talking about that, my first thought was, “Gosh! I must just not be a good parent. How is it that my kids have all of these challenges? What is it about me that’s causing my kids to have all of these challenges?” Joel and I were talking about it in the evening. One of the things I realized… That is an interpretation. It’s not factually based. It’s just a possible way of making meaning, in a negative way, about the situation.

It’s also possible that there’s something about me or God is doing something in me that these children are a gift to me, that they need something from me only I can provide as their mom, and Joel as their dad, that there’s so much purpose in loving them and helping them navigate life that is a really special calling.

How cool is it that God has given us the opportunity to invest in kids who really need us where we can really make a difference? It’s really hard. It’s not to minimize how hard it is, but what a cool purpose to have. That is an example of what you said, you know, creating purpose or meaning. What’s our interpretation of our lives?

Michael: That’s right. You can make that be empowering, like it was in your example, or disempowering where you just want to give up and stop trying.

Megan: Right. Exactly.

Michael: Well, from my perspective, what you and Joel have done with your kids, especially the ones you’ve adopted, is heroic. It really has given those kids an amazing chance, and I love seeing what’s happening to them. Even though, from your perspective, sometimes you see the places where there’s a gap, where they still have so far to go, the observation I make is how far they’ve come and where they would be without you.

Megan: Well, what’s amazing and maybe even truer is where we would be without them. The kind of growth we’ve had because of the opportunity to love them… I mean, we’ve been the big winners. While it has been very difficult, the difficulty of it has been a gift, and it has changed us for the better, so I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s truly a privilege.

So, when we’re thinking about purpose, what is the relationship between ultimately getting to a destination we want to or accomplishing something…? Because, certainly, that feels good. But also, the journey on the way. You hear people say, “It’s not the destination; it’s the journey.” How do we think about that? Because a lot of life is the journey and not the destination.

Michael: Well, I kind of see that as the difference between purpose and goal setting. Purpose is something that’s usually not measurable, something you’ll never ultimately achieve. It’s something you move toward. For example, our company mission very much grows out of my personal sense of mission, which is to help leaders find the focus they need to win at work and succeed at life.

When will I achieve that? Uh, never, because there will always be people who are still struggling with winning at work and succeeding at life, who are trying to find focus. But the goals I set every year move me toward that. So, it provides the true north that gives me a sense of where I am in relationship to that ultimate purpose I want to fulfill.

Megan: Okay. Since you brought up goal setting, how does goal setting and achievement increase our sense of purpose? Now we’re shifting a little bit into what you can actually do to increase your sense of purpose in your life.

Michael: First of all, we have to get clear on what’s important to us. There’s always a prioritization process that takes place in goal setting. You look at all of the things in your life that deserve your attention. Maybe I need better friendships or I need to improve my marriage, if I’m married, or I need to improve my relationship with the kids or I want to get a promotion or I want to start a business…all of these different things. We have to prioritize those, because we can’t do everything. We have to pick the few things we want to pursue.

In that process, we begin to narrow our focus and, again, move ourselves toward that purpose. I think we always have to ask the question about purpose as we’re doing goal setting, “Why do I exist?” Another word I use when I’m thinking about my purpose is that I’m a steward, and I want to be a good steward of what I’ve been given. How can I be a better steward this year? How can I set goals that make me a better steward of what God has given me in my life? I don’t know. What do you think?

Megan: I think the other thing is that making incremental progress is what gives us a sense of purpose or happiness. So, when we’re talking about those areas that Viktor Frankl talked about, meaningful work, love, and suffering… If we’re making some kind of meaningful progress there, if we’re moving from one point to another… It’s not necessarily that we have achieved the ultimate, that we’ve accomplished, like you said, our purpose, so to speak, but if we’re making progress, that is part of what helps us to be happy, to have a sense of meaning in our day to day lives.

The reason goal setting could be a practical way to apply that is because… If you set a goal that’s going to be accomplished within a year, for example, and you’re making steady progress toward that throughout the year… Every time you make steady progress, that’s an opportunity to have meaning and purpose, to feel like you’re moving forward in your life. You’re not stuck.

I think that’s a big part of this conversation: not feeling stuck. A lot of what people have experienced in 2020 is feeling stuck, that they were in this sort of suspended animation just waiting for the world to get moving again and get back to normal. What we all need to experience is progress again. (If you hear that in the background, that would be my 18-month-old. Apparently, she does not like what she’s having for lunch. #2020. All the kids are home.)

Michael: Okay. One of the questions I have, Meg, is what have been especially significant sources of purpose in your life personally? Is there something external to you that helps you with a sense of purpose?

Megan: The biggest thing is my kids. In fact, I would say my kids are my number one why. I’ve probably told this story now numerous times on the podcast, but a couple of years after we had adopted our middle boys from Uganda… I was working in the business. I don’t remember exactly what I was responsible for at that point, but my responsibilities were steadily increasing. You came to me and said, “Okay. I am ready for you to run the company. I want you to become the COO.”

I said, “Okay. I really want to do this. I feel like I’m ready. I feel like I can make a significant contribution, but the only way I can do that is if I can be done at 3:00 every day, because my kids have some significant needs. They’ve been through a lot. I need to be able to be present for them in order to feel good about what I’m doing outside of work. If I feel like I’m going to really honor my responsibilities outside of work and look back on my life without regret, I can’t outsource that to someone. They need me. So, if I’m going to do this job, I’m going to do it 9:00 to 3:00.” You were like, “Great. I don’t care. If you can make it work, make it work.”

I really think my personal boundaries, my margin in my life around work… The reason I care so much about having strict boundaries around that is because my family is so important to me. I love these kids with all my heart, and I am completely committed to their well-being, their healing process, all of the things they need. I have five kids now, and all of them have different needs from me. I’m certainly not a perfect parent. I’m not some kind of superhero, but I do think I have prioritized my family outside of work, and that gives me a ton of meaning and purpose.

Michael: That’s good. Well, for me, I think it has been reading. It gives me a perspective that’s outside of me and often outside of time, or this time at least. One of the things, as you know… As part of my daily ritual, I read the Bible every morning. I read the Bible through every year, and I’ve done that for decades. One of the things I love about that, as a person of faith, is it puts me into a larger context, a bigger story of what’s happening, and it gives me a sense of meaning to know my life is not just directionless, that I’ve been here for a purpose, and that I’m not going to die before my purpose is fulfilled. There’s a lot of that.

But it’s not just reading that. I also read… And I’ve been doing this every day this year. I’ve been reading The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday. It’s amazing to read these ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and to realize they had the same challenges, the same passions, the same kinds of problems, the same issues they were facing in their day. It makes me avoid the hallucination that we live in this really unique time. It’s not that unique.

Gail, my wife, your mom, has been reading David McCullough’s book John Adams, and she’s now reading it through for the second time, which is amazing. At the time we’re recording this, it’s just after the election. It seems like there’s a lot of political chaos out there, and she keeps reminding me, because she’s reading this… John Adams was the second president of the United States. She just said, “You know what? That chaos you’re experiencing right now was there at the beginning.” And you go, “Oh, okay.”

I’ve read enough of history, including a lot of Civil War history, in and around the Civil War, to know there have always been challenges, and that’s uniquely comforting. Even in these situations, these chaotic times, like COVID and all the rest that we’ve experienced this year, we can find purpose by creating purpose, by deciding why it’s meaningful to us in the midst of this.

Megan: Okay. So, what do you think the role is of setting goals outside of your comfort zone or, in other words, doing hard things as opposed to meaningful but easier things in this process of pursuing purpose?

Michael: Well, I think that’s usually where we find our purpose and where we find our meaning: outside of our comfort zone. If we just do something that’s incremental… Like, Don Miller uses this example in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, where he talks about editing your life and doing hard things. I don’t know if you remember it. He says if your goal is to buy a VW, that’s not that inspiring. Or to acquire a house that’s incrementally better than the one you have. Not that inspiring. Or to get a job that’s just a little bit better than the one you have so you can get a 5 percent or 10 percent raise. Not that inspiring.

Goals cause us to stretch, and they cause us to stretch into the realm of meaning where that thing would really matter. If we really achieved that thing, it would mean something to us. For example, when I first started doing goal setting, when I first started to get in shape, I decided I was going to run a half-marathon, which looking back on it, doesn’t look like that big of a deal. For those of you listening who are runners, you think, “Yeah, that’s no big deal.” Well, for me it was a huge deal. I’d never run that far in my life.

What that would mean for me was that I would have to be in the best shape of my life up until that point to be able to pull off that goal. That was the meaning I assigned to it. Or the first time I took a 30-day sabbatical. What did that mean to me? Well, that meant I had achieved a certain level of success in my business where the business could run without me for 30 days. That was meaningful too, but the meaning came as a result of setting the goal in the discomfort zone.

Megan: I totally agree with that, Dad. I have not only seen that in my own life; I’ve seen that in the lives of our team members, in our company, and in the lives of our clients and customers. I mean, it’s like a universal truth. It’s amazing, actually, once you start to do this in your life and get some confidence with it. You start setting goals and achieving goals, and you can look back on things that at one time you thought were impossible that now you’ve accomplished. It’s an incredible source of purpose and meaning, and pride also, you know, self-confidence. So I think it’s really worth it.

All right. So, we’re about out of time here, but I just thought of one other question I wanted to get your thoughts on. Why do you think it’s particularly important to pursue hard things (kind of along the same lines here) during an already hard season? The temptation right now is to say, “Hello. Have you looked at the list of things that have happened in 2020? We don’t need anything else hard.” Yet, in our company, we took on a huge goal for 2020, and we’re on track to do something pretty amazing financially that we’ve never done before. What’s the value of that?

Michael: The goal isn’t to accomplish something difficult. The goal is to achieve something meaningful, and it just so happens that those usually are difficult. It’s the reverse, if that makes sense.

Megan: All right. I see what you did there.

Michael: The difficulty is going to be because the goal is in a realm that it’s going to take extraordinary effort, maybe breakthrough thinking, something that is not part of the status quo, not part of your current reality. By nature that’s hard. For me, when I was doing that first half-marathon, running the half-marathon, completing it… I mean, I envisioned running across the finish line and getting the little medal they give you and what that would mean and how proud I would be, but as it turns out, that was difficult.

What that meant was getting up extra early to train. It meant running when I wasn’t used to it, going through all the pain of muscles that had been stretched beyond their current capacity, lung capacity that had to grow, and the monotony of it, doing it day after day after day for a period of about 12 weeks leading up to that half-marathon. (Maybe it was 16 weeks. I can’t remember now.) That was the difficulty. It wasn’t that I chose the difficulty. In fact, usually when you choose a goal that’s in the discomfort zone, you’re blissfully unaware of the difficulty that’s going to be involved.

Megan: That’s so true. You tell yourself such a great story about “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.”

Michael: But honestly, you wouldn’t do anything worth doing if you truly counted the cost. Would you?

Megan: No. Nothing. I can’t think of one example.

Michael: You wouldn’t get married. You wouldn’t have kids. You wouldn’t start the business. You wouldn’t take on that goal. It looked easy on the front end, but it’s usually not.

Megan: Okay. I kind of disagree with you a little bit, I have to say. I know you love a good fight, so here we go. Are you ready?

Michael: I’m ready. You’ve got me excited now.

Megan: Actually, I just think I would mainly add something to it, which is this. I think there is value of choosing to take on hard things in the midst of a hard season, and I think the reason for that is because it’s like resilience training. I have, for example, really kicked up my exercise routine in the midst of COVID. I have taken it to another level.

Michael: What?

Megan: I know. I heard someone say not that long ago, “I don’t know why anyone would think about focusing on their fitness during this time. Like, we’re all just trying to make it.” I thought, “Yeah, kind of,” except that what I get out of pursuing fitness right now is I feel strong mentally and physically, which prepares me for the strength I need to show up in in the real challenges of my life…the business challenges, the family challenges, whatever. Pursuing big goals that I know are going to be hard is great training for the ones I don’t choose.

I hope I continue to become more and more resilient and stronger and more capable as time goes on, but I think it’s like anything hard. You have to train for it. We’re all going to come out of 2020 hopefully stronger than we went in because we’ve been tested. We’ve been training. Kind of against our will in some cases, but we’ve been training. I think that’s the value of pursuing something hard and why you would be crazy enough to take on something big and hard in the middle of an already hard season.

Michael: That’s really good. I remember talking to somebody back when I was doing those half-marathons, somebody at the company I was running who decided to run with us and get in shape, except she was incredibly out of shape. She decided to train for it, and everything within her said, “I can’t do this. I’m so out of shape.” She ended up not only running that half-marathon, but she got in the best shape of her life. So, she started saying to herself, “If I can do this, what else could I do?”

Megan: Exactly. That’s the benefit right there, because you’re going to get into situations in real life that you can’t control, that you didn’t choose, that are going to require something incredible of you. If you can look back and say, “Yeah, it’s okay, though. I’ve trained for this. I know I’m strong. I know what I’m capable of.

Yeah, it’s going to be hard, and I’m not quite sure how I’m going to get through it, but I’m not showing up without any preparation. I have prepared for this,” I think that gives you a lot of confidence. Obviously, you have to be wise about what you take on in the midst of tough seasons, and it’s not always a right decision to do that, but I just think there’s a lot of value.

Michael: One of the best gifts you can give your children is for their inner dialogue to be, “I can do hard things.”

Megan: Totally.

Michael: The world is wide open to them if they can say that.

Megan: Right.

Michael: Okay. We’d better wrap it up. Guys, thank you so much for joining us. Megan, I’ve loved this conversation.

Megan: Me too. I’m inspired.

Michael: Thank you, guys, for joining us on the journey, and until next time, lead to win.