99: Feeling Shame When You Don’t Reach Your Goals

You're listening to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, business life coach, Andrea Liebross. I help women in business commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly, gain confidence, make your time productive, turn every obstacle into an opportunity, and finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career, and best of all, live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's Time to Level Up. Let's do this.

Hello, my listeners and welcome back to the podcast. I have not recorded a podcast in a few weeks. I did a little batching and a little repurposing to give myself a little space to think about what I want to share with you next. That was my way of helping you even more because I find that when I give myself space, I come up with some really great ideas. If I continue to push myself to produce new episodes every week, it becomes a lot. So I love to batch them, give myself a little break, and get back at it. Here we go.

Today I'm going to talk about something that I call progress shame, goal shame, or achievement shame. A couple episodes back, I talked about the difference between stuck stress and progress stress or productive stress. The productive or progress stress is helping you move towards your goals.

I think some of us have a little shame around that, the process of working towards the goal and actually reaching it. This shame is different than shame around something that you said or didn't say, or how you treated someone or didn't treat them. We're not talking about that kind of shame today, but rather, progress or goal shame or working towards the person you want to become shame.

I think a lot of my clients deal with this type of shame. As we work together and they evolve as a person or a business owner, this starts to come up and they feel like sometimes they don't fit in or they don't want to talk about what they're working on with other people. They have some shame around it.

I'm always asking my clients to set big goals, huge goals, and a lot of times the people around them or their own voices inside their head, that primitive brain back there, the frenemy voice has a lot to say about your ambition.

Today, I'm going to do a couple things. I'm going to help you see if you might be experiencing this type of shame. I'm going to help you clarify internally-driven goal shame versus externally-driven goal or progress shame. Then I want to share with you my thoughts on when you do share your goals with others, whether or not that's a good or bad idea, there's a lot of talk out there that it's a bad idea. Then I want to help normalize what I call the messy middle of achieving any goal as we fail on our way to success. Here we go.

When we think about this type of shame, most of the time, it is a very internal type of shame. It's not that we've done something wrong. But we have thoughts that there's something flawed inside ourselves. Something's wrong with me. Maybe I'm bad in some way. Maybe I'm not capable in some way. Maybe I'm inept. Maybe I'm a lot different than other people.

I think a lot of us experience this with goals and goal setting because the way that we set our goals is asking us to become bigger than we currently are. We don't always hit those goals in the timeframe we want, how we want, or at all. If you go back a few episodes where I talked about setting SMARTER goals, one of those Rs in that SMARTER is for Risky. Usually, it is not smooth-sailing when we're working towards a goal because there should be some risk involved.

I see this a lot in my Committed to Growth life-coaching clients. They think that personally there is something wrong with them. Why can't they consistently get to the gym if they’ve set getting to the gym goal, eat healthy, or tell their spouse, child, or boss what they're working towards.

Some people don't even reveal to their spouse or boss that they have a coach, that they actually are trying to change something. They have some shame, sometimes my Committed to Growth life-coaching clients, that they aren't saving enough or they're not focused enough. They want to just have a plan for every day, they want to use the Full Focus Planner and it's not happening. There's some shame around that or they want to save more money, some shame around that.

In my Runway to Freedom Business Mastermind clients, I see this goal shame in them because it comes out around their business. The business isn't as profitable as they would like it to be. They don't have as many clients as they would like to have. They haven't expanded fast enough or hired enough people. I think a lot of times we're expecting ourselves to believe that the goal is possible but what's really causing the shame is that we're not quite there yet to believe in it. We and other people want to remind us of that regularly.

We believe the goal is possible for someone, but maybe we're not quite there in believing it's possible for ourselves and there's some shame around that. I've actually started to wonder how many people don't even set goals or don't set super big impossible goals because of this progress or goal shame. How many people inquire about coaching but then back out, because they're afraid to set the big goals and they fear they might not reach them and it's going to be work to get there.

They recognize that there's work worth doing, then they're like, “D*mn, I don't know if I want to do that.” They predict that they'll experience shame, because they're unsure if they'll actually show up for themselves. Who wants that? A way to avoid that is just to not set a goal at all.

The way I'm going to define this type of shame is it's feeling like there's always something wrong with you because you have such a big goal that you haven't met yet, and feeling like you're doing something wrong because you've set this goal for yourself and haven't reached it yet. You have shame in setting the big goal, you have shame in the fact that you haven’t reached it yet, then you have shame in other people knowing that.

One of the things that I want to offer and distinguish between is that there's the shame we attribute to ourselves, like what's wrong with me, and then there's the shame that we attribute to other people. I want to offer that shame, this type of shame we're talking about today is only always internal, but it can be triggered sometimes by external. It can be triggered by what someone says.

Here's how you know if you have progress or goal shame. If you've set a goal for yourself, and when you tell people about it, you find yourself apologizing about it, justifying it, making excuses about it, or diminishing it. Is that you?

The other way to know if you have goal shame is that you don't share your goal with other people because you're ashamed of the goal and of yourself and your ability to achieve it. Then you have this type of shame.

When I work with my clients through the process of getting clear about what they want, having the confidence to go after it, managing their mind so they can manage their time to plan for it and make it happen, a lot of times this goal shame comes out in that discussion of where they are in that continuum.

If they haven't gotten past the clarity stage, if they even have gotten the clarity, then they probably have shame around creating the goal. If they've gotten the clarity and haven't done anything, they have shame around the fact that they haven't started. If they have started and are putting lots of effort in but still haven't reached it, there's probably shame in that how they're managing their time stage.

I want to say that I think goal shame is one of those things that really will prevent us from reaching through ourselves to create the next version of ourselves. It prevents us from becoming the person we want to become. Think about that saying the sky's the limit, or we hit the glass ceiling, and then think how often do you not even go up to the sky, move towards the ceiling, or tell anyone that you'd like to get to the sky or the ceiling. How much sooner do you limit yourself or where do you limit yourself on your journey into the sky? How often do you limit yourself before I get to the cloud? Is it always? Is it often?

If you find yourself saying, “Oh, I'd like to make a million dollars” or “I'd like to run a marathon” or “I'd like to be an authority on XYZ,” but you know honestly that this isn't going to happen for a while or not at this time, you tell yourself you're not ready, or you don't really mean it right now, or that even if you do get there, it's going to be short lived, that really it isn't about the goal at all, it isn't about the money, it isn't about whatever, or I don't really care about the money, lots of people say that thing, if you feel yourself talking in this way, then you probably have some unidentified shame.

This I see both in life-coaching clients and in business-coaching clients. It’s headed all different ways. I have a client today that I was talking to and she's reached all sorts of goals, but she has shame around the fact that she's saying yes to more clients than she, not can handle, but wants to handle. What's my problem? Why do I keep saying yes? That's an unidentified shame.

I think that goal shame in the beginning is pretty normal, especially if your goal is super big, and I think that it's something that we can expect. “Oh, this is the part where I experienced shame.” Sometimes we're tempted to adjust the goal, make it smaller, even to quit on it, or maybe even quietly quit. That's the kind of quitting where you don't even know when you really did quit.

But what I want you encourage you to do, I want to encourage you to bring it up. Bring up what you're working towards instead of extinguishing it. Because I think that adjusting your goal so you feel less shame about it is the opposite of what is required to create things that will make your mind explode because you're able to actually do it.

You want to blow your own mind, you want to set some goals where the limit is beyond the sky. Much like I talk about confidence as willingness to experience any feeling, the willingness to experience any shame that comes up as you work toward your goal is similar. I think a lot of times when we have shame, it's just a natural knee-jerk reaction from our primitive brain telling us not to risk failure and not risk death. It's that little voice in the back of your head that's telling you things that creates shame, that voice.

When we believe that there's something wrong with us or we're going down the wrong path, we go into the corner and we hide, which is apparently protective, according to our little voice, but it's not really protective, is it? I see in my Committed to Growth life-coaching clients, they suffer from this all the time. They don't want to risk failure. They are holding out for the perfect job, the perfect time, the perfect situation, or their body to feel perfect before going after their goal. I see in my Runway to Freedom business-coaching clients, they suffer from this by not making the tough decisions around hiring and firing or raising their rates.

Here's what I want to offer: that in the beginning of any goal progress, it's normal, this shame is normal and you're going to experience some internal thoughts that will cause the shame, which is who do I think I am? Why can’t I make that much money? I can't create that. I can't help that many people. It's that voice inside your head that wants to tell you that there's something wrong with the way you're going about this with you, and that shame, that little voice is going to be automatically triggered as soon as you set the big goal.

This is true for all the humans anytime we set goals for ourselves. Sometimes we like to think that other people set big goals and feel great about them. I had a client the other day say, “Everybody else seems to be killing it, but why not me? What's wrong with me?” We say things like, “Yes, I'm going to make six figures, multiple six figures. I'm going to go be the best interior designer I want to be, I'm going to help 1000 people, or I'm going to do this and feel great about it.”

I think 99% of us immediately ask ourselves who do we think we are that we're going to be able to do those things? Like immediately. We want to be able to say it's possible that I'm going to do all those things, but immediately we say who do we think we are to think that we can do that?

Our first question to ourselves is not “Wow, this is amazing. I'm so excited to figure out how to do it.” It's more like, “Yeah, really? I mean, you're not capable of doing that thing. You're not capable of doing anything super great.” That's the voice, the frenemy voice from the primitive brain that most of us hear.

I always like to say we need to access our prefrontal cortex in our forehead. Will the real you, will the real Andrea please stand up? When we access that and we quiet our frenemy voice, we're able to move on. Otherwise, we're stuck in that internal shame that comes up as soon as we set a goal. The way we deal with the goal progress creates that internal shame.

I want you to be able to say, “Oh, look, there's the part of the process where I feel shameful. I just want you to be aware of it.” Oh, it's normal. Of course, I feel this way. That's it. If we can just notice it coming up, allow it to be there as part of the process, and we don't try to diminish it or lessen it, we're actually going to feel it less.

We don't need to be doing a lot of work on it. We just need to let it be there and to recognize it. The work worth doing is not really to get rid of shame. The work worth doing is recognizing it and knowing what to do when you do recognize it.

Another piece of this is that when you first set a goal, personal, like “I'm going to run a marathon,” or business, like, “I'm going to make a million dollars,” you're going to be triggered externally. There's externally-triggered shame, which really are a result of thought errors that you have about what other people say.

A lot of people will say things like, “Oh, are you sure you want to put yourself in that position? Or don't you think you're aiming a little bit high? Or do you really want to work that hard? You sure you want to do that? I mean, you have a family, right?” Or they won't say anything at all, which we then make mean all of those things that some people actually do say. Something external happens, something is said, we have a thought about it, and that triggers shame.

Today I was coaching a woman who got a call from school that their daughter had done something and now had a detention for the whole week. She said, “I just was so embarrassed.” That's a personal example of how what someone said, the secretary, she had a thought about it that triggered shame. She's on her mission to become the best parent in the world. This definitely took her down a notch.

What we do sometimes is we flip the switch and we say, “Oh, yeah,” if someone says, “Are you really going to do all that hard work?” You just say, “Oh, I mean I'm not really interested in being super ambitious. I mean, I'm not really interested in making that much money,” whatever it is. Often, we respond with “Huh, there must be something wrong with me because I have that money goal, fitness goal, productivity goal, even a spiritual goal, or a parenting goal,” or “There's something wrong with me because I have an aspiration that's so much bigger than my own life or that I am currently doing right now.”

Again, I want you to allow for this and encourage yourself to be present with that shame and to not run away from it, try to apologize, justify it, or make an excuse. One of the things I see pretty regularly in my Runway to Freedom Business Mastermind clients is they have pretty big money goals. They try to justify the money goal by explaining away how that money will be spent or explaining away about how that money will be donated, given away, or anything like that.

I see women with relationship goals explain it away saying they are doing it for the other person. Or they have health goals and explaining it away because they say the doctor told them to do it. I really want to encourage you not to do that. I want you to own your goal. I want to encourage you to stand behind the goal without an explanation, an excuse, or an apology. I want you to know that you can just want something because you want it; it doesn't have to be noble. It doesn't have to be pure. It doesn't have to be socially acceptable.

You have to be all-in but you don’t have to say, “Oh, my gosh, yeah, I'm doing this because I'm passionate about it.” You can just want what you want. You can want some money, you can just want to buy some things, and you can want to build an empire just because you want to. You can want to run a marathon, write a book, do 100 sit ups, not yell at your kids, or go on a date a month with your husband, whatever it is just because, and it's not because you have to be working on your relationship or because you want to get into better shape. You can just want something to want it and make it a goal.

This is really what I help my clients do, identify what they want and just go after it just because they can. Just because they can doesn’t always seem good enough though in the world we live in. But I am super curious, if you could adopt the kind of thinking that “I'm doing this just because I can,” what would change for you?

What would change for you and why wouldn't you adopt that kind of thinking? Why wouldn't you adopt the kind of thinking that you are becoming the next best version of yourself and you don't have to explain or justify yourself to anyone? I think that that is the most amazing opportunity that we can have at this point in our evolution as humans.

Brooke Castillo does a lot of talking about evolving as humans. I think it's amazing that we can just do something because we want to, and we don't have to ask permission and we don't have to explain ourselves. We can just do what it is we're wanting to do and desiring. I want to encourage you to go after what you want without feeling like you have to justify your desire to anyone or explain away your desire to anyone.

A lot of times, when we do have a goal, this usually comes up with family members, the conversation might say, “Well, I'm not sure that what you're doing is something that I agree with.” Some family member might say that to you. Or “I'm not really sure that's going to be helpful for our family.” Guess what, you don't have to agree with them. You don't have to agree.

Other people's opinions are fascinating. They often trigger something inside of us. That's normal. But I want you to know that even though that's normal that it triggers something, it is not a sign that you should change the goal or not go after the goal. It is not a sign that you're doing something wrong. It's not a sign that you're flawed. You're in the process of growing and you're in the process of creating an extraordinary life or business.

It is normal to feel this shame. It is normal to take comments and opinions of others, have thoughts about them, and have them trigger shame. Now here's one thing that I think is super interesting, the next thing I want to share with you. There's a lot of advice out there to not share your goals with other people because other people won't necessarily support you and other people won't necessarily encourage you, which can be true but the opposite is also true.

I hear how you're telling me that they may not support you. I hear that they may not encourage you. But what I also hear is that it only perpetuates the belief that maybe this goal isn't meant to be, maybe you're doing something wrong, or it only increases doubt. If you're not sharing your goals, then it's only increasing your doubt.

When you tell me that I can't do something or something's not possible, then I immediately want to do it. My husband sometimes calls me relentless or tenacious. You know what, I'm happy to own that relentless or tenacious. I'm going after it. When you have a goal and you talk about it, maybe it's a weight goal or a money goal, and you start acting like that person who has already achieved that goal, the goal is way-way-way more likely to happen.

I talked to one of my girlfriends and we talked about how we're going to one day create a podcast called “You Can't Make This Sh*t Up.” Now, it hasn't happened yet. We haven't done that yet but we talk about it and it feels very real because we're talking about it. I talk to my publisher about writing this book. The more I talk about it, the more real it feels. I talk to other people about writing this book, it feels real.

Even though I may be afraid to talk about it, by making it part of our conversation, it makes it more real. We talk about it, we get comfortable with it, we make it happen. When I talk to my bookkeeper about things I want to do in my business, we talk about how much that might cost, and we start to plan for it, then I make it happen. It's real.

I've gotten the support I need. I’ve saved the money I need. It's going to happen. I don't wait till I'm ready to start talking about it. I talk about it before it starts happening. While sometimes I feel like that advice to not talk about your goals is well-intended, I also think it keeps the shame hidden, instead of giving it the light of day, which of course, then makes it real.

I don't really have a lot of shame around goals anymore because I've talked about it as a reality often, and it just seems like the normal thing that's going to happen next. But there is shame sometimes with people who think that working with me costs too much, thinking that people might say, “Oh, my gosh, you charge that much,” and I can sometimes have a thought that they must think that all I care about is money.

It's interesting because some of the people who might think that, you know what, they don't really matter because they don't understand me, the services I offer, the transformation I'm providing, or the evolution I offer, which is truly life-changing. If they want to think that, then great because they're not my people.

As soon as I start to have that shame around people questioning pricing, I think, “Huh, well, then they're not my people.” Now, there are other people who I really love being around and talking about these things with. They are “supportive.” I want their approval and I want them to believe in what I'm doing. I want them to understand why I'm doing it. Part of why I'm doing what I do is I want people to understand what's possible, not just as a woman, not just as a coach, not just as an entrepreneur, but as a human in the world.

Remember, the sky's the limit. Humans see limitations, but humans don't have to abide by the limitations. They’re self-imposed restrictions. These people who might feel shame around what I'm doing or what you're setting out to do are nothing unless we give them authority over us. We can just blow right through them if we want. It is important to me to stick with what I'm wanting, because I want it, and not to try to justify it.

Notice that in yourself. If you're trying to justify your goals and get approval on your goals, really what you're doing is looking to create shame. Because that kind of thinking just creates shame. For me, I do feel like anytime we ask ourselves to grow, we're helping people and adding value to the world. If I grow, you grow. But I think that when you add in the money piece, and you don't justify it, it really adds so much momentum to the fire because I don't have to explain myself to anyone. I know who I am. I know this is what I'm doing. I know this is what I'm offering.

Yes, I'm growing and helping people. I'm also making money in the process. That just adds fuel to the fire and that actually helps me go help more people. Here's my next point. It's normal in the middle of a goal and in the middle of achieving it to experience some shame. Here's what I want to tell you about that. As you're achieving your goal, you will have a tremendous amount of failure. Go listen to the podcast about loving failure.

Ever since I created a goal of creating a million dollars in my business and all the things that I need to do in order to create that business, I have failed a whole bunch of times. Or as I like to say, I have created a lot of learning moments. There have been flaps and mistakes. I can often end up thinking that there's something wrong with me and I'm never going to make this happen and feeling a lot of shame about that. You know what? That is just the way it goes. I'm going to experience that kind of thing.

It is super normal to experience shame on the way to the goal. It's important to be careful what you attribute meaning to as you fail. You can make it mean that you're not capable, you can make it mean that you're not good enough, and you can make it mean that you're dreaming too big. When you have a huge fail, what that looks like, it could prevent you from getting to the goal from running the marathon, from starting the business, from getting the promotion. It's very easy to think that you don't have what it takes.

I want to offer that you need to allow for this to happen but do not succumb to it and do not indulge in it. Do not allow any thoughts about there being something wrong with you to prevent you from becoming who you are. Those thoughts are normal. They're part of the process but do not attach to them. You can't believe that you are them or misunderstand that they are holding you back. You want to be able to really stay outside of yourself, eavesdrop, recognize that those are the thoughts from your primitive brain, that frenemy in the back of your head, and not you.

There's a huge difference there. The way that you manage that is by being careful how you assign meaning to the steps, to the failures, to the actions that you're taking to achieve your dreams and have the real adult you, not the toddler you, running the show.

Finally, last thing I want to offer you is that there's goal shame in achievement of a goal. Here's what it looks like internally when you've achieved a goal and you experience shame. I think that when you've achieved the goal, that when you've had a belief about yourself, that you are not worthy, weren't capable, or that you can't do something and then you do it, it's easy to have shame about “Why did I doubt myself for all these years? I should have been doing something different.” That's one level of shame, internal level of shame.

The other one is to feel shame about the achievement as if you are undeserving and that you shouldn’t be given the freedoms, the money, or the luxury that is being bestowed upon you because you have achieved your dream. It's really common for people to experience that, like “Who am I to have this? I'm undeserving.” What I want to offer about that, again, is that you expect that to happen.

Expect all this to happen and know that it's part of the process. That frenemy voice, we just need to quiet it. It's not going away, but know that you get to decide ahead of time to not allow those thought errors to prevent you from enjoying and being proud of yourself for your accomplishment.

I also think that there's goal shame when you actually achieve the goal triggered by other people, externally-triggered shame. People say, “Oh, that must be nice having done that, it must be nice to be able to work from home, it must be nice to be able to travel.” Yeah, guess what, I like to say it is nice. It's so great. I'm not going to feel guilty about it. I will not feel guilty about who I am or what I've created, or the opportunities I have, I will not ever feel shame or guilt about it. Because I've committed to making it happen.

What I've done in my own life, because I feel like for everything I've been given, I've also been given plenty of challenges and plenty of things that have helped me grow and I think everybody's life is exactly what it's meant to be. However things have happened, that's how it's meant to be. We can't judge other people.

Here's what's true when you achieve something that you've worked for. You can give yourself credit. You can give yourself the credits that due and own it without anyone's permission. You don't have to water it down. “Oh, well, I did have this opportunity. This person did give me a break.” You can just say, “I set a goal for myself and I achieved it.” You can own it with zero shame. Zero.

When other people have ideas about what you do or that you don't deserve, or what your accomplishment means or doesn't mean, you can hold space for that for those other opinions, but you don't have to take them on. Guess what, you might struggle with this. You might ask yourself “Is this really happening?” But that's a form of self sabotage.

“I feel like maybe this is not for real. Is this really happening? Maybe not. Maybe this is a fake out. It's not going to last forever.” That's self sabotage. It's a different kind of shame. Feel that okay energy. It's totally okay. Whatever's going on is totally okay. The way it's happened is totally okay. You don't have to have shame for being in full abundance, for enjoying things, for the fruits of your labor, for being proud about what you've accomplished. You don't have to have shame about that.

I truly know that I'm in the highest flow level when I don't feel shame about anything. That has to be a decision and a commitment, can't just be interested. If I allow for shame, if I witnessed it from the outside of myself without identifying with it, without taking it in, if I just notice it, if I eavesdrop on my own brain, but don't react to it, that's when the beautiful dreams come into fruition.

Keep an eye out for when you go after the goal and when you subconsciously think it's not going to happen, or when you go after the goal and you think you're doing it wrong. Tell the frenemy voice to quiet down and let your prefrontal cortex kick in so that you can build something amazing, so that you can do it without sabotaging your success, so that you can identify that it's going to be messy in the middle, so that you can quiet other people's comments.

Our brains believe that we're capable of what we're doing today. In order to allow for the belief that we're capable of whatever we want to do tomorrow, we have to be open to cognitive dissonance. There's a few other podcast episodes where I talk about that. The way to solve it is by changing the way we think, not by changing the way we act.

I want you to be aware that this is one of those things that sometimes we do. We change the way we act to compensate for the shame. It's important to know that that happens to us a lot as we make more money, as we run the marathon, as we don't yell at our kids. We can struggle with that success and there's shame that's going to come up along the way, but knowing that it's coming and it's all going to be fine, that's when great things happen. It's all going to be great when you know what to expect and you allow for it as part of the brain trying to reconcile success and growth.

Okay, my friends. Identifying the shame you're having, not squashing it, this is work worth doing. I hope you take this and examine what's going on in your world, in your life, and in your business. I hope you have a beautiful week. Remember right now is always a time when you can level up yourself. Have a great, great week. See you soon.

Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up Podcast with me, your host, Andrea Liebross. If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode, I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Okay. Now, what about you? You've listened to the podcast, and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade you, then stop being only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call. Right there on that call, we'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life and business, and have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.