Beyond Resolutions: Discover What You Want in 2025

Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. As we approach 2025, we're about to face the annual flood of new year, new you content. All those articles and posts about how this is finally going to be the year. You learn that new language, hit the gym regularly, meditate every morning and transform your life.

Then February 1 rolls around and for most people those good intentions are already gathering dust. The initial motivation fades and we find ourselves back in familiar patterns. So what's really going on here? Why does this cycle keep repeating? Much of the time, at least in my opinion, it's because we're operating from what we think we should be doing rather than focusing on what would be authentically fulfilling.

And we often fall back on commonly recommended shoulds, because it's genuinely challenging to connect with and then act on our own wants and needs. And that's what we're going to be exploring today, how to figure out what you really want and then use that understanding to inform your goals and plans in a way that maximizes your chances of success. To help us do that, I'm joined as usual by clinical psychologist Rick Hansen. So dad, how are you doing today?

I'm good and I really appreciate how you're approaching this forest in a way that is soulful and essential and bottom up. Basically three kind of factors in setting intentions that we actually stick with. So before we get into it today, I do want to give a couple of quick reminders. First of all, if you've been listening for a while and you haven't subscribed yet, it would be great if you subscribed to the show. That really does help us out.

Also, I want to take a moment to mention that if you're interested in applying maybe hay, a little bit more structure to your growth process over the next year or so, a great way to do that could be with Rick's Foundations of Wellbeing 2.0 online program. It's his flagship program, and it is a year-long science-backed journey through developing 12 key inner strengths like mindfulness, motivation, and confidence. I think it's a really wonderful offering. It's currently on sale. And if you like being well, I think that you'll love it.

I've included a link to it in the information and description for this episode. You can probably find that in your podcast player of choice. You can also find it on Rick's website and you can get an additional 20% off with the coupon code being well 20.

Okay, so my goal is for the episode here. I think that we should try to help people better understand their authentic wants and needs, feel more equipped to explore and discover what matters to them, and then learn how to engage in some kind of a goal-setting process informed by those wants and needs so that we're kind of closing the gap between what we really care about and what we end up committing to doing.

And I think that may be a good place to start here is by looking at like what tends to fall flat for people like the problems that that typically come along across the way. And at the very, very top of that is sometimes I'm not totally sure if people understand like why they're setting a goal. Does that make sense to you? Completely. Yeah, what's their why? That's one of the great questions. What's your why?

Yeah. And for me, a lot of the time, I'm really interested in figuring out these days, at least, I'm interested in figuring out what would actually be more fulfilling for me. Like, what would lead to me having that experience where you feel like you're getting a key itch scratched or you feel like projecting forward, you're looking back over your life when you're 70, 80, 90 years old and you're going, you know what? I did it. I did the best I could. It wasn't perfect, but I did the best I could.

I asked you a quick question for us. Yeah. I found myself reflecting on the difference between fulfillment and an often internal sense of urgency around completing some major life tasks.

Then in addition, there are people very understandably who have some serious urgency about more survival needs. They're not up to that stage in Maslow's hierarchy where fulfillment is really on the table. How do you think of the difference?

or relate to the difference between fulfillment and life task. I can think for myself that especially in my 30s and 40s, I had a sense of urgency about life tasks I had deferred. At that point, I was married with your mom and so forth. We were on our way to having children. Those life tasks were kind of on mission, but establishing myself and my career

No, that was roughly 10 years of grad school and other drama. And then once established, setting myself up independently. So how do you think about this? You're prompting me into a lot of stuff that I had sort of planned to talk to you about later, but I love talking about it organically because you're giving a really good example here, Dad. Would you say that working on those career aspects for you was fulfilling?

It was fulfilling ultimately. Here's how I want to jump on this. In the moment, maybe not. In the moment, a lot of stuff where you got to do the dishes. Yeah, totally. Well, even just the nature of it, it was more like I didn't want to suck. What I'm trying to say is that to be fulfillment tends to be valence very positively. Like, oh, I want to feel more sense of meaning, purpose,

Life tasks often have a sense of wanting to prevent a negative in a way, right? And they feel like... Yeah, bills do. You don't want a bad thing to happen to you. Yeah, totally. You just got to do them. I think about wilderness stuff where conditions were getting weird, storm was coming in. We had to get off the mountain. We had a life task.

It was not that it was particularly fulfilling to find our way back to safety, but we had to get down. What I would say about most of this is that they call it the upper middle path for a reason. So the joke here about a fair amount of interest in mindfulness groups and things like that, often there's upper middle class individuals who are following not the middle path, but the upper middle path in their life.

And some of these considerations absolutely are linked to various kinds of socioeconomic indicators or the ability to have the freedom in your life to pursue a goal as lofty as fulfillment. I don't really personally think about it that way, because I think about the question is not so much what you're doing, but the stance from what you are doing it. So you can pursue a task orientation.

which absolutely is about doing the dishes, collecting a check, caring for children, supporting your family, take your pack, getting through college, caring for a sick parent, whatever it is. You can frame those as either what I'll call an avoidance-oriented task. I'm doing this because I don't want to get yelled at. I'm doing this because I don't want my spouse to get mad at me.

Or be broke. Because I don't want to be broke. Sure, whatever it is, that's an avoidance orientation. There's totally a place for that. For starters, avoidance orientations, that can be extremely motivating for people because there's a lot of pain tied to it. I get that. I think that oftentimes we can relate to the exact same tasks from a very different lens, which is connecting it to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose that's tied to the activity.

So, of course, you had all of these tasks to do that, but you already named what the deeper sense of meaning and purpose was, which is it was connected to your family life. You really valued your partner. You really valued your kids. You wanted to show up for them. You wanted to be a producer. You wanted to be a provider. I have to imagine that that really informed a lot of late nights for you, even if it wasn't like top of mind while you were doing it, right? This is very deep, actually, in personal.

I think about Maslow's distinction wonderfully between what he called deficiency needs and being needs. And what you're getting at, I think interestingly, is that the same enterprise that people might be facing when they look at their intentions or goals and plans for 2025,

The same enterprise such as going to grad school or getting a license or finding someone to marry and so forth, moving from a kind of a mediocre job to hopefully a better job, whatever it might be. You can look at the same thing. You can be approaching the same activity through the lens.

on the deficiency frame, exactly, or a being frame. And I am here to confess to you that even as a product of a lot of human potential training in my 30s, 40s, and 50s, I confess that I approached a fair amount of that kind of from a deficiency frame that I was there a lot to avoid the bad, not so much to fulfill the good.

And you are also a very deeply motivated person. We've talked about on the podcast in the past. We had an episode a couple months ago that was essentially the joke title of it was some version of like me talking to the most disciplined person I know. And it was just you. You know, my dad, there you go. And so like this is something like where it's not hard for you to apply effort day after day after day. You can just do it. You can just sit down in the chair. You have the distress tolerance. You know, you can just make it happen.

I'm genetically lucky. You're genetically lucky. A lot of supportive social forces. We could name a million things here. The point being that you can do that. Some people can't do that. And for those people, it's often very helpful to find some other frame that helps support them through that.

And I also would imagine that there are probably aspects of your experience just from an experiential standpoint that would have felt better if you had felt a little bit more connected maybe to those kinds of deeper purposes or those kinds of more of a pursuit orientation, which is a way that I've talked about it on the podcast in the past. You can run from something, you can run towards something, you run in both ways, but they feel very different. Exactly. That's the takeaway for us. It's the same activity.

What's the frame? And is the focus about preventing the bad or promoting the good? That's the e-tory against update of avoidance and approaching. As you know, yeah, and honestly, when I look back, one of the life review kind of processes I'm going through is a gentle, not always so gentle inside myself, reckoning with pluses and minuses. And I think actually, if one is in a deficiency mode frame,

kind of grinding it out, avoiding the bad, getting off the mountain before you get electrocuted by lightning, kind of approach to life. It just doesn't feel that good. And you know, you can get kind of cranky. You can get distressed and driven and pressured and irritable around it. And definitely irritated at anything that seems like between you and the goal, like, okay, time to sit down for dinner with the family.

And mom's banging on your door as you're trying to write a book because the kid wants to see that. And of course, the kid wants to see that. Of course, mom wants support. Of course, all of those things. And also, there's a part of you that's like, oh, I got to write this book. Could you all just stop bugging me? And that's more the deficiency framework coming in. Yeah. And I'm writing and out of fulfilling some awesomeness, but to avoid disappointing my editor or missing a deadline, for example.

You can go to the gym because you really feel motivated to support various healthy ends. You can do it because for me, like I really enjoy the process of getting stronger. I've gotten more involved in it as a activity that I'm interested in. I want to know like how to lift well.

And also i gotta tell you why did i start going to the gym it's cuz i felt like a week shrimp that's why that that's a deficiency need it was very motivating right off the top and also i felt a lot of pain along the way i felt a lot of pain being there because i was in contact with my week shrimp less as i was starting you know.

So in some ways, we're skipping to the middle of the episode. I hope that people don't just feel like dropped into the deep end here. But I think that you're raising something off the top that's really interesting, which is these different ways that we have of interacting with what we care about and how we're going to go about pursuing it. So one point of difference is more like deficiency versus more pursuit or more fulfillment orientation, whatever you want to call it.

Another point of difference, which is sort of what I actually thought that we would start with, but I'm glad we started where we did, is being a little bit more externally oriented versus more internally oriented. And that's how I kind of framed the episode. Yeah.

So we're identifying a difference in how it is experienced from the inside out in doing the same activity. Now, here's the thing, certain tasks lend themselves. It's easier to feel fulfilled by them. A million percent. Yes. Yeah. Here I am writing poetry. It is very hard to feel fulfilled by doing the dishes.

It's harder. Those are more like deficiency tasks, or I will also say like live tasks, like just grinding it out to get through graduate school. And the point being that the more that the task

tends to be situated as a deficiency task as moving away from the negative, the more important it is and useful it is to bring in your mindfulness and some of the other good things we're going to talk about in this episode to reframe what you're doing in ways that don't lie about it. You're still doing it. You still got to put up with a crud and it's in a frame in which rather than moving away from the stick that's jabbing you in your back,

It's more like you're being drawn toward the golden cord of light toward what that which is fulfilling to you. Yeah, absolutely. And this internal external thing that I was just about to get into, I think is a big piece of it too. And that was really my framing of the episode going in.

Oftentimes when people set a goal or a resolution, they do it almost as if they are watching themselves from outside of their body. As if they were perceiving themselves as an external being and they go, oh, here's what I, as being external to forest, believes that forest should set as his resolutions for the new year.

And you know, I appraise forest behavior as not having enough A, B, and C, so he should go and set these resolutions, right? It's that kind of sense of the outside observer. Sometimes that's because a person is just very externally referenced for a whole bunch of different reasons. They grew up in an environment where they had to really take care of other people. Maybe they had highly critical parents, things like that.

Another possibility is that people do that, as I said in the intro, because they have a hard time connecting with their own interior. So they kind of substitute that outside perception of what would be good for their own ability to connect with what they really feel would be good inside of themselves. And that's really kind of what I wanted to focus on throughout the episode, which could then be supported by this kind of values orientation that you're describing here, Dad.

Yeah, I think that certain situations, let's say, might start with a lot of external factors. Yes. And those tend to move us into, I think, deficiency-type needs. It's not so much that we're motivated to get what their applause is that we're motivated to avoid their boots. The reason I went off in this bizarre tangent and got so excited about it was- I don't think this bizarre. I thought it was great, but yeah, go ahead.

I think that life tasks.

really tend to lend themselves to deficiency motivations. People look out on the world, they compare themselves to others, and they think, oh my goodness, giddy up, I gotta get going. All these people I went to high school or college or something with, wow, they're getting married, they're having kids, they're getting promoted. And here I am, blah, blah, blah. That was definitely true for me, certainly when I kind of stared harder things in my early 30s and figured out what I needed to do to really get going here.

So life tasks in particular that people might be staring out for this year, they in particular are the kind of thing that's very important to be watchful about deficiency type motivations and framing and feelings creeping in. And especially important to emphasize for yourself, oh, how can I orient to that as a so-called being need as Maslow put it in a frame of how this is fulfilling for me?

even as, you know, grind out what I've got to grind out each day. Yeah. So let's say that you are somebody who has a bit of a trickier time getting in touch with your own interior. You have a bit of a trickier time figuring out what those top line values are, what the big motivations, the what's your why, all of that. And you're working through a process of trying to figure out your resolutions, your goals, your intentions for the coming year.

How could you do that? What you typically have easier access to is what we've talked about so far. It's all of those external shoulds. Sometimes there is actually a little bit of teaching and an external should. So a place that I sometimes start when I'm having a hard time figuring this out for myself is I brain dump all the shots. I write all the shoulds on a piece of paper for should work out more regularly for should brainstorm for a course or an online program or something. That'd be really good for his business.

Shuds are very accessible for people most of the time. So let's take a look at one of those shuds that many people are going to have around this time of year. I've already mentioned it. I should go to the gym more regularly, or I should exercise more regularly. Some form of an exercise goal is very, very common for people. There are often a lot of problems with this though. For starters, maybe you've tried this and you just don't like it very much.

Another possibility is that this is a goal that has a lot of friction associated with it. You have to get out of the house at a particular time because you've got a busy schedule. You feel like you've got to buy particular kinds of clothing. It can be expensive to have a gym membership, all of this stuff. Then there's some other problems with it. The goal is extremely vague. What does going to the gym mean to you? How long do you need to be there for it to count?

All of this kind of stuff, right? These are all of the things that often lead to people, quote unquote, failing at a particular kind of resolution. Very external, very punishment oriented. I should have been doing this in the past. So I'm going to try to do it in the future. They're taking on an activity they know inspires pain for them or has inspired pain for them in the past. They're doing it in a way that's vague and unspecified.

And they're just kind of trying to go down that road one more time and hope that this time it'll finally work out. Okay, so how can we do this in a healthier, more effective way? What's the end that's being served by the means of going to the gym for you?

And this is how we're moving to more of that pursuit orientation. We're trying to connect with a value. Is it that you want to look a different way? Okay, that's a kind of value for some people. Is that you're trying to benefit your health? Are you getting ready for Hot Girl Summer in 2025? You know what's going on for you? Do you want to feel more confident? For me going to the gym, a lot of it was a self-confidence issue for me.

There are many, many, many different kinds of means that could serve those ends, right? So we're doing a very important point, a very important kind of peeling apart. Okay, so this is what I'm going after. How can I get to that target in a way that works better for me, right? And so you've really centered yourself in that. You've given yourself permission, in a sense, to pursue this goal from a very different kind of stance.

And now we're in the world of brainstorming, we're in the world of play, we're just messing around with it. What are the kinds of circumstances that have worked really well for you in the past? Who are the kind of people you like to be around when you're doing something like that? Are you more of a marathoner or a sprinter? Do you want to have a lot of social support or do you just want to do it by yourself?

Does it need to have kind of a competitive aspect to it or you more of a collaborator, whatever it is that's going on, you're just peeling this apart. And in that exploration, most of the time, you will be able to find something that you feel like you can commit to.

That is a small enough bite for you and that is much more consistent with like who you actually are as a person and in that what to pay attention for the really great thing to pay attention for is a feeling of ooh So not a feeling of a feeling of ooh, you know, what do you feel like? Oh? Like that's that's nice. Oh that yeah, like I could do that That's doable and then this kind of excitement starts to build

For a lot of people, resolutions are just a pain process. They're a process of cataloging all of the ways that they have failed in the past and the ways in which they are trying not to be such a failure in the future, essentially. And we got to exit that if we're going to actually get any mileage out of any of this. So I dropped a lot of words there, Dad. What do you think about all of this?

I thought the first 95% of what you were saying there would have made Aaron Beck, father of cognitive therapy, really, really happy. And there was still a nagging question, which in the last 5% when you got to the

Find your ooh. Satisfied my concern. That it's useful to do all this cognitive stuff. But at the end of the day, my dear friend Tom Bolin told me once, who was a master salesman, master motivator and very ethical person, he said, all choices emotional, fundamentally. And that's the ooh, right? What are you being drawn toward?

Yeah, we can go through this analytic cognitive process. It's great. It's necessary. It helps you sort of things out. It's a good foundation. I find like you said, what's so useful as kind of a meta skill is to be able to be in touch with yourself enough so you can track the fulfillment or the approach motivation that's arising in you.

What are you trying to approach? What feels good or sort of like anticipatory pleasure, you know, anticipatory fulfillment? What is that? And then kind of isolated and zero in on it, focus in on it, relate the necessary steps to experiencing that reward. You're identifying a reward in effect and then kind of marinate

spend a breath or two or five, just resting and deepening your own felt sense of connection between this anticipated reward, the ooh, and the steps necessary to achieve it. That's a fundamental meta skill, apply it to exercise, apply it to speaking more from your heart with other people in general. So I want to ask you,

You're a paragon for us. We're being really quite personal in this particular episode, which is kind of interesting. Yeah. Well, I think this gets so real so fast. When you start talking about anything related, I've really found this in the content in general, anything related to wants and needs just gets so real so fast because you're connecting with what you actually care about. Yeah, that's great.

You know, you present yourself as very rational, kind of procedural, analytic. Say that's accurate. I happen to know that you're a big puddle of feeling. Oh, sure. I mean, that too. Absolutely. Yeah. Get you a girl who can do both, right? And I want to ask you.

As someone who tends toward that more analytic, cognitive, Aaron Beck approved approach, how have you helped yourself to identify the ooh, and then in a way, surrender to it?

Yeah, fantastic question. My experience of myself is as a person who struggled with this, this very issue, figuring out what I really wanted, figuring out why it was that I kept being in situations that didn't feel quite right for me, or where I wasn't really quite getting what I wanted out of a, out of a circumstance that felt like it should be giving me what I wanted. But there was just something where it was difficult to internalize that feeling or connect with that.

social settings, for me, absolutely typically social settings. I started where I did with it because this is a way to get around feeling like I don't know what I want, which is what I hear all the time whenever we post content about like, oh, identify your values and then work from those values to like figure out a way to meet your important goals, whatever it is.

A lot of time, number one piece of feedback we get is some version of, but I can't figure out what I want. And so you can kind of reverse this and start with the should and backfill to the things that you actually care about. It's a way to help that person kind of artificially connect with that.

For me going kind of the other direction being able to start with the bottom and work my way up that was much more of a long term process of. Developing more of a sense of internal authority about how I actually felt some of it was a very somatic process for me.

To kind of simplify this, some of this was about me giving myself permission to feel good. I don't know if that's kind of a whole thing, but to really feel that, that interest or that like desire, like you were saying, the kind of like, ooh, feeling and to let that really be a part, to let that be something I cared about.

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think that that's really the simplest way to put it is that over time, that focus, that good feeling, increasingly became a target for me, as opposed to the target being spend this many hours a day doing A, this many hours a day doing B, and oh, you didn't go to the gym three times a week. So you're, you're a piece of shit this week, which was absolutely a part of my internal monologue until I was late.

20s, I would say. So it's, you know, not so long ago. Yeah. In effect, the ooh element, right? The emotion and sensation of reward became increasingly sailing up to you. It started to really matter. You started flagging it internally. You gave yourself permission to pursue it. Yeah. I think that that rings really true for me.

Yeah. And as a whole, I developed more internal motivation, more intrinsic motivation over time. That was a big part of it too, giving myself permission to prioritize positive feelings inside of myself, as opposed to a lot of that external shouldn't. This included kind of relaxing around how I was perceived by other people and letting go of a desire to be seen in a certain kind of way. That was probably part of the process for me too.

I don't know if that was part of yours, Dad, or if you've seen that happen with people you've worked with, but it was certainly an aspect for me. Yeah. By definition, the ooh, that'll be a title of our next book. What's your ooh? Finding your ooh. Find your ooh. People by business understand that word. I don't know, but anyways. Yeah. First of all, it's nature. It's approach oriented. It's promotion oriented rather than avoidance or prevention oriented.

And I think second for people, it pulls them out of their head of a lot of cognitive hamster wheeling and zeroes them in and helps them tune into what actually matters to them. We get stuck in our beliefs, but our beliefs don't matter most of the time inherently.

They matter because they connect us to certain values that do matter, which are at bottom, in most cases, emotional and somatic. I think what you and I are talking about is moving past so-called pure reason. If you're getting in touch with the ooh, and then if you're trying to help yourself, here's a bonus point. If you're trying to help yourself want to do something you don't want to do, but should do like exercise.

There's a certain amount of pain and it takes a while. The pain is immediate. The gain takes a while. How do you help yourself pursue it? It can super help yourself to get good at finding the, ooh, the, yeah, the reward and that which you've been putting off, let's say, so that you can motivate yourself more effectively, like in 2025, to consistently take the actions that will bring the reward that you're seeking.

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There's another piece of it that I think is really real for a lot of people where they have a kind of punishment part that sort of borrow the language of IFS where there's an aspect of them that is just so hyper critical of their performance.

And my feeling is that most of the time when people are choosing their resolutions or trying to select different kinds of goals, a lot of the time they're speaking from that part. They are speaking from the punishment part. The punishment part has the pen. You have been a bad boy and therefore you should fill in the blank.

And you can also see that and how people approach the goal or approach the resolution while they're doing it. The reason I'm using exercises and examples so often is because it's a very convenient example. It's totally operational. You can easily track whether or not you did it, all of this different kind of stuff. It's very convenient for the sort of a process. I'm not trying to convince everyone that they should exercise more.

For me, one of the biggest breakthroughs that I had was when I realized that I really was allowed to go to the gym for 20 minutes, if I just had 20 minutes, and that 20 minutes was infinitely more than zero minutes. Total breakthrough for me. But there was kind of a part of me that for a long time didn't allow that to count because it was too easy. It's too easy. It's not hard enough so it doesn't count.

setting aside the enormous amount of exercise science that suggest that small doses over time are actually way more effective than large doses and consistently. I just had a mental model of exercise as something that was supposed to be hard and painful and difficult and if it didn't feel that way to me it was because I was doing it wrong.

You know, that is a kind of punishment part. And I think that we can really take a look at the different punishment parts that we have and how they are sneaking in to the way that we're formatting or the way that we're conceiving of these different resolutions that we might have and are kind of sabotaging us before we even get started. Beautifully said.

And to build on what you're saying, I think about how so many resolutions are kind of about you should do x, y, and z that you've been putting off because they're not much fun. They're good for you, but they're not really much fun. And also often at a deep level, you just don't really care that much. And it's okay to be like, I just don't really care that much. Yeah.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And so when we look to this year, gee, what about having resolutions that come from a lot of kindness for yourself? And if you imagine one way to do this is to imagine the most nurturing, forgiving, loving, wise beings, you can imagine, even as kind of a committee of them,

Encouraging you to adopt certain commitments, resolutions, intentions for this year, that would be so pleasurable, so good for you.

Yeah. Sure. What if a different part had the pen? What if the maximum self nurturing part has the pen? Totally. What would those resolutions look like? I really love this dad. I think this is actually very clever. Just go through the exercise of it. So you brain dump your shuds. That's kind of the punishment part a lot of the time. What would it be like to give the pen to a very different member of the internal committee? What are some of the resolutions that would come out of that? And what would that feel like? Oh, yeah.

And even just operationalizing it in concrete practice, you could imagine asking a friend or your life partner. Oh, yeah, picks up for you or a adult child or a parent to basically complete the sentence with regard to the other person. I don't think we'll do it here because it would just be wild to do it publicly. But I'll just say, for example,

You know, something like out of love for us in this coming year, I would wish for you that. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That stance of out of love is the key part of it. Absolutely. Yeah. It's not criticism. It's not evaluation. It's, wow, I think that you would really enjoy, or I think it would really bring you a lot of fulfillment, or I think would really connect with these values that I see in you for you to fill in the blank. Yeah.

That's right. And even if you can imagine an imaginary schmaltzometer, you know, being in the mid range of the schmaltz, right? It's a place for that. You can just, again, imagine something like recognizing your innate goodness, dear.

I would wish for you, film the blank, right? Sure. Well, to do like a soft version of that, so maybe a version of that would be, I would wish for you, because I know this is a thing we really care about, to take more long hikes. And, you know, hey, once a month, I would wish for you that you take a long hike in a beautiful place.

Great. Like an example of that. That is allowed, and I really want to highlight for people, like if this sounds obvious, small, see, whatever, that is allowed to be a resolution. You are allowed a resolution that takes the form of I'm taking a hike once a month. Like that's okay. That's right. Yeah.

The things like, I would wish for you that you would check in about the news for 10 minutes on Saturday and otherwise ignore it for the rest of the week. That's it. You would watch cable news for a maximum of 10 minutes a week, whatever it is for you. Yeah, and I think that also part of this, one of the things I really wanted to talk about is how can we help ourselves get down to that values level?

that truly identifying those wants and needs for a person. They're often driven by distinct values that a person might have. A great way into this is what you've already described at, asking other people, getting some input from outsiders who you really trust, you really rely on. You can also do certain kinds of voice dialogue, which we've talked about on the podcast in the past, particularly where you feel like you are writing from a part of you.

Where again you're you're letting the most supportive most nurturing aspect of who you are hold the pen as you put the pen on the paper for the journal in front of you and you just free right from it. What do you care about what are some things that you think would be really enjoyable to do more of in your life.

What do you think would really support you in meeting these key, whatever, key tasks that you have key, whatever, but the framework is one of support, right? Again, we're moving toward we're pursuing or going after. I also think for a lot of people, frankly,

They're just not that interested in their own interior. A lot of the time this is because this was trained into them. And we know that extrinsic motivation crowds out intrinsic motivation. People, there's a lot of research on this. There's something called self-determination theory. Basically, the takeaway from it is that kids are naturally intrinsically motivated. But as they're exposed to unsupportive social environments, they become extrinsically motivated and they lose that intrinsic motivation.

And so some of this can be driven in part by your personal history, like what were things like for you when you were growing up? To use a phrase I use a lot on the podcast, what were the hopes you had for yourself, what were the dreams that you had, what were the values that you had before the world got in the way, before other people started messing with you? Often going down to that kind of a layer can be really valuable for people.

I want to apply it to something that I think is inherently a little challenging for people because it's in the life task category, which where my rant began in this podcast tends to pull more for deficiency type motivation, prevention avoidance motivations. Okay. Very often it does come up for people.

when they look at the new year to really acknowledge that there have been some significant developmental stages or life tasks that they've sort of drifted on. They've deferred. They've kicked that can down the road. I know, I know I certainly did do that. And when I was younger myself, because I wasn't up against raw survival. And I had to find that engine that why deep inside myself,

Okay, let's suppose that people listening to this are realizing, okay, you know, in 2025, I really do want to find a life partner. In 2025, with my current partner, it's either up or out, either things have got to get better between us or darn, I'm going to need to find somebody else that I really want to be mates with and maybe raise a family together.

Or suppose that someone else has a different life task, like they're okay in their work, it's okay, but it's not deeply fulfilling, nor very lucrative, and they're realizing, you know, I want to look elsewhere. Maybe they need to move. They want to change locations. Maybe they want to fresh start in a different country. Maybe there's a big life task.

How can we, for us, apply this good stuff we've got going here about intrinsic motivation, bottom-up motivation, finding your why from the deep down for some of these big life tasks that I think are real concern for people when they consider motivation.

I think I'm not struggling with what you're saying, Dad, and that I disagree with you. I'm struggling with it in that this feels so obvious and clear to me, if that kind of makes sense. Particularly all of the relational things that you're describing are suffuse with deep desires, need, orientation, doing what would really lead to fulfillment for me long term. I think that it's much more of a tonal difference.

It's about a tone of, wow, this has never worked out for me. And oh my God, here's just another time where I got to get on the apps and I hate the apps and oh my God, it's so annoying to do these very things. But the fundamental motivation is absolutely a fulfillment motivation. There's a deep connection to something that the person truthly cares about, which is forming the more meaningful relationship for them.

Well I think you're right and maybe we could even work through a particular one and we could even for fun potentially do a little role play in which we reverse roles and I'll be

the person and you'll be, you know. Cool, yeah, this is like a little coaching thing, totally. Okay, you know, it'd be kind of fun. And just about finding, let's say, a life partner or shifting to a different career or so forth, I do think because of the negativity bias and then culture and the rest of it, we're really vulnerable to getting sucked into deficiency motivation. Totally. All of that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. And then all that I'm saying about it is that

Yes that absolutely happens and so what we kind of have to do is do what we can to make the more pursuit motivations as large in our mind and the container with which we started the episode is this fairly narrow container of resolution schools things like that.

which for many people are often more focused, less on like I have to do the dishes today, and much more on these kinds of big picture things where I think we can easily start dropping in some more like figuring out what you really want to need inside of yourself. Yeah.

That's right. So you want to play and we can see if this is any good. Sure. Yeah. We can give this a, we can give this a shot and we'll see, see where we go here. Do you want to do the, for me, the, the relationship one is almost like a three sentence interaction. So maybe the career was better. I don't know. Like what did you see in the relationship one? Let's start with the relationship one and see how good a coach you are. Okay. Maybe we'll find out. We'll find out live footage right here. So, so, okay. So this is a person who

Who is really looking for a life partner? Okay, so I'm going to start out by saying yeah, this year I want to I really want to find a life partner I'm maybe in a relationship currently that we both know is time limited and yeah, or you know, I'm maybe dating people occasionally or

I've been so burned, let's do that. I've been so burned about this. I feel so disappointed. I've been rejected. I don't want to risk rejection again. I'm very afraid of that. Also, a lot of my reasons for doing this. I don't want to be lonely. It's kind of the prospect of becoming 50, 60, 70, or 80.

Not having a partner is really scary to me. Those are deficiency needs. And also, I just don't want to feel inadequate like I'm damaged goods and nobody wants me. So we're starting with already, there's clearly a feeling inside of you that this is something that you want, that you aspire towards, right?

Yeah, I'm honestly, I'm more in touch with the in touch with I don't want to feel ashamed of being single. I don't want to feel lonely. I don't want to feel unsafe as I get older. Yeah, that those motivations are very prominent. You know, I hear your Yakita Yak about fulfillment motivations, but you know, the negatives are pretty prominent in my mind.

Yeah, well, for starters, I would say all of that's totally true. A lot of people have very painful experiences in the world of data. They've really tried to find relationships in the past and they've really struggled to. They've particularly struggled to find the right kind of person for them, major pain point for a lot of people. Yeah. So the first place that we start with is by establishing some sense of community. Okay.

So that's what we just did, even in that little like statement, hopefully the person will better already more of a little sense of that inside themselves, little sense of community, little sense of common humanity. Okay. And that's fulfilling to feel in a weird kind of way that I've got sisters, brothers, whatever, you know, who are miserable too. Yeah, in a weird kind of way, like this is an experience people go through, you are not uniquely bad in your pain.

Yeah, not always miserable. I'm not always miserable, et cetera. Okay. So we're laying a little foundation of connection. And also as a key point in that, like just technically meeting a person where they are when they are coming in for something is almost always about appreciating and exploring the truth of the current experience. A key mistake that people sometimes make is they try to change the mood without first meeting it. You can't change a mood without meeting it where it's at.

So you start with, oh yeah, you feel like shit. Okay. Let's explore what it's like to feel like shit. From there, you know, practically with this person, I would ask what have you, what have you been doing so far? What have you done? Okay. Oh, yeah, we'll keep on going. All right. So yeah. So what have you tried in the past? Yeah, I have all these yabs. I could do it, you know,

I can give it the half hour a day. People say, you ought to do it. Maybe an hour a day max. Just think of it as a task. It's got to turn the wheel. I even sort of believe in the metaphysics of it that even, you know, I'm turning the wheel over here on Tinder or Grindr or whatever these things are called these days, but still there's something a little different that that's a good shout out. Very funny. Okay. Okay.

Okay, keep going. Keep going. Incredible. My 72-year-old dad talking about grinder. Gotta love it. All right, keep it going. Okay, good. I'm sorry. In their grinder, Zoomer. I don't know. Okay, good. Okay, here we go. Oh, never get that out of my head. I believe in that. You know in that, so in other words, while you're turning the wheel over here, doing the half hour, suddenly you just are more interested and you notice somebody's sending next to you and line it Starbucks. Okay. For sure.

I just...

Honestly, on any given day, it's more like I want to move away from the negative than I'm drawn to the positive and the moving away from the negative kind of spins me out into negativity and I don't do anything that day. So I want your help. I want your help to help me find that positive motivation. Would you say that other stuff in your life is going basically okay? Like you're in a supportive environment. I have a job. I live alone.

You know, I have two canaries, they make me happy, but I'm kind, you know, I want that life partner. Do you have much of a supportive friend environment in your life right now? Yeah, they're friends. You've got some friends. They're like, most of them are in couples. I look at the person they ended up with, and I think often darn, there are fewer and fewer people like that around just demographically, which puts me into a doom spiral. And then I don't take action again.

So are there things in social environments that have worked well for you in the past, like kinds of environments that you've found yourself consistently drawn toward? Well, I actually am there at getting a cup of coffee or having an initial sort of Zoom contact to make sure that this person is not a psychopath. Yeah.

I actually do pretty well. I like it. They like me. I enjoy feeling that they like me. I kind of don't mind it if they seem tepid or cool because I realize, hey, I want to find someone who really likes me. I think I'm a diamond in the rough.

Yeah, yeah. So my question was actually, I really appreciate that. And also my question was more about broadly, are there different kinds of social environments that you've been in, not thinking even romantically here, that you've tend to feel really comfortable in, that you've tended to excel in anything like that. You know, I like hanging out with my friends. We do stuff occasionally together. I don't care with other people. So you have a friend group, you like your friend group, you like spending time with them. What do you like about spending time with them?

They like me. They like you. Great. Good place to start. Yeah. And that's an opportunity for me to like them. Yeah. And so in that liking, what does that feel like for you?

Oh, interesting. I feel soft and warm and cared about inside. And it reminds me of good feelings I have when I was a kid with my best friend and also with my grandmother. So you feel kind of connected. You feel in relationship with them. Yeah, totally. Okay. And so part of the perk of going and finding a partner is having some of those feelings, I would imagine.

Oh, that's very nice. I could, that's good. That's great. I never thought of that, really. The same sort of friend feeling I could have with someone who liked me romantically. Wow, that's really interesting. I'm drawn toward that. Yeah. And a lot of the time we don't think about it that way.

We have a friend category where we're in like these good, positive relationships. And then we have this relationship category and we have all of these bad experiences inside of the relationship category. So they almost get kind of split inside of our mind, right?

Yeah. You know what, roast right there. Doc was so not a doctor, but okay. Don't even play with that one. That somebody's going to leave a serious cop. So not a doctor for the record. Okay. I got it.

Well, what came up for me right there was I want someone who will love me. I want to find a good person who will love me. And I like the feeling, not the idea, the feeling of being loved by a good person. Yeah.

Yeah, I like that a lot. Yeah, that just boom. I feel like that is a golden cord of motivation right through my heart, pulling me in the direction of that person who will love me, who is a good person.

Yeah, and so that's the circle. That's the target. And you can bear a lot of native motivation, payment suffering, grinding it out each day. If you truly have something like that, that is really drawing you. That's really drawing you as a core, deep, real value.

So when I feel all grumpy about, you know, all my friends basically hate dating, right? Sure. Yeah. No, no one says nice things about dating these days. Yeah, totally. So when they start going to add dating, it's horrible. Yeah. I'm just going to her. I hear it. Whoop. And I'm going to turn my attention to that feeling, that really nice feeling of feeling loved by a good person.

Yeah, for sure. Yep. That's a great way to do it. And so, okay, we're kind of extracting from the role play a little bit. So... Oh, wait a minute here. Time out. So that was really cool. And it just... Okay, all right. Okay, now there was... It became, I think, a really good demonstration of what we're talking about.

And, you know, for us, I've got some other problems. I'd like to bring them. Oh, God. All right. Help me with another problem. No, I'm kidding. I didn't realize you were joking there. I thought we were about to do a whole other role. But, but, okay. So I want to pull out some things that happened there, actually, because, like, obviously there's a, there's a certain unreality about the whole thing.

Also people who listen to the show know this i'm not a therapist so if anything that i was doing there appeared there a pisty i wasn't really. We weren't getting into the material in that kind of way we were very target oriented. It was much more about tasking in different kinds of ways which is more coaching orientation. Okay few thing few important things to pull out here.

What you are doing there, dad, with like, uh, I just feel so blah about it. That is often where people start. And it's often where you start with this inquiry. So as you start to look inside yourself to try to connect with these different kinds of wants and needs, it is going to be very normal for a lot of material to pop up that is very negative about this whole process.

What do you mean? What do I want? I can never figure out what I want. What do you mean? What I need? All of these people need all of these things of me, and I'm supposed to need things of myself. What are you even talking about here? That's part of the extractive process.

Very, very normal. And part of the growth process around it is appreciating that it is a bone normal part of the process. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not doing something wrong. You're just going through the steps. Okay. And that's why we kind of started with that person with that sense of common humanity. Yeah, dating sucks. You're right. Yeah, you have had bad experiences. Wow. That's really unfortunate.

Man, I totally understand where you're coming from with all that. And then so what we can try to do sometimes with people who are particularly intractable, like in our role play, whenever I kind of moved toward inquiry around what would kind of like draw your attention.

With a partner, the answer was always just, well, I just want a partner because I want a partner. And in fact, I kind of want a partner mostly because I'm afraid of growing old and dying and so on. Very understandable. Sometimes you can do kind of a form of substitution for people where you draw their attention to some other aspect that does have a little bit of lightness associated with it.

or a little bit of kind of like, ooh, as we were talking about. So, okay, all right, you mentioned I've got some friends. Great. Okay, what's it like to have friends? What's it like to be around other people? Oh, how about, how about your parents? Do you like your parents? Do you have a good relationship with them? Oh, like, if you see their relationship, see their connection to each other, assuming they have a good relationship, are there aspects about it that you would really love to have with a person? Okay, great. All of a sudden, we're kind of playing here in that more aspirational stance that we're talking about.

Is there anything in what I was doing, dad, that you as a clinical psychologist and longtime therapist would want to comment on or, you know, be like, Oh, there was a thing there. Oh, we could have done a thing here.

only good clever stuff. Cool. You affirmed how I felt. And second, you were noodling around for a positive motivation. And you found it related to my friends. What do I like about being with my friends? And then

No, I was being very real as a client. I was naming all kinds of stuff that people have named him. Totally. Real stuff. Yeah. You were like making it hard to make it hard. That's just how people are. Yeah. And like a real client, I was willing for there to be a breakthrough. Yeah. And when something lit up inside, I was ready to go for it. And I listened for, oh, wow, I want to feel loved by a good person. Yeah.

And that motivation is enough. And knowing that frankly, okay, maybe that's a one in a hundred, one in a thousand kind of person, but okay, I'm going to take a big breath and I'm going to start looking for that particular golden needle in the haystack. So yeah, it was excellent. Awesome.

And from there, of course, what happens is the how if we were kind of to take this a step further, we would go through a real how process, how are we going to approach this? Okay, that's the goal. That's the target. That's the feeling. That's what we're going after. And from that feeling.

All of a sudden, all of this activity can flow. But because you know your why and you feel drawn to that why, you're willing to bear a lot more friction along the way. If you don't have a why and it's pain all the way down, you're just not going to bear the friction, the natural friction that comes with going through a real goal-setting process. Like, we would do all of these different things. We would start to focus on our processes, not our outcomes. Okay.

How long are we spending on a daily basis, whether it's going online or swiping on people on the apps or asking your friends, hey, do you use there anyone in your social circle that blah, blah, blah. Can we break this big goal that we have this big feeling that we're going after into smaller bites?

Are there little things where we can feel success along the way where it's not just about you get to feel successful when you finally obtain it? You get to feel successful when you ask your friend, hey, can I get a little help from you? Or when you make the profile on the thing, often that's a very painful process for people for a lot of very understandable reasons. Is there something that you can do at the end of it where you're like, oh, I get to feel accomplished for just that? So I'm going to reward myself by filling the blank.

Whatever it is, normal smart goals that people talk about, understanding that falling off the wagon in different kinds of ways is a normal part of any kind of a goal-setting process, any kind of a resolution process, and you bake that in. Of course, I'm not going to do it exactly as often as I say that I am at the beginning of the year. Of course, there are going to be roadblocks, and you just understand that you accept that.

But all of that flows from having that target that draws your attention in an authentic way. That's beautiful. There's a metaphor from Sharon Salzberg, who's always worth listening to. Yeah, I love Sharon. And reading a longtime mindfulness Buddhist teacher, and particularly with a focus on the heart. And she has this metaphor, you may be familiar with it for us already, where there you are meditating.

And you're in the meadow. The meadow has flowers, it's lovely, it's calming, everything, you know, it feels fulfilling and you're sinking more and more deeply into that good sense. All right. And we can apply this as well to other things and periodically trains go by. Trains of thought that try to get you to hop on board, but you just stay there in the meadow, breathing, relaxed.

And then you find yourself on a train and you've been on that train for the last three minutes, 10 minutes, wandering in thought, daydreaming, worrying, ruminating. But the instant that you realize you're on the train, you're back in the meadow.

And I think there's something here about that that we can be in touch with and lived by our deep values, the deep yearnings and longings, the deep givingness. I mean, in the role play, I could have talked more truthfully. It's not just, I'm now back in it. I want someone to love me who's a good person who I also love.

Yeah, you want to be able to give that love toward the person. Yeah. So there we are. And then often, as soon as we realize that we're getting sucked into deficiency motivations and lack motivations, avoidance motivations, as soon as we realize that, we can use that as a cue, boom, to pop this back into the meadow.

of being lived from the bottom up by that which is beautiful, good and noble within us. Sometimes you need to give that voice, the deficiency voice, the choice. You need to give it the floor for a minute. You let it out, you let the steam out, you complain about. Meet the mood as you put it.

Yeah, I meet the mood dating in 2025. Oh, it's so messed up out there. Everyone's only looking for what's the, what's the tech talk meme at a six, four man in finance, blue eyes, you know, whatever it is. And I don't fit those markers. So how can I ever find love? You know, you let yourself do it. Blow the steam off. Okay. And then from there, what's the target? What's the value? What do we really care about? And how can we let activity flow from that?

I know we're wrapping up and I want to, if I could, bang on, I think two points that have been really personally meaningful for me.

One is to realize that I think you're the person who said it, that being precedes doing in a way. I think Heidegger said that, but anyway- I was gonna say that was not really an original thought, but I have said that in the past. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so number one, whatever is the final common pathway of everything good in your life or what does it run through, it runs through your level of being, your state of being.

your own personal psychology, what is your own general level of feeling and functioning. And so we can bootstrap ourselves in general through listening to this podcast and other things to gradually raise our overall personal psychology.

That's a really important thing because it's the origin point of all kinds of other good stuff that happens. It also sets you up. You know, the person you will be in a month, if you spend the next 30 days, bit by bit, day by day, lifting your personal psychology, that person a month from now will be more equipped to make good decisions and to draw and kind of magnetize the law of attraction, right? And other good things to you. So that's kind of big point number one.

develop your own personal psychology. The other thing is to surrender to the best within you. It feels so different when you just feel lived by love, when you feel given over to a movement toward health as that which gets you to do the exercise.

when you feel moved by your moral commitments to helping others in service. It kind of lives through you when maybe there's a form of self-actualization, like you have certain abilities or talents that just want to move through you and be expressed out into the world. The sense of surrender to those currents moving through you feels really different

Then scratching and clawing your way upstream, you know, against resistance. That's the second big headline that's really stood out for me when I look back on my own history of motivated action.

I love that dad. And clearly there's so much else that we could talk about here, something we barely talked about with self-criticism. I mean, we talked about it in terms of the punishment part that can emerge, but self-criticism as something that emerges when we start the act of doing and we fall a little short, we have that relapse moment or that fall off the wagon moment, self-criticism that comes in as we try to do things that are new for us, because often the time when we're when we're setting a resolution, we're doing things that are kind of new and unfamiliar.

That's a huge piece of the whole puzzle here. And I think that also with that, everything that we've talked about helps it as well. Everything that we've talked about in terms of orienting toward that deeper value can help it as well. Because it can help you kind of release it and go, you know what? Sure. And also, hey, I'm going to keep on going after my value. This is what I have a positive motivation toward. And sure, there's that voice in the mind that gets on us, but I still know what I'm drawn toward.

It was good for us. And I was really glad that you were OK with, I think, an unusual degree to which I was kind of volatile and bouncing around. Oh, I thought you were great here, Dad. We ended up going in a maybe in the recap. I was kind of almost backfill through my little planning sheet here. But I thought it was really interesting. It took us in really interesting direction. I think it made it feel super organic. I was totally unprepared for the role plan in a good way, I think. And yeah, I hope that people got some value out of this one.

That's great.

As Rick mentioned during the episode, I often enter these recordings with a pretty established plan of what I think we're going to talk about. And sometimes Rick comes in and he really reacts strongly or is very interested in something that I say early on in the recording. And that ends up totally changing the course of what we talked about. Today, that was when I mentioned fulfillment as a primary goal for me these days and something that I try to really orient toward when I'm setting goals or resolutions for the new year.

What's going to actually lead to me feeling more fulfillment. And Rick's point was that many people are not really oriented toward fulfillment. They're oriented toward day to day tasking. So how can you have fulfillment as your big macro goal when what you really need to accomplish in a given day is doing the dishes, taking out the trash, providing for your family, whatever it might be.

And my point, my response to it was, I think that these things totally connect with each other. And that really guided a lot of our conversation today. So here in the outro to this episode, I'm going to recap some of that. But I also want to talk a little bit more about some of the things that I had kind of planned for the episode. And that starts by exploring some of the reasons that people might not succeed at achieving their various resolutions for the year. There are often three reasons that this is hard for people.

The first reason is that behavior change in general is just really hard. The more friction that something has, the lower our likelihood if success will be. And people tend to emphasize high friction pursuits when they're setting their resolutions. Like we talked about a little bit later in the episode, I had a really hard time understanding that it was really okay for me to just go to the gym for 20 minutes.

That wasn't hard enough. It wasn't painful enough. It wasn't punishment oriented enough for me to think of it as being sufficient to check the box for meeting my resolution. Second reason people fail is that they just don't have very good process around their goals. They're focusing on outcomes. They're biting off more than they can chew. They're not setting up social support. They're not appreciating their unique temperament or the things that have typically worked for them in the past.

And the third reason is that they're focusing on shirts rather than their authentic wants and they might be doing this again for a few different reasons. Maybe they're focusing on those shirts because they are performing resolutions to placate either their inner audience, their self-critical part. We talked about that a lot during this episode.

or an actual outer audience they want to look good for certain people. Another reason, though, is that they might have a hard time figuring out what they authentically want and need.

But simply, what are they really drawn toward? And that was what we talked about a lot during the episode. And then when we can tie that big picture, what's your why, that target in the sky that we're drawn toward to a specific measurable goal, that's where the magic tends to happen for people.

Being more fulfilled tends to occur when we make goals and resolutions that are based on our needs, on our internal reference point, rather than based on the viewpoint of that externalized audience, that us that is resting a couple of feet outside of our body and reflecting on ourselves, judging ourselves and going, you know, you're deficient in these various ways. And here's how you can cure that deficiency.

This is essentially a way of talking about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. That view of yourself as being outside of the body, evaluating your behavior, all of that, that is extrinsic motivation. That is you looking at yourself through the lens of how other people probably perceive you. Intrinsic motivation is when you connect with what you really care about on the inside. If nobody was watching, you would do this thing anyways.

So what tends to work for people? What tends to lead to them setting useful resolutions that are aligned with their actual wants and needs? And then acting on them in a way that leads to them getting more of what they want. First, in order for resolutions to work, they can't all feel like work.

Some of them have to feel enjoyable at the very least and this was the the whole bit that we talked about together about giving the pen to a different part of who you are or even asking somebody that you know really loves and cares about you to volunteer some things that they would wish for you.

not as personal growth pursuits or, oh, I think this would be good for you, but truly just being purely motivated by what that person thinks you would find really enjoyable and fulfilling for its own sake. And something that can help us think about things in this way, particularly if we're a person who has a bit more of that achievement orientation or that kind of external performance orientation, is thinking in terms of one for you, one for me.

Okay, sure, you set your resolution that is about doing the thing you feel like you really should do. But then you also have a resolution that's tied to it, that it's more about what you're purely motivated towards. So an example of this for me is that I want to get more active with my dancing again. I want to be more actively engaged with that. But can I avoid it being a competitive thing?

and be more focused on the play of it, feeling good about it while I'm doing it, as opposed to having all of these competitive goals associated with it.

Then we can think about goals or resolutions applying to different areas of our life. Maybe there's a health area, maybe something that's more focused on your personal psychology, looking at your relationships, social life, work, whatever it is that's meaningful for you these days. And that can really help us figure out what the big rocks in the bucket are. What really matters? What are the pain points? Where would applying just a little bit of effort really make a big difference?

And then we can go through a process. And I outlined a process that a person might go through that starts with brain dumping some shoulds. It's often a lot easier for people to connect with the shoulds, that external view, than it is for them to connect with their own internal voice. That internal voice can be more difficult for people to find. But when we start with a should, we can actually work backwards a lot of the time to get to that deeper layer. So we use the example of the should of going to the gym or exercising more regularly.

Problem is there's a lot of friction with that goal. It hasn't really worked out for you in the past, and it's not really that specific. Okay, so we can go to a deeper level, and we can try to separate out our means from our ends. The end is what? What do you want from going to the jump?

Do you want to feel better about yourself? Do you want to improve your physical fitness? Do you want to socialize yourself a little bit more, go out into an environment where other people are there? Do you want to prepare for summer 2025? Most of the time, there are a bunch of different means that could serve the end that you're trying to reach. And then we can explore aspects of our nature. What's true about you? What are the kinds of situations that have worked well for you in the past?

What are some of the activities that you currently enjoy or maybe that you used to enjoy that could have information in them that you can apply to this aspiration that you have? Do you work best in just certain kinds of conditions? Are you more of a night owl or more of a morning person? Are you more about quiet or more stimulating spaces? How much failure can you bear before it feels like it's time to give up? We could go down a layer from there. What are some core values that you have? Do you have a real values orientation?

around health and wellness, or a values orientation around feeling like a strong and capable person, whatever it is for you. What can you connect to inside of yourself that you can tie aspirationally to this thing that you're trying to pursue? And then from there, can we find a means that is more accessible to you, that is matched to that end?

Along the way, we do all of the normal good goal-setting stuff. We appreciate our individual differences, our unique temperament. Just because a friend of yours could do something doesn't mean that you can do it and the fact that you can't do it does not make you a bad person. Different approaches work for different people.

We focus on our processes over our outcomes. What are the things that we control along the way? We break a big goal into small manageable steps. We get specific and time-bound and actionable and just all of the things that people say.

But you're probably going to get all of that advice in half a dozen other pieces of content that people are going to release over the next couple of months focused on getting more out of 2025. And my goal for this episode was that we would talk more about the big picture things, the soft and fuzzy things, the murky interior depth things that you could then apply to all of that other content that you consume.

So I hope you found today's episode interesting was very interesting for me to do it. Rick sometimes kind of throws me for a bit of a loop with these things and I get a lot out of it when he does that and it becomes more conversational. I started thinking about things in a new and different kind of way. It's very helpful for me personally.

Hopefully you like these kinds of episodes as well. If you have any questions or you have any comments about the episode, please leave them either on YouTube if you're watching over there or by leaving a positive review. That's a great way to leave a comment about the show and we really appreciate it. You can also find us on patreon. It's patreon.com slash being wild podcast and pretty much every social media channel.

I always love getting feedback about the show. It means a lot to me that so many people take the time out of their week to watch it, to listen to it, to talk with us about it. It's been a major source of meaning and purpose and fulfillment in my life. So again, just thank you for that. So until next time, I'll talk to you soon.