Ep 173 - Science-Backed Ways to Achieve Your Goals (What the Research *actually* Says)

It's 9:40 PM and you're four scrolls deep into someone else's highlight reel — the promotion, the marathon, the kitchen you've quietly wanted for years — and that familiar drop hits: I should be further along than this.In this episode, we're breaking down how to stop comparing yourself to others, starting with something that might surprise you: comparison isn't a character flaw. It's one of the oldest, most well-documented things the human mind does. We look at the research behind why humans are wired to measure ourselves against the people around us, why the direction of a comparison matters more than the fact that you're making one, and why this feels so much more relentless now than it did a generation ago — your very old wiring is being run against a very new, curated environment.We'll also walk through a reframe that changes the whole relationship: what if the sting of comparison isn't telling you that you're behind, but telling you what you actually want? You'll leave with two concrete questions to ask the next time that familiar drop shows up so that you can catch the story before you start to live inside it.🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.

It's 11:47 PM and you're replaying a text message for the fourth time, drafting responses you'll never send, rehearsing a conversation that hasn't happened yet. Then comes the second thought: what's wrong with me that I can't stop? Why am I overthinking this?Nothing's wrong with you. In this episode, we're unpacking your question--why do I overthink everything--and how the real lens here is how your brain is trying to protect you. "Overthinking" is actually deep, valuable processing that's been mislabeled as a flaw, and we'll identify the specific point where thinking stops being preparation and starts becoming a loop that freezes you instead of moving you forward.This one draws on research into the psychology of worry and rumination to make the case that your overactive mind isn't a personality defect — it's an old strategy that's overdue for an update. 🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.

Negative thinking and self-doubt are at their worst when life hands you back-to-back difficult circumstances. So what do you do to manage the negative thinking and self-doubt at a time when things are genuinely difficult? That's exactly what we're exploring in this episode--but from a place of genuine coping, not putting a bow on everything to make it look prettier than it actually is.Let's talk about the balance between not censoring the truth, and recognizing that sometimes negative thinking and self-doubt can obscure what's really going on, looking for patterns that bring self-awareness without the self-blame, and leaning into the things that really help you survive during challenging times.🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.

In life, we're going to have setbacks--job losses, health issues, death, breakups--things that "take us out of the game" of our usual flow of life and sometimes even have us feeling lost, grieving, derailed. So how do you pick yourself up again after a setback?If you're navigating this and definitely do NOT want any of the, "Just give it time" advice, this podcast episode is going in a different direction, talking about what it's like to be in the messy space of trying to literally pick yourself back up, again. We'll get into not just the actions to take but importantly, the ways to allow yourself a full process, with no rush or pressure to hurry up and "get back to normal" at a time when your "new normal" is being defined.🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.

Today's episode lands from a personal space--my father recently passed. The entire process of being with him in the hospital in his final days and then letting him go has been some parts profound but with the shock of grief it's often been brutal.So what do you turn to, to navigate grief and loss? I'm sharing how I'm taking tiny baby steps that respect my capacity from one day to the next (spoiler alert: I fail and flail, often feel "irrational") while continuing to press forward.If you've lost a job, a pet, a friend, a beloved family member--you know that grief is no ordinary experience and it differs from person to person. In this episode I hope that you find solace in knowing that you aren't alone.🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.

Financial anxiety is not just a mindset problem. Sometimes it's a reasonable response to real conditions — a volatile economy, rising costs, job insecurity, a savings account that isn't where you wish it were. Telling yourself to "think positive" about money when the fear is grounded in something real doesn't make the fear go away. It just adds a layer of self-gaslighting to an already hard situation.This episode is for anyone whose relationship with money has gotten harder lately — not because of a personal failure, but because the economic climate genuinely warrants some concern. Let’s explore what financial anxiety is actually made of, how to separate the signal from the spiral, and how to take grounded action even when the financial picture isn't as clear or stable as you'd like.This isn't about toxic positivity around money. It's about learning to face your financial reality with courage rather than avoidance — and finding what's actually within your control when a lot feels like it isn't.Money fear doesn't have to run the show. Here's how to work with it instead.🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.

"Just think positive." "Everything happens for a reason." "Focus on the good." If you've ever received that advice during a genuinely hard time and felt — not comforted, but somehow worse — you were not being ungrateful. You were accurately detecting something that doesn't actually help.This episode draws the line between toxic positivity and genuine hope. Not because positivity is bad, but because the forced, bypassing version of it is a specific kind of harm — one that asks people to perform okayness rather than actually move through difficulty. And in a world that keeps producing genuinely hard things to live through, knowing the difference matters enormously.If you've ever been curious about what the research *actually* says, I'm getting into Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, and drawing on two decades of coaching, and my own frank relationship with what it means to hold hope without lying. You'll leave this episode with a clear framework for telling the difference between positivity that helps and positivity that harms — and a grounded, evidence-based understanding of what genuine hope actually looks like when the thing you're hoping about is genuinely uncertain.This is not an anti-positivity episode. It is a pro-honesty episode. And it might change how you talk to yourself on the hardest days.🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't show up on any medical test and doesn't have a clean solution. It's the exhaustion of someone who has been holding it together for a very long time — through personal difficulty, collective uncertainty, and the relentless pressure to keep performing okayness when you are not, in fact, okay.This episode is about the permission to rest. Not as productivity advice. Not as self-care content. As a genuine psychological and physiological necessity that high-functioning people are especially likely to override — and especially likely to pay for later.Today I’m drawing on research in stress physiology and two decades of coaching to explore why the people who are best at coping are often the last to recognize when they've reached their limit, what the difference is between chosen rest and collapse, and how to stop treating exhaustion as a character flaw long enough to actually recover from it.If you have been quietly running on empty while telling everyone you're fine — if the words "I just need to push through" have become a reflex rather than a choice — this episode is for you. Rest is not a reward for finishing. It is part of how you finish. And it is long overdue.🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.

The world doesn't feel stable right now — and your nervous system knows it. Economic uncertainty, political chaos, global conflict: even if none of it is landing directly on your doorstep, it's landing in your body. You're more reactive than usual. Your sleep is off. You're scrolling more and resting less. You're doing fine — except that quietly, underneath it all, you're not.This episode is about how to stay grounded when the external world keeps shifting. Not through toxic positivity or pretending things are fine. Not through a five-step productivity system. Through something more honest: learning to anchor yourself in what's actually stable when almost nothing outside of you is.Today we're walking you through what groundedness actually means — and more importantly, what it feels like in a body that's been running on high alert. You'll leave this episode with a clearer understanding of why you feel so rattled right now, and a set of practices you can return to again and again when the news cycle, the economy, or life itself starts to spin.This is courage for the long haul. Let's practice it together.🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.

What does the research actually say about how to achieve your goals — and why does willpower alone so reliably fail?Let's break it down with seven evidence-based frameworks from psychology and behavioral science, each paired with a concrete action step you can use this week. We cover Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's goal-setting research, Gabriele Oettingen's WOOP framework and the surprising science of mental contrasting, Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory, identity-based habit formation from James Clear and Wendy Wood, Charles Duhigg's cue-routine-reward loop, Carol Dweck's mindset research, and the accountability science that shows just how much the relational dimension of goal pursuit actually matters.This isn't a motivational pep talk. It's a practical, research-grounded episode that will change how you think about what goal achievement actually requires — and give you specific tools to do it differently starting now.🚨 This isn’t just a podcast—it’s your wake-up call.If you’ve been smiling through the grind, holding back your truth, or checking every box while something inside you feels like it’s suffocating—it’s time to start a living practice of courage:→ Rewire your relationship to fear:  Courageous Living® Program→ Join a life-changing program, to become a life-changing coach:  CLCC→ Build a business that feels like YOU:  The Coaching Blueprint®→ Get the real-real on becoming a life coach:  The Craft of Coaching PodcastStart now:  YourCourageousLife.com Social: 📸 Instagram | 🎵 TikTok | 📺 YouTube | 📌 PinterestPlease note...while this podcast may discuss protocols to improve mental or physical health, listeners should always consult a qualified provider before following any advice or undertaking any changes to their lifestyle.