Episode 215: Two things to consider before changing your goal

Episode 215_ Two things to consider before changing your goal.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 215_ Two things to consider before changing your goal.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Stacy Westfall:
And then what you can do once you've embraced. Oh, wow. I can really see looking back, I could have done it this way. This actually could have been easier. You can see the other opportunities, the other paths. And then you can choose whether or not to call one of those adventures complete.

Announcer:
Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple: to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Stacy Westfall:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall and I help riders successfully set and achieve goals. In this podcast, I'm focused on one specific moment in time that sometimes occurs when someone is looking back at what they did last year and deciding new goals for the upcoming year. I'm going to share a great way to handle this moment, but first let me introduce you to the moment. Here's an example of what I mean. So let's pretend that in 2022 you were feeling really ambitious when you set your goals back in January. And let's pretend that you picked three different disciplines that you wanted to show your horse in, and you only had some experience in one of those disciplines, but you were gung ho ready to go all in. And you set off into the year and without going into detail, let's say that you rode the waves of learning each of those events. You took lessons, you went to shows, you did your riding time at home, you examined things, you did a lot. And then as you got to the end of the show season, you got wrapped up, let's say the end of October, maybe even the beginning of November, and then you got really busy with Thanksgiving and then you blinked and Christmas shopping was behind and you got that done. And then Christmas was here and you almost caught your breath. And then somebody said, Have you set any new goals for 2023? It is easy to imagine someone in that moment thinking, That was too much. I really need to cut back this year. Pause. This is the moment that I'm talking about in this podcast. If you find yourself in that moment where you are thinking, That was too much, I need to cut back, or some version of that, then this podcast is for you.

Stacy Westfall:
Here's the great news. If you have the idea that that was too much what I want you to notice is the word, was. When you look back at 2022 if you have the feeling that that was a lot, that was too much, that might not be what I want to repeat. I want you to pause and I want you to think about who you are now and how that is different from who you were back then. Because at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of 2022, in this example, you didn't know all the things that wouldn't work. You didn't know all the ways that weren't going to pan out the way you thought they might. You discovered all the ways that didn't work, and a few that did. And right now, as you begin to plan for 2023, sometimes people will throw out repeating a very similar plan because they feel overwhelmed when they think about what they just went through. When really what is very possible at this moment is to look back and look at the adjustments that you could have made that would make even repeating the exact same goal a lot easier.

Stacy Westfall:
Now, before you go into thinking that you have to repeat the goal, if you listen to this, I promise you, you can listen to this and learn from this and not repeat the goal. Or you can listen to this and learn from this and maybe you will repeat the goal. But what I guarantee is that if you listen to this and you look at these two steps I'm about to offer you, it will improve what you get done in 2023. Sound too good to be true. Here's how it's going to work. What I want you to do in this moment is remember to factor in everything you did learn. Especially if you had a crazy ambitious year that you just went through. Those are great for producing a lot of learning. So if you take these two steps, number one, look back and seriously look at how you would improve things. And number two, look at how you can take pieces of what you did learn and use it going forward. If you do those two things that I'm going to outline in more detail, it will radically change your result in 2023. So let's go into detail here. So, number one, go back and look at 2022 like you were going to do it again, but you wanted to make it easier. So that's not changing the goal. It is changing how you were getting there. Because what you did, if you look back, is you discovered, let's just say, 100 different things that didn't work. Because if you look, you can find a lot of little things you could change. So let's say you look back over 365 days and you find 100 little tweaks and some of those might be new tweaks and maybe some of them are one tweak that you repeated 50 times. And so changing that one thing would actually change a lot. If you take the time to go back and get really clear about what you would adjust in 2022, it might make repeating the exact same thing next year very possible and even easy. So let's put this into an actual example, so maybe it will get more clear in your mind. If you look back at 2022 and one of the things that you did to try to reach your goal was you took a weekly riding lesson. And let's say that in the weekly lesson, you drove to take the lesson from your instructor and let's pretend that you drove one hour and took a one hour lesson and then drove home where I live. That's really easy to do because there's a lot of travel from where I am.

Stacy Westfall:
So in that example I've spent an hour driving one way and then an hour driving back. So I've got 2 hours of driving time plus I've got hooking up the trailer, loading everything up because my saddle was in the barn and now it needs to get in the trailer. So realistically, I've got more than the 2 hours into getting to the lesson and getting home. So if I find myself in that situation, which I did a few years ago, and I look at how I could make learning a little bit more effective time-wise, one thing you might do is you might look back and go, I really wanted the learning and I really like this instructor, but I really also feel like I'm a little crunched on time and I want to use my time more effectively. What could I do differently? Maybe you look back and you think, Huh? I wonder if my instructor would be open to making every other week a virtual lesson. And so maybe you go to your instructor and ask them and they agree because now they get to sit in their warm house while they are instructing you. And you gain 2 hours of travel time and you still get the same outcome of the instruction. So do you see how you could look around for things that you could do that would be an adjustment but would still get you the same outcome? Another example would be maybe you look back at 2022 and you realize that there is something completely unrelated to your horse goal that is taking up a lot of your time or energy. One of my favorite memes or quotes that floats around on the internet is the one that says, Who knew the hardest part of being an adult is figuring out what to cook for dinner every single night the rest of your life? So that is a great example of something that might be taking up time and effort and energy that you could really actually focus on and you could learn how to tackle that in a way. Let's say that you batch cook on the weekends or whatever it is that you do. You make the decisions ahead of time. And in doing that, even though it's not directly related to your riding, it's related to your time use and your mental energy use. So when you look back at 2022 and you look at the goals and you look at what is making you consider not repeating that goal again, remember to go back and really adjust some of the things that felt like they weren't working. Even if you decide I now see, maybe I could do virtual lessons, you still don't have to choose to do it, but it completely will shift the way you think.

Stacy Westfall:
If you take the time to look at what you could change, because so often I see people throw out an entire goal because they had a feeling of overwhelm while they were trying to achieve it. And if they just simply looked back at what they could have adjusted, it would actually make repeating that goal a completely different experience. But for the sake of argument, let's say that you get to the end of the year and you think, No, I really do want to cut back on what I did and I really do want to make some changes. So I think I'm not going to continue studying one of those three disciplines that I was studying. What I really want to encourage you to do in the process of making that decision, let's say you've already looked back, you've already decided, you know, these are the things I can adjust and I still really want to reclaim time. So I am going to drop this at this moment. I still want to challenge you to consider, are you dropping it or are you really just modifying what you thought it would look like? Because if you already spent the year studying something and you are now considering dropping it, I just want you to consider what it would be like to pivot and think, how can I use the tools I already have and not even spend any additional time? Let me try to make that more clear. Another way I'm going to present this is, go for the low-hanging fruit. So if you really ended 2022 feeling like you spread yourself too thin and you've got two different unrelated events, let's say reining and groundwork/liberty work that you want to do, and you've been studying both of them, but you're really going to decide that 2023, you're going to focus on reining. So it looks like on paper you might be dropping the focus on the groundwork, the focus on advancing your groundwork and working on liberty. If you decide that in 2023, you're going to cut that out to try to save time, I actually want you to consider trying this on instead. Is there a way that you could spend five or 10 minutes each day and still continue to work on the liberty goal? Because I will bet you that you could find a way to do that, that wouldn't even, "cost you," the additional five or 10 minutes. There are so many places where people leave, I want to say money on the table, but it's really opportunity on the table. It's an opportunity cost. People lose the chance to continue practicing something if they're feeling overwhelmed and they decide to cut it out. So maybe they do cut out driving to take that lesson from an instructor. But you took a year's worth of lessons in that discipline. What if you could just take those skills and apply it to something you're already doing every day? So almost everyone leads their horse from point A to point B during a given day. Maybe you go from the pasture to the barn or the stall to the arena or the paddock to the pasture. And if you spent dedicated time in 2022, learning groundwork skills, learning liberty skills, learning dressage skills, learning reining skills, learning ranch riding skills, this goes across the board. I was trying to use groundwork and riding because they contrast a little bit more. Some of these things are really easy to continue with, especially after you have put in the upfront cost of learning.

Stacy Westfall:
So can you find a way to take the concepts you were studying in 2022? And if it feels like right now you don't want to repeat everything that you did in 2022, as you go forward into 2023, what if you can tweak it and take those forward, but in a little modified way to where maybe you get to the end of 2023 and you find that it really was more of a continuation of your goals from 2022 than you thought. So I talked about this actually already back in Episode 148. And in that episode I was specifically talking about three situations where horses frequently double-check the rules. And one of the examples was when you're leading them from one point to another. So if you look around, there are a lot of repetitive tasks that you do with your horse, leading them from the pasture to the barn, saddling them, putting them in the stall, feeding them, leading them from where they were tacked up to where you mount up the warm-up time that you do. So there are a lot of repetitive tasks that oftentimes people leave out as training opportunities. And so because they're not tapped into because there's just a habit of like just simply putting the halter on and going from point A to point B. And what happens is people lose a lot of opportunities to continue what they already started. So just let's continue very specifically, If you did put a bunch of money in the bank and you learned a bunch of groundwork skills in 2022, how can you use those in your everyday life in 2023 so that even though maybe for this example, you decide to really focus on reining, maybe, just maybe, you don't have to completely drop what you studied in groundwork? Maybe there is a way that you can continue developing your skills by just looking around at the repetitive things you do with your horse and squeezing in just a little bit of what you learned into your day-to-day. Because at the end of the day, that's actually how you make the most progress with your horses. One of the reasons I think people miss this opportunity is because if you are at the end of the year and you're feeling kind of overwhelmed with all the things you tried to improve and you're thinking about cutting back, sometimes when people are in that moment, they're thinking, Yeah, I learned some of these groundwork things and these liberty things, but they could be better. And because they're stuck in that mentality, they actually don't consider how they could actually get better just by adding them to these little day-to-day moments. It's interesting because when I travel with my horses or when people come to my barn, one of the most commented on things about my horses is their ability to ground tie and ground tying is a great example of something that is best practiced every day. Just a little bit of it every day. And so for that reason, oftentimes it doesn't make it on the list of big goals. So if somebody is making a goal list for 2023, a lot of times it's going to be something like I want to be able to do lead changes or I want to be able to do, you know, compete in this event or I want to go on this big trail ride with a whole bunch of horses and not have my horse acting up. And so there are these really, "big goals," that people set. And they often leave these smaller things like ground tying out of the picture. And ironically, the ground tying is something that once you put some effort into learning it, how to do it. Once you put a little bit of effort into learning the skill of how you would train a horse to ground tie, it is something that you can easily practice day after day and have this infinite return on. And so sometimes when people are setting goals and–and I'm going to use the terms big and small because I want this picture in your mind of, maybe you've heard it before, but you know, you imagine your goals like there's a bucket and that bucket is how much time you have available to you. And you imagine that you can put maybe 3 to 5 big rocks in that bucket before they're going to be sticking out the top. And so you put those big rocks in and then you can put some smaller rocks in and then you can put some sand in and then you can put some water in. Well, in the words or the phrasing of big or small, as we look at goals, sometimes what I see is people focus on a few big things and they go, I'm going to work on reining, and that's going to involve spinning and lead changes and my bucket is full. Well, those are kind of big things that encompass like a lot of smaller steps. But again, if you're going to be leading your horse from the pasture to saddle them up, there's a lot more room in there for the sand and the water. That could very well be your liberty groundwork that is being worked on in these little invisible places with no extra time spent. So make sure that when you are sitting down at the end of the year and making these decisions really focus on making your decisions for 2023 from this feeling of embracing what you're about to do versus avoiding something.

Stacy Westfall:
So let's go back to the idea that you are at the end of 2022 and you're reviewing and you have a thought that something around that was a lot. That was too much. So if I reflect back to a time in my life when I had that thought, like that was too much, I don't want to do that again, if I put myself into that situation, what I remember feeling was tired, kind of overwhelmed. But really underneath it was slightly judgmental, like, why did I sign up for all of that? So there was a little bit of a judgmental vibe going on. And when I look back to times in my life when I felt like that, it is really important to recognize those are not the emotions I want to be in when I'm setting my new goal. So what I've learned is that before I start setting the new goal, I really want to take the time to clean up what I think about what I just did. So even if you are not planning on repeating the same goal, remember that if you did repeat the exact same goal, you are not the same person. Even if you repeated your 2022 goal, you are not the same person now going into January 2023. So you would not do that same set of actions. You would go about it in a different way because of what you learned. If you truly open yourself up to looking at what you could have done differently, it does not mean you have to repeat the same exact goal. But what it will do is it will change your focus. There won't be a right or wrong answer as far as like, I should do that goal again. There's no right or wrong. There's no should or shouldn't here. But what will happen if you take the time to look back at what you really could have shifted and other paths you could have taken to arrive at the end of 2022? What will happen is you can uncover this embracing everything you learn, embracing what you learned from going through 2022. And then what you can do once you've embraced, Oh, wow. I can really see looking back, I could have done it this way. This actually could have been easier. You can see the other opportunities, the other paths. And then you can choose whether or not to call one of those adventures complete or complete for now. Maybe you really are not going to pursue three different events again. Maybe you're going to focus on one. But you might also find that those other two. Are right there under the surface because you already put so much effort into them that you actually see them bubbling up. So it becomes I am seeing my groundwork lessons continuing even though my focus is on reining. I am seeing my dressage things that I studied showing up even as I'm learning about reining. That makes learning so fun because no matter what you choose, you begin to see the threads of how you can continue to carry all of it forward without overwhelming yourself with goals. One of my students, Tanya, shared a success story, and I want to read part of it to you. She wrote: The videos I submitted still showed there's room for improvement, but in a week there was definite improvement in both myself and my horse, Mango. His transitions into the canter were smoother. He's listening to the leg swipe better. He was more consistent with continuing to canter and he transitioned down much better and with more energy. I can feel him becoming softer and will begin using the second-hand slide. I'm always very critical of myself and it is at times difficult for me to send in videos knowing there's a possibility it will be viewed by many and they will see my mistakes. However, everyone who is participating in this program can greatly benefit from sharing in other's experiences. There have been times when I wanted to jump through the screen and say, Yes, I've done that too, or I so needed to hear that today while watching the Zoom calls. I feel I've gained so much more knowledge and I greatly hunger for more. Some of my goals may now increase because I feel more empowered and confident that if life permits, I can do this. Thanks for sharing your talent and your knowledge, and for giving us the opportunity to know we are not alone in this journey.

Stacy Westfall:
Thank you for sharing that, Tanya. And did you hear what she said? Some of my goals may now increase. That is music to my goal-setting ears. If you would like help setting and achieving your goals, come join me inside the Resourceful Rider program. You'll become part of a community of riders who are setting and achieving their goals, who are sharing and learning from each other. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Announcer:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit stacywestfall.com for articles, videos, and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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