How to Reframe Your Goals So They Feel Inevitable

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If you’ve ever set goals you genuinely want… and still watched yourself stall, second-guess, or fall back into old patterns, this episode is for you. I’m breaking down the missing piece of goal setting that almost no one talks about — the part that makes goals feel inevitable instead of exhausting. This isn’t about more discipline or a better plan. It’s about who you believe yourself to be while you’re going after what you want. If you’re tired of forcing change and wondering why it never sticks, this conversation will make a lot of things finally click.  

In this episode, we unpack:

  • Why traditional goal setting fails even when you really want the goal 

  • The identity shift that makes follow-through feel natural instead of forced 

  • How to turn goals into powerful present-tense identity statements 

  • Real examples of identity-based change in work, leadership, and motherhood 

  • What unapologetic living actually looks like in real life — not in theory 

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Transcript

Intro

If you've ever set goals that you genuinely care about and want, but still watch yourself stall, second guess, or fall back into old patterns, then this episode is for you. Because most goals don't fail because you didn't want them bad enough. They fail because something deeper never changed.

In this episode, I want to talk about what I believe is the missing piece to goal setting. Like it's the part that actually makes goals feel inevitable instead of exhausting. It's not more discipline. It's not a better plan. It's who you believe yourself to be while you're going after the goals that you want.

In this episode, we'll talk about why focusing on identity changes everything, how you decide, how you show up, and why some goals suddenly stop feeling so hard to sustain.

If you're tired of trying to force change and wondering why it never sticks, then this conversation will make a lot of things click.

Are you ready? Let's get to it.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, your go to resource for integrating your career ambitions with life as a mom, I'm distilling down thousands of coaching conversations I've had with working moms just like you, along with my own personal experience as a mom of two and sharing the most effective tools and strategies to help you quickly feel calm, confident, and in control of your ambitious working mom life. You ready? Let's get to it.

The Part of Goal Setting Most People Never Learn

Hello, hello, working moms. I am just coming off hosting a workshop that I did yesterday focused on 2026 planning and goal setting with my newly formed membership. It's called Unapologetic. At the moment, the membership is just open to my past clients, but stay tuned. Later this year, potentially, I'm going to be opening up the membership to others.

This two-hour planning session that I did really gave the members of this group a container of reflection for effective goal setting for the year ahead. I've never taught this process to anyone else before. I'm still giddy over the work that these women did and the goals and the focus that came out of this planning session.

I wanted to take a moment and share the most important aspect of planning that I walked the Unapologetic group through. This was a part of the planning process that none of them had ever done before and was literally mind blowing to them as they went through the process, because it's like the missing piece of effective goal setting and goal completion that most people don't talk about, because I don't think most of us have a reference for this.

It really feels like the perfect time to be talking about this, not just because it's January, but because in the podcast, we've been talking for the last couple of weeks about unapologetic living and truly living your ambitious, badass life that you want and going after it without apologizing.

Building on the Traps That Keep Women From Going All In

Last week, we spoke about the three traps that women get into that prevent them from going all in to their unapologetic life and living ambitiously and having it all. Then in this week, in this episode, it just feels like we're really going to build on what we've been talking about. I'm going to offer to you that missing link in a very super practical way that brings unapologetic living so much easier. It makes it so much easier for you as you go after it.

All right, so you ready? I'm excited. Let's dive in.

Why Traditional Goal Setting Falls Short

So the problem with traditional goal setting is that it focuses mostly on what you do and what you want to accomplish. Lose 20 pounds. Don't work after the kids go to sleep. Prioritize my health. Spend more time with my family. Drink less alcohol.

These are all actions. They're like specific behaviors that you want to see change or happen or what you want to accomplish in the upcoming year. None of it is wrong. Those are really important types of goals. I believe there's just a more powerful way to frame these goals other than through action change and behavior change.

To go after your unapologetic goals, you have to start with your identity. That's who you are. The starting question isn't, "What do you want to do this year?" It's, "Who do you want to be this year?"

When Goals Become Identity Statements

To give you an example, let me talk about my own life from 2025. 2025 was a challenging year for me. As many of you out there already know, I've talked a bit about it. I felt very stuck. I was living almost in this hole of some kind.

When it came to my business, I wasn't making decisions. I was living in a lot of confusion. I was comparing myself to a lot of other coaches in their business and their growth. I wasn't feeling enough all of the time. I was insecure. I was anxious. I was waking up in the middle of the night thinking about all these things, just really living this low-level failure story a good portion of the year and within many aspects of life.

I'm not saying I wasn't successful, but everything felt heavy and hard.

As I was reflecting on 2025 back in December, and I was thinking about this year and I was talking to ChatGPT because that's a very common way that I like to process things and capture feedback, I really heard myself say things like, "I was stuck. I was confused. I was embarrassed about my progress. I was a failure. I was insecure. I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't making decisions. I was digging myself into a hole."

What do you notice about all of these types of statements, other than them being inherently negative? What do you notice? They're all identity statements. They all start with "I." When sentences start with "I," that means you're making some sort of comment about you, specifically about who you are.

Who Do You Need to Be to Achieve the Goal?

Then as I started to think about 2026 and my goals for my work and my business and the growth that I wanted to see, I started really focusing. I started countering a lot of those statements and thinking about who I really wanted to be.

If you want to lose 20 pounds this year, the fastest way for you to do that is to think about who you would need to be in order to achieve the weight loss. Literally, almost imagine yourself having already achieved the weight loss, thinking about who that person is and then embodying that person right now.

Not waiting until you lose the 20 pounds to embody that person and become that person, but embodying her now. Become the person that thinks about food differently, that thinks about movement differently, that incorporates exercise and rest and enjoys time for herself, that looks in the mirror and loves her body. Become that person now because if you do, you're going to naturally lose the weight. See what I mean?

Identity Is the Path to Being Ambitious and Balanced

If we're talking about work-life balance and becoming somebody that is both ambitious and balanced and lives unapologetically, who do you imagine that person to be? What do they do? How do they think? What do they prioritize? How do they think about themselves?

Whatever your answer is to those questions is essentially your step-by-step path to achieving the goal of being ambitious and balanced and living unapologetically this year.

Turning Goals Into Identity Statements

In this workshop that I hosted for my new Unapologetic membership, there was a moment where we were creating identity statements, which I'm going to talk about here in a minute, but we were comparing what a goal looks like and using goals as a framework to shift those into identity statements. I want to give you some examples of what I mean by that.

I want you to think about your 2026. Maybe you've already done some goal setting or resolutions or you've picked a word of the year or something you've done for yourself. Hopefully you've done that already. If you have, totally okay. It doesn't matter. Think about it right now. Think about a goal, something you want to achieve this year.

Why Identity Statements Are More Powerful Than Goals

As an example, one of my clients in the workshop, what she said is she wanted to stop people pleasing, but she wanted to stop caring a whole less about other people's emotions and carrying around what other people thought of her and coddling other people's emotions so much. Awesome goal. Really important. It's really essential in living an unapologetic and balanced life, not worrying about disappointing others. That's a really important skill set.

I want you to hear the difference between the goal being, I want to get out of people pleasing and care less about what other people think. That's the goal. Versus, I don't tiptoe around other people's emotions or let what other people think get in the way of my priorities.

Now, it's really the same thing, isn't it? One is framed through the lens of an action or a goal or change of some kind. One is framed more like an identity about who you want to become. Which one feels more powerful? Which one of them makes your ears perk up a little bit and you're like, whoa, she's pretty badass. It's the identity statement.

Why Identity Statements Create Faster, Stronger Change

So let me take a couple of other common examples, and that way you really understand what I'm talking about.

If the goal is to be more confident and make more confident decisions, again, really important in an ambitious and balanced life, confidence is key. Awesome goal. The identity statement sounds more like this: I don't second guess my decisions. I trust myself and my instincts, decide quickly, and don't look back.

Which one sounds more powerful? Which one would motivate you more? It's the second one, right? The identity statement.

Here's another example. Maybe your goal is to work less or to like contain work within your work hours, right? Great goal. One of the core principles that I teach inside the Ambitious and Balanced community. The identity statement might sound like this: I don't work past my decided work hours. I achieve everything I need to achieve within that time. I say I'm going to do it and I don't feel the urge to log back on.

Again, the goal and the identity statement are very similar, right? They're coming at the desired change or the desired result for 2026. They're just coming at it from a different angle, right?

And I think so many people get it wrong when it comes to goals, as they focus way too much on changing behavior and action, but they forget to fuel that action and behavior with the identity change that's necessary to achieve it. That is the missing piece that makes all of the difference when it comes to goal setting and goal achieving.

When Ambition and Motherhood Feel Mutually Exclusive

Back in 2024, I had a client. I'm going to call her Sarah just to keep her identity anonymous, but Sarah felt very stuck when we started working together. She felt trapped between her ambitious career goals and objectives and her desire to be a very present and connected mom to her two kids that I think at the time were like three and four.

Every decision she made felt like she was choosing one or the other, and she felt terrible about it all of the time. In her mind, there was like literally no way that her work ambition and her work goals and her motherhood experience that she wanted could work together. They were always at odds with one another. And that felt almost like a fact to her when we started working together.

How That Belief Kept Her Stuck

And because of that, she turned down some really amazing work opportunities. She was feeling like a failure as a leader. She wasn't delegating to people. And so her calendar and her workload were super overwhelming. She wasn't saying no to things that she really needed to say no to.

She sort of was stuck in this mindset of if I'm not doing it for the kids, like if the mom isn't doing it, then I'm not being a great mom. So she started feeling like she was shrinking on the inside, and her confidence and her leadership were really suffering.

What Changed When She Started Embodying a New Identity

Then in 2025, things really started to shift for her because she started to actually embody the person that she wanted to be, that she knew that she could be. She started to believe that her work and her family goals were not at odds with one another.

She started to believe that spending more time with her kids actually didn't make her a better mom. It was presence. She started to believe that time for herself, time with her friends, time with her spouse, even time spent working and on her work goals, was all of that was actually in service of her family.

She took a few trips with her husband that year, just the two of them. First time she'd ever done that and been away from the kids. She started to envision herself as a leader that delegated more. She hired more people on her team. She took less responsibility for their failures, their mistakes. She truly grew into a senior leader, all because of who she was becoming and believing herself to be.

We worked hard at focusing on her identity:

  • I am the leader that casts big vision and makes strategic plans. 

  • I am the mom that prioritizes presence. 

  • I don't let others dictate my schedule. 

  • I choose strategic opportunities on behalf of my career and my family. 

  • I am the right leader for this team. 

  • I am super successful and equipped and prepared for anything that comes my way.

These were the beliefs that she started to embody. It was no wonder by the end of 2025, she felt infinitely different than she had been feeling for years before that.

What started to come out of her as she worked on her identity is that she was making clearer leadership decisions. She was more decisive with her priorities and her schedule. She was willing to delegate. She was spending more focused, uninterrupted time with her family.

And as opportunities were coming her way to speak and to grow what she was doing, she took those without any guilt.

Unapologetic Living Starts With Identity, Not Effort

Unapologetic living this year is not about doing more. It's about deciding who you are willing to be, especially when it's uncomfortable, especially when it might disappoint others, and especially when certainty isn't always available. An unapologetic life is built on identity, not permission.

Your next steps coming out of listening to this episode is to take whatever goals or intentions or focus that you've set for yourself in 2026. Hopefully, you have taken some time to already do that. If you haven't, by all means, please, please, please contact me and book a work life balance strategy call where we could talk about vision for your upcoming year.

How to Turn Goals Into Powerful Identity Statements

Here's what I want you to do. I want you to take your goals and your focus and your intentions, whatever you call it, and I want you to take each of them, and I want you to turn them into a powerful identity statement.

Here's a couple of guidelines for you as you do this to make it super powerful.

Number one, number one, write it in the present. I am. It's not I'm going to or I'm willing to or I will. It's I am and then fill in the blank.

Number two, use ambitious and big language. Make it bigger than feels comfortable to you. It's not just I make decisive decisions. It's I never second guess my decisions and I always trust my instinct. Think big and powerful language.

Then number three, every goal should have five identity statements connected to it. 

I want your goals to be flooded with identity beliefs. This is the magic right here. This is literally the missing piece of why you have potentially struggled in the past to meet your goals, set goals, achieve goals.

It's not that you are changing. It's that you are not changing who you are becoming first. You're not changing the fuel behind your goals to make them happen.

If you want some support or you feel lost in who you are, know that you are not alone. It is very, very common at motherhood to feel like you are in the middle of an identity crisis. That is some very specific work that I do with a lot of my clients. I would love to connect with you on that. If that is a struggle, you can simply go to my website, www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to find a time to connect with me personally to discuss that.

The Identity I See in You

To close our time, I want to speak over you some identity statements. These are things that I believe about you. Yes, you. I'm talking to each and every one of you. And as I am reading these over you one by one, I want you to imagine them trickling down from your conscious mind down your chest, flooding your entire body. Are you ready?

  • You are magnetic. Ideas, people, joy flow to you effortlessly.

  • You are a visionary. You sit above problems and can see all of the moving pieces that others can't.

  • You have huge capacity, so much time, so much energy, so much spark.

  • You are desirable, wanted. You have deep belonging.

  • You are wildly capable. Nothing seems to get in your way. You always figure it out.

  • You are unshakable. You know who you are and what you bring to the table, and it is valuable.

  • You are unapologetic, going after what you desire and want without question or hesitation.

Until next week, working moms, let's get to it.

A Simple Daily Practice to End Overwhelm and Lead Your Day

If you wake up most days spinning with 100 different priorities vying for your attention, then the Daily Kickstart is exactly what you need. It's a simple six-step process that helps you get your thoughts out of your head, reset your mindset, and refocus on what actually matters.

It's designed to help shift you out of overwhelm and into calm, confident action before the chaos hits. This daily practice is the same tool I offer to all my clients, and it's going to show you exactly how to lead your day instead of react to it.

It takes just 10 minutes a day, and the impact will ripple through everything—your mood, your energy, your presence with your kids, and how you lead at work. My clients indicate time and time again that this tool was the one that made the biggest difference for them, and I'm offering it to you totally free.

You can download it by going to www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/daily-kickstart. And of course, I'll have that for you in the show notes as well.

All right, working moms, let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson