GGS-2: Myths

Elizabeth: [00:00:00] So if you’ve ever set a goal with the best of intentions, only to watch it fall apart a few weeks later and wondered. What the heck is wrong with me? Why can’t I just stick to it? You need to hear what I am about to say today because what if the reason that your goal slipped through your fingers has nothing to do with your motivation, your discipline, your willpower, or even trying harder?

What if you’ve been using a system that guarantees failure for a woman with a life like yours? So today I am exposing the exact myths that make midlife women quit on themself. Not because they’re not committed, but because the strategies that they’re using were never designed for that invisible labor, the emotional load, the unpredictability, and the sheer responsibility of everything that you are carrying.

And here’s the part that most women don’t wanna [00:01:00] hear, but desperately need to. Once you see these missed, clearly, you cannot unsee them. They change the way that you set goals forever. If you skip this episode, you will go right back into that same pattern that keeps you stuck year after year. But if you listen, you’ll finally understand why your past goals fell apart, and more importantly, how to set goals that work with your actual life instead of against it.

So let’s get into it.

Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast, the podcast for women over 40 who want peace with food, ease in their habits, and a body that they don’t have to fight with.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast. I am Elizabeth Sherman, your host, and I am so super glad that you are here with me today. We are in day two of the Goal Setting Series A four part series I run every year between Christmas and [00:02:00] New Year’s to help you set goals in a way that actually works for your real life.

Not the imaginary life you wish you had and not the life that you used to have in your thirties and Not the life that productivity gurus assume that you’re living while their wives are quietly running the entire household behind the scenes. This series is designed for you, a woman in midlife with a very full plate.

Complicated responsibilities, shifting hormones and decades of being the one who holds everything together. And if you’ve ever felt like you’ve set goals with the best of intentions only to watch them fall apart by February, you are in the right place because there is nothing wrong with you. Simply been using the wrong approach.

So today is part two of the four in the series, and we are talking about the biggest myths that sabotage your goals before you even begin. And [00:03:00] when I say myths, I mean the ideas that we’ve been taught to believe that are facts, things like, I should feel motivated if I really want this, or if I can’t be consistent every single day.

Why bother? once life calms down, I’ll finally have the time, or I just need more willpower. These myths feel true because they are everywhere. We hear other people talking about them. In the fitness world, in diet culture, in corporate goal setting, frameworks, even on the way that we talk to ourselves.

They are the very reason that your past goals have slipped through your fingers, and not because you’re not trying hard enough, not because you lack discipline, but because you were set up to fail by ideas that simply don’t match the reality of your life. So today I want to invite you into [00:04:00] curiosity instead of self-blame.

What if your path struggles with following through aren’t personal? What if they don’t mean anything about you? What if in fact they’re structural? And what if once you understand the myths working against you, you suddenly see a clear path to goals that feel doable and sustainable. So let’s get into it.

Let’s talk about why these myths hit midlife women, especially hard because if you’re anything like the women that I work with, your life is not set up for rigid, linear, perfect routines. It’s full of invisible labor, emotional labor caregiving, managing households, keeping mental running 24 7, and doing the kind of work that no one notices until you stop doing it.

Add in shifting hormones, unpredictable energy levels, and sleep that suddenly has a mind of its own aging [00:05:00] parents who need more support, adult kids who still need emotional tending and careers that don’t exactly slow down just because you’d like them to, and you have a completely different terrain to navigate your goals on.

Traditional goal setting assumes a clean slate. It assumes that you have a predictable schedule, consistent energy, and a support system that catches the overflow, but you and I both know that’s not the setup you’re working with. This is why I like that plate and meatballs analogy that we talked about in the first episode.

You have a plate that is already overflowing. You have work, family, relationships, responsibilities, errands, all of it. And when you add your health goals on top of that plate, like meatballs on top of a mountain of spaghetti, they stay put only when life is perfectly still. But when life starts to [00:06:00] shift even a little bit.

Those meatballs roll right off. And not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because you’ve been trying to stack something important on top of something that’s completely unstable, this is the part that most women never get told.

Your goals don’t collapse because you’re inconsistent. They collapse because your life is set up in a way that doesn’t support them. And so my job today is to help you see those invisible forces clearly so that you can finally stop blaming yourself and start building goals that work with your life and not against it.

So let’s start off with the first big myth. The belief that the motivation you feel when you set the goal is the same motivation that you will feel the entire way to completion.

Because

in the moment you. That this is it. This is the year the motivation is real. It’s [00:07:00] strong and it feels like clarity. It feels like urgency, and you assume that it’s going to carry you through to the end. You’re not wrong for believing that. It’s incredibly convincing that emotion in that moment. There is no other higher priority.

You’re uncomfortable with the way that things are right now. You’re tired of feeling the way that you feel and the. Quote unquote, pain of staying the same is right there at the surface. That discomfort gives you momentum, but here’s the part that no one tells you. That discomfort doesn’t stay that loud, and once you start taking action even a little, the pain starts to soften.

You start to feel a little bit better. You feel more in control and because the discomfort fades, so does the urgency. And so this [00:08:00] is where we hit the messy middle. The place where the motivation you started with drops off. The pain that pushed you into action isn’t as sharp and the payoff of the goal suddenly feels far away and less important.

And when you get to that point, your brain does what the brain does best. It offers believable reasons to skip. It says things like just this once, it’s fine, I’ll double up tomorrow. I had a long day, and it doesn’t really matter. Right? And the truth is, those reasons aren’t lies. You can skip. Nothing catastrophic will happen with your health, and that’s what makes it so slippery.

You’re not skipping because you’re lazy or inconsistent. You’re skipping because your nervous system is responding to stress, fatigue and [00:09:00] competing demands of real life, and it’s prioritizing short-term relief over your long-term reward. One of my clients, Deb, had a perfect example of this. She had a weekly yoga class on her calendar, and she started off really super strong.

She loved going to that class partly because. The studio charged if you didn’t show up, which definitely helped. But after a few weeks, her work stress started to ramp up. She would sit down at her desk, she would see a long to-do list, and then get this little hit of dopamine every time she crossed something off of that to-do list, and that dopamine hit became more rewarding than the payoff that she got in her yoga class.

Even though she really liked the class, even though she felt better afterwards in the moment, completing another task [00:10:00] felt more compelling, more urgent, more productive. And that’s the myth at work, thinking that because how you feel motivated now that you will feel motivated later. Motivation isn’t a moral compass.

It’s a sensation and it changes based on your stress, your energy levels, how much sleep you’ve gotten, your hormones, your workload, and how loud everything else in your life is. And when you understand that, you stop expecting motivation to carry you through and

Instead, you learn how to build systems that support you when motivation disappears like we expect it to. Now, the second myth that gets in the way is the idea that consistency means perfection. If you don’t do your routine exactly the way that you planned it on the exact day with the exact amount of time, [00:11:00] it doesn’t count, and I put that in quotes.

This all or nothing thinking that we’ve all absorbed from diet, culture, and productivity. Culture exists and it’s one of the fastest ways to sabotage yourself. We’ve been told that consistency looks like a perfectly checked off calendar. Immaculate streaks and routines executed with military precision, but that model comes from people whose lives are structured for that consistency.

People with support systems in place, predictable schedules, and way fewer interruptions than the average woman in midlife. Your life is not structured like that. Your days are full of unpredictability. Aging parents calling it inconvenient times, grown kids needing emotional support, a partner who somehow can’t find anything on their own, and work deadlines that shift without [00:12:00] warning or fluctuating energy levels, hormonal changes, and the thousands of tiny demands that no one else even notices, but are commonplace for you.

You cannot build a perfection based system on top of a life that is inherently imperfect. And I used to fall for this myth myself for years. I believed that unless I ran for a full hour, it wasn’t considered a real workout. I would procrastinate and just piddle around the house all day long, whittling away the time until surprise.

I no longer had that full hour because I was backing up to another responsibility that I had to get to. And because one hour was the rule that I had set for myself, it honestly never occurred to me that I could just run for 40 minutes or 30, or even 20. It was either the full thing or [00:13:00] nothing. And so most days, guess what I did?

I blew it off. And then I felt bad about myself and not because I didn’t wanna run, not because I wasn’t capable, but because the version of that consistency that I had in my head was completely disconnected from the reality of my life. That’s what perfection based consistency does. It tricks you into believing that the only valid effort is maximum effort, and it turns small, wins into failures.

It erases progress, and it creates a system where you are more likely to quit, then continue. But real consistency, the kind that creates real results is the ability to restart. The ability to scale something down if it doesn’t fit the ability to shift when life shifts. It’s the skill of [00:14:00] showing up in whatever way you can, not the fantasy of showing up perfectly.

And once you stop expecting perfection, you instantly become more consistent. Now another myth that sneaks into almost every woman’s mind is the belief that life is about to calm down, that the chaos is temporary, and once things settle down right, then you will finally have the time and bandwidth to focus on your health.

You know, the script after this project is done after the holidays, once things slow down at work after vacation next month, for sure. But here’s the reality, there is always another thing coming up. After the moment, one thing ends, something else moves right into its place, a different deadline, a different crisis, a different season of someone else needing you.[00:15:00]

Life is not a conveyor belt that gives you a clean, empty space. It’s more like a plate that’s already piled high and every time you think that you’ve cleared a little room, the plate shifts and something new, rolls right in. And most of us don’t see this pattern for what it is. It’s actually a delay tactic that feels responsible.

It feels reassuring. It feels productive. All it really does is push your goal further into the future while everything else still gets your time, your energy, and your attention. The truth is that this myth is comforting. It lets you believe that the problem isn’t the way that you’re approaching your goal.

It’s the timing. And as long as timing is the issue, you don’t get to change anything. You can hold onto the fantasy that future you. Will [00:16:00] magically have more space, more energy, and more control, but that future will never arrive. And I bet if you look back, you can see this pattern in your own life. How many times have you said that you will start after things calm down, only to realize that they never did?

How many times did you put off a goal because something else felt more urgent or more deserving, and now months, even years have passed. Now, I’m not saying this to create shame, but to give you clarity, because every time you wait for the perfect moment, you waste one resource that you can never get back, and that’s time.

Time that you could have spent making slow, imperfect progress time that you could have spent building habits, time that you could have spent living in a body that, and a routine that actually [00:17:00] felt good. Life isn’t gonna calm down, not in the way that you imagine, and that’s not a problem. It just means that your system, the way that you approach your goals needs to work inside the life that you already have and not the fantasy life that you have been waiting for.

So the next myth is the belief that successful women simply have more willpower. That they’re stronger, more disciplined, more committed, or somehow wired differently than you are. And if you’ve ever told yourself, if I could just try harder, I’d finally get this right. This one is for you.

Now, here’s the truth. Willpower is not a personality trait. It’s a resource and a limited one on top of that. Midlife women burn through that resource faster than almost anyone else. Between stress, decision making, emotional labor, and managing other people’s needs, and the hormonal shifts that [00:18:00] impact mood, energy, and sleep, your willpower tank is constantly being drained long before you even get to your own goals.

This is why the try harder narrative keeps you stuck. You’re not failing due to a lack of effort, you’re running out of fuel. I used to feel this in such a clear, frustrating way with chocolate after dinner

during the day, I wouldn’t even think about chocolate. It wasn’t a thing. I didn’t crave it at seven 30 in the morning. I didn’t want it mid-afternoon, but after a long, stressful day, suddenly the chocolate became magnetic.

It was like some sort of switch flipped at 8:00 PM at night, and for the longest time I could not understand why. I could resist it all day long, but then not at night. It wasn’t about the chocolate. It was about willpower depletion [00:19:00] all day long. I was making these tiny little decisions, managing tasks, shifting focus, absorbing stress, navigating emotions, using up that finite supply of self-control.

And by the time dinner was over, my nervous system was completely shot.

The part of my brain responsible for long-term thinking and goal-oriented behavior was completely offline. And the part that wanted comfort, relief, and ease was totally in charge.

That’s how willpower works. It’s not a moral failing, it’s not a measure of character, it’s physiology. And midlife physiology with all its hormonal fluctuations, sleep challenges, and sheer volume of responsibilities that women carry makes willpower even more fragile. And once you understand that, everything changes, you stop asking yourself why you can’t just have more discipline, and you start asking yourself the real [00:20:00] question.

How can I build a system that doesn’t rely on willpower at all? Because relying on willpower is like relying on your phone battery to stay at 100% all day long. It’s just not gonna happen. But once you expect it to drain And you build in habits and boundaries and routines that support you.

When it does, things suddenly get easier. Now, here’s the part that tends to hit women right in the chest. You’ve been judging yourself using models that were never designed for you or your life. Most of the goal setting advice out there, whether it’s from fitness influencers, 20 somethings on TikTok or male productivity gurus comes from people whose daily responsibilities look nothing like yours.

They’re not juggling aging parents. They’re not supporting grown kids or running households or managing [00:21:00] emotional dynamics, handling invisible labor, or absorbing the constant background hum of everyone else’s needs. Their routines work because someone else is most likely handling the details of their daily life.

Someone else is keeping track of the appointments, the meals, the laundry, the family calendar, the emotional support. You don’t have that. You are the one that does that for others. And that matters because when you’re, quote unquote, the capable one, the one who everyone turns to, the one who picks up the slack, the one who notices the things that no one else sees, your time is not your own.

Your mental load is not light. Your energy is not predictable, and your nervous system is not operating with the same ease and bandwidth of someone whose only job is to focus on [00:22:00] themselves. You’ve been following systems built for someone else’s life and then blaming yourself when they collapse under the weight of yours.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are not lazy. You’re not inconsistent or lacking discipline. You’ve simply been trying to fit your very real, very full life into strategies that ignore everything that we carry in this stage of our life. This is where the relief comes in because once you can recognize that the models were wrong for you, for us.

You can finally stop fighting yourself and start designing something that actually works for you. So here’s the truth that I wanna leave you with today. The problem was never you. It was the strategy that you were taught to use. Your goals didn’t fall apart because you weren’t committed enough or disciplined enough.

They fell apart because you were [00:23:00] trying to build them on top of a life that’s already overflowing. Using methods designed for people who don’t live anything close to the reality that you live every day, and as long as your goals are built for an imaginary ideal life, a life with more time, more energy, fewer demands.

Fewer interruptions, they will always feel fragile. A single disruption can knock everything over, but when you build your goals for the life that you actually have, everything starts to change. When you stop pretending that things will magically calm down. When you stop relying on motivation, when you stop expecting perfection, when you stop trying to white knuckle your way through willpower.

You suddenly see what’s been missing all along a system that bends with your real life instead of breaking under it. That’s what life [00:24:00] proofing is. It’s the art of designing your health habits around your actual responsibilities, your actual emotional load, your actual energy patterns, and the actual people who rely on you.

It’s learning how to make your health the plate, the foundation, instead of another meatball just balanced on top. Tomorrow’s episode is where we take this to the next step. We’re gonna talk about the obstacles that you will run into, not might, but will, and how to plan for them in a way that keeps your goals steady, no matter what life throws at you.

Because once you understand the real problem, you finally have the power to build a system that works. Now as I wrap up today, I want you to start noticing these myths in your own thinking. Start noticing where you expect motivation to save you. Notice where [00:25:00] perfection sneaks in. Notice where you’re waiting for life to quiet down and notice where you’re blaming willpower for what’s really exhaustion, stress or responsibility overload.

Tomorrow in day three, we are going to take everything we’ve unpacked here and apply it to your real life. look at the predictable obstacles that tend to knock your goals off track, and I’ll show you how to build a plan that anticipates them instead of hoping that they won’t happen.

And if you’re listening today and thinking, okay, Elizabeth, this is starting to finally make sense, but how do I actually do this? That’s exactly why I created the LifeProof Your Health Playbook. It is an amazing playbook that walks you through how to LifeProof your health. It walks you step by step through creating goals that fit your actual routines, your actual energy, your actual responsibilities, not the [00:26:00] fantasy version of your life.

You can find it@elizabethsherman.com slash life Proof Dash Playbook. I’ll link it in the show notes as well because that’s a pretty long URL, so. If you’re tired of setting goals that you don’t follow through on and you want a system that supports you, instead of fights, you go download the playbook.

It will help you to dismantle these myths in the context of your life and start building habits that stick. That’s all I have for you today. Have an amazing day, and I will see you for day three, which is tomorrow. See you then. Bye-bye.

Hey, before you go, if you’re ready to stop forcing yourself into someone else’s idea of a healthy routine and discover your own, take a look at the Life Proof Your Health Playbook. It’s a step-by-step guide that helps you to build a foundation that actually supports your life. Instead of competing with it inside, you’ll learn how to [00:27:00] create margin.

Plan with flexibility and anchor habits in a way that feels natural, not exhausting. You’ll also get a full video and audio series so that you never feel lost along the way. To get the LifeProof Your Health Playbook, go to elizabeth sherman.com/life Proof Playbook and get your copy there and you’ll find everything that you need in the show notes.

Let’s make your health something that finally fits the life you have.