Undergoaling Versus Overgoaling in Business

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When it comes to setting goals in business, we're often doing it all wrong. You hear experts preaching all the time to set goals higher than you can possibly imagine...and then wonder why it never works. Listen in as Katrina explains how to set goals to guarantee success in this episode of the podcast.

The episode:

Katrina Widener: Hello, everyone. Today it is just me here on the podcast, but I'm really excited to talk to you guys about one of the concepts has been coming up a lot in group coaching. I thought this might be something that would be easier to explain to you on a podcast episode, as opposed to an Instagram post or an email blast, because it's a little bit of a more abstract or nebulous concept, but it's something that can really make a big difference for you in your business. Specifically when you are trying to move your business further or really bring in that consistent income. It's a subconscious check that we use, when we're trying to get ourselves in this mindset of really being able to find consistent success.

Really what this is is the idea of under-goaling versus over-goaling. I first heard about this from Dielle Charon, who's another sales and money mindset coach. She's absolutely amazing, and it was something that I learned from her a long time ago, and it's so important and impactful for our businesses. When I first talk about under-goaling versus over-goaling, I oftentimes have clients who are thinking that under-goaling is this bad thing. That, "oh, I'm selling myself short. I'm not setting high enough goals. I'm really under-goaling." And while that does happen, I want to first, before you even dive into it, clarify that when we talk about under-goaling, we're actually talking about a very strategic, simple process.

When do you want to over-goal or when you want to under-goal, you're making this as a conscious decision and taking it through Human Design, to make sure that whichever one you're choosing is really aligned with you. It's really sitting down and saying, am I choosing to stretch myself right now? Or am I choosing to get myself into the right mindset right now? And that might not make a ton of sense, but I promise I will explain it all.

Under-goaling is really when we are deciding to set our goals as things that we know we can reach. Oftentimes in entrepreneurship, you hear people talking about goal setting as something where it's like, "Set something that's a little bit of a stretch. Don't undersell yourself. Don't make this something that is too easy for you to get, because then you're never going to grow. You're never going to up-level, et cetera, et cetera."

And really when I'm talking about under-goaling, I'm talking about something very intentional. We are specifically choosing to set goals that we know that we can reach, because it tricks our subconscious mind. When you are doing something like running a business that has been very scary and that forces you to step out of your comfort zone again, and again, and again, and again, and again, our subconscious mind reacts the same way that say your brain would act if you were a caveman, and there was a bear there, and we're stepping out of our comfort zone going toward this dangerous animal, that's going to attack us and we're going to die. Our brains literally think that we're going to die every single time that we step out of the comfort zone, because the way that the brain works is that it takes in information from our lives, and it processes it, and it stores it as patterns.

It says A plus B equals C, A plus B equals C, A plus B equals C. This is how we get conditioning, but this is also how we stay small. Because when we come up against D, something that our brain has never approached beforehand, never seen beforehand, it's going to turn around and hide because it doesn't know that. It hasn't processed that information yet. It hasn't been able to create a predictable pattern, so it doesn't know what the outcome is. So it sees it as terrifying as a life or death situation. This is why so many people get frozen and stuck in an action when they're trying to get out of their comfort zone. It's because your brain doesn't know what's going to happen, and it gets really, really scared.

It can be showing up on Instagram stories like your face, showing up on video with your face, or it can be taking a big, big leap and investing in something. Or I can literally be coming up against a bear in the wild, right? Each one of those things your brain sees as equally scary. So when we choose to under-goal, and we choose to set goals that our brain knows that it can achieve, your brain goes, "Oh, I can achieve that goal. I can achieve that goal. I can achieve that goal." And then it does achieve those goals. And it says, "I achieved that goal. I achieved that goal, and I achieved that goal." When you do next set a goal that is a little bit harder, a little bit of a stretch, and I'm not talking a big stretch, I'm saying "I'm setting a goal to go on live twice a week. I know I can do that. I know that I could go live twice a week. That doesn't seem too scary." And if that does seem scary, pick a different example. But then when we say I'm going to do one YouTube video, the jump from going live two times a week to doing a YouTube video, it doesn't seem that scary anymore because our brain is so used to winning. And especially if you celebrate every single goal that you achieve, when you're in this under-goaling stage, your brain is especially going to be like, "Yeah, I'm on top of this. I know exactly what I'm doing. I can reach every goal I set." And it really is tricking your subconscious mind into the belief that you can hit any goal that you set.

This is why we step into the under-goaling stage. This is when we choose this strategically is when our brains are terrified, our brains are afraid to do anything. So we trick them by setting goals that are achievable, that we know are really easy and really achievable. And then having that be what our brain is working toward, so that then when we choose something that's a little bit harder, our brain immediately goes, "Oh, I can get that to look at all the other things I've done." So that is under-goaling.

Next, when we're talking about over-goaling, this is what a lot of business coaches talk about when they're saying, "You need to set bigger goals. You need to try something harder. You need to do something you need to reach for." The thing is that when we're in the season where we are setting big goals, when we are over-goaling, what we're actually doing is that we are forcing ourselves to show up and to act differently, to change how we as human beings think and move and take action.

When you're in the under-goaling stage, this is where you're trying to build confidence and especially build the confidence of the subconscious brain. Make that part of your brain feel really, really confident. When we are moving into the over-goaling stage, this is where we are trying to stretch that subconscious. We are trying to make it have dreams bigger than anything that we could have possibly ever imagined.

The first rule of over-goaling is it does not matter if you make these goals or not. There's a 50/50 chance you could achieve that, or you could not. A great example of setting these huge goals could be: Under-goaling, I'm going to make sure that I make $40,000 this year. That's my undergoal. I know that that's achievable. I know that that's something I've done beforehand, or I know that that's not too much of a stress from what I made last year. Over-goaling, I'm going to make $100,000 this year. This is forcing you and your brain to stretch and step into a different role that you've never been in beforehand, and you're going to get a lot of fears that do come up.

We're almost talking as if under-goaling is to make those fears feel better and trick your mind. And then over-goaling is to make these fears bubble up so you can face them and move through them. What I often tell people when they're in this over-goaling stage is that it's forcing you to show up as a different person. The person that you have to be when you're under-goaling versus the person that you have to be when you're over-goaling is showing up very, very, very differently.

For instance, if you're someone who has a lot of fear around having a lot of money, maybe by setting this big goal, this is forcing you to get a financial planner. This is forcing you to really look at your systems and automations and make sure that they're in place before you can bring in this big money. Maybe it's making sure that you need to have a firm schedule in place on a day-to-day basis. So you know exactly what you're doing when you sit down at your desk. Maybe this is saying, "Hey, do you know those contracts or that business insurance that you're like, oh, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. If you're making $100,000, you need to have that in order before you can show up as the person who makes that amount of money."

And this is why we over-goal. When we know that we need to shake things up, when we really need to stretch into that new role, into that CEO of a business as opposed to a solopreneur, that's when we over-goal. And the beauty about over-goaling and under-goaling is they each have their own amazing, but very, very different purpose. There are different seasons in business, and you're going to use these in different seasons. Oftentimes you're going to flip back and forth, and flip back and forth, and flip back and forth. I'll even use myself as an example. At the end of last year, right in the middle of COVID -- even at the beginning of this year, I was in under-goaling stages. I was saying, "I want to be on five podcasts interviews this year. I want to be making this amount of really achievable money. I want to make sure I have at least this amount of people in group coaching."

And the thing is is that if we use an example of like, "Okay, my under-goal to have two people signed up, my regular goal is to have it sold out, and my overall goal is to have 10 people on the waitlist." I have to show up as a different person for each of those three goals. And if I am achieving this, I have two people signed up in group coaching, and I celebrate it by either treating myself, or having a glass of champagne, or something to give my brain that ping, that Pavlov's dog reaction, that sense of joy and serotonin, right? Then I'm going to be in a place where when I want to flip, like I did earlier this year, into over-goaling, my brain is going to be like, "Hell yeah, I can do that. I can achieve anything. Look at all these goals I just achieved."

And now that I'm in over-goaling, doing things like forcing myself to operate in a new way, stretching, doesn't feel so scary, because my brain has already subconsciously been tricked into believing it can achieve whatever it wants to do. So now I can stretch into this new existence. I can stretch into a new definition of what a CEO in my business looks like, and how they show up, and really actually implement the ideas that I have, instead of getting frozen in fear. Because often what happens is that entrepreneurs choose the over-goaling or the normal goal every single time. But they're not doing the mindset work or the subconscious work to make those things actually happen. So instead they're actually scaring their subconscious brain into inaction, into freezing, into sitting and not changing anything, because it's so terrified of what it doesn't know.

But if your brain already believes it can achieve whatever the hell it wants to, and then you have a season of over-goaling when you're asking more, and more, and more of it, it's forcing you to show up in a different way. And it doesn't even matter if you achieve the goal because you are now a different person than you were before you started over-goaling.

Anyway, I hope that all of this is resonating with you guys. This is something that's been coming up a lot and I've been getting questions on it, so I thought that it might be a great topic for the podcast. If you do have any questions or comments, please feel free to DM me on Instagram. You can find me at @katrina.widener. Otherwise I would love to hear you guys leave a review or a comment here as well. Thank you so much, and I will talk to you next week.