Hey, this is Lindsay Dotzlaf, and you are listening to Mastering Coaching Skills episode 270. To really compete in the coaching industry, you have to be great at coaching. That’s why every week, I will be answering your questions, sharing my stories, and offering tips and advice so you can be the best at what you do. Let’s get to work.

Hey coach, I’m so glad you’re here. And if you are listening in real time, happy almost New Year’s Eve. This episode is coming out at the very end of 2025, and I have something special for you today. But I just want you to know, no matter what month it is, no matter what day it is when you’re listening to this, that’s okay. Hopefully, this will be one of those episodes that you save to come back and listen to when you need to hear this reminder. Okay?

So as we’re coming up to the end of the year, I know what is very normal for a lot of coaches is to look back at the beginning of the year, remember the goals that they set and say, okay, did I hit the goals? How have I done? And maybe even in these last couple days of the year, if you haven’t hit your goals, maybe you’re the coach that’s like hustling to make it happen if you’re close.

And I want to help just reframe the way we think about goals, the way we talk about goals. And this is not just for your goals or for your business goals, but also for your clients. And I have been thinking about this so much. I know I’ve done so many episodes on goal setting because I think that goal setting is a huge part of what we do as coaches, like with our clients. And sometimes I think we just get it a little wrong or get a little lost in the whole meeting the goal of it all.

And so hopefully, this today will just be a little reminder. Again, if you are listening in real time, you might be currently setting goals for 2026, or maybe you’re putting off setting goals until 2026 because you’re still focused on your goals for 2025. And oftentimes at the end of the year, I just know that this is something that is really on people’s minds. And then, you know, two days from now on the 1st, you’re going to wake up and it’s going to be like a blank slate, right? You’re just going to get to start all over.

Which is fine. But I hope that you have a couple takeaways from this episode that just help you think about your goals a little differently and have a lot more fun in your business this next year. First, I want to tell you this quick story about my daughter and how she taught me something so powerful about goals recently. And of course, the thing that she taught me, I already knew it, but it was just so tangible. She did it in such, such a way that it was so obvious how it could have gone otherwise if she had had a different mindset around what happened.

So, my daughter has a horse, and she rides in competitions. And recently, maybe about a month ago, she had a competition that it’s called eventing. And if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. I, a few months ago, wouldn’t have known either. But basically, it’s a full day of riding with different parts of the competition. You may have even seen it in the Olympics if you watch the equestrian portion at all of the Olympics. But basically it’s like the same rider does multiple events.

So they do dressage, if you know what that is. You’ve probably seen the videos of the horses that look like they’re dancing. That’s dressage. And then there’s a jumping portion, and then cross country. Jumping is just a short course that has jumps in it, pretty self-explanatory. And then cross country is a long course across a field, basically, a big field. It has jumps, it has obstacles, it has maybe water, it has all kinds of things. And they have to go on a specific, you know, course all around.

And she has done dressage and jumping many times, but she’s never done cross country in a competition. So this was the first time. But they do it all over one day. So basically we were there before the sun came up, and we left as it was getting dark. And she rode her first event, which was dressage, around 8:00 AM, I believe. And then she had her next one, you know, midday. And then at the end, she had the cross-country event.

And after the first two events, she was, I forget, either in first or basically tied for first in her class. And then heading into cross country, she was really excited. She was a little nervous. And she had mentioned something to me about, oh my gosh, I could like win this, which she has never done that before in a big competition like this with lots of people. And so, I knew she was a little nervous, so I, as her mom, went and stood in the cross country area.

You can kind of stand on a little hill in the middle or sit there and watch and you know, as she goes all around. Because like I said, it’s quite a big course. Sometimes she would even be a little out of view from me. So she did that. And I went and sat on the hill. And then about halfway through, she missed a jump. And you get two or three chances. So if you miss it, you have to circle back and try it again, circle back, try it again. And for some reason, her horse just did not want to jump over this specific thing. And that means she was disqualified.

So after the whole full day, she worked so hard. She was having the best day. Now she’s disqualified, which means she’s disqualified from the whole thing. I mean, she still had the scores from the other two things, but of course, she’s not even going to get close to, you know, probably being in the top, I don’t know, 50% of the riders, right? Because of course, there were other riders that disqualified as well.

But anyway, so she disqualified. And as her mom, I immediately was like, oh no. And so she rides off and has to ride off the course, and I’m pretty far from where she ends, so I kind of took off running to meet her so I could be over there. So she gets off and she’s very quiet and she just kind of goes about what she’s doing. And I could tell she didn’t really want to talk about it. And so then we finished up the day, you know, it took us a while then to get packed up, clean all the things, clean the horse, everything.

All the girls were a little quiet. And in my mind, I was thinking she is devastated. I bet she’s going to start crying the second we get in the car. She’s just holding it in. So we get in the car, and I look at her, turn around and I say, hey, how are you feeling? And she says, Mom, that was the best day and also I’m starving.

Now, this was so different than what I thought she was going to say, right? I thought she was going to be devastated because of that very last thing that happened. But she wasn’t at all. That was completely me projecting, maybe how I would have felt about it. And I want you to really think about that. What if we are thinking about all of our goals the wrong way? Right? I was braced for her to be devastated thinking that obviously the goal of the day was to do well in the competition.

But for her, it clearly wasn’t. And then we actually talked about it more and she was telling me all the amazing things that did happen that day. She didn’t even mention the disqualification. And then when I asked her about it, she said, oh yeah, that was a bummer, but it’s okay because, and she again went on to say all the good things. And if she had only focused on how she placed at the end of the day, that would have completely ruined any of the fun that she had.

So I want you to think about something as coaches we often call the messy middle or the river of misery. And I want to just reconsider how the framing of that maybe isn’t quite right. We talk about that phase of our business, which is like between the goal setting and the end, whatever the end is. We talk about all of that like we’re in the messy middle until we hit the goal. Like it’s something we just have to get through.

And think about all the language we use for that. We call it the messy middle, the river of misery. It’s also sometimes called the gap or the dip or the wilderness is what Brene Brown calls it, or the valley of despair. It’s all survival language, right? It’s like oh we just have to get through this part.

But what it implies is that you’re heading to a part that isn’t messy, which I think is really interesting. It frames all of that middle part as something to endure to get to the better part. But if you think about running your business, it really is like 1% setting a goal and achieving a goal, and 99% the, I’m going to say in quotes, messy middle, right? Everything else in between.

When you set a goal, that can feel like a high, it can feel so exciting. It can also sometimes feel a little chaotic and uncertain. And then if you think about the point where you think you’re going to measure like did I hit the goal or not hit the goal? It literally is like a moment in time.

One time, a coach who was a colleague of mine, she hit a big goal that she’d been working on for quite a while, and I will never forget this. I said, how do you feel? And she said, honestly, I don’t know, like, weird? And I said, why? And she said, I don’t know how else to say it. It feels like I thought there’d be a parade. And we laughed about it. But really think about that.

When you put all your eggs in this basket where it’s like, here’s the goal, hit it or bust, hit it or fail. You do build it up so much in your mind that you think when you get there it’s going to feel like elation. And that you don’t get to feel that way until you hit it. And we also forget to take into account that by the time we usually hit a goal or get to that end line, the finish line, whether we’ve hit the goal or not, we are, those of us running a business are already also in the middle of another thing, right?

Because our businesses are rarely running with one singular focus that we’re working towards. And even if you are, it’s not like you can work for this month, set a big goal for the month or the year, whatever. And then when you get to that finish line and you measure it and you say, did I hit it or not? If you didn’t hit it, it’s not like you have the next month off, usually, unless that’s how you’ve structured your business. But for most of us, that’s not how it works.

So the next day, you’re literally back into it. And so what if we are really doing ourselves a disservice when we’re calling it the messy middle? When we’re thinking, I’m going to set this huge goal, and just the only option is to get there. Because the middle is not a phase. It’s where your business actually lives almost all of the time.

And so I know that when I am coaching my clients on this feeling of failure when they didn’t hit the goal, most of it is coming from this exact thing, right? And then they end up living in this place for so much of the time and completely forgetting how to enjoy their business.

The purpose of you running a business, I hope, is not just to hit goals. That would be like the most boring business ever. Hopefully, you’re running a business because you thought it was a good idea and you thought you would enjoy running a business and coaching and doing all the things that come along with running your coaching practice.

And I know so many coaches think like this because I can’t tell you how many times someone has said to me, yeah, but I know you don’t feel that way because dot dot dot, right? Because you’ve hit these big goals because they see something in my business that they are thinking, oh, she’s like there. And let me just tell you, it never feels that way to me.

Not that I don’t celebrate. I’m really good at celebrating. It’s something I had to learn, actually. But I love to celebrate, but I also love to celebrate along the way. And I love to plan my business in a way that feels good to run it. That’s very different than only enjoying my business when I’m hitting goals. And I’m not arguing not to have goals. I want to be clear. I actually just recently hosted a planning workshop. I host it every year. But I think of goals as the lighthouse. The purpose of them is just to make sure that we’re headed in the right direction and to warn us of hazards and to just like keep us on the path, but not to judge our worth as a human or even as a coach against.

One thing that comes up often in my mastermind, Reimagine, is coaching on launches or even, I’m going to say launches in quotes, but it could be loose. Like some of my clients have launches that open on a certain day, close on a certain day, but also some of them look at maybe like a month as a launch or two months or three months, and they choose like how many clients do I want to sign in that amount of time?

And the reason I have them do that is just because of the lighthouse, right? It gives you something tangible to measure. Like is it working? Because if you don’t have anything to measure, then you don’t know how to course correct. But so often they come to coaching, you know, they get coaching on the beginning, kind of like, how many clients am I going to sign? How many, let’s say they’re launching a group program. How many people do I want in my group? What is it going to be like to run it? Right? They get all of that coaching. They’re so excited. They’re on fire, they’re lit up.

And then there’s a lot of coaching usually that happens at the end. Maybe they’ve hit their goals already and it’s kind of like, okay, what’s next? Where do I go? Or maybe they haven’t. And that’s usually where a lot of the coaching comes in.

But then along the way from that first decision of what they’re doing till they decided here’s the end point, most of the coaching is around all the things going wrong, all the things they could be doing differently. And so often I hear them say things like, I just hate this part, it feels terrible, or my energy has faded. I don’t know what to do.

And I think that’s what happens when we get in that goal-setting mindset where the whole point is the goal. Instead of the whole point, right, when they’re like, I don’t know what to do, I’m like, what do you mean? You’re running a business. That’s what you do. How do you run your business instead of how do you just hit the goal?

And then let’s say they do hit the goal, right? And they celebrate, and they enjoy that moment. And then often, they come back the next week looking for coaching on what’s next, right? What’s the next thing? Or I at some point have to ask them because I kind of notice, okay, they hit the goal, but I can kind of see from just watching what they’re doing that they aren’t even thinking about, oh yeah, like they have still a business to run. Just because you hit the goal doesn’t mean it’s over.

Which is one reason you don’t want to think about it in a way that exhausts you, because it’s not over. You’re just going to get up the next day and do the same thing. Of course, with a break if you need it, or with a weekend or, you know, whatever. I’m a huge proponent for rest and breaks. I’m sure you know that if you listen to the podcast.

But this, what I’m talking about here is different. Right? It’s that mentality. It’s like when people who work regular, let’s say like corporate jobs and they just live for vacation. You don’t want to run a business like that. That is not the reason you started your own business.

And then the other thing that happens, which we do talk about this part often, is that the person you are when you hit the goal is a totally different person than you were when you set the goal. You have changed, you have grown, you have learned a lot about yourself and about whatever the thing is you’re trying to accomplish, and you just have become that different person.

And so even if you do hit the goal and you celebrate, it still feels a little more expected than you think it will because at that point, you’ve worked so hard to be the person. Which is just one more reason that it doesn’t feel usually like you think it’s going to feel when you hit a big goal, which means you’re just chasing a feeling that doesn’t actually live at the destination. That feeling, whatever it is that you are wanting, you have to learn to create that throughout the middle.

And the middle, I don’t even think the middle is the best word for it, but that’s what I’m going to call it for now. The middle is not the obstacle. It is the good part. What if it was? What would be different for you if you started thinking about the middle as the good part? If you think about the story I told you about my daughter, her enjoying her day was not contingent on winning or placing or getting a ribbon. She was just in it and having the time of her life with her friends and her horse, which is her favorite thing on the planet.

So my wish for you for 2026 or whatever year or month you’re currently headed into, plan to enjoy all of it. Not just the beginning and the end. Not just the exciting part where you set the goals and the exciting part where you hit the goals, but literally all the parts in between. The building matters as much as being in the part where you already have built.

So here are some questions, coach, I want you to think about these when you are thinking about your goals, even if you’ve already set your goals for next year. I’m going to ask you some questions that just might help you reframe them a little bit. And again, I want to be clear, I am not suggesting not to have goals. What I am suggesting is that you don’t place your worth as a human or a coach on the goals. And really consider this with your clients too. Because if you can get out of this mindset, it will be so helpful for your clients as well.

Okay, here are the questions. You ready? What would make the building enjoyable? What would make the journey enjoyable? What would make the day-to-day running of your coaching practice enjoyable?

This is my favorite one. This really hit me when I was writing out these questions. I came up with this one, and I just, I actually sat with it for a minute. If you knew you’d be in some version of the middle for the next five years without exception, what would need to change right now?

Next question. What do you need to build into your business so that the middle isn’t something to endure? And what would change about 2026 or again, whatever time frame is ahead of you, if enjoying the middle was the goal? What would change?

So to close, bad news, if you’re a person that just loves to chase goals. You are going to spend all of 2026 in some kind of middle. And that is not failure. It’s just called running a business. The question isn’t how to get out of the middle faster. It’s what would make being there feel like enough or feel fun or feel like the best part of the journey. What would it look like to get to the end of December 2026 and say, that was the best year ever and I’m starving.

I literally wrote that on a post-it and just have it at my desk because I think it’s so powerful. It’s such a powerful statement of that was the best ever and now I need refueling, but in the best way, right?

Okay. Happy end of 2025. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. I cannot wait to be back with you in 2026 talking about some new things. Speaking of big goals, I’ve been teasing a change to my podcast that’s coming.

What I want you to know is that actually is coming soon, but it did have to be put off. I thought I could do too many things at once. It’s a toxic trait of mine. And I had to call it. The membership launch was more important at the time. Now there’s going to be some changes coming to the podcast, but you will know when it’s the last episode before the new podcast starts. I’m just so grateful you’re here. Thank you for being in my world and I will see you next year.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mastering Coaching Skills. If you want to learn more about my work, come visit me at lindsaydotzlafcoaching.com. That’s Lindsay with an A, D-O-T-Z-L-A-F.com. See you next week.