Core Goals Are the Secret to Achieve Your Goals This Year

We just passed the New Year milestone, entering 2025, so sci-fi, right? If you’re like me, perhaps some half-witted New Year's resolutions are bouncing around in your mind. 

Things like making $1 million, losing 30 lbs, being on TV, getting a new relationship, getting married, curing your back pain, or just learning to follow through. 

I want to remind you that every resolution you even think about committing to is completely valid - no matter how silly or unattainable it may seem. Every goal you set for yourself reflects your true inner desires, wants, and needs, so none of them are ridiculous. Seriously. 

Take a moment to write down your top 5-10 goals for the coming year, we’ll work with this later. 

Pssst... this blog is an excerpt from Kim's upcoming book Beyond Limitations!

How Can a Healing Journey Lead You Away from Achieving Your Goals?

When starting any process of change, I think it’s vitally important that we get clear on our goals. Most people often gloss over this step because when something sounds too good to be true, we jump head first without thinking about it. Part of what helps you make informed decisions about your care, in whatever way, is that you’re clear on what you want and need from that care. This ensures we use our resources wisely; our time, money, energy, and effort are limited. We need to use them wisely. 

We want to use our resources to move us toward our goals instead of farther away from them. But we need clarity on our goals, particularly our core goals so that we can choose and let go of treatments, relationships, ideologies, beliefs, etc, when they no longer guide us in the direction of our goals. This clarity ensures we make progress instead of becoming stagnant or, worse, going in reverse. 

Many of the clients I work with come to me after a stint of trying every wellness trend, protocol, practitioner, or treatment they could find only to realize they aren’t any better, their disease isn’t cured, they’re out a bunch of cash, and in some cases, they’re worse off than they started. This scenario enrages me and breaks my heart. We’re all just seeking relief in one way or another, and unfortunately, this can leave us open to being manipulated, taken advantage of, and harmed. 

The Three Types of Goals

I define goals into three categories: Optimization Goals (aka Wishful thinking goals), Specific Goals, and Core Goals. Before we dive in I want to take a moment to remind you that EVERY goal you have for your health, your life, and anything else is completely valid. No matter how extreme or out of touch someone might think they are - they’re valid because they matter to you. So if having a juicy booty is your top priority, right on! That matters. If living to be 105 and running a marathon that year is important to you - sweet! If walking to the mailbox without being in pain is your goal - excellent. Every goal matters, no matter how un/realistic they might be, because every goal points us toward our most important type of goal: the core goal. 

Optimization Goals (aka Wishful thinking goals)

Optimization goals are arguably where the most manipulation and harm occur, especially in the wellness world. These goals are the ‘too good to be true’ snake oil goals: 

Take this supplement and live an extra ten years! 

Eat this, not that, and you’ll cure your Multiple Sclerosis! 

Eat this diet and lose 40 pounds in only one month! 

At their core, these goals either can’t be accurately or affordably tracked and measured (or measured at all), or simply too good to be true and outright impossible. 

We don’t know when your expiration date is, so it’s impossible to know if that supplement will really make you live longer. One person’s success story isn’t always transferable to another person. And some things are just straight-up lies. This is why I call them wishful thinking goals: they are goals that make sense, attractive and are things that people generally want, but it’s impossible to know if those methods and treatments actually produce the result you want. 

Optimization goals are what scammy wellness industry influencers, coaches, and even licensed professionals capitalize on - the pipe dreams, the quick fixes, and all for the low price of thousands of dollars to a coach with no formal education whatsoever. Ooof. 

Clearly, I have a bias here; optimization goals are not my favorite. I’ve seen the harm they cause - from patients developing eating disorders on ultra-restrictive diets, increased depression and anxiety because of rigid protocols, cancer turning from stage one to stage four because the patient was told they could be ‘cured’ with herbs and should fire their doctors, and even death due to side effects of treatments being administered via telehealth across the globe and mismanaged side effects. 

Specific Goals 

Most goals on your list are probably specific - they’re how you think and believe your wellness journey and our life should look and be. Unlike optimization goals, specific goals are measurable, trackable, and achievable, although some are easier than others. They are your vision for your life. These are the real, nitty-gritty ways that we want things to look, our bodies to feel, etc. Some examples of specific goals include: 

I want to weigh 140 pounds and have a six-pack. 

I want to double my income.

I want to walk to my mailbox without being in pain. 

I want to have a period every month that doesn't make me throw up and miss work. 

We can sometimes set specific goals that we become overly attached to. I can remember being obsessed with the idea of weighing 120 pounds when I was younger, it didn’t matter how I looked or felt, I needed to hit 120 on the scale, which I never managed to pull off. In fact, the process of trying to get to that number actually led me farther and farther away from my core goals, but I had no idea at the time that was happening. 

Core Goals 

Core goals are the root of all goals, the holy grail of goals if you will. They are what all those goals you wrote down mean to you. Core goals essentially sum up the meaning of all of the other goals; it’s what changes, who you get to become, and what your life looks and feels like if you were to achieve the goals you’re conscious of. 

Take a look at your list of goals, they likely fall into mostly the specific and optimization categories and are very clear, you may have wanted these things for years or even decades. 

I want you to take a few moments to visualize with yourself and sit with this idea of what your life would be like, who you are, how you feel, and what it means to you once you've achieved those goals. 

You've achieved everything on that list of goals; what does that mean? How does it feel? Who are you once you’ve achieved those goals? 

Our ego creates specific goals, which we tend to hyper-fixate on - that number on the scale, the amount of money in our bank account, the perfect wedding, 2.5 kids, and a white picket fence, curing your cancer. The ego is all about protection and safety. In the context of goals or recreating our lives, it usually creates goals that we have an acute awareness of exactly how they will look or what they will do for us - it’s rarely creating a goal that is outside of our conscious awareness. This ties into that saying - ‘sometimes you don’t get what you want, but you always get what you need.’ The ego wants, but the subconscious knows what we need. The first list of goals is what the ego wants, while the second list of core goals is what we actually need. 

Why Core Goals Matter to Achieve Your Goals 

If you’re struggling with your core goals, let’s do a few examples. 

Let’s say your initial goals list includes things like six-pack abs, losing 40 lbs, and being able to look super hot in a bikini this Summer. 

The core goals fueling those intentions are what we gain, how we feel or who we are once we’ve achieved those specific goals. This might be having more self-confidence, finally completing a lifelong goal, feeling more attractive, improving your relationship with your partner, having more self-esteem, or feeling healthier. 

This is one of my favorite examples because it’s so clear cut - to me, it’s obvious that improving self-esteem and confidence, having better relationships, or even being healthier are not explicitly tied to weight loss, abs, or the bikini. There are plenty of other ways we can work on those core goals - personal development work, therapy, couples therapy, buying clothes that fit us, eating healthier foods, and exercising. We don’t have to lose weight to achieve these goals. In fact, for many people, the process of intentional weight loss might even pull us farther away from those core goals. 

If you do a really restrictive diet plan that you fail every week - how does that help your self-esteem? It likely has a pretty negative impact because every week you’re failing. If your plan to lose weight takes over your life, limiting your social interactions, making you grumpy because you aren’t eating enough, missing quality time with your partner because you’re at the gym 2 times a day - is that helping your relationship? Probably not so much. 

The activities we do, or don’t do in order to achieve specific goals might actually move us farther away from our core goals – and this ultimately isn’t what we really want. It’s why many people will say losing weight didn’t change their lives in the way they thought it would – because the core goal was never weight loss – it was confidence, connection, and self-love. 

What if My Specific Goal IS My Core Goal?

The weight loss example is simple, but not all goals are this clear cut; some core goals correlate more with the specific goals than others. What about wanting to be able to walk to the mailbox without pain? Or having fewer migraines?

The core goals underneath this might seem like being free of pain, but that’s not all of it - what does being free of pain mean to you? What does it do for you? How does your life change? 

It might mean being able to be more present with your family, having more self-esteem or a better sense of self-worth; maybe it’s having more freedom to do what you want to do or more connection with other people. The core goal is what being pain-free does for you or means to you.

Yes, freedom from pain would go a long way in helping meet those core goals, but life is a real asshole sometimes, and being completely free of pain is unfortunately not always possible for everyone, so what then? 

When meeting our specific goals isn’t possible, we have to start to think outside the box. There’s usually always something we can do to move toward the core goals. We can work on shifting our relationship with our pain. We can work on improving our communication with others so they better understand our experience and we feel more supported. We can engage in personal work to improve self-worth and self-esteem. 

Just because pain might be unchangeable doesn’t mean that’s the end of the road. Finding clarity around our core goals can also help us see a path forward. When before, we may have focused only on removing pain, but now we have a multitude of options for how we can approach this. Hyperfixation on the goal of pain relief might take us farther away from our core goals, leaving us with lost time with our family or worsening mental health due to that focus turning to obsession. 

Wanting to be free of pain might not initially be so obviously harmful, but fixating on finding a cure can pull away from our core goals. The core goals for being free of pain were freedom, self-worth, and connection. 

Pain is a difficult animal, it’s going to pull you away from those core goals in and of itself because that’s what pain does - it causes our world to become small, close in on us and there’s often nothing we can see or experience other than pain while we’re in it. So, seeking out a treatment for pain can become a very important and very obsessive search for many people. The issue is not that searching for a treatment is bad but that there are many treatments we may find that don’t work, are dangerous, unproven, or have a slew of side effects. 

It’s normal to want to seek relief, but becoming obsessed with seeking that relief in and of itself sets us back from those core goals. We might spend all of our money signing on with a Chiropractor who says he can cure us with five treatments a week for the next 6 months, only to eventually learn that while you got some relief, you weren’t cured. You spent more money than you had and missed a lot of opportunities for connection by being shackled to those appointments. 

How To Achieve Your Goals By Aligning With Your Core Goals

Healing isn’t a straightforward process; change isn’t a linear process… it’s a lot of give and take and back and forth. When we are working toward a goal, especially a specific or optimization goal, we need to use our core goals as a litmus test against which to check. 

By consistently checking in with the treatments or protocols we do to evaluate if they are actually helping us, potentially hurting us, or doing absolutely nothing, we can make a choice whether or not to continue.

When we know our core goals, we can effectively choose and let go of the things that work and those that don’t. We don’t have to always defer our decision-making to the provider - we get to decide for ourselves, too. 

I like to use a 3 and 6-month commitment and check-in strategy to do this. 

Because you’re right - sometimes things are hard and require a little sacrifice in order to get where we want to go. 

So commit for 3 months – then check-in. Do I feel closer to my goal? My core goal? What am I sacrificing to achieve this? Is that in alignment with who I want to be? If all signs point to yes, commit to another 3 or 6 months and check in again. 

If all signs don’t point to yes, it’s time for a decision. We might want to try it out for another 3 months; we might want to bail, we might want to let some parts go but keep others. The choice is yours. 

But it’s ok to quit and start over. In fact, it’s better to quit sooner than later if you notice something just isn’t working. 

Not everything is so clear cut, and there is always room for nuance, I wish it were more simple, but alas, life is complex. Sometimes, we will need to stick with something that takes us away from our core goals because, eventually, it moves us closer toward them. Going through chemo is hard, it sucks and it feels awful, this might make you feel like you’re going farther away from your core goals. Not every situation in life is clear-cut, and most are probably more complex than not. 

The end result vs. temporary difficulty is another factor in our decision-making. The result of being treated with chemo usually has an evidence-based success rate attached to it, we factor this into our decision to do the treatment or not, and knowing those risks we can choose to continue or stop treatment. An 80% chance of being cancer-free and having 10 more good years with your loved ones might be very much worth the exchange of feeling like trash for 6 months for many people, and for a few, maybe it isn’t. 

I don’t want you to read this and think that just because something is hard, painful, requires isolation, or difficult means that you absolutely shouldn’t do it; we have to look at choices with nuance and curiosity. Sometimes, the hard thing is worth it in the long run, and we need to factor in the bigger picture as well as the immediate experience. 

Want more help determining your core goals and aligning your actions with them? Book a free Discovery call to see if coaching or hypnosis is a good fit for you!

Local to the East Bay Area? Dr. Kim is teaching a workshop at the Somatic Playground on Monday, February 17th, on exactly this topic!