How to set goals you will actually achieve w/ Noelle Pikus Pace

Today you get to hear from somebody pretty darn incredible, but maybe not for the reason you might think.

I’m here with my friend Noelle. You might know Noelle Pikus Pace as a World Cup champion, a World champion, and as the Olympic Skeleton Silver medalist. She is incredible for all those reasons and more, but that is not why I love her. It’s not why I really came to be so impressed with her.

My favorite things about Noelle Pikus Pace

She is an incredible human in so many ways. When I first heard that Noelle was moving into our ward, I was excited, but I also kind of assumed that she would think she was better than everybody else.

I even remember telling somebody else, “I’m not going to invite her over for dinner because I don’t want her to think that I just want her to come over because she’s so famous and I’m trying to just use her for that reason.”

It took a long time and she invited us over to dinner first. She is absolutely 100% normal human. She gives us her daughter’s old clothes. She loves to go Christmas caroling. But beyond that, as I have watched her from afar (before we actually became friends), I would listen to her in Sunday school at church and her answers were insightful and very meek.

She doesn’t take herself too seriously and she really cares about other people. She is the one who will go find somebody who is lonely or needs help and sits next them. She’s the one who knows some of the really hard things that people in the ward are going through because she cares.

That’s why I love her. That’s why I am impressed with her. She also knows true anguish. She has been through some really, really hard things. So, while you might see the outside of this Olympic champion and think that her whole world is just perfect and she has this beautiful family, she has also known some incredible disappointments, real physical pain, and some real emotional pain as well. I’m really excited to have you here.

NOELLE: Thanks. It’s so good to be here.

MISTY: Noelle also understands what it is to be a mompreneur. Which is something that I think is really important for all the people that I have on this podcast. I want them to be able to relate to you and to where you’re at.

She has her own business and has her hands in a lot of different things. She’s created an online course, but even more than that, she works with corporations like Amazon and helps them with development.

NOELLE: It’s leadership development. We teach how to implement growth mindset principles into their lives. So it’s more of the soft skills of leadership development. It’s not so much the hard day-to-day, computer skills. It’s more about finding our purpose, our values, the relationships around us, being aware and mindful of those relationships and how they’re influencing our thoughts and our behavior and recognizing those so that we make better decisions day to day.

That’s just a glimpse into what it is that we’re doing now, but it’s great and I love it. It’s been awesome.

MISTY: She’s also in the schools, like our kids’ junior high. She has a whole program there. She’s helping students learn these same principles and put those into action, which is really cool because that’s going to affect the upcoming generations. To me, that’s even more exciting than what you do for these big corporations.

And the course that she’s created teaches all those same things for us. Any one of us can go access these incredible principles that Noelle has learned throughout her life and then fine tuned as she’s taught them all over the nation, the world.

But today, what I want to focus on with Noelle is goals. She’s really, really good at reaching her own goals and helping other people reach theirs. This is airing right before the beginning of 2022, so everybody’s got goals on their mind.

We think about these goals that we’re trying to reach and a lot of times we don’t reach them. I have done that. I have set so many New Year resolutions, not reach them, and then I get down on myself and I get frustrated.

So was it just a waste of time? 

Is setting goals a waste of time?

NOELLE: It is if you don’t have a plan. 

I love the quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery that says:

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

If we’re setting goals for ourselves, but we don’t create a plan for it, we don’t make time for our goals in our schedule, like actually look through our schedule and say, “this is my 15 minutes,” or “this is my hour” or whatever you need to accomplish that goal. If we’re not actually taking the time to make a plan to move forward, then yes, then it is a waste of time and it’s going to actually be counterproductive because then we’d go into that cycle of beating ourselves up.

New years is definitely a time the overall population starts to set goals and say, “Okay, I’ve got this goal.” And while that’s a good thing it’s also good to know that the goal setting process can be in June or in September. It could be a 30 day goal, break it down into smaller bite size pieces.

For example you could say, “I’m going to go running every morning and I’m not going to miss a day.” And then your kid gets sick. And then all of a sudden you have a deadline to meet or something happens like a vacation throws you off of your schedule. Then you’re like, “oh, well” and then you give up because you’re too far behind.

I think that’s also one of the challenges is that we don’t tend to go into any kind of goals allowing our mindset thinking that there’s going to be a setback, but if we can know beforehand that it’s not going to be perfect or pretty at times, we can give ourselves some flexibility with that goal.

There has to be some kind of give and take. I have to know that when a setback happens, I’m going to decide beforehand. “Okay. If my kid gets sick and I miss a week of my goal, what will I do then? What will I choose to do?”

It’s the same thing with the Olympics, with every day things, with mom things. It’s in every aspect of our lives. But just knowing that when you hit a wall, like in school, Are you just going to throw your hands in the air and say, “well, I tried” or are you going to hold on tight and hunker down and get through it?

You might have some bumps and bruises along the way but you’re going to cross your finish line. You’re going to get there, but you just have to anticipate that there will be setbacks and create a plan. You’ve got to have a plan with every goal or else, yeah, there’s no point to creating them. 

Simple tips anyone can do to help plan goals

MISTY: One of the things I have started doing my goals or routines is when I am scheduling my day out, I leave blank space. I leave like two or three hours that are completely unscheduled. So that means if something happens then I have some extra padding.

So what else? When you say plan a goal, what do you mean by that?

NOELLE: There are a couple of things that you could do.

First, I truly believe in having deadlines and whatever deadline it is, for myself if I’m making a leadership development course or something I’d say  “I’ve got to have this done in six months.”

I’ve got to break it down into smaller size pieces. So, my ultimate goal is six months to have X done. And now I have to see what I need to do in three months and now one month, and I’m going to say, “okay, by the end of this month, this is where I want to be.” And then I have to break it down. “At the end of the week, this is what I have to do.” Well, then what do I need to do each day this week in order to get there?

I see it one day at a time. It alleviates that anxiety, that stress, that overwhelming feeling that I just can’t do it all. So that’s one thing is just breaking it down into small bite size pieces and simplify the process. Sometimes we just over-complicate things. And just by simplifying the process into the smallest little things, if we could just be 1% better or give 1% to our goal each and every day, those marginal gains are going to be huge by the end of the month or by the end of the year.

Whether it’s saving more money, or maybe it’s even balancing time with your family and just saying, okay, if I can just make sure for 10 minutes tonight, I’m going to read a book with one of my kids. I just need some personal time with him.

I love setting alarms on my phone. I’ll even give myself a five minute buffer. That allows me to wrap up whatever I’m doing. Then I sit down and read a book or something. You can be fully present during that time, whatever it is, by simplifying your goals and sometimes I need those reminders in my phone and that seems to help.

MISTY: How do you find the time to plan? That’s something that I hear from a lot of people is, “I just want to get started. I just want to start working on it. I don’t want to take the time to plan it out.” 

Something like that – six months and then three months and then a month and then a week, and then a day – it sounds like a lot of work. How do you simplify that process?

But, how do I balance my goals?

NOELLE: Abraham Lincoln said something like, if you asked me to cut down a tree, if you give me 10 hours to cut down a tree, I’ll take nine of them, sharpening the ax and then one to cut it down.

Whereas, a lot of people will take that ax and just be hacking for that whole 10 hours. If we do the same thing and think about it with the goal process, we think it’s wasting time to create a plan. But if you can sharpen that ax and say, okay, I’m going to sit here with my Google task lists and see which boxes I can check and when.

I do it week by week. And what I’ve realized, I’m very much a checklist person, I love seeing that little box just get checked. I look at that and think, “I just did something!” I love seeing the box go away.

I do my planning every Sunday evening. That’s when I look ahead for the next week and I decide what are the main things that I need to do this week? It depends on how big the task is, but I pick three to five main things.

If, at the end of the week, I get these three to five things done I can breathe better. And then I sometimes will add in maybe three to five smaller things. I’ve realized in order for me to have sanity at home, being a mom and trying to manage business is the whole thing. It’s the whole picture that makes us human. It’s the whole picture that makes us give our best in anything that we do. And so if I can say, “if I get these three to five things done, I’m going to be super happy, but these next three to five, if I have to bump those to next week, it’s okay.”

I actually have things that I have bumped for like four months and it’s okay. My goal was to clock out when the kids got home from school, I just wanted to be completely present with work while they were at school and then the second they walked in the door, I wanted to be done. And when they go to bed, sometimes that laptop comes back open.

I love when I’m present and I love being able to ask them how their day went and I just feel like that’s what is best for our family. It’s easier said than done, but that means that some of those checklist items have to be put on the back burner.

How to deal with competing priorities

MISTY: Okay, something else you said, at the very beginning, you were talking about how you actually have to figure out how you’re going to find the time to do this goal. So, I’m thinking about the idea of competing priorities, right?People will come to me and say, “I want to start a business.” I’m like, “okay, what are you willing to give up in order to start a business?”

And for some of us, maybe it’s just the sitcom we watch every night, but sometimes there are some really hard decisions. For example, I’ve chosen not to volunteer in my kids’ classrooms. I don’t go on field trips with them. And those have been conscious decisions I have made because I want to run a business.

NOELLE: It’s good that it’s conscious because I think that’s when it gets tricky. We start to realize we have some anxiety but can’t figure out why. You’re thinking, Why am I so stressed? My kid had a field trip today. And if you’re torn because that’s where you really want to be but you don’t recognize it because you haven’t made that conscious decision that “yes, I’m giving up this so that I can do that?” That’s when you start feeling pulled by these two different aspects.

And if you’re really feeling like you need to be on your kid’s field trip, you’ve got to give something up over here in this career area. You definitely have to give up something somewhere else.

What will you get rid of to make more space for your goal?

MISTY: Okay. So you suggest if someone’s saying, I want to set this goal to have created a course, like you just said, in six months they should conscientiously think about what they’re going to exclude or remove from their lives.

NOELLE: Yeah, absolutely – conscientious, intentional. I love the word intentional, deliberate, conscientious, mindful, whatever it is, but you need to be able to see what it is that you want and know what you’re giving up.

Opportunity costs.

I love what President Oaks talks about when he says everything comes at an opportunity cost, no matter what it is in your life for good, better, best. You always are picking something and we might have like 50 good things on our plate. We all have thousands of good things to choose from. And then the better things are narrowed down. Better and best things are far and few between, but if we’re mindful of it, we can start seeing those things that are the best choices for us and our family.

The tool Noelle uses to help her find better balance in her life

MISTY: So how do you recommend people determine that? Because that’s something else that I feel like a lot of my people face – they’ll come to me and say, “I really feel called to be online. I feel like this is where God wants me. He needs me here. He’s got something for me to do here. I don’t know exactly what it is.” How do you really decide?

NOELLE: I use something called the Wheel of Life and for me that’s really, really helpful. I use it pretty frequently. It kind of looks like a pizza and you cut it into 8 different slices: career, finances, family relationships, fun and recreation, personal growth, learning, spirituality and physical health. Then you say on a scale of one to 10, how satisfied are you in each of these areas?

We have to understand that it’s constantly fluctuating. Sometimes we’re like, “yes, I’m giving all I can to my career.” And then all of a sudden it hits us one day and we’re like, “oh, I haven’t been such a great mom” or “I haven’t done so much with my family.” It’s going to be like that our whole lives.

I do this probably once a month, to be honest, I use it that frequently. And I’ll just say on a scale of one to 10, how am I doing with my family? How satisfied am I with what I’m offering with my family time? And if I’m realizing, okay, maybe that’s at a four and maybe my career’s at like nine and then maybe my finances are at like a nine, but my fun and recreation is at a two. I can step back and look at this picture and I see where it’s all colored in and see different areas.

I can that maybe I should probably take a vacation with my family. We probably need to plan something or I need to spend more time with them. And when I do that, finances are going to drop a little and maybe my career is going to drop a little bit but my family’s coming up. It’s this give and take, but I use that tool all the time and it allows me to just say, where is my stress and anxiety coming from? Why am I feeling guilty about this or frustrated inside?

I can take a step back and say, “oh, I didn’t even realize that spirituality is low right now. I need to be more intentional with my prayers and my scriptures. I have to be mindful of it. I like seeing the visual side of it.

MISTY: I remember once my sister, who’s seven years younger but very wise, I called her before she had kids. My kids were 2, 3 and 4 and I just didn’t feel like I was doing a great job. And she told me, “Misty, we too often focus on how we’re doing today or this week or this month, instead of this year. Take a step back because there’s no way to be perfectly balanced in a day. But we can be more well-balanced over a long period of time for sure.”

That tool seems to be a way for us to recognize that even in ourselves, that it’s okay that family is down right now, because next month I’m going to take that up a notch and then work will go down for a little while. I won’t drop it entirely, but it’s a give and take.

So I know that you guys set goals as a family. You have a family bucket list, but I want to know why do you do that? How do you feel about your achievements with skeleton, with your business, as a mom? And how do those affect your kids and what they do in their lives?

NOELLE: We absolutely love setting goals but we haven’t always done this. Our oldest was about 10 when we started doing a family bucket list. But you can do it at any age, it doesn’t matter what age you’re at. My spouse and I, we started creating one, which I highly recommend. It’s so good because then you start understanding each other more. Or sometimes you work on them together and it just adds that little bit of fire again, that little spark, it’s really fun.

But as a family, we’ve set goals for quite some time now. And it comes and goes away as everything does. Sometimes we’re really good at it and sometimes we take a step back. We like to do them in 30 day increments. So it keeps it simpler, especially for younger kids. And even with our littles, our six year old twins, for them it might even be just a week long. For example, one of our boys had a goal just two weeks ago to learn how to do 10 one-armed pushups.

It could be as simple as one-armed pushups. I mean, this is not simple for me, I can’t do that. But it could be anything from learning how to juggle as a family. We started doing that one and making it easy. 

James Clear (in his book Atomic Habits) talks about five different things that can help you with discipline. And one is to make it easy. Two is to design your environment. And that’s just something as simple as, if we’re watching a lot of TV as a family, turn the couches away from the TV or maybe you unplug the TV each night before bed. You have to actually intentionally go and plug it in. Or you have to name the show you’re going to watch before you hit the power button.

MISTY: I give my daughter control of my screen time passcode. I set screen time limits for myself and then I give my daughter my passcode. So if I want more time, I have to ask her for permission. That fits into design your environment.

Simple tips for being more intentional when planning how to achieve your goal

NOELLE: Absolutely. Because you’re intentionally doing it. With the goals for the family, we just started setting juggling balls all around. We’re just trying to make it as easy as possible, designing our environment, so that it’s something that is accessible. We just bought 5-10 sets of juggling balls and we just put them on the back of a couch. We put them on my kitchen table and yes, it was annoying as a parent, but we all started learning how to juggle.

We’d be sitting there talking to each other and start throwing one ball up. Our ten-year-old boy, he just started throwing it up and throwing it up and then all of sudden he’s throwing to you and then he starts trying to do it with another ball. It’s fun and it kind of sparks this positivity in our home where it’s like, I  can do hard things.

It creates this mindset change from saying, “I don’t know how to juggle, I guess I can never learn.” And that’s us as a parent. These little things that we say, they make a big difference and then once a child or an adult learns how to do one thing, it becomes easier to be willing to try to do something else. To believe you can believe you can do something.

MISTY: Absolutely. If you could go back, would you change anything about all these goals that you’ve accomplished and how they’ve affected your family? Like going to the Olympics, that was hard on your family. How did it bless your kids?

NOELLE: I wouldn’t change. I wouldn’t change anything.

Obviously, there have been hard, hard times along the way, but even the hard times that shaped us into who we are today. It’s taught me things about myself that I would have never known and things about our family that we would have never known.

Going to the Olympics was absolutely incredible. We had our two young kids when we went to the 2014 Olympics and brought home a silver medal. To have a support system is huge. Whether it is a spouse, whether it’s a best friend, whoever it is, but just having someone there to be your advocate to be supportive, to be a dreamer with you or a driver or a motivator, whatever their role is, is really key to success. And man going to the Olympics, I couldn’t have done it without Janssen. There’s no way.

He was pushing the stroller everywhere with the two kids. It was absolutely incredible. I wouldn’t have done it any other way. There will always be those naysayers, those people that doubt and say, “there’s no way a mom of two kids could come back to the Olympics and bring home a medal.” One of our friends actually went through and did the statistics of what it would be to go to the Olympics, in your 30s, as a mom of two kids and win a medal. They actually did that statistic and it said you’re more likely to drive a Land Rover on the moon.

I was like, oh, that’s kind of cool. That’s awesome. Go Moms! If we believe like we can do anything, we can do hard things.

MISTY: Coming back to the whole goal thing, Yeah, it comes down to finding that balance because you can give all to one area or another or another, but if we can’t find balance, it’s really hard to find fulfillment in anything that we do, because we’re going to be so stressed.

So I think that’s something you’re really good at, you do well in a lot of areas.

NOELLE: Well, I put on a good face sometimes. You haven’t seen me flat out on my kitchen floor (because it’s nice and cool) because my check list is so long and I’m like, “Jansen, I just can’t.” It paralyzes me because there’s so much to do, I don’t even know where to start. And until I take that step up the ladder, those rungs seem so far away. I don’t even know where to begin because there’s a thousand of them.

I’m not going to think about the other 900 that I have to do, but if I could just think of this one tiny task, check one more step, and then you can feel like you can pick the next.

How does my business actually help my children?

MISTY: Guys, even people who go to the Olympics feel this way. You’re totally normal.

Let’s go back to the Olympics, where you’re talking about your family. So, my very first introduction to Noelle, before I ever met her, is probably similar to many of yours. It’s this visual of her coming down on that sled and she jumps off the sled.

She realizes that she’s just won the silver medal and she hops the fence where all the spectators are and she runs up to her husband and just gives him the biggest hug. I was crying and I didn’t even know her. If you haven’t seen that clip, go look it up because it’s moving.

And your kids were there. They saw you achieve something. That is a gift I want to give my kids. I want my kids to know that it’s possible to achieve things, even as an adult, even in my forties/fifties/sixties, we can achieve things, we can move forward and grow.

Sometimes when I get really worried about my business and if what I’m doing is damaging my kids. I love your idea of the wheel of life. I love that. I also think about, “okay, but what does my business giving them? What is it actually giving to them that they wouldn’t have otherwise?”

Well, they’re learning to do the laundry, make dinner, they’re gaining confidence. They’re seeing their mom do something hard.

NOELLE: Yeah, for sure. My mom worked full-time all growing up and I think it was a blessing in my life. I know for her, it was a really, really hard decision.

So both my parents worked full-time. My dad was a blue collar steel fabricator. He was there for 16 hours a day. My mom was a 9-1-1 dispatcher and she worked graveyards. She would try to make it so that she would be home when us kids were home. So she’d work graveyards and then she’d come and get us ready for school, sleep for 3-4 hours, wake up and get the house cleaned and make sure dinner was on table and then see us when we got home.

I don’t know how she did it. I literally mentioned that to my husband this morning. I said, “how did my mom do it? I don’t know how she did it.” But it made all of us hard workers – my siblings and I. They’re determined, they’re motivated. And yes, we fail. We fail like everybody, but it’s failure upon failure that leads us to success.

But this attitude that we won’t give up, I think that’s something that seeing my mom working hard and providing for our family gave me. She worked hard because she had a purpose for why she was trying to bring in this money. She wanted to pay for vacations and our extracurricular activities. 

I vaguely remember my parents having a conversation in the kitchen when I was 11 or 12 where they determined that my dad’s finances were to pay for the house and the needs of the family. My mom’s was to make sure we had all these little extra things in our life,  like time together.

It was motivational to see her do that because it inspired me to know that there was still a lot of balance at home and I saw her working hard and she gave up some stuff but I never felt like she wasn’t there for me. She was at my track meets and she was the most supportive mom ever AND she worked full-time. It made us have to get our own food sometimes and I learned how to do my hair when I was like five because she was at work. My dad just told me to brush it 100 times.

I’d make my little baggies of raisins, marshmallows and chocolate chips and I’d take them to school. My parents never knew some of the things, but it was all good. We’re going to stronger because of it. 

MISTY: I love that perspective. I get really worried and kind of down on myself sometimes.

NOELLE: My mom working, like I do, made me innovate. It made me create, made me figure out how to do things without somebody holding my hand and showing me how to do it all along the way. I actually had to figure things out.

It’s led to my whole Olympic journey because I had to figure it out. And mom wasn’t there to hold my hands. She believed that I could, and I believed I could. I knew I could.

MISTY: Yes, absolutely. I’ve seen that. I will go to a hotel for three or four days and my daughter will call me. She’ll say, “oh, I figured out how to make macaroni and cheese.” This was a few years ago, but I was so excited. She was so excited to tell me. If I had been home, she would have just asked me. I would have either come and done it for her or I would have watched her, but she wouldn’t have been motivated to really do it. I know she can figure it out. So it’s kind of cool. 

How can I help my kids with the Children & Youth program?

Okay. So let’s talk about the church’s new goal program. Almost all of these women have kids at home. Many of them are in this  children and youth program. What are your thoughts on this and how could they be more effective at helping their kids with those goals? Because I’m pretty sure that a lot of them are going to set a goal for themselves to help their kids with their goals.

So how can we be more effective as moms? I really want to know this. I have some kids who are really struggling to really even set a goal and they don’t believe in themselves. What can I do to help my kids?

NOELLE: Yeah, it is a challenge and a lot of it is so vague. I’m a check list person and without having these checklists in this new children and youth program, it’s a challenge for me to be able to stay consistent with it.

NUMBER 1:

I have reminders on my phone.

So every first Sunday of the month, I have a thing that pops up on my phone and it says ‘time to set a new goal.’

NUMBER 2:

Let your kids discover.

So one of the things that Jansen and I have found that is really beneficial, when you have kids, is letting them discover. Instead of telling them what goal they should set and telling them how to do it,  giving them that ownership and that buy-in on it has been massive.

Butcher paper is one of my favorite things with kids, and colorful markers. I love making these colorful, making it fun, making it their own, even with our little six year olds. We’ll take some markers and have just flatten out some butcher paper on the ground and just say, “what is it that you want to learn? What do you want to do? What do you want to have?”

They just list everything and anything out there, whatever it is. And a lot of times we actually have to help generate those ideas. They’re limited by their knowledge, right? There’s this balance between those two extremes, taking it over for them and letting them flounder. With much information comes much inspiration.

We can inform them and say, “Hey do you want to do hip hop? What’s hip hop? Well, let me show you.” You get on YouTube and you just show them some hip hop dancers.

Do you wanna try fencing? What’s fencing? And you get on there and you show them a YouTube about fencing.

This is what we did with our kids at the beginning of this last year. Our ten-year-old boy was like, “I want to try fencing. I want to try BMX” because we just started putting up all these different videos. Do you want to do guitar lessons? Do you want to read scriptures? Do you want to learn it? And you want to memorize this many? Just a lot of different ideas and they started writing down the things they wanted to do.

And then we said, “okay, now circle your top 10.” They ended up with over 20 and then we kind of step aside and say, “okay, so now just circle your top 10” and they circle it with their favorite color.

Next we say, “okay, now narrow it down to your top three out of those 10.” And there are only three because now they’re getting excited. Now you have competing priorities and they have to choose.

Once they have their three, then we will tell them to choose one. And this has been so much fun for us to see that they’re actually excited.

Last year we did, we had them do one per month. And sometimes we don’t have to do the butcher paper every single month, because they’ve already got a handful. 

For example, my son really wanted to try fencing. So I’m going to look up somewhere for fencing. It comes on to my plate as one more thing, but I looked up a fencing place and they offered a free trial class. Perfect, I don’t even have to pay anything. He tried it and he’s like, “that was fun, but I’m done.”

So he checked that one off. He found out if he liked it or not. And then in February he tried something else. It gave him courage. Once you take a step on that rung, you can continue to just look at the next possibility. Then he tried BMX, then he did guitar, and then he started doing archery and that was the one that he ended up sticking with.

I think just allowing them to explore, but knowing that it is going to be a little bit of work on our plates, like the driving there and helping them decide if they want to continue. So there is some time commitment from us, but if we’re not willing to put in any time, it’s not going to work. If it’s only in the kids hands, it’s just not going to work.

And so it does take making time for that. So for me, it’s the first Sunday of each month that we kind of go through and they each get to pick one thing. Then you’re going to the calendar to make it happen. Sometimes it is something as simple as like one and done fencing, but sometimes it might be me just reminding them.

Our 13 year old, she had a goal to work out three times a week. So I just set an alarm on my phone and said, “Lacey, did you work out today?” She said no, or she said I don’t feel like it. That’s when I say, “okay, did you want to meet this goal? You can either do it today or tomorrow could be your day,” but then you start having this conversation. If she’s out by week one, and she’s saying, no, I don’t want to do that anymore. Then you say, okay, then what is it that you want to do for the month?

I’m kind of proactive that way, where I’m like, You’ve got to do something in order to progress. I don’t just say, “Okay. You’re done” then let her have the out of that particular goal. I ask her to choose a different one. So she still has that agency. She has to make it an intentional decision. And sometimes we’ll have to even say something like, “okay, so you wanted to clear six inches higher than a month ago. So by not doing this, you most likely won’t reach that goal. Is that something you’re willing to give up?”

If at that age it just sounds fun, that’s okay as long as they know that’s their why. If they sign up for something we make them commit because I’m not paying the registration fees if they don’t commit for at least three months. Even with the whining and crying and fighting and whatever it might take to get them there.

If at month two they’re like, “I am done.” We’re like, “Nope, you said, or else you can buy it back” where they can pay for the registration.

MISTY: I like that you’re creating this desire to learn by having them write them down, you know, really choosing something huge instead of just being told, you’re going to learn XYZ.

NOELLE: Yes. And that comes back to the children and youth goals program. Their curriculum is discussing:

• discover
• plan
• act
• reflect

A lot of people skip over the whole planning part. This whole four part curriculum is the pattern for growth.

Writing on the butcher paper is DISCOVERING. It’s just giving them an idea to discover what it is they want to do. Then you make a PLAN. Like when I said I was going to call to see if there’s a fencing place and then you will participate in it. There’s the planning part. And then it’s the take ACTion on it. I’m going to get in the car and physically drive you there. You’re going to go in and do it. And now REFLECT, how did you like it? What did you like about it? What didn’t you like about it? Now what would you like to discover? And now you go back to the drawing board and start all over again.

So that whole pattern is incredible. If we could just learn how to use it, I use it all the time in the Olympics, which is why I’m like, yes, this is it. But a lot of people were like, what is this?

Do you need help defining your life purpose?

MISTY: So two last questions. The first is about your course, would it benefit these mompreneurs? So would it be something that, if they were to go through it, what are they going to learn?

NOELLE: Absolutely, it would help. So my course is called Life Stacking. It just teaches 12 principles of a growth mindset. It teaches you to define your own purpose in life. How many of you have defined your purpose in life? Not just a one-liner like, I want to live with Heavenly Father again. I’m not dissing on that at all because that should be all of our ultimate purpose.

I wrote this a couple of years ago and this is what this course helps you to do is to define your own purpose. Mine is:

The purpose of my life is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and cherish my loved ones. To pursue lifelong learning and growth and to strengthen and share my testimony so that I might inspire others to live more fully, love more openly and make a greater difference today.

So that’s my own personal purpose. Anything that I do in my life, if it comes back to this purpose I know I’m on the right track. If it’s not helping me to cherish my loved ones or if it’s not helping me to pursue lifelong learning and growth or to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, then I know I need to rethink where I’m headed.

That’s just the first step. This course helps us to define our values. We know we have values, but we don’t always know what we have as values or why we have them. And this course helps to define those values.

It helps us to face fears. There’s a tool that I have in this course where it teaches you how to write down all your fears and then find solutions for those fears so that you tackle them one at a time.

So instead of just avoiding our fears, instead of avoiding our stresses and our anxieties and putting them on the back burner, it helps us to be able to actually see what those fears are and say, why am I afraid to do this? Why am I afraid to take this step forward? Well, I don’t have enough money in my bank account. Okay. So what’s the solution. Maybe I need to start talking to investors. Or taking that leap of faith to take out a loan or something to make this bigger than what it is.

What do I do when I’m having a bad day?

MISTY: These are just a couple of little tools in this course, but yes, it’s an incredible course. It’s a 12 week course and it’s on sale right now. It’s $97, which is crazy, I still can’t believe she’s selling it for $97. I would be telling people to charge $1,000. I’m not going to let her leave it at $97 for long. So go snag it now. There’ll be a link to it in the show notes.

So Noelle, I know I have had this thought, “well, she’s an Olympian. She just has a different mindset. She’s just different than I am.” Do you really lay out on the floor sad and breaking down? Because I have so many moments where I really just can’t do it today. I just want to keep staying in bed. Oftentimes I’ll just go eat ice cream. I really don’t pick myself up and go do anything. What do you do in those moments?

NOELLE: I think it’s good to know that it’s okay to have those moments. I think it’s healthy to have those moments, but to have a time clock to say, “I’m going to just give myself today. I need today, but tomorrow I am going to be on top of it. Tomorrow I’m going to hit this list hard. Tomorrow I’m going to be back working. But today I just want to sit down and watch a hallmark movie and eat my tub of ice cream and just feel bad for myself and feel overwhelmed. And I just want to sit here and cry a little bit and just say how overwhelmed I am.”

But know that you’re going to get back at it. You can’t allow yourself to wallow there in despair or it’ll eat you to pieces and it’s not being like being an Olympian means this doesn’t happen to me. That’s just something that I did.

That was fun and I was pretty good at it, but I have other topics, other things that I want to do. I’m not great at writing, but I want to write another book. That’s overwhelming to me.

But, when we have those days, when we want to eat that tub of ice cream and watch a show, sometimes the best thing to do is to just say, you know what? Instead of being halfway in and halfway out and feeling miserable about it, let’s just go all in to just sitting here, taking time. Then it’s time and I’m back in. I can do this.

So instead of I’m done, I quit. No, I need a break. I’m going to recognize that I need a break. I’m going to be okay with the fact that I’m not going to beat myself up because I need a break. But I’m going to get back out and tomorrow morning I’m setting my alarm clock and I will not hit snooze. I’m going to hit this list.

That’s a huge aspect of it, just giving yourself that next milestone, that next deadline to get back on the horse, because it’s like running a marathon.

I’ve never done leadership development courses before. This is all new to me, what I’m doing now. I don’t even know where to go for a mentor and all the things that I’m trying to do. Sometimes it’s just overwhelming. There are days when I’m just so overwhelmed and I just have to allow myself to just say (like if you’re running a marathon) “just keep going, just keep taking a step, even if you have to slow down. And you’re like, okay, I just need to stop at this water station. And now I’m going to get back on the horse and start walking and start jogging. And then maybe I might have a sprint here and there, but maybe I need to slow down halfway through.”

So just knowing that it’s okay and it’s not a straight line, it’s more all over the place on your path to getting to where you want to go. And sometimes it’s all the way over here and then you have to come back. There are loops and stuff like that.

How can I manage my expectations?

MISTY: Many of you know that’s kind of how my path has been with business. It’s been very, very twisted and very up and down. So has Noelle’s, even with the Olympics, it was not a straight shot. It’s not like she just got up one day and said, “oh, I’m going to go to the Olympics.”

She had real horrible physical injuries. She completely retired and then came back years later, as a mom. It wasn’t an easy path.

NOELLE: If you think it’s going to be easy and you think “my product is amazing, everybody’s going to want to buy it” and it’s just easy from point A to point B, you better rethink your plan because otherwise you’re setting yourself up for some massive setbacks and some massive pints of ice cream days.

But if you know it’s going to be rough going into it, those bad days will be fewer and farther between because you knew that there were going to be crappy days. So you just need to take it with a grain of salt and just do what you can do. Don’t think about all the things that you should be doing.

Those shoulds can kill us too. Like I should, I should, I should, I should – don’t should on yourself. I’ve heard that so many times, don’t do that to yourself because so many times it’s just, what can I do today? All right. I’m going to give my best today. Even if that means it’s not quite what my expectations were. And sometimes you just have to lower your expectations.

MISTY: Yes! A really good example of this guys, for me, is tech. So I know a lot of you think, oh, she just knows how to do the tech. She can just get on there and do it. It’s easy. And it’s fast. Well, that’s true. To some degree I’m probably faster than somebody who’s never even heard of WordPress before.

But if I am planning something, I think, okay, it’ll take me about an hour. If it is tech-related, I’ll double it or even triple it, because I just know there will be something that comes up that makes it take longer than I think. And when I do that and I say, okay, I want it to take an hour. It’s probably going to take two, I’ll plan two, and then it only takes an hour then I’m overjoyed.

But if I plan for an hour and it takes me two? I’m so depressed and I’m so upset and I’m so down on myself thinking what’s wrong with me and why can’t I figure this out? So that’s just a specific example of how I do that in my life. There are lots of ways in which I don’t do it, but scheduling is huge.

Over-scheduling is probably the number one thing that causes that stress and that overwhelming feeling of just not being able to do everything we want to do.

NOELLE: I love what you said where it’s like, if I think it’s going to take an hour, I’m going to plan for two and if it does take me one – whew party! Good advice.

I think we underestimate ,when it’s big picture, what we could do over a year and we overestimate what we can do in a day.

Final motivational thoughts from Noelle Pikus Pace

MISTY: So true. I love that. Okay. And then last, anything else that you would like to tell these wonderful women?

NOELLE: You are incredible. You have so much potential. The world is open for you, and God wants you to develop all of your talents that you have, and he wants you to be happy. He wants you to give of your knowledge and your skills to help build other people around you.

That’s one of our greatest reasons for being here, right? Support each other, and to help each other and to also earn a living so we can support ourselves and our families. So what you’re doing is making a difference and keep being that difference, have courage to continue moving forward, put in the work.

It’s going to be hard. There’s hard times in life. There’s always going to be hard times. There’s always going to be challenges along the way. There’s always going to be setbacks. There always will be. You’re not alone in that; we all face challenges. You’re not alone. We’re all just trying to figure this out step-by-step.

I am sometimes flat on the floor in my kitchen. So overwhelmed. And I just allow myself to just lay there. I’m like, I just need 5 minutes on the cold floor. We’re in this together. Keep letting your light shine and be you. Be the best you that you can be.