Episode 69: Don't Let These 3 Things Steal Your Next Goal

As a new year begins, many of us feel inspired to set goals—but too often, those goals quietly slip away. In this epsiode, learn how distraction, dispersion, and drift subtly pull us off course—and why recognizing them ahead of time can change everything. If you want to move toward what matters this year without beating yourself up along the way, this episode is for you.

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Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 69. Don't let these three things steal your next goal.

I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships.In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way, so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hello, and happy new year.

I know there's nothing magical about January 1st. It's actually just another day, but I do love the feeling of having a fresh start and a new year, and I like to look back on the old year, and how things went, and what I learned, and how I grew, and also take some time to set intentions for what I want to create moving forward. How about you? Maybe you want to declutter some areas of your home or mind this year.

Maybe you want to strengthen a relationship. Maybe you want to take better care of your body this year, or be more present with your family, or walk more closely with God. Before you set a goal, I want to give you just a couple of things to think about.

I see a lot of people set goals and then get super frustrated that they don't reach them, and then they use the goal as a weapon to beat themselves up and tell themselves that they're a failure, and instead of propelling them toward growth and new horizons, which is what a goal is meant to do, they end up using their goal to create regret and self-criticism, and I don't want that for you. So today, I want you to know that no matter what goal you set, there are going to be three forces that will go to work against you, and when that happens, it won't be because you're failing. It won't be because you're too weak to succeed, or because you're somehow inadequate.

It's just what's going to happen, and knowing this ahead of time can really help you not get as discouraged when the going gets tough, and instead of letting these three things steal your goal, you're going to be able to face them with confidence now that you know ahead of time that they're going to come. Okay, so I'm going to tell you about the three D's, the three D's that can sabotage your goals, that can steal them from you. I learned these from Tommy Newberry.

He calls them the three horsemen of regret, because they can get us off course from what we really wanted to accomplish, and they all start with the letter D. They are distraction, dispersion, and drift. So let's start with distraction. This is something that can steal a goal from you, if you're not aware of it, if you don't notice it, if you don't know how to respond to it.

A distraction is an urgent or otherwise enticing lower value activity that pulls you away from what you previously designated as a top priority. Okay, that's a lot of words. So I'm gonna say that again, just so that you can kind of let it sink in and see if you agree with this definition.

A distraction is an urgent or otherwise enticing lower value activity that pulls you away from what you previously designated as a top priority. So if you're thinking of this in a visual way, let's say where you are right now is the starting point, and then where you want to end up is the end point. And you could draw a straight line from one to the other, but if you get pulled into distraction, then it means that you zigzag, and you go to the left, and then you go to the right, and then you go to the left, and then you go to the right.

And really, you're just trying to get from this beginning point to the end point, but you keep getting pulled off by something that is a lower value activity that then takes energy away from what you were originally focusing on. So take a second and think about that. What really matters to you that you want to be making progress on and moving toward? And now ask yourself, what is pulling my attention or my time or my energy away from that? Here are some common distractions.

One of the most obvious is things that happen on your phone, right? Urgent or otherwise enticing lower value activity. Have you ever had the experience where you were just going to check the weather on your phone really quick, and then you realize that you've been standing there for 15 minutes with a towel on your head, somehow doing other things on your phone that you never really intended to do, right? Like that's a distraction. So there are all sorts of things that can happen on a phone or any other device that's actually a lower value activity.

It feels urgent in the moment, but it's kind of a distraction from something that was a higher value that was more important that you intended to do. Another distraction, and you may not have thought about this in this way, is complaining. Complaining is a distraction that will pull you away from your goals and keep you from focusing on what you actually truly want to accomplish.

And it makes your direction, instead of going straight toward what you want, you're going to be veering off this direction and veering off that direction and complaining about this and complaining about that. So that's another thing that makes you zigzag. Another common distraction is comparison.

Comparison gets you focused on someone else's goal instead of your own. And instead of making progress in a straighter line, you zigzag to the left and you zigzag to the right when you're comparing yourself to other people. And you're going to make a lot less progress on what you're working on because you keep looking to the side and wondering if you're measuring up.

So those are just a few. What are your biggest distractions that pull you to the left and to the right from what actually really matters? A distraction is an urgent or otherwise enticing lower value activity that pulls you away from what you previously designated as a top priority. And think about this.

What will you regret a year from now if you give into these distractions instead of maintaining a focus on your goal? So I want to encourage you to start noticing when you zigzag away from your actual goal to attend to something that feels kind of important and urgent in the moment, but it's not actually as important as the main thing that you really want to accomplish. And if you notice this, tell yourself the truth. Just start noticing like, Oh, I'm reaching for something that's urgent or enticing, but actually this is lower value.

That's just something you can start doing to get a little bit more awareness of this. All right, here's the second D that can steal a goal. This is the second force that can leave you feeling regret if you let it win.

And this is dispersion. So dispersion in general is basically distributing things over a wide area. Like the wind can cause dispersion of seeds that then get planted in lots of different places.

Or if you have multiple attractions at a theme park that can disperse a crowd so that they're not all waiting in one line. So dispersion can be useful and helpful when it's done on purpose. But when it comes to goals, a lot of times dispersion is something that we don't do on purpose.

We do it by accident and it can weaken our progress when we spread our energy or our time in too many directions. So I like to think of this like if you have a, your garage garbage can. Okay.

And it's got some gross stuff in there. You might get out a pressure washer to be able to spray that out. And with a pressure washer, you can focus the water.

So with a pressure washer, you can focus the water onto a specific spot and really work on it. So if you have something that's really gooey, you can focus in on it. And by pushing the water in a concentrated way, you can loosen up that gooey spot and get it to go away.

But imagine that you have a few holes in the hose and that the water is leaking out in a couple of places. Like you would be using the same amount of water, but since it's leaking out in a few places, you wouldn't have enough water pressure to get that gooey, sticky thing loosened up. And so you can't get your garbage can cleaned out by drizzling water on it all day long.

You actually need a few minutes of really high pressure rinsing to be able to do it in the same way. Think of the resources that you need to make progress on a goal. You have, you're probably going to need to use time, physical energy, mental energy, emotional energy, maybe money, maybe relational energy, things like that.

So part of reaching a goal requires allocating the time and energy and maybe money toward that thing. Without intention though, you can end up accidentally letting your resources leak into other categories, which will leave you drizzling energy onto your goal, but not making much progress. You're using up all the water, but because it has been dispersed into so many areas, you won't see very much progress.

Dispersion is a challenging one because if you're like me, you have lots of categories of your life and lots of areas that matter to you. You have a body to take care of that needs sleep and healthy food and exercise. And you might also have a marriage, maybe kids, a home.

Maybe you have vehicles, a yard, a job, a volunteer position at church and other categories of things that matter to you, where you spend time and energy. So dispersion as a horseman of regret that sabotages progress for you is when your energy or time or focus is spread thin in a way that makes it feel like you're not really making any progress. Like you're trying to make a fire, but you can't really light 25 separate pieces of kindling and get more than some smoke.

But if you could take that same amount of wood and arrange it tightly together, you could end up with a fire and heat that would be much more fulfilling. So I'm going to talk next week more specifically about strategies for how to combat these three D's. So just for now, I want you to start noticing how you are allocating your resources, your time, your sleep, your physical energy, your mental energy, your focus, your decision making juice, and just see how you feel about progress you're making.

And if you feel like you're expending lots of energy, but not making much progress, check for leaks and see if you can find out where you are accidentally drizzling out water instead of being able to concentrate it in one area. All right, the third D word that can steal your goals is drift. Have you ever ended up somewhere you really didn't want to be? Like one day you woke up and suddenly realized that your basement was a total disaster or that you had put on a lot of extra weight.

Or that you're not really connected anymore to someone that you used to be really close to. It probably happened slowly, just a little bit at a time. So you didn't really realize it while it was happening.

And this is called drift. And as it relates to goals, you start out heading in the right direction, but then you slowly drift away from the goal and don't end up reaching it. You end up in a totally different place than what you originally intended.

James Clear, the author of the book, Atomic Habits, explains it like this. He says, imagine you're flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusted the heading just 3.5 degrees South, you will land in Washington DC instead of New York.

Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff. The nose of the airplane moves just a few feet, but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart. So drift is what happens when you have an intended destination.

And then one day you wake up and you go, how did I get here instead of there? It's a slow, imperceptible process, little by little. And drift is the human condition. It happens to some degree to all of us, but it's no reason to give up or get mad at yourself.

It's a reason to become more aware and look for strategies to get back on course. So those are the three D's that can steal a goal, distraction, dispersion, and drift. You can start out headed in a great direction and get distracted and forget where it was.

You actually wanted to go, or you can start out going in a great direction and then end up spreading your resources so thin that you can't really move toward it. Or you can start out going in a great direction and slowly without really meaning to end up drifting to one side or the other, so that your ultimate destination isn't going to be in line with what you originally intended. As you step into 2026 dream big, set your sights on something that matters, something that stretches you, maybe even scares you a little.

And as you do, I want you to expect resistance, expect these three D's to come in and try to steal your goal. You will get distracted. Your energy will get pulled in lots of directions.

Your focus will drift. But when this happens, just know nothing has gone wrong. This isn't failure.

It's the terrain. This is what the road toward anything meaningful actually looks like. And the difference between regret and growth isn't avoiding these obstacles.

It's learning how to respond to them. So next week we're going to talk about how I'll share three simple practical antidotes to distraction, dispersion and drift to help you stay oriented, gather your energy and keep moving forward toward what matters most. Meanwhile, start noticing where you see distraction, dispersion, or drift trying to steal your goals.

Thanks for joining me today. I'll talk to you next week.