Missed Your Goals? It’s Not Self-Sabotage—Here’s What It Really Is

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Feel like your goals ghosted you this year?

You're not alone—and it's not self-sabotage.

In this episode, we’re talking to self-trust coach Dawn Ledet about why missed goals aren't failures, how to stop making your inner dialogue sound like a mean girl, and what to do when your ambition outpaces your execution.

Whether you’re a solopreneur navigating your next big move or just trying to stop rage-scrolling instead of working, this conversation is your permission slip to ditch the guilt and actually work with yourself—not against you.

Let’s rethink the whole “new year, new me” thing… and make some real progress instead.

Like the show? We'd love it if you'd leave a 5-star review!

Connect with Dawn Ledet

• Visit theselftrustcoach.com
• Read Master Your Inner Dialogue
  
• Listen to The Self Trust Solution podcast

Favorite Quote About Success:"

"Self-trust is the first secret of success." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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About Dawn Ledet

Episode Transcript

Carly Ries: Hey, listeners. Today, we sit down with self trust coach, Dawn Ledet, to uncover why missed goals aren't self sabotage, and why your negative self talk might be the sneakiest thing holding you back. From turning inner critics into curious companions, to planning audacious goals that actually fit in your life, this conversation will have you rethinking everything you thought you knew about follow through. So grab your coffee, reopen that dusty goal list of yours, and tune in because it's not too late to get back on track. You're listening to the Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for those just taking a bold step or even just thinking about taking that step into the world of solo entrepreneurship.

My name is Carly Ries and my cohost Joe Rando and I are your guides navigating this crazy but awesome journey as a company of one. We take pride in being part of LifeStarr, a digital hub dedicated to all aspects of solopreneurship that has empowered and educated countless solopreneurs looking to build a business that resonates with their life's ambitions. We help people work to live, not live to work. And if you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is not the show for you. So if you're eager to gain valuable insights from industry experts on running a business the right way the first time around or want to learn from the missteps of solopreneurs who paved the way before you, then stick around.

We've got your back because flying solo in business doesn't mean you're alone. Okay. So Dawn, at the time of this recording, it is March and all of those New Year's goals that everybody was so excited about are now either coming true or they are long since attempted. Or all gone by the wayside. And you are just so great at goal setting, goal achievement that's like kinda your shtick.

We always advise people to do goal setting as like the first thing they do when they when they start their business. So now that we've hit that point of the year, and people might need some encouragement, why aren't missed goals a self sabotage problem? Like let's get to the root of this and keep that momentum going.

Dawn Ledet: Absolutely. You know, the problem with labeling missed goals, missed opportunities, delays in goals as self sabotage is we miss out on valuable data in reaching our goals. It's a reduction of what's actually happening.

Right? And then it creates its own big hurdle to overcome, which makes it feel harder and more uncomfortable. It becomes this battle of you against you instead of you and the real obstacles and challenges that come with every goal and let's say new endeavor. So what are those like surprising things that hold people back from achieving their goals that they may not be aware of? They just think it's all my fault and they don't see those blind spots. It's that we forget that discomfort is normal. It actually can be expected. We end up When we think that discomfort is a problem, we end up fighting against ourselves instead of for the results we want.

Joe Rando: You mean like you're fighting against the discomfort or you're fighting basically being angry at yourself for not making the goals? I just wanna understand.

Dawn Ledet: Absolutely. Because what happens is, I like to remind, like, all our dedicated fitness entrepreneurs out there, that it's similar, to making time for your workouts. It's not comfortable, but you do it for the after effect benefits. Or for our parents out there, it's so hard, right? The teen years, the rebellious moments, and then we bask in the rewards of first steps and graduations and successes.

When we normalize that hard is part of it, that if things are difficult and that we connect to the times that we do do difficult things for the net positive results, we have a way to work with ourselves instead of against the discomfort. Because when we make the discomfort a problem, that's when we reach for those go to comforts, which often are things like working on a task that's more familiar, that's easier for you, that, or stepping away and going to scroll social media or answer emails. Because these are just easier, take less effort than addressing the discomfort at hand.

Carly Ries: Those are the not important things, Joe, that we always talk about.

Joe Rando: Yeah. Not urgent, not important. But question, What about the propensity of some people, I'm not talking about myself by any stretch, to set goals that are overly ambitious and then run up against reality and feel badly about the fact that, gee, I didn't achieve all the goals I set out.

Dawn Ledet: Right. I mean, I don't think there are goals that are too ambitious, to be honest. I think our planning for how to follow through with those goals is what is understated. So we make a plan that doesn't align with our lives, and then we beat ourselves up for not achieving those goals instead of making a plan that actually aligns and is doable. So the goal can be super audacious.

Just make the plan.

Joe Rando: The execution. Yeah. If do something huge, you don't wanna try to do it in the next month. You wanna maybe allow the next year is what you're saying.

Dawn Ledet: Absolutely. So the way we do success dates or goal deadline dates, whatever term you wanna use in the self trust lab, we do it based on actually laying out what does it take to achieve this goal. Let's look at all everything that it takes, and let's plan it out. How much time do I wanna spend on this each week, each day, eve each month? And then that gives you your deadline.

Joe Rando: That's tough though sometimes. When you're doing something you've never done before, and you go, oh, think it's gonna be this, this, this. And then you do it, you go, oh no, there were all these other things I never thought about. Right?

Dawn Ledet: Well, that's when the evaluation becomes so important. We have to learn from ourselves along the way. Of course, you're not gonna know exactly how to do it because we don't know what it takes to get something done until we've done it. But if we're taking each step along the way and learning, oh, hey, that step is gonna take three more weeks. Let me adjust for that.

Instead of using that energy to beat ourselves up for not being able to get it done, we can learn from ourselves and create an execution plan that actually works.

Joe Rando: That's really great.

Carly Ries: I feel like you're dangling a carrot here. Can you kind of go into your practical framework that you help people with? Because you're like, well, you evaluate, you set the goals and what it takes. And I'm like, oh, I know there's more and I want to know more.

Dawn Ledet: Yes. Well, I believe truly that it only takes three skills to achieve anything. And it's make decisions, follow through, and then have your own back. And in that have your own back piece is the evaluation process.

It's learning from what worked, what didn't work, and what we can do differently to adjust in a way that works for us. And when we can filter any strategy that you have, you can filter it through those three skills and really boil it down to simplify it because we get caught up in all the noise and rhetoric of everything that it takes instead of tuning in and listening and learning from what we're already doing. There's so much wisdom there. And when we don't mind that wisdom, we don't mind that data, then we often go into all the self talk that Joe was mentioning about like, why isn't this working? And this is, you know, I'm terrible.

Carly Ries: Well, so let's talk about that self talk for a second. Because I'd imagine that is 90% of goal setting is just how you how you treat yourself basically. And if you're like, oh, I'm so stupid. I can't believe I do not think about that in the plan. Do you remember maybe a decade ago that little the video of that little girl that went viral that's like, I love my mom.

I love my Jessica. Joe, I don't know if you ever saw that but

Joe Rando: I saw it.

Carly Ries: All these affirmations. And if only we could all be like that in the morning because we're not. And it's so much easier to nitpick the things that we're doing wrong than it is to do the things that we are doing right. So what is the connection between self talk and goal achievement?

Dawn Ledet: Absolutely. Like any strategy can work truly, but you have to have self trust to execute it. And it starts with our inner dialogue.

Our inner dialogue is so powerful. And it contains so much wisdom just waiting to be heard. And you hear that part clearly when you're, you know, deciding on your goal, when you are sure of what you want, when you are thinking about all the ways that you wanna serve your life, your family, your clients. But often what we're listening to is what I call the lobby noise. So if you think of a busy lobby filled with voices of other people, of experts, of your family and friends, of your past, paired with your own doubts and insecurities and fears, we spend so much time in that lobby and that's when we start to feel overwhelmed and that's when we start to create confirmation bias for we have thoughts like, I suck and this is too hard for me.

And then boy does our brain go to find evidence to support it. And I love to remind people, and you'll recognize this in yourself if you think about it. You say something like that and your brain immediately starts to bring up evidence from the past. Remember when you didn't do that one thing you said you were gonna do? Remember when you didn't follow that meal plan?

Remember when you didn't finish that course? It just is so good.

Joe Rando: don't know if this is a question or not, but I think about people I've known, and you know, growing up, my parents, they were really great. I mean, they were really nice to me. They made me feel good about myself. I kind of didn't trust them because of the rest of the world that maybe they were, exaggerating a little bit, which they absolutely were. But, I kind of came up with this, you know, pretty positive surrounding, at least in terms of my family.

And I know people that grew up with really awful messages being given to them from birth. And I feel like what you're saying makes total sense, but I just wanna point out that there are some people that are gonna struggle with this a lot more than others to get rid of those I call them the tapes playing in your head of the things that make you feel like you're not competent or capable. And wanna I mean, I don't know. You may have opinions on this. I just don't wanna put it out there like, hey.

You know, I just have to get over that. Some people are gonna struggle. Some people gonna need therapy to get to that point where they can deal with that.

Dawn Ledet: Sure. It's less about changing that. That is the key piece of this. It's not about affirmations and turning every thought you have into a positive thought. I would not recommend that at all, as a matter of fact.

But it is changing the relationship with those thoughts. So understanding the origin of them, that's what I write about in the Master Your Inner Dialogue, is we wanna understand that we do have these voices, whether we created them out of protection for ourselves when we were younger, whether they were actual external voices that said words to us, how we internalized them. And so identifying the origin of them creates a separation from them. They are voices. They are not you.

And then you can start to create a dialogue with them so that when you hear something like, what's wrong with me? You can actually answer it with nothing is what I would hope you would say. But I can tell you for myself, that one used to come up for me a lot and I hear it a lot from my clients. What's wrong with me? And sometimes you say it so innocently, like kind of jokingly like, oh, what's wrong with me?

I dropped my phone. What's wrong with me? But confirmation bias is real. And when we don't answer that question, our brain wants to prove us right. It loves to prove us right.

And it goes to look for evidence. And when there's all of that lobby noise giving you evidence, then we can live in that space. But if we answer it like my answer in the beginning was just everything and nothing because it made me chuckle a little bit. I thought it was kind of funny. I've realized that that still had some confirmation bias challenges with it.

But so now I can cleanly say nothing. Like nothing's wrong with me and I might be struggling with something right now. But that's the opening to actually connect to yourself instead of disconnecting. What we normally do when we internalize those thoughts or questions is we end up creating more disconnect. We either wanna duck and run, or we want to fight against them instead of creating more internal connection and working with ourselves.

Carly Ries: So would you recommend that people kind of practice this proactively and get that, like, even when they're not struggling with something, they really like rehearse that? Or when something comes up, that's when they have these inner discussions. How would you approach that?

Dawn Ledet: Just beginning to see it as a dialogue is so helpful. Don't try and rewrite your story. Your story is your story, there's so much beauty in it. Even the difficult stories have so much beauty. But here's what happens.

Our inner dialogue, we hear it in a tone. Right? So whether you hear it in the tone of a judge or a bully or a critic, our inner dialogue actually doesn't have a tone. It's one we give it. And so my invitation is to neutralize that tone, is to start catching thoughts and maybe even just restating them without any tone at all, or in the tone of a child or in the tone of a robot.

I have clients that use British accents. Do something that takes that sting out of it, the story that it's carried for so long and turn it into an actual conversation. So like if you hear this will never work in that tone of just like bully, This will never work. You're likely to either believe it or push against it. And that's where our goals get paused or delayed or even released.

But what if you heard that will never work with no tone or maybe in the tone of a child? You may lean in and get curious. And I always invite you to take it as an invitation of two types. First is an invitation to affirm yourself, your path, or your goal, or second as an invitation for a new perspective. So this looks like, if you're seeing it as an invitation for, to affirm yourself, your path, your goal, that will never work.

Could be like, and it totally could. And it will. It's like, oh yeah, this is just reminding me. If we think about, you know, we actually pay people to challenge our thoughts sometimes. We're just being able to do that for ourselves here a little bit, but in a constructive way.

So the second would be, you know, that will never work. We might wanna look at it and be like, okay, what is a way that could work better? Maybe there is something here that is not aligning. Maybe there's some wisdom. If I walk through that lobby into the door of my wisdom and intuition, maybe there actually is something here that I wanna reconsider before I keep moving forward.

Carly Ries: So you're saying like it doesn't have a tone, but we assign it the tone. And my tone is subtle with mine because it's self deprecation. And so instead of saying, you're so stupid, blah blah blah, it's oh, there's Carly biting off more than she can chew again. And that I'll save that bit for another time, I guess.

But that often to people doesn't come off as negative self talk because they think it's, oh, well I'm being funny, it's not true. But really it is still negative self talk in disguise. How should people approach that if they're kinda turning it into a Yeah.

Dawn Ledet: I mean it's just always being on to your confirmation bias. There's nothing wrong with saying any of these things, to be honest. It's just how is it supporting you in moving forward? So if you're saying something like, there's Carly biting off more than she can chew, true, have an answer for that. Because you know it exists now.

You know that's something that is part of your repertoire, part of your self talk. And so if you have an answer ready for it, such as, turns out I can chew a lot, or maybe here's something that I wanna, pull off the plate just for today. Or maybe I wanna rethink where this lands in my day, week, or monthly schedule.

Joe Rando: Yeah. I really like this, and I wanna point out that what I love about this is that it's not Tony Robbins, like, get up every morning and look in the mirror. I'm great. I'm great. And part of you is going, no.

No. I'm just lying to myself and using a mirror and lots of physical motion. And it's like, this is more this feels very real to me. like it. It feels like, yeah, I've gotta come to terms with this thing.

I'm gonna give it a maybe what do you think about the idea? My wife works with children with anxiety, and she gives the anxiety a name. The kids give it a name. And, I mean, just give whatever that thing is that's saying this to a name and deal with it like you deal with an annoying coworker.

Dawn Ledet: I'd love for it to get to a point where it's not an annoying coworker. Because again, we're not trying to create more division. And that's my other struggle with self sabotage is we divide ourselves into these pieces. Like there's pieces of us against us, as if we're not all for ourselves. And what we really need is a united front.

There's enough out there for us to battle. We need a united front to move forward with it. And so we wanna become just friends with our inner dialogue. We wanna connect to it. It's not rainbows and daisies, so don't try and make it sound like rainbows and daisies, but take care of yourself through it.

When there's some discomfort that wants to pull you away from the task at hand, introduce comforts that actually support forward movement. So it's just retraining those go to habits of comfort into habits of comfort that actually support forward movement.

Carly Ries: Dawn, I think the thing I love most about what you do for people is that this applies to everybody.

I have never met a single person that's like, I'm setting this goal and I achieved it with ease. I'm unless they set like, I'm going out to get my newspaper and then they grab their newspaper. But like real goals, this applies to every single person, especially solopreneurs who would have that whole who don't have their ideas desolate to off of other people. They are the person that they bounce those ideas off of.

Joe Rando: That and the fact that they don't have a boss going, get this done by Thursday. You know, they have to be that boss. So, yeah, I mean, this is kind of critical ways of thinking about things for a lot of or maybe all solopreneurs, which is, I think it sounds really powerful to me.

Carly Ries: Well, I want people to find out about more about what you do, which we'll get to in a second. But before that, you help people find success through self trust. So we have to ask you, what is your favorite quote about success?

Dawn Ledet: Oh, it probably won't surprise you since I am the self trust coach, but my favorite quote is self trust is the first secret of success. And that's Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Carly Ries: I was gonna say, like, did you write that? I've heard he's pretty reputable, so I guess that's good one. Well, Dawn, where can people find you if they wanna learn more?

Dawn Ledet: If you are recognizing, that your inner dialogue is impacting your ability to follow through and trust yourself, I have a book, it's called Master Your Inner Dialogue. It's the shortest read ever, but it's a great guide for shifting the way you talk to yourself so that you can create that unified front towards all of your goals. So you can stop second guessing and start following through and create more ease. Like you said, Carly, it's not gonna be easy. And so that's why we have to normalize discomfort, but we have to create that united front towards it so that we can achieve what you want.

And look, I know that reading a book is just the beginning, so I've created Beyond the Pages. It's an email series that actually walks you through the book with deeper insights and actionable steps so that you can integrate the concepts into your daily life. And you can find it the selftrustcoach.com.

Carly Ries: Easy enough. That sounds great. Well, Dawn, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This has been so helpful. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in.

You know the drill. Please leave that five star review. Share this with a friend. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, and we will see you next time on The Aspiring Solopreneur. You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone.

In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.