Reclaim Your Excellence: The Path To A Meaningful & Joyous Life w/ Brad Stulberg

So you set your big goal. That's step one. I mean, step two is you wanna break down the goal into the component parts that's gonna help you get to achieve that big goal. Today, I'm joined by Brad Stolberg. Brad is a sustainable excellence expert. He's a human performance coach, and he's also a best selling author. Step three is you largely forget about the big goal because it can be overwhelming. It can force you to rush and get impatient and then fall off a cliff, and you focus on those small steps, those component parts, the things that you can do day in and day out, the little victories. And then the final step is when you catch yourself stressing about the time horizon or thinking about the peak that's still thousands of feet away metaphorically, you come back to those small steps in the moment. Alright, Brad. So it's the new year. Everybody out there has pondered their goals and their dreams. They've put pen to paper. I think the best way to launch into the discussion that I wanna have would be for you to share some of your best advice on how to set everyone up for sustained success in 2026. I think the biggest trap that people tend to fall into with any fresh start, but perhaps particularly at the beginning of a new year, is you've got all this motivation right off the bat, and you set this big, audacious goal. And the idea of the goal is great. It's really fluid in your head. You've got a plan for how it's gonna work. But then that plan meets reality, and life gets in the way, and there are hiccups. Or maybe you realize that you overshot the target a little bit. And there's this all or nothing mentality where if you're not firing on all cylinders all the time, then it's like, to hell with it. Why even pursue this goal? And a much better approach is to accept that failure is gonna be inevitable. Whatever you had planned is never gonna work. Dan Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for the planning fallacy. Right? Like, we we plan, and things go 40% haywire all the time. And the same is true with our personal goals. So I think in situations where people are struggling, the number one thing that I would say is just get back to focusing on consistency. What are the smallest steps that you can take? And the bigger the goal, the smaller those steps is the first thing I'd say. The second thing I'd say is maybe you've gotta do a quick evaluation and determine, did you set the right goal? And the way that I like to think about goals are are they aligning with your values, like, who you are, who you wanna become? And if they are and you're not on track, then it's simply a matter of you're probably trying to do too …