247. The Science of Goal Setting: Fit (with self-connection) and Grit (with harmonious passion)

January 28, 2026

Why do most New Year's resolutions fail by week three? Often because we don't really connect with those resolutions. In this episode, we'll build on our self-connection series to see how that work of connecting with our true self can inform goals that we're more likely to achieve. We'll focus on a two-step framework for goal achievement: fit (goals that match your authentic values) and grit (sustained effort that doesn't lead to burnout). If you haven't caught the rest of this series, head back to episode 243 for the first part.

p.s., Find your Simple Joy practice for this episode right here at our blog.

About: The Joy Lab Podcast blends science and soul to help you cope better with stress, ease anxiety, and uplift mood. Join Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek for practical, mindfulness-based tools and positive psychology strategies to build resilience and create lasting joy.

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Sources and Notes:

Joy Lab Program: Take the next leap in your wellbeing journey with step-by-step practices to help you build and maintain the elements of joy in your life.
Self-connection series:
- Making Self-Connection Your Superpower in 2026 [ep. 243]
- The Practice of Self-Awareness: Why You're Worth Knowing [ep. 244]
- Stop Waiting to Accept Yourself: The Truth About Unconditional Self-Acceptance [ep. 245]
- The Power of Self-Alignment & Reclaiming Your True Self [ep. 246]
Self-acceptance episodes:
- No Need to Hurry, No Need to Sparkle, No Need to Be Anybody But Yourself [ep. 160]
- Accept Yourself Just As You Are & Then You Can Change [ep. 150]
- How to Change: External vs Internal Motivators [ep. 145]
Authenticity series:
- Unmasking Your True Self: Exploring Authenticity and Awe [ep. 216]
- Embrace Your True Self: Accepted, Connected, & In The Game [ep. 217]
- The Road Most Travelled: Awakening Through Suffering [ep. 218]
- Follow Your Bliss: Awakening to Joy [ep. 219]
- The Still Small Voice: Awakening with Soulfulness [ep. 220]
More on inspiration and goal-setting:
- Inspiration: The Engine of Joy" ... gives some great basics for this element of inspiration) [ep. 10]
- Resolution #1: You Don’t Need to Be Fixed [ep. 40]
- The Myths of Change [ep. 41]
- Five Principles for Inspired Change (or something that looks remarkably like it) [ep. 42]
- Harmonious vs. Obsessive Passions [ep. 43]
Dr. Angela Duckworth's website.
"You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, and how you can still come out of it." — Maya Angelou

Key Moments

00:00 - Introduction: Self-Aligned Goals & Inspiration Welcome and overview of self-concordant goals; completing the self-connection series (self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-alignment)

00:30 - Why Most Resolutions Fail by Late January Understanding the resolution dropout rate and introducing the two-step process: fit and grit

01:00 - Goal Fit: Matching Goals to Your Authentic Self What makes goals "self-concordant"; creating goals from self-awareness and self-acceptance rather than guilt or shame

01:45 - The Spark of Inner Inspiration How self-connected goals naturally arise with inspiration; the difference between authentic motivation and external pressure

02:00 - Understanding Grit: Dr. Angela Duckworth's Four Characteristics Breaking down the science of sustained effort and resilience in goal achievement

02:30 - Grit Characteristic #1: Consistency Over Time Maintaining focus on aligned goals without constant jumping between priorities

02:45 - Grit Characteristic #2: Perseverance Through Setbacks Finding new paths when blocked; resilience in the face of obstacles

03:00 - Grit Characteristic #3: Pacing & Patience Working toward bigger visions rather than just checking off to-do lists

03:30 - Grit Characteristic #4: Harmonious Passion The fuel for sustained effort; authentic alignment vs. external validation (reference to harmonious vs. obsessive passions episode)

04:00 - Connecting Fit & Grit: Three Keys to Success How self-connection enables perseverance, passion, and overcoming setbacks

04:30 - The Values Tattoo Exercise Using your values tattoo from episode 246 to identify meaningful goals

05:00 - Real-Life Example: Sleep Goals & Energy Balance Personal story about identifying sleep as a core value related to energy expenditure (give and take)

06:00 - Four Questions to Check Goal Fit Does this goal reflect YOUR values or someone else's expectations? Pursuing from genuine interest or external pressure? Accounting for real circumstances? Can you accept yourself while working toward it?

07:00 - Goals Can Evolve: How authentic goals adapt to new information; moving from sleep rituals to sleep apnea treatment

08:00 - True Grit Isn't Forcing: Checking In With Self-Connection Avoiding burnout by ensuring persistent effort aligns with genuine interest and self-reflection

08:30 - Your North Star for 2026 Using values tattoos as guideposts; goals don't have to be rigid finish lines

09:00 - Closing Wisdom: Maya Angelou on Defeats & Rising Inspiration for embracing setbacks as opportunities to discover who you are

10:00 - Outro & Resources Visit JoyLab.coach

Coming Next Month on Joy Lab

Next month starts our series on grief. If you're wondering what that has to do with joy, well, it has everything to do with joy. The truth is we can't have one without the other. In the series, we'll explore how to move with and through grief more skillfully so that your joy can grow too.

Please remember that this content is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice and is not a replacement for advice and treatment from a medical professional. Please consult your doctor or other qualified health professional before beginning any diet change, supplement, or lifestyle program.

Please see our terms for more information.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call the NAMI HelpLine: 1-800-950-6264 available Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. – 10 p.m., ET. OR text "HelpLine" to 62640 or email NAMI at [email protected]. Visit NAMI for more. You can also call or text SAMHSA at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

Episode Transcript

247. The Science of Goal Setting: Fit (with self-connection) and Grit (with harmonious passion)
===

[00:00:00]

Aimee: Welcome back to Joy Lab, Aimee here. It's just me today and we are at the end of our self-connection series. So for context, we're working on our Element of Inspiration. This is our last episode of our self-connection series. So our conversations in the series on self-connection have been around self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self alignment. And today we're talking about self-concordant or self-aligned goals.

So it is the season of resolutions or if you like the majority of folks, it's about three weeks into January and the vast majority have already given up on our resolutions. No shame. I wanna touch a bit on why that happens, but mostly talk about how we can set goals that we are more likely to achieve.

So here's this two-step process for setting and achieving our goals that we're [00:01:00] gonna talk about today fit and grit. So fit really has to do with goal matching. The goal matches us, our desires, our interests, our values, rather than goals that are created from guilt or shame or external pressures of some sort.

And then grit has to do with a kind of sustained effort and resilience to keep going after that goal. Let's talk fit first. Fit can help us with our goal setting because goal setting that truly comes from our interests, our desires, from what we really want to achieve, we're gonna be more successful at.

These are sometimes called self-concordant goals, self-aligned goals, and we talked about self-alignment last episode. So based on what we've been working on this month, we could say that goals that really fit us are created from a place of self-awareness and self-acceptance. Two of the aspects of self-connection we've been working on.[00:02:00]

And so when we're feeling more self-connected or when we've been working on our self-connection, these goals that really fit us can rise up just naturally. And I think they often rise up with a little spark of inspiration. Uh, a little light from within. So I'll link to a podcast that we did a while back on inner inspiration, if you wanna dive deeper into that, like spark.

So now for grit, I wanna lean on Dr. Angela Duckworth's research here on grit. Dr. Duckworth identifies four characteristics of grit. The first is consistency over time. This is about having a big goal or these smaller goals that don't jump around all of the time.

They're in the same vein. Second is perseverance amidst setbacks. This is kind of the grit that is easy to resonate with, like when we get knocked down, when we're blocked, we find a new path or new ways to work on that [00:03:00] goal. The third is pacing and patience. This is the practice of working toward kind of bigger goals rather than just knocking things off a to-do list, so to speak. There's a kind of vision of something bigger and further off in the distance that is keeping you able to maintain this kind of grittiness, this perseverance. The last one is authentic and harmonious passion. This is really the fuel. We can be gritty, we can fuel those other characteristics when we really align with the goal, it's, it's ours rather than a goal that we set and go after for external validation. So it's really coming back to the fit. We did, uh episode a while back on harmonious or obsessive passions. I'm gonna link to that in the show notes. It's very helpful here when we're thinking about goal setting and a balance of energy [00:04:00] toward how we go about achieving our goals. So when we think about fit and grit and the kind of grit that arises from self-connection, then one, you can persevere because the goal reflects your authentic values. Two, you show passion because the pursuit genuinely engages you. And three, you overcome setbacks because you're committed to something meaningful to you.

So let's get into how we can identify some of these goals that have fit and grit. Remember that tattoo we created last episode. If not, head back to episode 245 to do the many selves practice and then episode 246, we talked about that values tattoo.

So if you have your tattoo or you can do it now, come back. It's likely, there are a few pieces to it, a few aspects of how that value takes shape in your life. That's where your goal can come from. It may come from an aspect of the tattoo that you added because it's important to [00:05:00] you, but that you struggle with.

So for me, when I did my values tattoo actually last year, I like to do this kind of yearly, I identified more on what has to do with my energy expenditure, my give and take. How much energy am I putting out? How much energy am I taking back in? 'cause I was feeling a little unbalanced in my, how much am I putting out, how much am I taking in? And so, I really identified with sleep for that.

It was an aspect of it. It had like a moon and sun sort of identifying, this energy of, of activity and rest. And so I wanted to put more attention into the rest period. And so sleep practices were something I was really focused on in 2025. I'm gonna tell you more about that here in a moment, I think. So pause on that.

All right, so you identify what that goal might be. The next step is to check in again and see if it fits, so you can ask some questions to see, for example, does this goal [00:06:00] reflect your actual values or is it someone else's expectations? Another question, are you pursuing this from genuine interest or external pressure?

Another question, does this goal account for your real circumstances and capabilities? Maybe a last question to consider, can you accept yourself as you are while working toward this goal? So if you can answer "yes" to those questions, then it's likely a good fit at this time. That goal is a good fit, and this is where some specificity comes into play.

If this is a really big goal, maybe what are some smaller, simpler, self-concordant, paths that can help you get there? How can you walk toward it in such a way that you can maintain grit? And the good thing about these tattoos is that they are not permanent. They are evolving. So even though grit suggests this kind of long-term perseverance toward a goal, it's very [00:07:00] likely that your goals will shift.

That's fine. The values can still be strong and, and, serve as guideposts and, and the way you play them out, the way you walk with them can change. And that's a good sign as well, that your goals are responsive to your self-awareness and self-acceptance.

So back to my sleep goals in 2025, I was really working hard and I was proud of myself. I was really working hard on these sleep practices. I gave up all caffeine, friends, was torturous, but I did give up all caffeine, other bedtime ritual practices and to no helpful outcomes. I was still sleeping really crappy. Finally, did a sleep test and found out I have sleep apnea, moderate to severe sleep apnea. So, my goals have changed as they relate to sleep practices and how that serves my energy expenditure. So now, instead of these sort of like [00:08:00] maybe more complex sleep practices that I engage at at night, I've shortened them and I now use a CPAP, which,I'm okay with because it's helping me sleep. So with grit, it's the same process. Like if I would just ignore the need for the CPAP and keep like adding more complex sleep rituals to improve my sleep, it's just not gonna be helpful, right? So remember to keep checking in with your self-connection as you're applying persistent effort to make sure you're not just spinning your wheels or burning out. True grit is not about forcing yourself toward any finish line, it's about the sustained passionate pursuit of goals that genuinely interest you and that genuinely reflect who you are. So I hope you can have some fun with these. So maybe whatever's happened, if you've set resolutions that haven't worked out it, that doesn't matter.

You can come back to those values tattoos or create one and see if there might be a goal in there that you [00:09:00] can name for 2026. And it might not even be such a clear goal. It might just be that that tattoo is, a bit of your like North Star for 2026. And that this idea, for example, for me, of energy expenditure is like just always something that you're keeping front of mind so that you can help guide choices and your decisions and the way you're moving in the world so that it's closer to that value.

So I wanna close us with, some wisdom, some motivation from Maya Angelou. Here it is. " You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, and how you can still come out of it."

Thanks for joining us!: Thank you for listening to the Joy Lab podcast. If you enjoy today's show, visit JoyLab.coach to learn more about the full Joy Lab program. Be sure to [00:10:00] rate and review us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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247. The Science of Goal Setting: Fit (with self-connection) and Grit (with harmonious passion)

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