Set Goals That Empower Not Exhaust You
As we enter a new year, it’s easy to feel pulled towards big, dramatic goals. The kind that promise a completely transformed version of ourselves by February.
I always had great lists of goals - essentially, how I thought I could make myself or my life ‘better’. There’s a reason goals like these feel so tempting.
Your brain is wired to chase dopamine fantasies.
Dopamine is a chemical in your brain associated with the anticipation of pleasure.
A dopamine fantasy is when your brain imagines an extreme, positive change and releases dopamine in relation to it.
These fantasies feel exciting because they create a surge of dopamine and you enjoy the anticipated pleasure.
But critically, dopamine fantasies tend to be extreme, unsustainable and emotionally disconnected from your real life. Hence the focus on fantasy.
If you are excited about a big, unsustainable goal you have set yourself, it will likely be an exhausting, dopamine fantasy in disguise.
It’s your brain chasing the feeling of change, the excitement and pleasure, not your brain focusing on the process of change.
You can get tricked into what’s realistic by your own brain. So when you set out to achieve your goal, you will most likely:
Falter, stop and ‘fail’.
Not because you lack intelligence or discipline. Just because the goal was too much of a jump for your brain, too quickly.
What often then happens, is your brain can then use your ‘failure’ as inaccurate evidence and reinforce disempowering beliefs:
“Change isn’t possible.”
“I’m not good enough.”
“I’m not capable.”
These thoughts generate challenging emotion you could do without.
Instead of being deceived into exhausting goals by what your brain will naturally do, let’s focus on how to work with it.
As a first step, do a fantasy check. Always check your goal is a realistic, kind adaptation to where you are currently. Big disempowering fantasies are out.
Let’s Practice Together:
Helpfully, we are reinforcing this empowering approach together every week…
Every email I send you has one goal: to enable you develop emotional empowerment step-by-step.
We won’t be focusing on unsustainable pressure or perfection. We’ll be taking small, manageable steps each week.
Steps that your brain can actually follow.
I’ve Done the Hard Work For You:
I had to teach myself emotional empowerment the long, slow, inefficient way.
Piecing together psychology and neuroscience, I had to find out how to apply this to my own experience. It worked, but it took months and months.
You don’t need to do that.
Each email I send is designed to be:
➡️ Manageable
➡️ Emotionally realistic
➡️ Supportive of your brain’s natural design
The only goal you need to set, is to cultivate the conscious motivation to read each email and apply the small step that week.
Don’t forget, motivation doesn’t appear magically, it’s created by your thoughts.
Choose a Motivating Thought Option:
Here are a few thought suggestions that can help your brain generate the motivation to engage with empowering weekly steps:
“This is a step I can absolutely take for me each week.”
“I’m learning how to achieve empowering, not exhausting goals.”
“I don’t need to do everything, just this one thing each week.”
“I’m becoming someone who prioritises my emotional empowerment in a way that works.”
Choose the one that feels the most comfortable and motivating when you read it.
Then — and this is important — set it as a repeating silent alarm on your phone each day.
This gives your brain a gentle cue to revisit the thought, embed it, and strengthen the thought pathway that generates the motivation.
Build a life where your goals are achievable and your empowerment inevitable.
Not through pressure. Not through extremes. Not through dopamine fantasies.
But through consistent, compassionate, brain‑aligned steps that build your emotional empowerment from the inside out.
We’ll do it together, one week at a time. You can also apply this to all your goal setting from now on!
The power of emotions really is amazing - let’s make yours your most powerful asset!