Goals as Self Care, an Interview With Our CEO

Abandon the shame storm, all ye who enter here.

In part 3 of 6 in our goal-setting mini series, we sit down with Pearl Day Spa CEO, Sean Vierra, to talk about goals as self-care, what it means to set a good goal, and how to stay on track.

Feeling stuck or already losing steam with your New Year’s resolutions? Just want to get better at setting and achieving the goals you set in your life? Read on and follow along over the next three weeks.

Hannah: First of all, why are we here today even talking about goals at a day spa?

Sean: Sure. Totally reasonable question, and it has a pretty simple answer. Goals are self-care. When we set and achieve goals, it can really build that muscle of self-reliance. For myself, there can be a lot of stress wrapped up in telling myself I can or will do something but then not having a strong feeling of self-reliance that I can or will make it happen. I feel like that’s a common feeling. The shame gremlins. The inner saboteur. We tell ourselves we are going to accomplish something, then that little voice in our head loves to chime in and say… “Remember what happened last time?” or  “You know you don’t have the skills to do that. You don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re probably going to fail, so why try? Better just stay safe instead of possibly failing” I feel like the better we get at knowing how to set a good goal, the more we can build that self confidence and self reliance, and that can relieve a lot of stress. It’s extremely empowering. We all have the inner saboteur, it’s about learning how to work with it. Knowing how to say…hello, I see you there at my front door, but I’m not inviting you in for dinner. And of course New Year’s Resolutions. A lot of us right now are thinking about goals or ways we want to improve this year. 

Hannah: For those that haven’t met you before, tell me a little about yourself, what you do, some of your background:

Sean: Oh boy. Well, I haven’t always been in the spa world. For being 37, I actually haven’t had very many jobs. I’ve been the CEO at The Pearl Day spa for the last six years. I used to live in Utah and moved back to Oregon about 7 years ago and started a business doing massage. Once I grew that, I had the opportunity for a merger to grow my business, and that’s how I ended up at The Pearl. Prior to that I lived in Utah for a number of years and managed spas there as well as practiced massage. Before my spa days I worked in logistics management at Target for about six years. While it wasn’t related to my current field, I did gain a lot of experience in management. I actually really loved my time working for Target. I think we all have a little Target addiction hiding in us somewhere.

Before we get too far into this I do want to take a moment to say that I sure as hell haven’t figured it all out. I fall short and mess up constantly. Anyone I work can attest to that. Ha. It just felt important to say that. I know when I read or listen to things like this, I tend to go into comparison mode and that just isn’t helpful. I just know what works for me, and hopefully a couple of those things can work for someone else. Goal-setting is just a skill like any other. Anyone can get better at it. It isn’t something a person does or doesn’t have.

Hannah: Why do you think people can find goals such a challenging topic? 

Sean: Starting from a place of thinking that failure is wrong or bad. Definitely. It’s just such a common thing to be afraid of failing. Failure will happen. It just will. Look at any achievement around you or anyone that’s done anything good. Behind one success is about a hundred ways they failed before that. A failure is a moment to learn what didn’t work and to try something different--that’s all. It’s a totally unavoidable part of the process of doing. There’s just sooo much cultural stigma around failure. It’s a real bummer how deeply rooted that feeling is. 

I also think people sometimes set goals without much planning. They start with the end goal first, instead of starting with the big picture and setting the end goals last. The goal just doesn’t matter to them, not really. When we don’t have a plan, we don’t know where we are headed, and it can be really hard to stay on track when things unfold differently than we expect. Plans change and we want to jump ship because we didn’t prepare ourselves. Again, failures WILL happen. Having a game plan for what to do WHEN they happen is just so so helpful.

Hannah: 80% of new year’s resolutions fail by mid February, why do you think that is? 

Sean: I think it’s totally the shame storm that happens. We feel like a failure because we didn’t set a reasonable goal and didn’t prepare for what to do when things go off track. The shame storm is very powerful. It can craft a real convincing fiction about who we are as people, and we often believe it. 

Hannah: A little bit ago you mentioned a component of self-reliance when it comes to goals. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

Sean: Hmm. I think building self-reliance, especially in the beginning stages, is really important. It really keeps you moving in the direction of what you want. And self-reliance comes from setting micro-goals that you know you can achieve. I’ll use my planner as an example. And I know you’re probably tired of hearing about my freaking planner, but it’s a perfect example so you can hear it again. Life got hard. Hello 2020. And I really fell off the bandwagon of using my planner, which is something I enjoy. I’ve used a planner pretty religiously for years, but I just totally abandoned it for months. I could have set the goal to “start using my planner,” but I knew that wouldn’t work for me. Instead, I started out with a goal to just pick up my planner once a day for two weeks. That’s it. Pick up the dang thing, and I achieved the goal. When I got that habit down, I added a little more. Enter the date every day for a week, etc. Just building little by little, habit on habit. It can feel so hard to break goals down because it doesn’t feel like we are making a ton of progress, but the alternative is to set a goal that we don’t actually make consistent effort toward. Start small. Smaller. Even smaller. Build from there. Build the self-reliance and let that fuel you to keep going.

Hannah: Can you talk to me a little bit about what your goal planning looks like? 

Sean: It’s something I could really talk about forever, but I know not everyone finds it as fascinating as I do, so I’ll try to pare it down. Planning is super important, and it’s also the step most people skip over. I kinda look at it in two chunks. There’s the longer term pre-planning and then the shorter term doing. 

Hannah: Ok. Let’s start with pre-planning. 

Sean: I have to get this out there first...this stuff is important. Do not skip this. I’ll be the first person to admit that doing this level of planning can feel like it’s keeping us from the actual “doing,” but it’s such a necessary first step. When I say pre-planning I’m talking about big ideas. Long term-plans. Your values as a person. Who are you at your core? What’s important to you? Where are you headed in ten years? What about three years? I think starting with values is such a big idea I couldn’t possibly cover it here. But if you can make your goals match your values as a person, that’s the magic right there. Is family priority for you? Travel? Helping others? Start there. If you’ve never thought about what your values are, there’s a blog post on our website about discovering your personal values. Pick up any Brene Brown book. She’ll steer you right. Make it doable. Sit down, set a timer for just like 20 minutes, and write down the big stuff. What’s most important to you as a person? Where do you want to be in ten years? Write down things that really motivate and inspire you. Things that feel almost impossible. There should be just a hint of them feeling possible, and definitely things that are going to make you flex and grow and learn. So much can happen in ten years!  Go bigger, you can always scale down. Everyone far underestimates what they can do in ten years but overestimates what they can do in a year. Then what about three years?  Get it on paper. Leave it for a few days or a week and come back to it. You probably won’t feel settled the first time you do this. Come back to it three or four times until you feel like it really jives with you. 

Need a little help getting started? Download our printable goal planning worksheets here.

Start with your values: Visit our blog post on how to discover your personal core values here.

Hannah: And how does that translate into the short term?

Sean: Short-term to me is one year or less. Then the next layer is 90 days or less. Take a look at the work you’ve already done. Once you have an idea of what’s important, what smaller chunk of the bigger picture are you going to tackle this year? 3-5 important things but no more. Then break those down into 90 day goals. The 90 day goals are where we get into the doing. 90 days is long enough to really get some things done, but it isn’t so big that it feels...intangible. I don’t feel like I can conceptualize what I’m going to do over the next ten years, but the next 90 days is foreseeable. I can feel it. I can really hold it in my hands. I really want to stress that this is the end of the process, not the beginning. You create your north star first, then chart the path. This really helps me when things get off track. Inevitably, plans will have to change and adapt as you get into the doing. This interview is a perfect example of that. It first started out as a video, and then I got so insanely overwhelmed with editing video footage that I wanted to jump ship. Then I asked if we could do a Zoom interview instead. Scrap all the editing malarky and just share our interview. Well you better believe the Zoom recording got accidentally deleted. What a mess. So it all got converted into an article. Did the end goal end up at all like was planned? Nope. Sure didn’t. But I think it still got us to where we are going, you know? The goal was to share a thing or two that someone might find valuable when it comes to setting their own goals. And who knows, maybe that didn’t happen! My point is that when you know what the end goal is, the exact path to it can have a little room for some wiggle. 

Hannah: If you had just one silver bullet tip for someone when it comes to setting goals, what would it be? 

Sean: That’s easy. Progress is success. Really let that sink in for a second. Progress is success. I’m sorry to break it to you, but you will never “arrive.” We will get to where we think we wanted to go, and it won’t feel like we thought it would, so now we want to go somewhere else. Somewhere bigger and better. Don’t get caught up in a rat race of feeling like you can’t deem something a success just because you haven’t arrived at some fictitious end that doesn’t even exist. If you’ve made progress, congratulations! That IS success. Really soak it in. I’m such an “onto the next thing” person that I have people in my life that remind me to stop and appreciate things because I’m not very good at it. Pardon my french, but perfection is bullshit. Perfection is the lowest hanging fruit you could possibly aim for. It’s void of all growth because it’s void of stumbling blocks and learning. Aim for progress, not perfection. Get excited about saying…gosh I really botched that didn’t I!? But I learned so much.

Join us next week for a live interview with local entrepreneur, Brenda Stebbeds, owner of Urban Therapeutic.

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