Learning to Backflip

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A post shared by Sarah Arnold-Hall | Goals Coach (@saraharnoldhall)

My goal to learn to backflip on a trampoline is DONE.

Next goal: standing backflip. Let’s go.

I Track Every Goal I set. Here’s The List.

I set goals to feel alive.

Sweaty palms.
Racing heart.
Can’t think of anything else.

But I don’t just write them in my journal, I track them in public.

Here’s the live list I keep updated on the front page of my website:

Entrepreneurship
✔️ Blog every day for 2 years (July 21st, 2021)
✔️ Become my own boss full time (Sept 30th 2020)
✔️ Build a 6 figure/year business (April 30th, 2022)
⚪️ Build a 7 figure/year business
✔️ 1000 subscribers on YouTube (Dec 10th, 2021)
⚪️ 5000 subscribers on YouTube
✔️ Become a Certified High Performance Coach (Nov 16th 2018)
✔️ Coach an Olympic Athlete (June 1st, 2022)

Health
✔️ Do 20 push ups in a row (Oct, 2019)
✔️ Do 50 push ups in a row (Jan, 2020)

Adventure
✔️ Climb Mt Kilimanjaro (Sept, 2011)
✔️ Hike to Everest Base Camp (May, 2007)
✔️ Do a bungy jump (Jan, 2007)

Personal
✔️ Speak on stage (Nov 19th, 2022)
⚪️ Present a keynote
⚪️ Write a book
✔️ Get a Psychology degree (Oct 2017)
✔️ Dance in an on-stage Salsa Performance (May 18th, 2024)
⚪️ Do a breakdancing windmill
⚪️ Master the moonwalk
⚪️ Compete in a Salsa competition
✔️ Land a backflip on a trampoline (May 1st, 2025)
⚪️ Land a standing backflip

(I'm currently working on building a 7 figure business, landing a standing backflip, and hitting 5000 subscribers on YouTube.)

I don’t always hit the first deadline. But I always hit the goal.

Not because I'm particularly good, but because I'm relentless.

When I started my business in 2018, I expected to go full time in a couple of months.'

It took two years.

People were literally telling me to stop.

But I just kept going.

So if you're in the middle of a goal right now, don't stop.

Stopping is sneaky, because it never feels like stopping.

Most high performers don't even notice they're stopping.

Stopping sounds like:

• I need to focus on other things right now

• I have other priorities

• I need to pause for a bit

• I'll come back to this soon

• I'll start next week

• I've got a lot on at the moment

• I want to do it properly, so I’m waiting until I can give it 100%

Even the most committed people lose momentum when the goal takes longer than expected. 

And because on social media, people only ever share their achievements after they've done them, it feels like everyone else is winning, all the time.

That's why I share my goals publicly, before I've achieved them.

I want people to see the messy middle. 

Who can you share your goal with today?

You Are Not Behind

You are not behind. Behind is just a thought.

There’s no official scoreboard of what you “should” have done by now.

You don’t need to catch up to a timeline YOU invented.

In your own life, there’s no such thing as being behind, or backlogged, or needing to catch up.

There are just things you want to do that you haven’t done yet.

The problem is the way you’re picturing your position in relation to your tasks.

You’ve been standing behind your to-do list, looking at it through the lens of everything you should have done already.

But that angle will always make you feel behind.

So shift into the present.

Put your expected tasks IN FRONT of you.

When I was at University, if I had two weeks to write an essay and there was one week left and I hadn’t started, I just imagined one week was all the time my professor ever gave me.

You can do that too.

One day to write a book chapter.
Three hours to get a client.
Two weeks to train for a marathon.

Start like now is exactly when you expected yourself to start.

You’re exactly on time.

Because how good does that feel?

And feeling good will help you make progress faster than feeling behind ever will.

So go take action now, right on time.

My 2025 Goals

I've been publishing my scariest, most impossible goals on the internet since 2017. 

Because when I feel accountable, I always show up 100%. 

But what if I don't hit the goals?

So what? Nobody dies. 

I'd rather risk failing in public than settle for splaying small in private.

So here are my goals for 2025 (even though it’s February, and I’m a bit late sharing them!)

1. Create a million dollars.
   This is my “impossible” goal. I only ever set one impossible goal at a time. I want to see if I can add a million dollars of value to the world.

2. Perform in a salsa performance.
   Dancing is the absolute joy of my life and performing on stage is exhilarating.

3. Go to Date with Destiny in person.
   Date with Destiny is a 6-day personal development event hosted by Tony Robbins in Florida. I’ve wanted to go since I was a kid, and this year I’m making it happen.

4. Create a hobby with Daniel we both love.
   Even though we both enjoy lots of the same activities, we decided the next level after nine years together is creating new interests together.

5. Create a close community of friends.
   Daniel and I recently moved to Sydney from New Zealand, and community is extremely important to us.

6. Create the best health of my life.
   I left this goal deliberately vague, because I don’t want to focus on metrics, I want to focus on how I feel.

What are your goals for 2025?

Tell the world. You’ll actually show up.

How To Let Going ALL IN Be Easy

1. Identify what needs to happen to create the result. Not what your perfectionist brain wants the process to look like. You can have a messy process and produce a killer result. Do you REALLY need to do all those steps you think you need to do?

2. Commit to doing what needs to happen.

3. Commit to NOT doing any extra stuff.

4. Relax. No one is going to die if you let it be easy. Goals are just for fun.

Success Leaves Clues

Success leaves clues.

Here are three questions to unlock those clues:

1. Why are you at your current level of success, and not further behind?

2. Why are you at your current level of success, and not further ahead?

3. What’s the difference between future you, who has achieved your goal, and current you?

Here are my answers:

Why am I at 2600 YouTube subscribers, and not at 1000 subscribers?

• I uploaded weekly for 12 weeks

• I started making videos FOR YouTube rather than making videos and putting them ON YouTube. Just because it’s on YouTube doesn’t make it a YouTube video.

• I hired an editor that made my videos a lot more watchable.

• I focused massively on titles and thumbnails

• I focused so much more on

Why am I at 2600 subscribers and not 5000 subscribers?

• I stopped creating/publishing while I moved countries (And therefore I paused hiring my editor)

• My titles and thumbnails can use so much improvement still

• The quality of my video structure isn’t at 100k level yet

What’s the difference between future me (who has 5000 subscribers), and current me (who has 2600 subscribers)?

• She puts way more thought into the titles and content

• She trains for YouTube like Michael Jordan trains for the NBA championship (and has a dedicated YouTube mentor)

• She doesn’t shy away from the hard work of creating more engaging content - she is willing to go the extra mile to get a better shot or create a better script.

• She is extremely comfortable in front of the camera (she talks to it every day until the camera feels like a person)

• Immediately she hires support again

• She has a permanent set up so all she has to do is turn on the lights and camera and GO, there’s no “set up time” required.

How would you answer those questions?

July 2024 Goals

I just moved to Sydney, so this month I’m taking a step back from my usual intensity and giving myself space to work on some fun goals I’ve been wanting to pursue for a while.

By July 31st, I will easily:

Master the Moonwalk

I grew up watching Michael Jackson music videos because my mum was a huge fan. So I can kind of do a moonwalk already.

But it’s not fluid and it doesn’t have the visual effect it’s supposed to. So this month, I’m going to practice every day until it’s so smooth, it’s criminal. I’ll post all the cringe videos.

Thoughts that will drive me to create this result:

• This is so fun

• I want to practice today

• Any minute now, it’s going to just click.

• Once I have this move, I’ll never lose it. It’s like riding a bike.

Solidify the Vision for my Next Coaching Program

As I evolve, my business does too. This year has been full of inner evolution. So I’m ready to create something new. I feel it bubbling up, I just haven’t created enough mental focus for it to arise.

Thoughts that will drive me to create this result:

• I know exactly what to create

• People are waiting for this

• Anything I create will work

What are your July Goals?
What do you need to think to make them happen?

The Blog Is Back

Between 2019-2021, I wrote a blog every single day for two years.

730 posts. Never missed a day.

It was life changing in so many ways:

• I developed the discipline to show up for my goals, every single day, no matter what. Even when I was sick, tired, busy and resistant.

• I learned how to trade perfect (and even good) for done. Some of the posts I created are physically painful for me to re-read. But I was willing to be bad at writing to get good at showing up. I discovered that a large part of getting what you want in life is allowing yourself to be dissatisfied with the process.

• It inspired me to create a graphic (below) about showing up daily that got seen by 6 million people, liked by 120,000 on Twitter, and shared by 35,000, including by Ariana Huffington, and Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO/Dragons Den. I still get messages every week from therapists and schools telling me how they have it printed and hung up in their offices and classrooms.

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A post shared by Sarah Arnold-Hall | High Performance Coach (@saraharnoldhall)

My decision to show up daily came from words by the writer Sean Wes (who is now on a hiatus from the internet).

It’s that last sentence that got me.

I realised I’d been looking for the microwaveable version of success. The ready-meal option. The quick fix.

But there is no shortcut. There’s only doing the work.

And just like Sean said, showing up daily did make me money.
It did build me an audience.
It did solve most of my (business) problems.

The blog itself wasn’t what created success (I’m pretty sure for the first whole year I had about five readers), but the act of learning to show up daily meant that I actually started doing the necessary work to build a sustainable business. I finally learned to stick with things long enough to see them work.

(The truth is, ALL the marketing gurus are right. Every technique, every strategy they say is the secret to success, it all works. But only if YOU work. You can’t try it and stop after a bit because you’re not seeing results. You have to pick a strategy and go all in, and NOT STOP UNTIL IT WORKS.)

So, I blogged for my two year commitment, and then finished so I could focus on creating my podcast, How to Take Action.

Now – two years and 110 episodes in – I’ve been starting to feel that something is missing from my online presence.

I haven’t been feeling on fire with my influence like I used to.

For years I’ve had a theory that to be truly influential, you need to be both inspirational and aspirational.

Inspirational
Noun
Causing people to want to do or create something

Aspirational
Noun
Role modelling the process of doing and creating something

Inspiration alone is useful.
Aspiration alone is cool.

But together, they can light a fire of ambition so hot you can’t put it out.

Think, Kim Kardashian becoming a human rights lawyer. She added inspiration to her aspirational lifestyle. Or climate activist, Greta Thunberg’s double crossing of the Atlantic Ocean to attend a conference. She added aspiration to her inspiring message.

Don’t just share how to do something. Role model doing it.
Don’t just role model doing something. Share how to do it.

If you think of the most influential person in your life, it’s likely that they had those qualities:

1. They taught you how to think differently (inspiration).

2. They role modelled the way (aspiration).

And that’s why I’m bringing back my blog.

I’m creating what I wish existed for me to consume: the juicy, behind-the-scenes of someone’s goals, mixed with the nitty-gritty how-to instructions.

While I won’t be posting daily (my “showing up daily” focus is now directed towards the back-end marketing of my business), I will be updating frequently with my goals, processes, and insights.

I hope it inspires and aspires you to do something impossibly ambitious.

Day 730: The End.

Today is my 25th birthday, and this is it. Day 730. Two years of daily blogging in a row, nonstop. I made it!

No matter what I do in my life from here on out, that achievement can never be undone. That brings a delicious sense of satisfaction!

I’m grateful for every single one of you who have been with me on this journey. For my readers, whom although I don’t know, I felt a tremendous sense of accountability to complete. For my clients, who frequently inspired ideas for blog posts. For my boyfriend, Daniel, who patiently waits for me to finish a blog post before I can go to bed. For my past self, for setting myself this goal. And for Sean Wes, for inspiring me to do it in the first place.

Here are some of the things I learned, after two years:

1. Blogging isn’t a habit you can build. It definitely didn’t become automatic after 21 days. The habit I built was discipline.

2. It’s okay to do B– work. When you embark on a project like daily blogging, perfectionism really gets kicked to the curb. (If you want to let go of perfectionism I highly recommend publishing something daily!). Although I developed my writing voice throughout the process (someone described it as “punchy”!), some days I just settled for a really average, really boring post. And I’m okay with that.

3. Accountability is everything. I had many days where I considered stopping. But I had publicly announced it so many times that it just felt like there was no option but to go on.

4. Another key reason I stuck to it when I didn’t feel like it was just how big the goal was. I felt like, if I’d already done 43 days, or 202 days, or 564 days, how could I stop now? That’s the power of setting impossible goals.

5. Learning to show up daily is one of the best things I’ve ever done. Now I trust myself to hit any goal I set myself – because I know that I’m willing to show up, even on weekends, and Christmas, and birthdays.

And so now, I’m done. I considered continuing with daily blogging, but I decided not to.

Endings are wonderful.

They provide space for new beginnings.

And I’ve got some new impossible goals to attend to. (I promise I’ll still post on occasion, I’m not deserting this blog forever!).

Until then, thank you for coming along on this wild ride.

THE END.

Podcast

Today I’ve been outlining my podcast (my next project after I finish two years of blogging).

I’m not sure whether I’ll launch it soon, or if it’s the kind of thing that will need to simmer for a while.

Either way, it’s coming.

I'll announce it here when it's out (because I plan to still post on my blog occasionally – just not daily).

What would you like to hear in a podcast from me? Leave me a comment or email me at hello@saraharnoldhall.com with your suggestions.