Before You Set Goals, Ask This One Question
- Davina Jackson
- 4 days ago
- 11 min read
Welcome to The Woman CFO where money and life intersect.
This space is crafted just for you to take control of your money, shift your mindset, and build a financial life that matches the reality you’re living and the future you’re creating.
Around here, we don’t do one-size-fits-all money rules. We talk about money the way it shows up in real life: shaped by pressure, priorities, and decisions that don’t fit into neat boxes.
Before You Set Goals, Ask This One Question
January has a way of making goal-setting feel urgent.
Not exciting. Not energizing. But urgent.
It pressures you to decide quickly - to name what’s next, lock something in, commit - as if not having a plan yet is a failure instead of a signal that something still needs space.
After a year built around adjustment, survival, and holding things together longer than expected, speed isn’t always the best action. Sometimes it’s just momentum carrying us forward before we’ve had time to notice where we’re actually standing.
In the last post, we named something important: you don’t need a fresh start. You need room to stop rebuilding the same life under a new label, and to step out of survival mode before declaring what’s “next.”
This post is about what comes after that pause.
Once the urgency quiets down, a different question shows up. One most goal-setting conversations skip entirely: Not what you want next, but why you want it now.
What you’re hoping the next goal will finally fix.
What kind of pressure it’s responding to.
That question matters because goals don’t come from nowhere.
They’re often shaped by context, pressure, exhaustion, instability, and the hope that if something changes fast enough, the discomfort will stop.
But not every goal is about building forward. Some are about getting out.
Before you decide what you want this year to look like, let’s slow the moment down long enough to ask a more practical question: what am I hoping this goal will fix for me and what pressure is it responding to? Especially when it comes to money.
Let’s get into it.
Instant Gratification Zone: Read in the Order You Need
Short on time? Jump to the sections that matter most to you.
Goals Aren’t Neutral: Why what you want is often shaped by pressure, not understanding
Escape Goals vs. Support Goals: How urgency (especially in January) pushes the wrong kind of goals
How This Shows Up in Your Financial Life: Why smart plans keep breaking and what to do instead
How to Tell the Difference (and When to Wait): A reality check for deciding what comes next
TL;DR: What This Post is Really Saying
If your goals feel heavy, urgent, or exhausting before you’ve even started, the problem isn’t motivation or discipline.
It’s that many goals are built as a response to pressure, not as a support for your actual life.
This post slows down the part of goal-setting most people skip: understanding why you want what you want before you lock in what comes next. Not in a self-help way, but in a practical one because goals built to escape stress, instability, or exhaustion often recreate the same strain they’re meant to solve.
Inside, we look at:
Why goals aren’t neutral and how pressure quietly shapes what you think you want
The difference between goals built to escape and goals built to support your life
How January’s urgency makes reactive decisions feel intentional
How escape-driven goals show up in your financial life and why they keep breaking
A simple reality check you can use before you set goals so they hold up in real life
This isn’t a post about setting better goals.
It’s about making sure the next ones don’t demand constant self-sacrifice to survive and don’t pull you into the same cycle under a new plan.
Goals Aren’t Neutral
We like to treat goals as harmless.
Inherently good. Automatically productive. Proof that we’re moving forward.
But goals don’t form in isolation. They’re responses.
They’re shaped by what life has demanded, what’s been missing, and what has felt unsustainable for too long.
When pressure has been constant, goals often form as a way out. When stability has been shaky, goals become a search for safety. When exhaustion has been normalized, goals promise relief even if they quietly ask for more effort to get there.
That isn’t a personal flaw. It’s a normal human response.
The problem starts when we assume every desire is rooted in growth, instead of recognizing how often it’s rooted in unprocessed pressure. Because when a goal is created under strain, it tends to carry that strain forward. It doesn’t remove it, it redirects it.
That’s how people end up chasing “better” versions of the same life.
New plans.
New timelines.
New standards.
All built on the same tightness that made the old ones exhausting.
This is where the question we’re taught to ask falls short: What do I want next?
It sounds reasonable, productive, and forward-looking, but it skips the most important part: what the goal is responding to.
Wanting something isn’t the same as understanding why it feels necessary now. Without that understanding, goals can end up solving the wrong problem or masking it just enough to keep you moving.
So before you set the goal, ask yourself: What am I hoping this will fix for me?
Not what it will look like once it’s done.
Not what it promises on paper.
But what you believe it will relieve: the pressure, the instability, the fatigue, the sense of falling behind.
This matters more than it sounds especially when it comes to money because goals built to fix discomfort quickly often turn into financial plans that assume perfect behavior, future energy, or income that hasn’t stabilized yet.
They become aggressive timelines. Tight budgets. “This year I’ll finally get ahead” plans that leave no margin for real life.
Wanting relief doesn’t make your goal wrong, but when relief becomes the strategy, the goal stops being a guide and starts becoming an escape route.
Escape Goals vs. Support Goals
This is where the distinction stops being theoretical.
Some goals are built to move your life forward, while others are built to get you out of a moment you’re tired of living in.
These two patterns show up again and again as support goals and escape goals. They operate very differently and the consequences aren’t equal.
It’s the second kind that usually pulls people into trouble without them realizing it. They don’t start as bad ideas. They start as a response to pressure.
That’s because escape goals aren’t reckless or irresponsible. They’re reactive and form when pressure has been building and something needs to change now.
They’re (often) shaped by fear of staying where you are, exhaustion that hasn’t had room to settle, and the belief that relief has to come fast in order to count.
January is especially good at producing these kinds of goals.
It doesn’t just encourage planning, it rewards speed. Deciding quickly is treated as a sign of seriousness, and momentum gets mistaken for commitment. The faster you lock something in, the more focused and disciplined you’re assumed to be.
Urgency has a way of flattening this nuance.
It creates the sense that if you don’t decide now, you’ll fall behind.
That pausing means wasting time.
That taking a beat to understand your motivation is the same as avoiding responsibility.
After a year that required constant adjustment, this pressure lands harder than usual because many of us are still carrying unresolved fatigue, financial stress, and emotional backlog. And yet, January asks for fresh certainty on top of it.
That’s where things get distorted.
Urgency feels like insight. It mimics decisiveness and leaves you feeling certain even when what you’re responding to is discomfort, not direction.
Escape goals formed from urgency tend to ask a lot upfront. More discipline. More sacrifice. More energy than you realistically have. They promise safety or peace on the other side if you can just push through one more season.
This is how goals end up built on strain instead of support.
Aggressive timelines that leave no margin.
Plans that assume future energy, future income, or perfect follow-through.
Goals that look responsible on paper but collapse the first time life gets expensive, unpredictable, or human.
The goal may sound mature, but the structure underneath it isn’t livable.
Support goals, on the other hand, move differently.
They’re built to make life more manageable while you’re working toward them. They don’t rely on adrenaline or exhaustion to succeed. And they focus on reducing pressure over time instead of demanding intensity all at once.
The difference isn’t ambition. It’s sustainability.
If a goal requires you to be constantly depleted in order to work, it isn’t building a life. It’s replacing one problem with another.
This is why so many January goals feel compelling in the moment and hollow a few weeks later. The timeline changes. The target changes. But the strain doesn’t.
Support goals assume you’re human. That life stays full. That energy fluctuates. That stability matters as much as progress.
So before you move on, it’s worth asking whether what you’re building is meant to support your life or simply help you escape the version of it you’re tired of carrying.
How This Shows Up in Your Financial Life
When goals are built from escape, money stops being a stabilizer and starts becoming part of the pressure.
That’s how people end up with financial plans that look responsible on paper but fail in practice.
Aggressive savings targets built on deprivation.
Debt payoff timelines that assume nothing unexpected will happen.
Budgets that only work when you’re perfectly disciplined, fully rested, and never human.
The problem isn’t intelligence or effort. It’s that the plan was built to fix discomfort quickly, not to function under real conditions.
Escape-driven financial goals tend to share the same flaw: they assume future capacity you haven’t secured yet. Future energy. Future income. Future consistency. They work only if life cooperates and life rarely does.
That’s why so many people experience the same cycle year after year: a strong start, followed by burnout, followed by guilt, followed by another reset.
Not because they lack discipline.
Because the goal was never built to survive reality.
Instead of asking whether your financial goals are ambitious enough, here’s the more useful question: Does this plan still work when my life is average (not ideal)?
That’s the standard.
So, before you set or recommit to any financial goal this year, do this one thing: run your goal through a reality check.
Run Your Goal Through a Reality Check
Take your primary financial goal - saving, debt payoff, income, investing - and answer these questions honestly:
What happens to this plan when a month costs more than expected?
What does this require from me every single week to stay intact?
Where does this assume extra energy, extra money, or perfect behavior?
If I miss a step, does the plan adapt or does it punish me?
If the answer is “the whole thing falls apart,” the goal isn’t strategic. It’s brittle.
A support-based financial goal isn’t the fastest version of success. It’s the version that survives inconsistency.
That may mean slowing a payoff timeline so cash flow can breathe.
Lowering a savings target so it doesn’t trigger rebound spending.
Building margin before optimization.
Choosing stability over speed, even when urgency tells you to push harder.
This isn’t lowering standards. It’s designing plans that don’t require self-betrayal to maintain.
If your financial goal only works when everything goes right, it isn’t a plan. It’s a pressure test that you’ll eventually fail.
The work here isn’t to force better discipline. It’s to build goals that can carry you through real life.
What you do with this information matters because when you notice that a goal isn’t ready doesn’t mean you abandon it. It just means you don’t force a decision before it can actually work in real life.
How to Tell the Difference (and When to Wait)
At this point, you don’t need more frameworks or examples. You need a decision checkpoint: a moment to tell whether a goal is built to support your life or help you escape it.
Support goals tend to feel steady even when they’re challenging.
Escape goals usually carry pressure and the sense that something has to work or else.
That pressure matters because it’s often a signal that the plan is asking for more than your life can consistently give.
You’ve already seen how this shows up financially: plans that rely on perfect behavior, budgets that only work when nothing unexpected happens, and timelines that collapse the moment life gets expensive, messy, or human. When those plans fail, people don’t rethink the structure. They blame themselves, push harder, tighten up, and decide they weren’t disciplined enough the first time.
That’s the cycle you’re interrupting here.
If a goal only works when you’re fully rested, fully focused, and operating at your best, it won’t work when life gets real. Forcing yourself to decide anyway doesn’t make the goal stronger. It just locks the pressure in place.
This is where waiting becomes a strategy, not avoidance. Not because you’re unsure, but because timing matters.
Reacting and choosing aren’t the same thing, and urgency is very good at making decisions for you.
So, taking a pause here isn’t about doing nothing. It’s about not locking yourself into a plan that requires constant effort just to stay afloat.
You don’t need a perfect plan before you’re allowed to move forward. You need one that works in real life and that’s worth waiting long enough to see.
Waiting to decide doesn’t mean waiting for motivation, confidence, or the “perfect time.” It means waiting until the goal stops being a reaction and starts being a response until you can see what it asks from your time, your energy, and your money without feeling rushed to agree to it.
What Changes Once You See This
Once you recognize the difference between goals built to escape pressure and goals built to support your life, the entire goal-setting conversation shifts.
You stop treating urgency as a signal that something must be decided right now.
You stop assuming that discomfort means you’re behind or doing something wrong.
You start noticing when a goal is asking for more than your life can realistically give and you stop blaming yourself for that tension.
This doesn’t mean you suddenly know what the “right” goal is. It means you stop agreeing to goals just because they promise relief.
You become more selective about what you’re willing to lock in, what you’re willing to delay, and what you’re no longer willing to build your time, money, and energy around.
Nothing needs to be finalized in this moment, but realize something important has already changed.
You’re no longer choosing goals from pressure. You’re deciding which goals are worth committing your time, money, and energy to and which ones aren’t.
What to Do With This Before You Move On
You already did the hardest part in the last post.
You stepped out of the pressure to reinvent everything and named that you don’t need a fresh start, you need room.
This post was about what to do with that room.
Not rushing into better goals.
Not optimizing.
But slowing the moment down long enough to see whether what you’re building is meant to support your life or help you escape it.
Wanting relief isn’t wrong especially after everything the last year required. That response makes sense.
The problem shows up when goals are built to outrun discomfort. Those goals tend to recreate the same strain under a different name.
New plan.
Same pressure.
Same financial resets.
The same feeling that you’re doing everything “right” and still not getting ahead.
That’s the cycle this post interrupts.
So before you move on, do one thing:
Pick one goal you were ready to set and don’t finalize it yet.
Run it through the reality check from this post.
Ask what it assumes about your time, your energy, and your money.
Notice whether it still works when life is average, not ideal.
If it works, keep it. If it doesn’t, that’s information not failure.
Pausing here doesn’t mean you’re behind. It means you’re being precise.
You already stopped rebuilding the same life out of urgency.
This is where you make sure the next one is built to support the life you’re actually living not the one you’re trying to escape.
That decision is steadier and far more likely to last because it’s made before you set goals, not while you’re reacting to them, and changes how every goal after this one gets built.
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