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If you can't bring yourself to tell someone your goal, you don't want it bad enough.

Althogh I know that to be true, even sharing goals with loved one's feels like opening your trench coat.

The vulnerability of telling people your audacious goal must be challenging for everyone.  For the full perspective I called my old weightlifting teammate, 2020 Olympian and 3X Pan American Champion, Wes Kitts.

As far as audacious goals go, a gold medal in the Olympics is towards the top of the list right below colonizing mars and knowing what your wife is thinking.  There’s years of training, sacrifices, travel to competitions, drug testing, nutritional requirements and monetary struggles.  You expect those challenges.

Then there are the other things.  Barriers you didn’t think about. Emotional and psychological blockades like verbalizing your goal to friends, family, and followers.  Wes experienced them all.

“The first time I remember being hesitant to say a goal out loud was a few years before the Olympics.  I was training to break an American record.  I realized pretty quickly that if I can’t even tell people, how can I really believe it myself?”  Without enough conviction to tell people about your plans, you’ll never put in the time, effort, and energy it takes to accomplish the goal.

Wes went on to explain “the thing about going for something big is, you’re risking failure.  Not only did I have the goal, but I needed to actually put the weights on the bar and lift it in competition.”

But it wasn’t the actual lift in competition that was scary.  Training 13 sessions a week prepared him for the event.  The heart-stopping part was putting himself out there and telling people he was training to qualify for the Olympics, or training to break an American record.  It felt like bragging to a humble athlete that doesn’t like to talk about himself.  A masturbatory practice.  In his good ol’ boy southern accent, Wes explains the innocent act of telling people his goal felt “like standing butt naked in front of the mirror, just wearing it out.”

His confidence climbed as he started by telling his mom, then high school football coach, and eventually whoever asked.  Contrary to his initial beliefs, nobody scoffed at him.  Nobody told him it was impossible.  To his surprise, nobody pointed and laughed!  What he got instead was an uprising of support.

Now it's your turn. It doesn't matter how big the goal is. If you want to lose 6 lbs, hike the Pacific Crest Trail, or skate accross America. The first step is to take the dream out of your head and turn it into a goal by vocalizing it to trusted friends and family.

And if they point and laugh at you? Fuck 'em.

Be great,

Danny Lehr