Invisible Effort Syndrome: Why Your Goals Need Evidence, Not Just Action [New Podcast Episode]

I have noticed this over and over: spiritual, creative people are working away in their business and on their dreams, putting the hours in, dedicating themselves to the task ...

… and yet they constantly feel like they’re not doing enough. 

It feels like their goal is still far away, their work is just a drop in the ocean, and it means they often give up before they’ve even seen real change.

If you don't know me, my name is Astra and I’m a personal transformation coach. I help you change your mind so you can evolve into the person you’ve been waiting to become. And one of the areas that comes up with my clients is how they can feel and be more successful in their business and lives.

In this new podcast episode, I look at this problem I call Invisible Effort Syndrome, and why you're more successful than you currently realise.

Key Points

• What is Invisible Effort Syndrome?

• The visibility gap

• What you actually need to keep going

• Evidence: strategy, not vanity metrics

• Three takeaways to implement today to solve Invisible Effort Syndrome

Links In This Episode

⁠The Soul-Driven Goals Workshop

astrasoulfeather.com/souldriven-goals-workshop⁠ 

⁠What's Really Stopping You? Diagnostic Tool

go.higherlove.co/goalquiz

Watch On YouTube

https://youtu.be/ZIb5MoQGo4s

Listen On Spotify

Click here to listen to the episode on Spotify.

Transcript

So here's something I've noticed over and over with the people I work with and in my own life many years ago. Spiritual people, creative people, people who are here on the planet to make a difference. You are working away on your goals, whether it's a business, life, personal calling.

You're working, putting those hours in, dedicating themselves to what you're doing, devoting yourself and yet you constantly feel like you're not doing enough. You feel like your goal is just so far away. Your dream is this distant thing on the horizon that you're never going to get to.

That every piece of work that you do, every action you take towards your goal, just feels like a drop in the ocean. As soon as you've done it, it's lost and it's dispersed. And what this means is I've seen that you often give up before you've seen real change.

So if you're new to me, my name is Astra. I'm a personal transformation coach and I help you essentially change your mind so you can evolve into the person that you've been waiting to become. And one of the areas that comes up for my clients over and over is how they can feel and be more successful, whether that's in their personal life or in their professional life.

So let's have a look in the podcast episode today about what to do about this particular issue where you're working all the hours you can, doing all the things you can to achieve this goal and it feels like you're not doing anything. I call it Invisible Effort Syndrome. And really, you're a lot further along than you think.

So let's dive in. First of all, what actually is Invisible Effort Syndrome? Well, you know that you're suffering from Invisible Effort Syndrome if you can spot the following in your life. You put the hours in to your dreams and goals.

This doesn't matter whether you've got a full-time job, part-time job, caring responsibilities. The minute you've got an opportunity to work on your own passion project, the thing you really care about, you're there and you're putting the hours in. You are taking action.

You're making connections. You're doing the work. And you may even occasionally feel that forward momentum.

You feel like success is happening. Maybe a project comes in or you meet a great collaborator or you write 10,000 words on your book or something like that. But most of the time, it feels like you haven't done enough.

In fact, sometimes it even feels like you haven't done anything. You maybe wake up the next day and feel like, I'm no closer to my goal than I was yesterday. Even though you know, logically, you know that you've put the hours in.

So Invisible Effort Syndrome is where what you are doing and what you feel about what you are doing are totally misaligned. And what causes this IES, Invisible Effort Syndrome, is first of all, a visibility gap. So the issue with this is not a lack of action on your goals or on your dreams.

I know that you're doing things. The issue is a gap between what you are doing and what you see of what you are doing. Your effort, any effort you take, any action you take towards achieving your goal or creating success in your life, it will be invisible if you do not document it.

And these are two different processes that people often get confused. Visibility of your goals, making what you do visible and obvious to you, is different to actually just taking the action. And making your actions, your progress visible, is the difference between taking action and registering the action.

Actually clocking, really understanding what is happening. And that's why when you do get those spurts of forward momentum and those individual successes, like collaborators or projects or money or exciting opportunities coming in, they feel so amazing because it's a visible manifestation of all of the effort you've been putting in. The trick is you can make that effort visible without the external manifestation.

But the gap, the visibility gap, is why every time you think you've made progress and then you reflect, it feels like, I haven't done enough, I need to do more, I haven't really done anything, I haven't taken action, even though you have. The visibility gap is why that inner critic is so loud and seems kind of unequivocally truthful. The inner critic isn't lying, it's looking around, it's looking at your diary or your calendar or whatever, and it's going, well, what did you do today? What did you actually do today on your goal, your dreams? And because there's nothing there, it can't see anything, it's working from the wrong data.

It's telling you that you haven't done much when actually you have. And this visibility gap is what causes or what's the root problem of invisible effort syndrome. And so you've got this invisible effort, which then leads to your inner critic piping up and saying, well, you haven't done anything.

And you start criticising yourself. And when you criticise yourself, when you doubt what you're doing, that is not going to help you take more action. It's going to actually reduce the amount of actions and progress you want to make on your goal, because it doesn't feel like anything, it feels like two steps forward and one step back.

So you reduce what you're doing, you stop doing things, and that only confirms the self-criticism. So it becomes this self-doubt spiral based on the fact that you're doing things, but you're not recognising you're doing things, they're not visible to you. So you assume you're doing nothing, you criticise yourself for it, you stop doing as many things because you don't feel good, and that confirms the problem you had in the first place.

So the medicine to treat this invisible effort syndrome is to interrupt this loop and to make your action visible. This is what will actually help you keep going and ensure that not only are you taking consistent action on your goals and your dreams, but that you feel good in the process, that you don't beat yourself up, that you don't doubt yourself, that you see yourself as having these incremental improvements and wins, rather than waiting for these external manifestations to happen to confirm that you're doing the right thing, rather than waiting for the sign from the universe to tell you that you're on the right path. You already are, you've just got to show yourself that.

And the problem is that our tendency is that we kind of know this on some level, but we call it something like accountability or motivation. And so we tend to reach out to others to be able to get that. So you might sign up for like a masterclass or sign up for a programme where every day, every week, every two weeks, you're getting that accountability.

Maybe you set a goal and you get an accountability buddy, or you go to a group for this motivation. And it's a way of keeping your action visible by reporting it to somebody else. It is the Weight Watchers model of goal setting.

You go every week, you tell people what you have done or you haven't done and other people's opinions. And the external world is what keeps you accountable and makes your effort visible. The problem with that is that external accountability, external visibility is very brittle.

It's very fragile. It relies entirely on someone else acknowledging, validating and recognising your effort. And they might have a very, very different approach to your goal and what they think you should do than what is actually best for you that you know to be right.

So we instead need to look at how we can use self-recognition, making ourselves visible for ourselves to sustain momentum. This is a piece, this self-recognition is a piece of planning and goal setting and success that I used to find so hard. I would think it was bragging.

I would think it was arrogant because it felt like, how dare I celebrate this tiny win? How dare I celebrate that today I did, yes, in fact, post on social media or, oh, yes, I did do my accounts. Or, oh, I did go to the gym, even though it was for only 20 minutes. Like, how dare I do that? And that came from really quite a sad place of not really growing up in an environment where my successes and my achievements were celebrated.

And I wonder if this resonates with you. When I did something wrong, it was very quick to be pointed out to me and I knew about it straight away. My mistakes were seen as things to be quickly rectified.

But my achievements, my successes, the things I did well, even the small things I did well, were not really talked about that much. They weren't celebrated that much. And it meant that my whole process of feeling successful was all about making sure I was perfect, making sure I was doing everything right.

And therefore, no action felt like enough. How could it when I needed to always be right and always be doing it well? When the whole process of setting goals and trying to achieve them, there's a lot of mistakes, there's a lot of things going wrong. Some days you're tired, some days you just can't be bothered and you do a little bit.

But if you're constantly judging yourself on this, like, 100% A student perfectionist, it's never going to feel enough. So I knew that self-recognition was something essential to this process because I'd beat myself up. I'd felt so sad about the things I'd achieved, even though on paper I was really successful.

I had a life and I'd done things that other people could literally only dream of. So about 10 years ago, when I realised this process, when I realised that I was taking the wrong approach to setting goals and to success, I built self-recognition into the method that I developed. And it's one that I now teach and have taught my clients for all this time.

I call it soul driven goals. It's a method which really encourages, really, really encourages internal motivation. It's all about you, baby.

It's all about you. It gives you really simple tools as well to recognise yourself. I found it really hard.

So I had to use the simplest possible tools to make it really easy and to treat Invisible Effort Syndrome, which is absolutely what I was suffering with. In the next section of the podcast, I'm actually going to touch on a key exercise from the Soul Driven Goals method that you can use today when you're listening or watching. But there's so much more in it because we really need a new way of setting goals.

We really need a new way of achieving things and looking at success than the ones we've got at the moment, which are based in such a linear and extractivist culture. So if you're really looking for a way to transform Invisible Effort Syndrome that I know is going to be resonating with you, and maybe you want to turn it into, let's call it, wild success syndrome, then you'll want to watch the full Soul Driven Goals workshop. I teach the whole method in it.

And the link to enrol is in the episode description. But let's look now at one of these exercises. So again, to reiterate, documenting the evidence of what you do is not vanity, it's not arrogance, it's not showing off.

It's a specific strategy to help you be more successful and feel more successful. And it is the main difference between feeling successful and not feeling successful, even if objectively you're doing the same thing as somebody else. It's recognising what you've already done.

You've got to bring your actions and your feelings about those actions into alignment. And to do that, you're practising, you're taking action on what your goal is, what your dream is, but then you're also documenting the evidence of that practise. This is a practical tool.

It's not self-indulgent. It's not, like I said, it's not showing off. It's not, oh my God, look at my amazing Instagram selfies of me going to the gym.

It's a practical tool to help you keep going. It is a way to show yourself clearly, unequivocally what you have been doing and therefore combat the idea that you're not doing enough because you'll be able to see that you are. So there's loads of different ways to record your progress.

Lots and lots of different ways to record your progress. I'm going to give you some examples now, but have a think about the one that's going to suit you the best. Everybody works differently.

I think that there's a tendency to, you know, let's say you want to feel more grateful every day or something like that, right? So you start a gratitude journal, but you actually hate writing by hand. So why would you do that? Like, don't do something that you don't want to do because then you won't do it. So here are some different options, but absolutely think about the way that works best for you, whether you're visual, verbal, kinaesthetic, creative, analytical, whatever it is, think about the way that's going to work best for you.

The one I use very frequently is I write in my journal. I've been keeping a daily journal since 2017, which is an extraordinary amount of time. You can write what you did and how you felt.

Just a couple of sentences. You could use social media as a diary tool to record what you've done. It doesn't have to be your own personal account.

You could make a private account just for you or just for you and maybe a select group of people or just people you know are interested in the subject that you're focused on, on the goal that you're focused on. Use it how we used to use it, which is, hey, here's my day. Hey, here's what I did.

And focus it on those wins, those activities every single day that you've done. You could also email yourself to do this. I know this sounds kind of crazy, but why not? Or WhatsApp yourself.

I do that sometimes. WhatsApp myself with things I've remembered that I've done. And then later on, you can go back through your email or your WhatsApp and see that.

You could also go analogue with it. Take photos of the actions that you do and you could create a photo album of those things, whether that's on paper or just in your phone. So one of the ways that one of the ways I use this particular recording tool was there was a time in my life when I was kind of struggling a bit to eat in a way that felt really nourishing.

And I had a belief about myself that was I didn't really know how to cook. I didn't really know how to look after myself. Anyone who knows me will laugh at this because I love cooking and I'm actually really good at it.

But I really struggled to to to kind of believe in that. So I set up a album on my phone and it's just all photos of meals that I have prepared for myself. They're not particularly attractive.

They're not particularly like styled. It's not about fancy restaurants I'm going to. They were about meals that I had made for myself to remind myself that I did actually have that skill.

And it did not take long for me to to keep that record, to totally change my mind about cooking for myself. Like really did not take that long. And that's what evidence does.

It's staring you in the face. You cannot contradict it. You cannot use all those beliefs about yourself and all those stories and myths that keep keep you small and hold you back from your goal, from feeling successful, feeling and transforming into the person that you're kind of waiting to become when the evidence is there.

You can't do anything about it. You've got to change, baby. You have to change another way or a series of ways.

That's about documenting the evidence. But reminding yourself is to think about in your life where you constantly look at things. This might be your phone screensaver, your laptop screensaver.

It could be the back of the door in your bathroom, a cork board by your keys, anything like that on your desk. And to put reminders and examples of what you've done in those places, use them all over the place. This is not a reminder to do something.

This is a reminder of what you've done. It's not a reminder to do something. It's a reminder of what you've done.

It's a signal and a visible signal of your achievement. You could also use, as I said, cork boards, post-its, things like that. If you're more a physical learner or a physical person and you're doing you've got a goal or you've got a practise in your goal, which is about this kind of consistent action, it's not necessarily different every time.

Say that you're going to the gym every day. I think that's a good example. Or you're taking your vitamins every day.

That's a good one. Is to have a bowl or a cup or some sort of container on your desk or by your bedside. And every time you do the thing, it's like add a penny to it or add some sort of like add a pebble to it from one bowl to the other.

Or you could use Lego every day that you do something. Just build a little bit more on your Lego house. And you will have this visible manifestation of everything that you've done.

Not only will it be there clear and unequivocal to you, it will also be fun because if it's not fun, you're not going to do it. So this is the way to cure Invisible Effort Syndrome is to make the effort visible, to give yourself unequivocal evidence that you are, in fact, taking action on your goal. And the second part of it to interrupt that loop is to celebrate yourself without condition.

Now, I know this can be really hard. It has been one of my life's greatest journeys. It's one I'm still on to celebrate myself as fully as possible without thinking it's because I've done something or I've not done something.

Feeling good about yourself, what you've done, what you who you are today, who you're becoming is key to succeeding. It's a rule I talk about a lot. One of my rules of wild success, you can't get to a good time without having a good time.

You've got to feel good now. If you only ever celebrate yourself conditionally, I will feel good about myself or I will give myself a present or a gift when I have achieved X. It means that you're kind of constantly on this treadmill to try and get somewhere. It feels like a carrot, right? It feels like you're running towards a carrot.

But actually, it doesn't really give you that momentum because once you've got that carrot, so what? We need to be celebrating ourselves without that conditionality because it's a strategy. It's another strategy. One of the parts of reducing and the medicine for Invisible Effort Syndrome is making your effort visible.

The other is to celebrate yourself as a strategy. The more visible the documentation of your evidence, the easier it's going to be to remind yourself that you're having a good time, that you're having good feelings, that life is good and therefore you're going to be able to maintain momentum. It's not arrogant.

It's not showing off. It's two very specific strategies to keep going and to make sure that you don't give up just because you think you haven't done anything. So let's wrap this up with three key takeaways, and these are three small actions that you can take today, this week, this month to help you with this process of medicating your Invisible Effort Syndrome.

So the first one is to start an evidence file. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It doesn't have to be like a big fancy thing.

You do not have to go out and buy anything. It could be a note on your phone. It could be in a notebook.

It could be a poster. And just begin that evidence file with what you've already done. It doesn't matter whether it was last week, last year, the last time you did something was, you know, seven years ago.

Who cares? I don't care. And neither should you because you've done it. So start that simple evidence file today.

Begin with what you've already done and it will give you a great foundation. The second task, the second takeaway is identify the inner critic, what their favourite story is about your progress. What is the favourite story that they love to tell? Is it you haven't done enough? You're not doing it right.

You'll never be able to achieve this. Or is it something like mine is you're going too slowly? It needs to happen faster. So identify what that story is and then using your evidence file or using parts of your evidence file, write down, identify three pieces of concrete manifest evidence that directly contradict it.

So whatever that story is that it likes to tell, use your evidence file. Use your visible effort to contradict it. Because it's about allowing what you're doing to be real and to give your inner critic more data.

Undoubtedly, it will come up with some other thing or some other shitty thing to say. But the point is that you are working with your mind to give it the evidence it needs. And lastly, this is something to do every day to make sure that you continue with your evidence file.

It's to just schedule five minutes or so at the end of the day or the end of when you're doing your kind of activities towards your goal. It's just record one thing that moved you towards your goal, however small it is. And remember, actions don't have to be big.

It's all progress. So if it is going to the gym, you're allowed to have an action as researching correct form for particular exercises. It doesn't have to be going to the gym.

If it's building your business, perhaps it's connecting with one new person on LinkedIn or applying for a networking ticket. It doesn't have to be these huge things, these huge like dramatic overnight changes. Small sustainable changes are what get you towards your goal, but you need to make them visible.

Otherwise, you will think you're not doing anything. So if you have resonated with this podcast episode and if you want to transform yourself this month, if you want to transform your relationship to success and to goal setting, then you are going to want to check out my Soul Driven Goals method that I teach in a workshop. As I said, I've been using this method for nearly 10 years.

It took me from feeling very numb but successful on paper to actually enjoying, recognising myself, celebrating my life as I achieved really quite unique and interesting dreams that I never really realised I could achieve because I was so focused on everything I was doing wrong. It helped me focus on what I truly wanted and to celebrate the uniqueness of my success as well. This workshop is two hours long.

It's available on my website on demand. I've put the link in the episode description or you can also just search online for Higher Love Soul Driven Goals and it will be one of the first results. If you know that this is a process that you're on as well, but you're not maybe yet ready to invest in the workshop, although it's only two hours, you know what I mean? And it's going to change.

It will change your life. But if you're not quite ready for any reason, I want you to use a diagnostic tool instead. That's free, available again on my website.

But this is a really cool diagnostic tool because it specifically focusses and helps you understand what is stopping you. It's actually called What's Really Stopping You. And when you answer the questions for this quiz, it's going to spit out a personalised result of the one thing that you need to focus on to start feeling successful.

After you've done the quiz, I'm going to then send you a short series of emails that are using some of the key philosophies from the Soul Driven Goals method so you can actually put that thing into practise. So the URL for that is go.higherlove.co/goalquiz. I've also put it in the episode description, but I highly recommend you do that so you can actually start working on this today if you're at the beginner stages.

If you're already ready, and I truly hope you are, then enrol today for the On Demand Soul Driven Goals workshop. But if not, the quiz is going to be right for you. go.higherlove.co/goalquiz and the link is in the episode description.

Thank you so much for listening and I'll speak to you next time.