#wegotgoals

Sometimes, we’ll have a guest on the #WeGotGoals podcast who doesn’t actually like or set goals (I’m looking at you, Dawn Jackson Blatner and Josh Katt). For whatever reason, they don’t connect to the term, or they’ve employed a different paradigm to accomplish great things. Which is fantastic—one of the best things about the show, in our humble opinions, is the glimpse at the wide variety of paths high achievers have taken to reach success. But this week’s guest, Nicole Bernard Dawes, has the opposite perspective. Goals drive nearly everything the founder and CEO does. She aims to set both ambitious aspirations—say, starting an organic snack company, Late July Snacks, that hit $100 million in sales this year—and small mini-targets, including what she wants to get out of each business meeting. And she’s not afraid to lay them all on the line. “If you don’t even know what you want, you’re definitely not going to get it,” she says. “And I think clearly articulating what you want helps people. Setting goals help

There's something to learn by listening to any individual's success story, but when the story starts with being kicked out of high school at 15, one can get pulled especially quickly into hearing how it panned out. I found myself at the edge of my seat while sitting across from Pivotal Coaching Co-Founder Scott Hopson for the latest #WeGotGoals podcast episode interview because that was exactly how his story started. If you're in the training industry, maybe you've attended continuing education sessions through NASM, EXOS, The Gray Institute, or Power Plate International; if so, you've probably studied Hopson's material or done a workshop with him. He also helped launch Midtown Athletic Club, Chicago's first urban sports resort with 575,000 square feet of health and wellness amenities. And, as the co-founder of PTA Global, he's coached countless personal trainers in a unique approach focused on behavioral science. Essentially, Hopson has worked his entire professional life on becoming the best version of hims

Elite runner Jordan Hasay had a goal of winning this year’s Boston Marathon. And she had a good shot—in her first marathon, in Boston last year, Hasay finished third and ran a faster first marathon than any other woman in U.S. history by almost a full three minutes (her 2:23:00 bettered Kara Goucher’s record of 2:25:53, set in 2008). Last fall at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, she once again finished third, and improved her time to 2:20:57. Magazine profiles were written about her chances. But this past April 16 was not her day—and not, in her case, because of the epically bad race conditions that knocked out so many other athletes. As Hasay explains on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals, a stress fracture sidelined her the day before the race. “You put so much into the preparation and then I got so close to being able to race,” she tells me. “When you do set a goal and then you're not able to achieve it or even—I mean, not even being able to toe the start line, that's really tough.” Hasay took about a

In December 2017, I called Laura Vanderkam to ask her what I needed to know about time tracking if I was going to attempt to do it. What's time tracking? It's exactly what it sounds like - keeping tabs on how you spend your time all day, every day, for as long as you want - and I was intrigued by the prospect of attempting to do it. After reading Vanderkam's book I Know How She Does It, I knew I wanted to track my time for at least a week to see what I could learn (hint: so much). One of my biggest takeaways was that by analyzing the data on how you do spend your time, you can make better-informed decisions about how you want to spend your time and how you're going to do that. When Vanderkam came out with her latest book, Off The Clock, I knew there was no better time to have her as a guest on our podcast, #WeGotGoals. We've interviewed some pretty hardcore goal-setters and getters in the past, and discussed anything from how someone might attempt to sell every cup of coffee in the entire world, to doing what

Julie Smolyanksy is a tough woman to nail down. Not in terms of her schedule — although she is all over the place, having recently published her first book, The Kefir Cookbook, while running Lifeway Foods full-time as CEO and President. Instead, over the course of our conversation on the #WeGotGoals podcast, I found myself trying — and repeatedly failing — to put Smolyanksy neatly in a box that I could easily write 500 words on in a blog post. Smolyanksy is a CEO/President, sure. But she's also been the first female CEO of a publicly held firm (when she took over Lifeway Foods in 2002 after her father's unexpected death). She's a mother and a feminist activist, identities that drive her decisions as a businesswoman who wants to set a strong example for her daughters. She's an immigrant who came to the United States as an infant with her parents, who brought kefir with them as a taste of Eastern Europe and later turned it into a $12 million business (up to $120 million in 2017). She's sharp as a tack and incre

If there's one thing I've learned from listening to over a year of #WeGotGoals, it's that building a business or achieving a major goal is rarely as easy as these rockstar goal-getters make it seem. But for Katlin Smith, keeping things simple is the secret ingredient to her success with Simple Mills, an all-natural baking mix and foods company that uses recognizable, natural ingredients in place of things like high-fructose corn syrup and artificial ingredients. Smith started Simple Mills in 2012, right after she began cleaning up her diet and cutting out processed food and sugar. Almost instantly, a lightbulb went off in her head. "Growing up, I learned okay, food affects your weight, it affects your digestive system. But never did I think that food could affect your immune system or the other things we're learning about now, like anxiety, depression, or cancer. And it was just stunning to me that food can affect those things." Armed with these realizations, Smith realized she had to do something to change h

As president of the U.S. expansion at F45 Training - the Australian-born fitness franchise - Marc Marano's job is as much sales as it is strategy. He's here to make Americans fall in love with F45 - and to get more franchisees in the process. And as you'll hear Marano talk through on this week's episode of #WeGotGoals, getting to F45 - the big goal he accomplished - required a giant leap away from his family's legacy business passed down from his grandfather to his father and finally to his cousin and him. As difficult as it was for him to leave the business in property, for Marano, it was even more difficult to watch friend Rob Deutsche. He opened the first F45 in Australia in 2014. “He was former banker, but again like me, decided to hang the tie up for the last time because he needed something better in his life,” Marano recalled. After six months of careful deliberation, Marano made his decision. "That goal was achieved only to walk out of a business that I knew everything about to walk into the fitness w

Chef Josh Katt, the founder and CEO of Kitchfix, isn’t a goal guy. In fact, when I posed the first of our two big questions on #WeGotGoals—what’s a big goal you’ve achieved, why was it important to you, and how did you get there?—he couldn’t really come up with an answer. Don’t take that to mean he’s achieved less than other guests we’ve had on the show. In about five years, Katt has built Kitchfix from a small personal chef business into a citywide meal delivery and catering company. He has more than 60 employees and a Gold Coast storefront, not to mention packaged products like Paleo granola and waffles available in-store and online, nationwide. Maybe it’s just a matter of semantics. Katt prefers to discuss things in terms of passions and beliefs, guiding principles he aims to follow. Eating a healthy, nourishing diet. Knowing where your food comes from. Treating your customers well at every step of the transaction—while also doing right by your employees. Those core elements have taken Katt far beyond wher

Runners on the Lakeshore Path spend miles with their noses down, but starting August 2017, there was a reason to look up just north of LaSalle Street. The Shore Club is an oasis on the Lakefront that Lisa Jaroscak and her two partners - Robbie Schloss and Nick Thayer - helped to create. The day that this location opened its doors, Jaroscak told us that she accomplished a big goal that took months of hard work and endless creativity. She talked through what that meant for her on this week's episode of our podcast, #WeGotGoals (a live episode that we recorded at the new Moxy Chicago). That goal and its achievement may seem like a departure from where Jaroscak started her professional journey. Just five years ago, Jaroscak graduated from college with formal training as an operatic soprano. But as any musician learns, getting paid to perform your craft comes with a lot of hustle. And that hustle propelled Jaroscak to find opportunities - opportunities to book other artists and to eventually produce music festival

A group of deer or sheep is a herd. A collection of ferrets, a business. (Seriously.) But what’s the best term for a community of runners? If you’re Tim and Jessica Murphy, you call them the BibRave Pros. And in four short years, you gather more than 100 of them, working to connect them to each other, to races, and to related brands so the whole sport benefits. For this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals, I caught up with the power couple and BibRave co-foundres before last month’s Boston Marathon. I’ve known them since BibRave’s early days here in Chicago (they now live in Portland), and wanted to learn more about how they’ve built such an engaged, inspiring collective of socially savvy athletes. “I love talking about community and what the word actually means, because I feel like it gets used and sort of abused a lot,” Tim said. Not any group of app or website users, customers, or past participants qualifies. “It’s not a community until there becomes this sort of interconnected fabric where they’re all concerned

One of the more endearing parts of my personality (I hope) is my tendency to go ALL IN on reality television shows, as friends who have been forced to receive my weekly email recaps of The Bachelor and The Challenge will attest to (yes, I still watch The Challenge and am in the Bill Simmons/David Jacoby camp of considering it America's fifth professional sport). But I'm late to the Survivor franchise, which is mildly embarrassing considering it's considered by many to be the greatest reality television competition of all time, with the greatest host of all time (Jeff Probst) behind the wheel. When I began watching this season, I immediately noticed one contestant whose passion and positivity jumped through the screen — and when I learned she was from the Chicago area, a yogi who had quit her job in corporate finance, and a self-published author on the subject of female solo travel, well, I knew I had to talk to her. The first thing you realize when talking to Stephanie Johnson of Survivor: Ghost Island is tha

Four and a half years ago, Jim Huether saw the potential behind a niche industry before it became one of the most sought-after spaces for brands to play in or companies to launch out of. "In 2014, I remember everybody said the recovery and movement space, it's too small ... you can never create a sustainable global business in the recovery space," Huether recalled. But, as he likes to point out, "You have to know that you're going to have naysayers, and if you have naysayers, it usually means you're doing something right." Huether took his passion for working with small, emerging companies and figuring out how to scale them, and he applied it to Hyperice. Hyperice, launched in 2010 specifically for high-performance athletes, produced tools and technology to speed up recovery, prevent injury, and enhance movement through the use of vibration technology, heat, ice, and compression. Today, you can find Hyperice products in gyms, studios, and everyday athletes' homes all over the world. When Huether linked up wit

Some people would view the loss of a leg as a tragedy, or at least, a significant obstacle to pursuing the path they’d painstakingly planned out for themselves. For Melissa Stockwell, my guest on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals, losing a limb offered a second chance at a lifelong aspiration. As a young gymnast, she’d always dreamed of going to the Olympics. She practiced twice a day. Her walls were covered in Team USA posters, her entire life decorated in red, white, and blue. Her love for her country eventually took her to the Army and to Iraq, where in 2004 a roadside bomb took her leg. While recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, she learned about the U.S. Paralympics. That, she knew, was where she needed to be. “Here I was, an athlete with a physical disability, and I was being told that I could compete on the world’s biggest athletic stage and represent a country that I defended over in Iraq,” she says. “What greater honor would it be to wear that USA uniform on that stage?” Stockwell picked a

"The one with the hair" is a moniker she's come to embrace. In 2015, Heidi Stevens considered her then-new photo for her Chicago Tribune column "Balancing Act" unremarkable - until her inbox flooded with commentary from her readers. She shared a few in a piece for the Chicago Tribune, with gems like. "For heaven sake, comb your hair." "My neighbors and I give you permission to shoot your hairdresser." While Stevens was taken aback by this overwhelming response to a style that is arguably on-trend and beach-y, she took it in-stride and sought to learn why readers were so quick to comment on her appearance along with that of her female colleagues. She wrote this of the surprising responses: "Each one takes me aback. Not because my hair is above reproach, but because my hair is completely beside the point. It's unremarkable in appearance (not dyed fuchsia, not shaved on one side) and has no relevance to my job: I'm not a model; I'm not selling hair products; I don't work at a salon." She continued, "Is this real

When we bring guests onto the #WeGotGoals podcast, we know they aren't just inspiring individuals because of what they've accomplished, but because they have a unique perspective on goal setting that we can't wait to unpack. Lee Kemp, seven-time wrestling national champion with three gold medals in the World Championships, four in the Wrestling World Cup and two in the Pan-American Championships, might just have the most fascinating outlook on setting goals we've ever had the privilege of sharing on the podcast. In 1980, Kemp was headed to the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow when he heard the news on television: President Carter announced America's boycott of the Olympics. This news, which may have sounded like a disappointment to avid sports fans at home, changed the course of Kemp's life forever. "That was going to be the launching pad for my success," he told me during our interview. "Well, that launching pad wasn't there. That flight had took off and I wasn't on it." Kemp is one of the most decorated athle

(This episode has some explicit language)   Peter Rahal, co-founder and CEO of RXBAR, didn’t set out to build a multi-million-dollar company. But he had goals, both large and small. Practically speaking, he wanted a clean, healthy protein bar to fuel his workouts. On a bigger scale, he sought freedom and fulfillment. “Prior to working at RXBAR, I'd always had a normal job. I felt really handcuffed and I wasn't in a position to be successful,” Rahal told me on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals. “And so a goal for me early on was always to really flourish and have freedom and achieve success for myself.” Those dual quests took him and co-founder Jared Smith farther than they could have imagined. In 2012, they began pressing dates, almonds, and egg whites into bars in Rahal’s parents’ basement. From the beginning, they established high standards and lofty values. The product had to be excellent. The process, collaborative. And even as they glimpsed glimmers of progress, they stayed humble, knowing they didn’t h

Back the Kickstarter. Celebrating a close family member's 50th birthday in the ICU is a worst-case scenario for most people — but for Danni Allen, watching her father battle (and then overcome) weight-related health issues proved to be the catalyst that inspired her to audition for "The Biggest Loser." After beating out 300,000 other applicants to be one of the final 15 featured on the show, Allen showed up to set and was immediately faced with the harsh new reality of her next six months — namely, the signature tough love of trainer Jillian Michaels. "When you meet Jillian Michaels, she gives you no second to think," shares Allen. "There wasn't  a minute to think before she had you on the treadmill." And that first workout? Yeah, it lasted four hours. Jillian Michaels, at the time, "was not my favorite person," Allen says tactfully. But eventually, the trainer wore Allen down. Or as Allen laughingly confides, "she literally beat it out of me!" "Plus, my entire team got kicked off in the first four weeks - so

Note: This episode contains explicit language   Prior to having Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway, creators of New York Times Best Selling cook books, Thug Kitchen, on our podcast, I wanted to know, "Do they curse as much in real life as they do as a brand?" The answer was - not surprisingly (and yet still delightfully) - of course. This episode of #WeGotGoals is marked E for explicit, and in it we dove into the "why" behind the profane language. As lighthearted and fun Davis and Holloway are to chat it up with, they mean serious business when talking about eating healthy and taking care of yourself. "Take that shit f*&$!#% seriously," Holloway said. "We want to grab the audience and shake the s*#$ out of them and say, 'Eat a f*&$!#% salad, I'm worried about you!'" Davis interjected, "The swearing levels the playing field." She emphasized that you don't have to change who you are or completely change your life if you pick up healthier and smarter eating habits. In creating The Official Cookbook, Party

By now, runner, author, and activist Kathrine Switzer has logged countless miles. Most famously, she completed 26.2 as the first official female in the Boston Marathon, in 1967. The stunning photos of race director Jock Semple nearly pulling her off the course made history and cemented her life’s purpose of empowering women. But like any others, her journey started with a single mile—one she’d run, on repeat, at her dad’s suggestion beginning when she was 12. He told her it would improve her performance on the field hockey team. Ultimately, it transformed her life. “Every day I felt like I had a secret weapon, a magic that nobody could take away from me,” she said. “It was just amazing to have that under my belt. So by the time I was 19 and training for the Boston Marathon, I felt like I could do anything.” Switzer’s goal of sharing that power brought her to Chicago earlier this month to speak at a fundraising luncheon for the Midtown Educational Foundation (MEF). At the MEF’s Metro Achievement Center for Gir

This episode is presented by Chicago Sport and Social Club, reminding you that summer is just around the corner. Get into a summer volleyball league now and use code “GOALS” to get 5 percent off until March 15. We've evolved into a team that's obsessed with goals - how people think of them, how they set them and then how they ferociously pursue them. When we set out to ask people about those things, we thought we'd given our #WeGotGoals podcast guests the perfect platform to talk about their life story. What we actually found was that we'd created a master class in goal-setting with high achievers across the country and the team that produces the podcast each week learned a whole lot along the way. As we cross into our second year with the #WeGotGoals podcast, all four hosts look back on the two big questions we ask all of our guests and we threw in one extra question. And so, hosts Cindy Kuzma, Maggie Umberger, Kristen Geil and I all took a dose of our own medicine and put each other on the spot to say our b