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 big goals aloud.

The episodes that really changed our views on goals span the year and come from incredible people.

Kuzma recalled her interview with sports interviewer and reporter Taylor Rooks who was excited by the distance between herself and her big goals, rather than dismayed by it.

"Instead of thinking, oh gosh, I have all these things I want to accomplish, I'm so far from my goals. I don't know how I'll ever get there. This is really overwhelming and disillusioning," Kuzma recalled of her interview with Rooks. "She looks at that and thinks, wow, how exciting that I get to work toward that big goal."

Umberger brought up an early episode with Dawn Jackson Blatner and a quote that is often referenced at HQ.

"If you're enthusiastically doing the work, the opportunities will come," She quoted."If I'm doing the best I can and if I'm doing that authentically, there's nothing more than I can do than that."

Geil referenced a recent episode with Jessica Zweig who touched on the art of trusting your gut.

Geil astutely took away, "I feel like with goal setting, a lot of people are so driven by achievements and watching the numbers grow and hitting certain milestones that it can be really easy to ignore your gut or your intuition along the way in favor of going after what you think you should be doing.

For me, there were two major takeaways, one on the art of visualizing and dreaming big from Matt Matros - founder of Protein Bar and Founder/CEO of Limitless Coffee and Tea - and the art of dedication I learned from Jen Ator, Director of Fitness at Women's Health, who set out to accomplish something absolutely ridiculous at the IRONMAN World Championship at Kona.

Of Matros' interview, I remembered:

"Visualization, as we know and as science has shown us is a powerful tool to help you prepare yourself for coming up against an obstacle, a goal, a situation. Athletes use it. CEOs use it because it prepares your brain to actually encounter that thing. It prepares your brain to encounter success. It prepares your brain to encounter failure. So if you're thinking about success every single day, you're more prepared to succeed."

And when it came to Ator, I marveled at the joy she experienced during something so grueling as crossing the finish line at the IRONMAN world championship.

"She loved that experience, but it was also the hardest experience she'd ever been through and I think that if you talk to anyone who's accomplished anything great, that is something that they have in common."

Thank you for joining us for a year of #WeGotGoals - we can't wait to see what we'll learn from goal-getters next.

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Transcript:

JAC: Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. With me, I have Kristen Geil, Cindy Kuzma, Maggie Umberger, and myself, Jeana Anderson Cohen on this very special podaversary episode. It's our first anniversary of hosting the #WeGotGoals podcast and in celebration we are going guestless, hostful. So around the table you will hear us answer the big questions that we ask our  very impressive guests, but today it's all about us.

KG: Yay.

CK: Love it.

KG: Finally.

JAC: We've been waiting for an opportunity to talk about our goals. So our first question that we want to talk about today is a big goal that you've accomplished over the past year. Kristen, would you like to start?

KG: Sure, I would. So over the past year I have gone through a couple of major career transitions. For a long time now. I've been dabbling in the thought of going full time freelance writing and also getting my personal training certification so that I could start to teach group fitness classes in gyms, which I actually started doing back in like 2014--and then I just stopped going to the classes that I was taking at DePaul and decided, no, I don't think I want to do this right now. But luckily I had a nice little nudge when my full time job back in June decided that they wanted to send all of our copywriters to Hoboken. And I said, no, thank you please. So it was the perfect--Noboken, yes, it was a hard pass. But luckily that gave me the little push that I needed to actually start being more aggressive about looking for freelance clients, which included ramping up my work with aSweatLife and starting to work on the podcast. And I was also lucky enough to be a part of the sweat life group that got their personal training certification through NASM. So for about eight months I really was doing the full time freelance writing and working in the gym and it was a really exciting time in my life and I learned that I loved working for myself and making all my own decisions and you know, not really having to answer to authority that was six levels above me in the company hierarchy. So yeah, it was really exciting. Although health insurance sucks always, always.

JAC: What about you, Cindy?

CK: Sure. So one goal that I achieved in the past year was requalifying for the Boston Marathon, which I've done for a few years in a row now. I've been fortunate enough to accomplish that, but this year it was a little bit different. I had a little bit of a wrench thrown in my plans when I had to have emergency surgery in February. And my best opportunity to re qualify for Boston was in Boston, which was in April two months later. So I've written and talked a little bit about this before, but in the context of goals, the way that I was able to accomplish that--to go to Boston to run fast enough to, to go back there--was really something that Yael Shy talked about when when Maggie interviewed her a couple months ago was kind of holding that goal with a loose hand and recognizing that just because things might not work out exactly the way I planned, they might still work out.

CK: Being OK with the fact that I wasn't going to be able to do exactly the training I thought I needed to do or wanted to do to make that race my best ever. But just approaching it day by day, doing what I could every day to speed my healing and get back to training and running. And that really just allowed me to do it. You know, like when, when I needed to rest, when my doctor said to rest, I rested. When my doctor said it was OK to run, even though I was scared to run, I ran. And just day by day, step by step, I got there. And what's great about approaching goals in that way is that you have the big target, but if, if then after you set that big target, you think about what you have to do every day to make it happen and you trust that you do that, even if you don't achieve that goal--like if I hadn't made it, I would've been disappointed, but I wouldn't have been disappointed in myself. I would've known that I had done all I could. So it was made the victory extra sweet.

JAC: I love that. OK, sorry to interject there.

CK: Jeana, what goal did you accomplish this past year?

JAC: So I, whenever I'm asked about my goals, I struggled to think of a goal that lives outside of the walls of aSweatLife. And this year is the first time I really actually did something in, in quite a few years, in the past five years that wasn't related to aSweatLife that I was extremely proud of and that was running a marathon for charity and actually unplugging to do it. And the reason why it was so prideful and just wonderful was because I actually unplugged for a day and it took a marathon for me to unplug, which is crazy and I've been saying it ever since. But it was such a wonderful experience. I mean, I'm ...