Oprah herself may be mulling a bid for the presidency—but if you’re looking for the next Oprah, look no further than this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals.

Taylor Rooks is only 25, but she’s already a sports journalist and anchor in the number-one market in the country. She has her own podcast, Time Out with Taylor Rooks, where she’s interviewed the likes of Kevin Durant, John Wall, and Snoop Dogg. And she knows what she wants for the future—a talk show on which she’d have real conversations in the style of Ms. Winfrey or of Barbara Walters.

“I always think of Barbara Walters’ Whitney Houston interview. The way she spoke to her and the way that Whitney opened up … you leave that thinking, whatever you think of Whitney, you felt like you understood it more,” she told me. “I wish to one day be able to do something like that.”

If her past performance is any indicator, Rooks will go for that goal with full gusto. She set her sights on sports journalism early and spent her college years at the University of Illinois working hard, breaking stories for scout.com and reporting from the sidelines for the CBS Sports Network. That hustle allowed her to achieve the big goal she talks about on the episode—landing her first job out of school at a network rather than a local TV station.

“We do this thing where people kind of say, OK, this is the track you're supposed to go on. You do this. You start local. And then you eventually work your way up,” she says. “But I think that by telling people that, you’re almost conditioning them to think that that’s the only way.”

She saw a different path, and followed it, landing a gig as an on­air host, reporter, and correspondent for the Big Ten Network immediately after graduating. She has nothing but positive words about her experience there—“I would have been content if it was my last job,” she says.

But when an opportunity came up a little over a year ago at SportsNet New York, she realized she couldn’t pass it up. “A really good friend of mine said, OK, this isn’t about ego or money, which place will make you better in two years? And I knew it was SNY. I kind of try to think that about everything,” she says.

She told herself: “You have to do those things that make you uncomfortable and put you in uncomfortable situations to reach that ultimate goal of having a talk show and being able to have those long conversations.”

All this takes major confidence, something Rooks has in abundance. Her family—which includes accomplished athletes like a pro-baseball-playing uncle and a father, Thomas, who was a top rushing leader for the Fighting Illini—instilled it in her from a young age.

And she continues to foster it by owning up to both her strengths and her weaknesses, and always doing whatever she can to improve her skills. For instance, she loves basketball and football most, but has been learning baseball to cover the Mets and Yankees. She spends her downtime watching SportsCenter or TedTalks instead of, say, reality shows. And while she uses social media to connect, she knows not to let either the praise or the criticism she hears there creep into her psyche.

Instead, she relies on feedback from people she truly trusts, and never forgets how she’s gotten where she is today. “You have to believe that you’re here because you're supposed to be,” she says. “You don’t really luck your way into successes or luck your way into positions. It may help get you there but it's not going to keep you there. And it’s just kind of reminding yourself, you belong there and no one can take that away.”

By the way, she wants YOU to feel this confidence, too. “I think I know what every single human can accomplish—I know that we all have this limitless potential. Every single person can be what they want to be. I truly believe that,” she says.

Listen to the episode of #WeGotGoals and you’ll finish feeling like you just got a pep talk from your kindest, smartest bestie. And if you like what you hear, be sure to rate it and leave a review (then hop on over to listen to her show).

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"Meddling," my husband said after consulting dictionary.com to try to settle an argument, "is a bad thing."

I put my headphones back on, not acknowledging what he considered a win. Sure, a meddler isn't invited to address an issue, but that doesn't mean she can't help make it better with her unique skills. After meeting Maaria Mozaffar - civil rights attorney, policy drafter and author of More Than Pretty - who describes herself as a "meddler," I can't help but see the descriptor as good.

"I think everybody has the ability to have empathy and step in others' shoes, but not everybody pays attention to it," Mozaffar told me on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals. "I paid attention to it since childhood ... that it made me very satisfied."

And as we conversed our way through her accomplishments for the podcast, Mozaffar shared how her natural draw towards helping others shaped her life.

Mozaffar saw a future in which she would use her powers of meddling as an attorney, to ensure justice for those who couldn’t always stand up for themselves. First, though, there was the little matter of passing the bar exam. She tried—and failed, five times. Rather than doubt her intelligence and abilities, though, she put the situation in perpective.

"Real life and application of the law and advocacy for the law is not a multiple choice test - such as life is not a multiple choice test," she said. Resilience is a natural result of failure in the face of a big goal and when she took the test a sixth time, she succeeded at her mission to take home the license she needed to practice.

After passing the bar exam, she continued her work in policy and advocacy, inserting herself into the issues where she could impact the most people: rights at the borders, the travel ban and food deserts. Along the way, she also took notice of how women viewed themselves and their success, developing the ideas that would lead to her book More Than Pretty.

In the book, she explores issues relating to beauty, intelligence, social media (and selfies) and how strong women navigate a world where their worth may seem determined more by how they look than what they contribute.

"If I want [my three kids] to have a good example of what a strong woman is, a strong mom is, I can't just tell them about it - I have to be that," she said.

And a natural way to show your children exactly how strong you are is to add "triathlete" to a list that already includes "she who stands up for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Mozaffar describes the sport of triathlon as a way to keep her body strong and feeling good to allow her to "contribute to society."

"Triathlons are uniquely interesting because triathlons are like life, right? It doesn't matter if you're first. It doesn't matter if you're last. The only thing that matters is that you cross the finish line smiling," she said.

Listen to the episode of #WeGotGoals and get the book by Mozaffar (which she used as a tool to raise money for an organization she loves, The United State of Women, for the first month it was on sale). And if you like what you hear, be sure to rate it and leave a review.

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JAC:Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen; with me I have Maggie Umberger and Kristen Geil.

KG:Hello Jeana.

MU: Good morning Jeana.

JAC: Good morning ladies.

MU: So Jeana this week you spoke with Maaroa.

JAC: I did. I spoke with Maria Mozaffar. She is a civil rights attorney. She is an author and speaker and just generally a protector of humans who need protection.

MU: And the way that she sets goals is really cool because she has her eyes and ears open to what people need. And when you say she's a protector of humans that like encompasses her many jobs because she goes into so many different realms that take her on a lot of different paths but they're all under that umbrella of like total selfless acts.

JAC:When she was describing her law practice she talked first about where she volunteers her time, which I find really interesting because the places where she volunteers her time or donates her time--those things tend to take up more of her time than sort of the billable hours stuff. So she she's been active in sort of the Border Rights and the rights that humans have at the U.S. borders as well as the ban, the travel ban. And she also wrote a book called More Than Pretty.

KG: One of the things that came through on your interview with Maaria is that she has no quit in her. Can you tell us about some of the obstacles that she's faced and how she's overcome them?

JAC:So Maaria, you're right does not know how to quit. She failed the bar exam five separate times and she'll talk through the story of how she overcame it what she did to overcome it. But she knew that she needed to pass the bar to practice law, to do the things that she wanted to do and because that was a block in the way of her big goal. She understood that she would just have to keep banging her head against that wall until she broke the wall down. And she wrote letters. She reached out to people. But I think what was most incredible was that I didn't even have a chance to ask her how it felt to pass the bar exam because she immediately explained how it felt, which was that she was on this high probably so high that it was almost as if she was stoking her own ego. But she has this incredible connection to sort of religion and the universe and she felt that the universe almost put her back in her place after feeling like she'd passed the bar and she was on this high. And she found herself sort of back down where she needed to be where her head had to be to actually move forward and achieve the things that she was there to achieve. The bar exam was just one step along the way.

MU:And when we think about fitness I think a lot of times we get to treat fitness as our little selfish moment of the day where it’s just, we do this for us and I know that's how I feel about a great yoga class or whatever it might be. But even when she talks about her relationship to fitness she's a role model to other people. Can you talk a little bit about that?

JAC:So she is a triathlete which is incredible because I don't know when she does it. A multi-sport athlete takes a lot of time for him or herself to train for the three sports, involved for swimming biking and running. And she's doing those things and she's also sort of doing them for her family. So she talks about how she crossed the finish line carrying her daughter in her arms wearing a T-shirt that said she was her husband's wife and her daughter’s mother. She's not just doing it for herself she's doing it to be a role model for her whole family which was incredible and a lesson to me as well because I as I sort of think about where my life will go selfishly I think about how children will fit in because I think so much about how you can be either a strong woman or a caretaker. And that's just not true. Because she is both of those things she is both a strong woman and a caretaker sort of in one body doing all those things, vacillating wildly between being strong so she can take care of people and taking care of people so that she can be strong. And I thought that was the most incredible thing about her was that she sort of broke all the rules.

MU:It's a truly amazing interview. So here is Jeana with Maaria.

In 2004, then-18-year-old sprinter Allyson Felix went to the Athens Olympics aiming to win gold in the 200-meter dash—and took silver to Jamaica’s Veronica Campbell.

In Beijing in 2008, the two lined up for a rematch, with the same result.

But Felix never took her eyes off the ultimate target, an individual gold medal in the 200 meters. In 2012, she finally achieved it.

Of all her accomplishments—her eight other Olympic medals (including five other golds), her 11 World Championship victories—that one holds the most meaning, she told me on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals.

“It was eight years of being dedicated and sacrificing and having doubts—you know, is this ever going to come together?” she said. “So being able to accomplish that goal represented so much for myself, and also all the people who supported me.”

Few mortals can even fathom the type of success Felix has seen in her sport. How is it even possible, I asked her, to work toward goals that are so audacious, so otherworldly? Her answer: one day, one hour, one track session at a time.

“Whether that looks like getting through a workout in certain times for a specific day or even to the sense of, I want to do something that takes me out of my comfort zone, I want to try a different event, something I’m not as comfortable with—those are all smaller goals that help me reach some of the bigger ones that can feel just a little harder to achieve,” she says.

It’s a mindset that’s obviously paid off, making her one of the most decorated athletes in track and field history. Along the way, she’s faced setbacks and obstacles, including those early Olympic defeats and a serious hamstring injury in 2013. “I don’t think I ever really get over those moments,” she says. “But they’re always fuel. They’ve taught me so much.”

Felix also finds energy and inspiration in aiding others—especially children—in achieving their goals. She spoke with me on the phone from Abu Dhabi, where she was working to help athletes with intellectual disabilities prepare for sprint events in the upcoming Special Olympics World Summer Games, to be held there in 2019.

“To me, this kind of work is just so meaningful. It truly changes lives. And so to be able to be a part of that, to see people reach their individual goals—it’s a different type of rewarding,” she said.

After all the hardware she’s earned over her 15-year career, Felix isn’t anywhere close to hanging up her track spikes. She’s still looking to compete at the World Championships in 2019 and even to earn a spot on her fifth Olympic team at the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo.

Getting there will require just the right balance of hard work and recovery to keep her body healthy, a line that shifts along with her physiology as she ages. She knows the barriers will be significant—but that’s exactly why she keeps at it.

“I love to challenge myself, I love to do something that doesn't come easy,” she said. “I'm looking forward to the whole process and journey.”

You can follow that journey—along with Felix's work with organizations like Special Olympics—on Twitter and Instagram.

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Show transcription:

JAC: Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen, and with me I have Kristin Geil and Cindy Kuzma.

KG: Good morning Jeana.

JAC: Good morning. Cindy you talked to Allyson Felix this week right.

CK: I did. Oh my gosh it was such an honor to speak with her and I apologize for the quality of the audio. She was on a cell phone. But what a treat to talk to this multiple gold medalist, Olympian, and World Champion. She's had an incredible career as a sprinter, and I was so glad to speak with her about her goals.

KG: Well, what kind of goals is she working on right now?

CK: She is still—believe it or not her first Olympics was in 2004—and she still has her sights set on the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. So if you do the math there, that is incredible. She’s also taking a long term view thinking beyond her career as an athlete. And some of the work that she’s doing right now she was in Abu Dhabi to work with the Special Olympics and really doing a lot of work to help children people with intellectual disabilities and others get a lot out of participating in sports as well, and so that is something that she is working on in the long term too.

JAC: Recovery is really important to her. How does she balance the hard work she has to do to achieve these big physical goals with getting rest and recovery?

CK: Yes she made a point of talking about recovery and rest and how essential it is to have that balance as a high level athlete. She builds in a couple of weeks of rest  after every season. She makes sure that after a competition she gets enough rest. And really every day she has to balance the work that she needs to do with the recovery that her body needs. And she notes that that equation has kind of changed as time has passed too, that the older you get the more you remember the harder work outs you did when you were younger and you think you have to do those you get the same results. But that equation just changes your body changes your physiology changes. And she's really conscious about maintaining the right balance as she continues into the later stages of her career.

KG: When you were training for any big goal but you know especially something like the 2020 Olympics that seems so massive and so high up on the mountain top that taking the first step could be really daunting or you wouldn't even know where to start. So how does Allyson Felix balance those huge goals with smaller more tangible ways to break it up?

CK: Yes she definitely breaks everything down year by year month by month day by day workout by workout she's focused on what she has to do that day. When she gets out of bed in the morning she thinks about that and I'm sure she keeps her sights set on those big huge goals too. But she really also makes sure that she has a clear focus on the steps along the way to get there and those process goals I think can be really served her well obviously in the long run.

JAC: And here is Cindy with Allyson.

CK: Well Allyson thank you so so much for joining me today. Now you Allyson Felix have 25 medals in total, nine Olympic medals six of them gold 16 World Championship medals 11 of them gold. If I got any of that wrong feel free to correct me, I think I counted right.

AF: It’s all good.

CK: On #WeGotGoals we typically ask people about a major goal they've achieved and how they got there. But those kinds of goals are just so so out of this world. I mean how do you even approach massive goals like those and how do you do it in a way that’s helped you sustain a successful career for so long?

AF: Well, I think that for me it's really helpful to break a goal down. Because even for myself you know when I think about the things that I want to accomplish I’ve always been someone who set my goals really high. But I think at times you know, you can set a goal and it can just seem a bit overwhelming. And so that, I have noticed that in my career and so I've always tried to kind of work backwards and think about you know how am I going to accomplish this? What does that look like? How can I break that goal down into what I need to do each month or each week all the way down to something, a week, or even setting a daily goal. And so that's always helps big goals to seem more manageable and just more of a reality. So that's something that I’ve done over the years to help me get through. So whether that look like getting through a workout in certain times for a specific day or even to the sense of,  I want to do something that takes me out of my comfort zone. I want to try a different event, something that I'm not as comfortable with. Those are all smaller goals that help me reach some of the bigger ones that can feel just a little harder to achieve.

CK: Oh, that makes so much sense and I feel like a lot of times when I’ve talk to accomplished athletes I feel like they do, they have process goals like that that take them to those bigger goals. When you think back over all that I mean can you pinpoint one accomplishment that’s been the most meaningful to you? Or do they all have their own special meaning?

AF: I think they definitely all have different meanings, different parts of the journey and different times in life but one that immediately comes to my mind is within my first individual gold medal at the Olympics. And that happened for me in 2012. But before that it was actually at my third Olympics. I had been to two games prior and had gotten silver medals to the same person and so to me, accomplishing that goal really just meant a lot because it was eight years being dedicated and sacrificing and having doubts, you know, is this ever going to come together? So being able to accomplish that goal represented so much for myself and also all the people who supported me, you know. All the people who were on my team and who helped me to get to that moment. It's just, it was such a group effort as well. So that's one that sticks out in my mind as being a huge accomplishment.

CK: You mentioned the support of your team and also some of the challenges that you ...

File this one under "things you don't want to hear while recording a podcast entitled #WeGotGoals":

We've actually stopped using the word "goal" at The Junto Institute.

"Cool, cool," I thought to myself, as I mentally face-palmed during my interview with Raman Chadha of The Junto Institute. "This is fine. Everything is fine."

Chuckling a little at my dismay, Chadha went on to explain that his team had shifted towards using the word "priority" in place of goal. They'd found that their apprentices viewed goals as "far out in the distance," while priorities had a greater connotation of urgency, and gave their apprentices something to work on that very day.

The language nerd in me sat with that thought for the rest of the day, debating the hidden meanings of goal versus priority, and how using one word over the other shifted your focus on a daily, weekly or annual basis.

It's what I call a "fuzzy concept" - an idea that you can grasp, but that doesn't always have tangible, actionable deliverables attached to it. And fittingly, that's exactly what Raman Chadha specializes in every day.

As the co-founder of The Junto Institute, a leadership revenue accelerator for growth stage companies, Chadha helps leaders and entrepreneurs improve their leadership skills and their companies' bottom lines by developing emotional intelligence skills, which they then apply to their companies for a higher probability of success.

And as anyone who watched Nick Viall's season of The Bachelor knows, emotional intelligence is another fuzzy concept that's difficult to understand, let alone apply in a high-stress environment like a growth stage company. (FYI, Chadha and Junto define emotional intelligence as "the ability to recognize and regulate the emotions in ourselves and in others, and how we use that information/data to guide our thinking, actions and behaviors by progressing through self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship management.)

The Junto Institute is based on the belief that emotional intelligence is the single biggest contributor to leadership effectiveness and job performance - crucial factors for growth stage companies in the "sink or swim" phase of entrepreneurship.

Chadha also highlighted two common traits of leaders that he's observed throughout his time working with entrepreneurs: tenacity and the ability to cope with ambiguity, uncertainty and chaos.

"In entrepreneurship, there are more lows than there are highs," Chadha said. "So [you need] the ability to bounce back on a regular basis, the ability to power through a rough day."

Similarly, since no two days of running a company are the same, you need to get comfortable with the unknown and operating without a fully-fleshed out path of how you'll get from Point A to Point B.

For those of us not at the helm of a growing company, we can still develop emotional intelligence in our everyday lives. One specific way to do that: work on becoming increasingly aware of how you're feeling in as many moments as possible throughout the day.

Try it right now: how are you feeling? Push yourself further than "fine," "tired," "happy" or any other generic adjectives; try using the most specific word you can find (need inspo? Check out this emotion wheel for ideas). By becoming uber-familiar with your own emotions and feelings, you develop self-awareness AND empathy for those around you (which in turn helps you become a more effective leader).

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Show transcription:

What makes you happy? What makes you unhappy? What habits would you like to improve? What and who are you grateful for in your life? What is your definition of success? Not part of your average checklist or daily to-do's, but questions like these make up the Happiness Roadmap as outlined in Mo Seetubtim's Happiness Planner.

Seetubtim asked the readers of her personal blog for input about what would help them in their everyday lives. Their overwhelming answer was help to find and feel happiness daily.

"A lot wanted to learn how they could be more positive and happier, and I thought this was so interesting," Seetubtim shares. "There are so many books out there about happiness and positive thinking, but it's not like something you can just read and change overnight. It requires practice. You need to practice the new way of thinking, of doing, over and over and over until your mind is trained."

And thus sparked the idea of The Happiness Planner, a daily journal and planner with gratitude and positive thinking at the forefront of the agenda (literally).

When we talk to gold medalists, stuntwomen or finance gurus, we tend to hear grit behind their words; their goals are specific and they've got to be fierce if they mean business about accomplishing them. But Seetubtim sees goals in a slightly different, perhaps even softer, light.

"I think one of the things I've come to realize over the years ... it's not about what I get, it's mostly about what I become," she says. "And I really like the process of competing with myself and becoming the best I can be.

Goals for this founder - no matter how big her business becomes - can still be about developing the smallest of human attributes.

Seetubtim offers up potential goals like "I want to be more organized" or "I want to be more humorous" as interesting and worthwhile goals to go after.

"I think these are some of the things that people can actually set as personal goals - and I think [they're] actually really fun to achieve. A lot of people don't even think about achieving [them]."

Gratitude and positive thinking as a habitual act that you must practice is what sets The Happiness Planner apart from millions of other diaries and journals worldwide. Taking The Happiness Planner to the global market is a huge goal Seetubtim's accomplished this year, and next up, she wants to bring the planner to more youth across the world.

Where we grow up and who we grow up with may be out of our control, but learning how to deal with our own internal conflicts is within our control. If we can do that from a younger age, we'll be better equipped to deal with even bigger conflicts in adulthood.

As Seetubtim says in the conclusion of this episode, "If everybody grows up feeling more happy and whole, there would be fewer issues in this world."

"I do believe that at the core, people feel something different about barry's - because it is different," Joey Gonzalez, CEO of Barry's Bootcamp said as we sat surrounded by the glass walls of his West Hollywood office, talking about the future of the company.

Just down the street, you'll find where Barry Jay created the first Barry's Bootcamp with two partners in 1998. When the lore of the treadmill-slash-weightlifting concept spread across Hollywood, drawing in celebrity clients, Jay just wanted clients to be on time, see results and have a an unforgettable time in the process.

Gonzalez started at Barry's Bootcamp as a client and was soon helping to fund its growth as a partner, he said. He was named CEO in 2015 after serving as the company's COO for more than nine years. Benefitting from slow and controlled growth before, during and after the studio fitness boom, Barry's was able to find its tribe, voice and culture.

That thoughtful growth led to an investment by North Castle Partners in 2015, which yielded - you guessed it, more growth - to bring Barry's to more consumers across the world. With all of that expansion, one thing is top of mind for Gonzalez: culture.

When she trained for her first triathlon six years ago, Denise Lee was swimming, biking, or running six days a week. But she couldn’t find gear that made her “feel like a badass.”

So she set about to craft activewear with a look that motivated her to train harder and reflected her edgy, urban, high-fashion style. ALALA, the athleisure company she launched four years ago—before athleisure was even a word—has gone on to thrive despite burgeoning racksful of competitors.

On this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals, Lee told me she credits this success, in part, to luck and good timing. But she has entrepreneurship in her blood—her parents both had their own businesses. Clearly, she drew inspiration from their perseverance and strength from their encouragement.

“When people think about starting their own thing, it’s really important to have that support from the people closest to you, because it’s scary enough as it is,” she says. “If you really have a lot of people telling you, ‘Don’t do it, stay at your job, just be comfortable, you know, just climb the corporate ladder’—I do think that can be a hindrance to your early success and early development of your business.”

She’d also spent time working for Chris Burch, a serial entrepreneur in the New York fashion world. From him, she absorbed instruction on speed and trusting your intuition. Far better to make a bad decision quickly, he told her, than to dawdle while making a good one.

“If you’re a smart person, you’re confident in yourself and you trust your gut, most of the time you’re going to make the right decision and not make too many bad decisions,” she says.

“But even if you do make bad decisions, you’re able to make them quickly and adjust to whatever decision you made, and then pivot off of that and make another quick decision.”

The big goal Lee set this past year was to craft a clearer vision and personality for ALALA. She kicked off this process with an ingenious exercise—asking everyone to come up with adjectives they thought defined the brand, then narrowing it down to three. Now, they use these words as a guidepost and filter for every move, from big marketing campaigns to individual Instagram posts.

Listen to hear how she’s created successful partnerships, whether she managed to crush that triathlon after all, as well as what those three adjectives are (and if you, like us, were inspired to craft your own—share with us in the comments). You can see more of ALALA’s personality on Instagram and online.

#WeGotGoals is produced by Cindy Kuzma. If you like it as much as we do, please subscribe—and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts.

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Transcript

JAC: Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen. With me, I have Maggie Umberger and Cindy Kuzma.

CK: Good morning Jeana.

JAC: Good morning Cindy. Cindy you talked to Denise of ALALA, right?

CK: Yep I sure did. I talked to Denise Lee, who is the founder and CEO of ALALA, which is brand of activewear that's kind of taking the world by storm right now.

MU: Cindy I loved listening to your interview with Denise because it is an up and coming brand and it was cool to hear the brand story and sort of that journey that it has been on. But I didn't expect to take away such personal life lessons from it. And I really did. So you'll hear in the interview an exercise that she took her team through to help really define what Alala is. And I thought about it and I was like I want to do this exercise for me to kind of gauge, am I doing the things that ladder up to who I am? It's a simple exercise just defining three adjectives that really encompass who you are. But I haven't done it before. So I was surprised and delighted to take away a personal lesson.

CK: What is interesting about that too is that--there's a little bit of fear involved in letting go of some of the things that don't fall under those adjectives but once you really have that clarity of vision and are able to make decisions based on those adjectives that do define and describe you I think it really ultimately leads to kind of a sense of freedom and purpose. And yeah it's definitely something that could be applicable for a person or a company.

JAC: And it's interesting to hear her talk about partnerships and other brands that she grew up with. I know that as aSweatLife has grown we've seen brands like Carbon 38, ALALA, Bandier, all sort of grow in athleisure and activewear space. So hearing her name those brands as partners and almost mentors not that you look to a brand at the same age as a mentor but sometimes they are because they learn lessons that you aren't learning at the same time. A partnership actually led her to me where I met her and got to talking about this very podcast which is how we ended up with her on the show. She caught a trend before it was a trend. ALALA is athleisure at its finest. I'm wearing a pair of ALALA pants that are luxe in every sense of the word.

They have details that I would never think of. There's a sort of shiny brushstroke gloss on them. There's mesh behind my knees. These pants are not traditional yoga pants. Everything they make is meant to be worn in all areas of life and the company was founded right at that sort of inflection point where athletic attire became what you wore all day everyday. So they kind of got lucky in that they caught that trend and they caught that trend with some partners who also had some clout and some movement like Bandier and like carbon 38.

CK: Right. It's true. I think you're right that she was lucky in her timing. But the reason that she got lucky is because she wanted something that wasn't there. I mean she came up with the idea to create this line of activewear because she was looking for workout wear that inspired her to work out. But then that she could also wear around town in New York as the busy kind of entrepreneur type woman that she was. And she didn't see anything out there. So she caught the train but she was able to do that because she was focusing on on a need that wasn't yet being filled. And that's what let her take advantage of that opportunity at that moment.

MU: And when we talk about setting goals and attaining them you actually have to make decisions to get there. She has a really interesting take on making decisions.

CK: Yeah, she talks about making bad decisions quickly and then adjusting if they turn out to be bad. You know again back to the point of her being in a kind of a cohort of a lot of brands coming up at the same time I mean things move quickly in this space and she has learned from her mentors and has applied to her life and her business that sometimes it's better to just make a move even if it's not 100 percent the right one. And you can always course correct it's far easier and far better for your business than just kind of sitting around waiting for for you know deliberating and making sure you make the 100 percent right decision every single time.

MU: It's a really refreshing take on making choices. So here is Cindy with Denise.

CK: I'm Cindy Kuzma and I am here with Denise Lee who is the founder of ALALA. Denise, thank you so much for joining us today on the #WeGotGoals podcast.

DL: Thanks for having me, Cindy.

CK: Before we talk about our two big questions on #WeGotGoals I wanted to have you tell our listeners a little bit more about how the brand got started. I know the idea came about because of your own unsuccessful search for activewear that you wanted to wear. Is that right?

DL: Yeah, exactly. So in 2012 I was training for a triathlon. And along with that was six days a week of running and swimming and training and so being a part of the fashion retail industry in New York City I've always had my own sense of style and as I was training for the first tri I was like, OK well I want to go out and get some new activewear so that I feel more motivated to work out six days a week and I look good and I feel good. And during my own personal search at the time there really wasn't too much out there besides the big brands that we all know. My thought on those were just that it didn't really reflect my own personal taste and my personal style like I wanted something cooler and kind of more innovative and you know, made me feel like a badass.

So I looked around and there really wasn't too much out there. And so that's kind of the genesis of how ALALA started. I thought there was a wide space for a more kind of New York City downtown cool aesthetic activewear line and you know that was something that was missing from the market.

CK: Well, and my next question was going to be what you felt kind of to describe the aesthetic and what you kind of feel sets the brand apart. So that sounds like a pretty good description of that.

DL: Yeah I think we are very much rooted ...