Her Discussions by Dr Faye - CHANGE YOUR LIFE for £0 | ultimate 2026 goals setting strategy (+ free template)

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

It’s wild that research shows a goal-setting gap, meaning women set goals lower than men. That’s why I had to record this episode.This is the perfect goal-setting strategy that combines all the possible strategy frameworks you could think of, along with a couple you’ve never heard of, into one.But first, please don’t forget to subscribe, it really helps us to grow this podcast 🤍Resources & links mentioned:Notion template - https://clammy-alto-d59.notion.site/Dream-to-Daily-Pyramid-Method-2026-Goal-Setting-Dashboard-2f34bcbf8eb38051b0e5e7e0946ff5afYou can find the ‘12-min beans pita’ recipe here (skip to minute 35):https://youtu.be/oBY7N7BcD6MLinks to subscribe / follow:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/her-discussions-by-dr-faye/id1835829612Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5viLYizHD4Zy6J42iqtPRoCan I ask you a BIG favour? 💙Please leave a review or rating. It helps us grow the podcast and bring you more amazing guests.Share with someone who needs this; it might help them live a happier, healthier life.Follow us on social media or join the broadcast channel to send us your questions for our guests. I'll leave the link here: https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbY4liwxlLnewx4H/?igsh=MWhuaXFweGtucTB3cA==https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbY4liwxlLnewx4H/?igsh=MWhuaXFweGtucTB3cA==🛑 Disclaimers & legal:This podcast is for educational / informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, legal, or financial advice. All opinions are those of the speaker(s).

I am sick of the anti-goal setting rhetoric that I've seen in 2026 and I completely understand if you are sick of the New Year, New Me rhetoric. I get it. However, as women, I want to make you aware of something. There is a gender goal gap. Recent shows that women set lower goals than men. So when we are talking about goals, I need you to know that it is an act of feminism to be an obsessive goal setter. And in being an insufferable goal setter, I have spent the last five years. is devising the perfect goal setting strategy that incorporates all the different goal setting frameworks

you could possibly think of and a couple you never will have heard of into this perfect pyramid method that will not only give you the pathway for setting your goals, but also make sure that you are dreaming bigger than you ever have before because I know that as women, we are so, so, so guilty for capping our potential. Stick around until the end because I will tell you, how you can get a free copy of this notion template that I'm using for my pyramid method for goal setting. And before we go into the specifics, the nitty gritty framework for how you're actually going to achieve your goals, we need to start with a step I think most people get wrong. This section is specifically for you.

If you are someone who has big, big, big, big, big dreams, however, you really struggle to find the motivation in the boring, mundane everyday stuff. It is because you do not have a strong enough why. So I would like to introduce you to Bahaag goals. If you have never heard of Bahaag goals, Baha'ag stands for big, hairy, audacious goals. For women, this is specifically important because of this 2023 study that found women perform worse when they make their goals public.

They dumb them down, they make them more realistic. They are not as audacious. So the whole point of this section is to forget about what is realistic, to forget what is compatible with your everyday life, to shoot for the stars, to dream as big as you possibly can, because Lord knows, as women, we do not do this enough. There was a dinner that I went to last year

or the year before with Jasmine Sawyers, who is an Olympian, and she said that her resolution for that year was to just be more delulu. Do you think that, like, as women, we just need to be a little bit more delusional? So to actually set your Baha' goal, what I want you to do is to envision yourself in five years' time. What is the absolute dream scenario you could possibly imagine for yourself in five years' time?

And then I want you to make it 20% bigger. So if your dream is to be in the Forbes 30 under 30, whatever, make that 20% bigger. Say you want to, I don't know, sell your company for a ridiculous amount of money. Or say for me, I would say five years time I would love to have a PhD in a women's health topic that I'm interested in. How can I make that 20% bigger? Have a PhD from the top university in the world. Think about just keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until it feels like something that you would genuinely be proud of because also what I don't want you to do is set a Bahag goal that doesn't feel authentic to you. I think there's so much external noise when it comes to goals setting about what you should be doing.

The key is making it audacious, but still feel like yourself, not just something you're doing for the external validation. I have a little bit of an embarrassing story about why I think the hagg goals are so important. It is about Faye in 2020 when I had just started my YouTube channel. I was in my second year of medical school. I think I had less than 1,000 subscribers. We'd just gone into lockdown. I think it was a year after Molly May came out of the Love Island Villa. And to give you a bit of a better picture of what Fay looked like in that era,

she had ass-length blonde extensions that cost her quite a lot of money every month. And I would sit and I'd edit these videos for my YouTube channel that absolutely no one was watching. And it would take me hours and hours and hours and hours. And I remember vividly lying in my bed at three in the morning, trying to keep editing this video because I wanted it to get up the next day for about five people's watch this video. I'm editing, I'm editing, I'm editing, and I remember things to myself like, Faye, you just need to go to bed. And you know what popped into my head at that moment? My Baha'ag goal.

And you know what my Baha' goal was? To be the next Mollie Mae because I did not want to be paying for my hair extensions, paying £100 for my long, ass length, blonde hair extensions every couple of weeks. Obviously, my Baha'ad goals have changed a little bit. since 2020, but I can hand on heart say that that is what got me through the hours and hours and hours of editing when no one was watching my YouTube videos. What I'm trying to say is you absolutely need that North Star to guide you. When things get tough, you have to have that vision that gets you through. Maybe it's not Molly May, but there will be something. That is the top of the pyramid.

Next layer of the pyramid is a goal setting framework that I guarantee you will have never heard of before. And this section is for you if you feel like you are making goals, because they're the goals you think you should be working towards, you think you should lose weight in January because everyone else is on a diet and they're losing weight. You think that you should have a goal of earning more money because everyone else is trying to earn more money. Or you think that your goal should be go to the gym more because everyone else is going to the gym more, but that doesn't actually align with what you want from your life. And because it doesn't allow with what you actually want in your life, you inevitably fail.

But there's a solution I will get to in just a moment. But I want to explain why for women specifically, again, this is so important because there was another 2023 study that found women may be more likely to achieve their goals if their motivation is not solely financial. Now, in comparison to men. Now, that might be because for women, it's seen as, it's frowned upon a lot of the time to have a financial motivation or it could be because

women often do have more complex motivations and I know that when I do this next exercise every single year I find out that my motivations are so much more complex than just having cash in the bank so the solution I'm so sorry if you've ever watched any of my other videos on this before because I'm going to sound like a broken record you need to do the perfect day exercise the perfect day exercise is you imagine your day one year from now. So we're at the beginning of 2026. What is your perfect day the 1st of January 2027? You're going to start from the very beginning in the morning. Where are you waking up? What do you see when you wake up? Who are you waking up next to? Very important question. Every single detail, what are you eating for breakfast? How do you feel in

your body? Do you feel tense? Do you feel stressed? Or do you feel relaxed at ease? Like you have journal as if you are living out that day. Not I will do this. You say, I did this. Past tense. Be as specific as you possibly can be. Once you've written freely about what your perfect day looks like, I want you to go through and pick out the key themes from your perfect day a year from now. Now, for me, there are always every single year when I do this, even though the days are different, there are always three key themes that come out for me. And that'll be different for everyone. Mine are always a sense of purpose. That is really, really important to me. I'm a firm believer that we spend more time working than we spend with the people we love. So it may as well be something that we find worthwhile.

Financial freedom, always a huge one for me. I'm not someone who values fancy, fancy, fancy things, but I'm someone who values the sense of security that finances bring. I think. probably growing up, I experienced a lot of financial security secondhand from my parents. And I'm not ashamed to admit that financial security is important to me. And the third one is balance. Whenever I look back and reflect on my perfect day exercise, I always notice how my day doesn't feel rushed and I feel I envision myself to be a lot calmer. So now you have your themes from your perfect day exercise. I need to introduce you to a goal setting framework called the hard goal setting framework. Now, this stands for heartfelt, animated, required and difficult.

Do not worry, guys. All of this is going to be in the notion template. You do not have to remember any of it. But the hard framework. And because I really value balance, I think a reason goal setting culture gets such a bad reputation is it's so tightly linked to hustle culture. But I'm a big believer in your goals, reflecting all the different domains of your life. So I like to split my life into five different domains as well.

So career finances, health and fitness, mental well-being and my relationships. So often when I feel like my work-life balance is off, one of my relationship goals will be make time to see one person, at least one social interaction every week, which is equally, if not more important to address than your career goals. For all these life domains, I want use people. I want to use pick one to two goals for each of them. We don't want to overcomplicate it, just one to two. And I'm going to give you some examples of different ones. Let's say that in your career, you, by December 2026, you want to have passed some sort of qualification or exam that allows you to progress in your career. To make it heartfelt, you might think about the emotions you feel by not having

this qualification. So maybe you feel behind in your career, or maybe you don't feel like you have the knowledge to do that job well and that makes you anxious. And then to make it animated, you would visually think about how it will feel if you open up that email, that letter, whatever, and you see your exam result or you get that qualification and really visualize every single little detail. Required is where we think about whether this is actually relevant to your life. Is it something that actually needs to happen for you to meet those bigger goals? So if you need that. You need that. that qualification to progress. And then difficult is for you to study for an exam, that is something that will mentally stretch you and be challenging. And if you achieve it, it is a sign of growth.

So then for like finances, it might be that you want to save up for a deposit or health and fitness. You might want to strength train three times a week. Mental well-being, you might want to start therapy because anxiety is getting in the way of you live in your life to the fullest. And then relationships, like I said, one of your goals might be to make sure that you are carving out time for at least one social interaction every single week. Now, a quick note on manifestation. I am a woman of science through and through. If I hear one person talk about manifestation as a means of envisioning a car parking space around the corner, I will scream. That is not real. And it also makes a mockery of the actual real life science. behind manifestation. Manifestation absolutely 100% works. Just not in like this mystical

fairyland way. It's basic psychology. When you visualize something happening, you prime your brain to spot those opportunities and carve a path towards achieving that goal. It's not about using the power of your mind to bend spoons. And that's why I think if you look at very traditional goals setting frameworks, like the smart framework, so having goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, attainable, realistic. You know you need fiber for a healthy gut, but do you actually know how to get it? Quaker's been serving up fiber since 1877,

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But first, I need you to listen to this next step on the pyramid. If you're someone who has so much motivation in January but then by March, you are tired, you're exhausted. You cannot be bothered anymore. the momentum has worn off. Our brains really struggle with goals that feel too distant. And I think expecting yourself to keep up the momentum of a single goal for 365 days is a lot. But what can help is having a shorter feedback loop. So I like to do 12-week sprints.

Now, you may be thinking 12 weeks isn't that just a quarter, Faye? Well, quarter sounds a little bit too finance bro. So 12-week sprints is what I like to. what I like to go by. From your goals from each of your domains, now I want you to look at your 12 week sprint. What can you do in the next 12 weeks to reach that bigger yearly goal? And this is where it gets a little bit fun. So Google, when they set their OKRs, which is like their targets for their employees, they recommend that employees should be hitting 70% of their target. If the Google employees are always hitting 100% of their targets, they are not,

setting goals that are ambitious enough or if the employees are not hitting their goals obviously they either haven't set good goals or they're not trying hard enough to hit them i want you to look to the end of your 12 week sprint whatever your goal is and i want you to create a three-tiered system so we've got the bronze tier this is you keeping your promise to yourself it is kind of the bare minimum of you just meeting that goal then we have the silver tier which is i am becoming her i am becoming the girly pop that I want to be. And then we have the goals here, which is, and I hate to say this, that woman, because that is a little bit of a controversial phrase.

I'm going to stand by it, though, because that woman, who she is, is whatever you want her to be. It's controversial to them because I think it's been adopted by trad wife culture and some things I don't feel very aligned towards. But building a version of yourself where you feel you are treating yourself correctly is whatever you want it to be. It does not need to be anything externally validating. It can just be becoming that woman for yourself can just be becoming someone whose nervous system is regulated, becoming someone who isn't people pleasing, becoming someone who isn't staying late in work every day, who is setting boundaries, who is building work life balance, who is being more present with their friends and family. Those are

your three tiers. Then what you're going to do is you're going to put that goal into the notion template, which I'll tell you how to get at the end. At the end of the video, we are going to talk about the step that everyone misses, and I honestly think is the most important. But first, this is the final rung on our pyramid. And it is for you if you have big, big, big, big, big dreams, but you struggle to implement them into your day to day life. I think we can all be really guilty of forgetting about the unsexy groundwork that has to happen for us to get to where we want to get to. So maybe you want to save for a deposit for your first home, but when it actually comes to sitting down and making a budget, that is extremely unattractive. And I completely understand.

It is boring and it's not fun. Maybe you want a fed ass and you're only going to the gym once a a month because that's not the fun part. Thinking about how nice and juicy you want your bem's to look is not as sexy as going to the gym at 5am in the morning when you're tired. So this is how we really break it down into daily manageable goals which keep us chipping away so that we can just do 1%. And this is actually the biggest life hack in all of this because honestly if you do things on a daily basis, you really do not need to be doing much at all. And the example I'm going to give is my biggest goal for 2026, which is super unbelievably unsexy. But it is something that I've been trying to do for years. And I'm going to verbalise it now so that you can all hold me accountable.

And that is 2026 is the year that I become a tidy, organized girl. Because I am so ridiculously anal and type A in every single other area of my life. You walk into my home and it looks like it's been hit by a bomb. And I'm not someone. If someone puts in the comments, just, you know, put things away as you go along. It doesn't work. It does not work. That is what I'm trying to get to.

I want it to become second nature. But I think if you don't have the tidy gene, it's not part of my regular routine. can't spot when things are untidy until I've got friends coming over and that I realize that I've been living in a mess for the last, you know, two weeks. But I'm done. I'm done. I want to live in a tidy home and I've recognised does prevent me doing my job because I do not want to film anything ever when my home looks awful. So this is the year I'm tackling it. And the way that I'm tackling it is every single day I'm setting myself the target of doing 10 minutes of tidying. That is it. The flat does not need to be tidy at the end of it. I am just setting myself the target of 10 minutes of tidying

every single day. 10 minutes is so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of our day. There is never going to be a single day where I do not have just 10 minutes to do the bare minimum. I'm on day seven and I've done it every day so far and actually every single day that I've done it, I've ended up going over the 10 minutes because once you get started it's so much easier to keep going. With your own goals, what I want you to do is think of the smallest possible thing you could do every single day to try and make that happen. So say if your goal is this year, you want to exercise more. The smallest thing you could do every single day is go on a 10 minute walk. Like, that is the absolute bare minimum. Some days you go to the gym, some days you go and play

like tennis or you go to parties or yoga, whatever. The bare minimum is just going for a walk for 10 minutes. you can always make time for 10 minutes. But if you do that 10 minutes every single day, you are going to get so much further than if you set yourself the goal of doing an hour gym session three times a week and then life gets in the way a month in and then you quit and you fail and you don't go to the gym again for three months. Same for me.

If I set myself the goal of being a tidy person by doing one big deep clean every week, that becomes this big mountain of a task that I do not want to do. And actually one week I miss it and then at goals out the window and I don't want to be a tidy person anymore. What I need you to do is build an identity around the goal that you want to set. So think about the person, say, you want to eat healthier. What does someone who eats healthy do every single day?

That could be eat their five a day. That could be eat their breakfast. That build that identity and ask yourself, what does that person do every single day? Now pick one or two of those habits. Keep it as simple as possible. One or two habits. And you are going to track those habits. We need to be giving ourselves a little dopamine kick every time we tick off those habits.

For me, I am making it a point of telling every single person I come into contact with every single day that I've kept up my 10 minute tidying habit because that makes me feel good about myself. It's small to other people. This is a big, big, big thing for me. It gives me a huge dopamine kick, actually. It's a little bit insufferable of me and you will be hearing this for the next 12 months of the year. It could also be a sticker chart. I've seen the most fun TikTok sticker charts where every single day that you keep up your habit, you just pop a little sticker on the chart. In the Notion template, there will also be a habit tracker

so you can use Notion or there's so many other habit tracking apps. It does not need to be complicated. It can be as simple as just clicking a button. Our brains are simple, simple, simple things. Like we make them so much more complex. Brain likes to feel like it did good thing. You press a button. You feel like you did a good thing. You get a little dopamine. kick. It's really, really simple. The most important thing is you track it, however you choose to do it. Now, little bonus point, if you want to attach this habit to something you already do anyway. So, for example, if you want to get more steps in, you may have to travel to work anyway. So you might walk instead of getting the bus. I know for me, for me to get to the tube station, I can either do a

10 minute bus or a 20 minute walk. Just by walking instead of getting the bus, I've done that habit, but I've also attached that habit to something I was going to do anyway. When we create that link, it's called habit stacking. And it just makes it so much easier for us to stick to because we remember it. We do the thing we were going to do anyway and we think, oh wait, I can do my habit right now. Finally, this is the step most people miss. I think the reason most people hate goal setting is because I think we've all failed at it. And then after we failed at it, we felt shit. And then we've blamed the goal setting for our feelings of feeling shit. It's not a failure of us. It's often failure of the environments around us. We set our goals when we're in this fresh new year state of mind

with loads of energy and then life gets in the way. And our goals don't happen. We get tired. We get busy. So this is the most important section when it comes to actually making sure you get to your goals. It is the pre-mortem. Now, you may have heard of a post-mortem. This is what is done after someone has died to try and work out why they died. In the pre-mortem, we are going to try and predict why your goals will fail and put in strategies to try and stop them from failing. Let's say your goal is to eat healthier in 2026, but you have a really busy day at work and you come home and you order a delivery because you're tired. Maybe you want to go to the gym consistently, but then one night You stay up late, you can't get to sleep, so you sleep in.

Or maybe you want to save more, but then you go on a couple of big nights out and you completely blow your budget. What has happened to me in the past when I've set goals and then failed at them, I have had this really like all or nothing mindset. If I fail the goal, that's it, throw in the towel, throw in all the hard work that you've done previously, forget about it completely. It was never going to happen. You'll never capable, think that you were never capable of doing that in the first place.

That is completely the wrong attitude. We want to look through each. our habits or our goals and identify a trigger. So maybe if you want to eat healthier, look at your triggers for eating foods that are less nutritional. I don't want to put foods in good or bad because I don't think that's healthy, but foods that you don't feel aligned to your goals.

I order takeaways whenever I'm tired and work. I am a big emotional eater. My weapon of choice is a cabri's dairy milk. Big bar, the entire thing. I also tend to eat more unhealthily depending on the environment I'm in. So one of the hospitals I worked at had a Gregs at the train station. And when I came out of work, I was tired, I was hungry, I hadn't had a snack all day.

It was a Greg's straight away. So now we've identified the triggers. We can kind of work on how we can prevent it. So, for example, if you know you're someone who when you get tired, that is when you want a takeaway. I tried out simmer last year. And I always kind of begrudged meal prepping services because in the back of my head, I kind of, I felt like that's quite inexpensive things to pay for when I could just get myself off my ass and meal prep myself. but I never meal prepped myself.

And then I always ended up spending more money on the takeaways anyway. So I found having a couple simmer meals in my fridge that I knew were pretty nutritious and I could just stick them in the microwave for a couple of minutes and that was my dinner done. Or having some really good quick, easy meals. Dr. Megan was on the podcast and she gave a really, really, really good quick 15 minute gut friendly meal. I also have a bean pitter 12 minute dinner recipe. that I shared in a vlog recently that I will link on screen now as well. Or if you're an emotional eater, I am.

And I found that actually sitting with my emotions and tracing back my steps and thinking about why my nervous system feels a bit dysregulated and just addressing that head on sometimes stops me in my tracks from devouring the entire dairy milk bar. I will still probably have a couple of chunks, but it just stops that. I'm quite bad for just like eating beyond my hunger because I'm just trying to give myself an emotional hug, which is not healthy. Also finding delicious, more nutritious options, the deliciously Ella salted almonds.

Oh my gosh, they were a recent discovery. Wow. Love them. And if you're someone who works near a Gregs, McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, whatever, maybe even considering taking a different route home or having a snack before you leave work so that you're not walking past and smelling the fries at important temptation in your way. Now you have some preventative measures in place. You also have to plan for what happens when you inevitably fail to keep up your goal because

I'm going to be completely real with you. Life happens and life should happen. We are meant to live. We are meant to go out and socialise with friends. We are meant to enjoy delicious, not very nutritious meals. We are meant to stay up late because we're having a good time. Like life should not be all about keeping up with our goals and our habits. And it's kind of beautiful that they will inevitably.

fail but what is important is how you react to them and remembering that when they fail you don't just throw away all the work you get back on the horse and you just keep going because it's not a sign that you are a failure of a person or you lack discipline it's a sign that you know when living life is more important than just ticking a box and getting your quick dopamine fix so if you want to click there is a link in the description that will take you to the free notion template if there any goals that you guys are setting for the new year then definitely leave them in the comments so that we can all keep each other accountable. If you found this episode helpful, then please make sure to follow the podcast and click the notification bell on. Thank you so,

so much for listening and I will see you in the next. Monster Energy. Everybody knows White Monster, Zero Ultra. That's the OG. It kicked off this whole zero sugar energy drink thing. But Ultra is a whole line up now. You've got Strawberry Dreams, Blue Hawaiian, Sunrise, and Vice Guava. And they all bring the Monster Energy Punch. So if you've been living in the white can, branch out. Ultra's got a flavor for every vibe. And every single one is zero sugar.

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