The Power of "Yet": The One Word That Keeps You Going When Your Goals Get Hard

Welcome back to the Productivity Podcast where I give you a daily productivity tip so

you can get the most out of your time, your talent, and your ideas.

I'm your host Brandon White, here we go.

You're three months into training for that half marathon.

The first few weeks felt great.

Now your knee's ache, your pace is slower than you wanted, and the race is coming up fast.

Or maybe it's the weight loss goal.

You've been at it for six weeks.

You were doing the work, and the scale just isn't moving like you expected.

Or the savings goal.

You're contributing every month, and it still feels like the number is barely budging.

You're not at the starting line anymore in any of these scenarios.

You're in the middle where the real work is, and the middle is hard.

That's right.

When a quiet little voice shows up in your head and says, maybe I'm just not the kind

of person who does this.

That voice is wrong, and today we've got a three-letter word to stomp that voice out.

Today we're talking about the power of yet, what it is, where it comes from, what a study

published in Nature found about how yet changes real behavior, and three ways to use it right

now in the middle of whatever goal is testing your patience and your sanity.

Old psychologist Carol Durek spent decades studying why people push through hard things

and others don't.

What she found was the difference often came down to one belief whether a person thought

their abilities were fixed or whether they thought they could grow.

If you want to go deeper on that, we dropped a full episode on fixed versus growth mindset

in episode 214, it's worth a listen.

But today we're zooming in on one specific tool that comes out of her work, the word yet.

People with a fixed mindset here, I can't do this and treat it like a verdict, case closed.

People with a growth mindset here, the same thought and add one word.

I can't hold this pace yet.

I haven't cracked the savings goal yet.

I'm not where I wanted to be yet.

That word doesn't erase the struggle.

It just refuses to let the struggle be the final word.

A 2019 study published in Nature titled A National Experiment Reveals Where Growth Mindset

Improves Achievement Fowled over 12,000 students across 65 public schools in the US.

Researchers found that a brief growth mindset intervention under one hour improved grades

among lower achieving students and increased enrollment in advance courses across the board.

One hour, measurable, lasting behavioral change.

The mechanism wasn't complicated.

It was a shift in how people talked to themselves about what they were capable of, and that

same shift works whether you're a student hitting a wall in math class, someone grinding

through a six week fitness plan, or a person watching their financial goal feel further

away than it did when they started.

There's three tips to put this to work right away.

First, catch the verdict, add the word.

When you're in that fixed self-talk, your brain will offer you conclusions.

I'm not a runner.

I'm bad with money.

I don't have the discipline for this.

Those feel like honest self-assessments, but in the middle of the hard stretch, they're

just adding a log to the fire of your doubt.

Notice the thought and add yet out loud.

I haven't found my stride yet.

I haven't hit the number yet.

It sounds almost too easy, but it works.

Tip two, zoom out to your direction, not today's data point.

When the feedback isn't what you wanted, the scale, the pace, the bank balance, it's

easy to let that single number become the whole story.

Yet is a reminder that one hard week is just one chapter in the book, not the whole book.

The question isn't, am I there?

It's, am I still moving?

If the answer is yes, you're not failing.

You're just not done yet.

Tip three, let yet open the next question.

When you swap, I can't for, I can't yet, something almost automatic happens.

Your brain wants to know what's next.

I'm not losing weight as fast as I hoped yet.

So what haven't I tried?

I'm not comfortable with this yet.

So what do I need to learn?

The word moves you from stuck to curious, and curious people find a way through.

Stuck people just wait for motivation that may never show up.

The middle of the goal is where most people quietly stop.

Not dramatically, they don't quit out loud, they just slow down, they lose heart, and

eventually it just fades.

One word won't fix everything, but it will keep the door open long enough for your

effort to pay off.

You haven't gotten there yet, and yet is exactly where you need to be.

Your move.

Thanks so much for listening to the Productivity podcast.

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show.

We'll see you in the next episode.