Stop Setting Goals You'll Abandon – What Radical Awareness Actually Means
- Brainz Magazine
- 12 hours ago
- 9 min read
Kat Mitchell transforms how women over 40 think, feel, and show up in their lives. As a certified Master NLP Practitioner, hypnotherapist, and speaker, she guides women from self-doubt to self-trust, helping them break patterns of overgiving and overwhelm to reclaim their confidence, clarity, and courage---one powerful mindset shift at a time.
Every February, the same pattern repeats itself, the gym membership gathers dust, the morning routine fades, and the carefully crafted vision board gets shoved in a drawer. We tell ourselves we lack discipline, willpower, or motivation. But what if the real problem started long before we set the goal?
Most New Year's resolutions fail because they're built on a foundation of what we think we should want, not what we actually need. They're created from external pressure, comparison, and the exhausting belief that we need to fix ourselves before we're worthy of the life we want. For women over 40 who've spent decades meeting everyone else's expectations, these goals often become just another way to prove we're enough.
The missing piece isn't another strategy. It's radical awareness.
What radical awareness actually is
Radical awareness isn't positive thinking or mindfulness meditation. It's the willingness to see what's been running your life without sugar-coating it or running from it. It's asking yourself the uncomfortable questions most people avoid because the answers might require change.
It means looking directly at the patterns you've been repeating for years, the people-pleasing that leaves you exhausted, the boundaries you don't set because you fear disappointing others, the dreams you've shelved because someone once told you they weren't practical, and the version of yourself you've been performing because it feels safer than being seen.
This is neuroscience, not philosophy. Your brain operates from patterns established through repetition and reinforcement. Many of those patterns were formed when you were young, navigating environments where adaptation meant survival. As a Master NLP Practitioner and Certified Hypnotherapist who spent years leading multi-million-dollar projects before transitioning to transformation coaching, I've seen how these unconscious programs dictate everything from career choices to relationship dynamics.
But here's the powerful part, research from Stanford University on neuroplasticity confirms that the brain can reorganize itself throughout the lifespan through intentional practices and experiences. Your brain isn't fixed. The neural pathways running your current patterns can be rewired through deliberate attention and new choices.
Psychologist Carol Dweck's groundbreaking work on growth mindset demonstrates that when people believe their abilities can develop through effort and learning, they activate different neural circuits than those who believe their traits are fixed. Her ongoing neuroscience research shows that a growth mindset leads to quantifiable changes in brain responses to challenges and setbacks.
This matters because the stories you tell yourself aren't just thoughts floating in your head. Neuroscience research on self-talk shows that inner speech activates the same brain regions as speaking aloud, including Broca's area and the auditory cortex. When you repeatedly tell yourself limiting narratives, you're not just reinforcing a belief, you're strengthening specific neural pathways. And when you shift those narratives through radical awareness, you're literally rewiring your brain.
Different types of self-talk activate distinct neural pathways. Instructional self-talk engages planning regions and the cerebellum, while motivational self-talk activates reward and emotional centers. Positive framing enhances left prefrontal cortical activity and reduces stress hormones like cortisol. This is why the work of becoming aware of your internal narratives isn't optional for transformation. It's the foundation.
Radical awareness is the moment you stop being a passenger in your own life and start questioning which neural pathways you're strengthening with every thought, every decision, and every story you tell yourself about what's possible.
Why women over 40 need this conversation
Midlife brings a particular reckoning. You've likely spent decades building a life that looks successful from the outside while feeling increasingly disconnected on the inside. You've managed caregiving responsibilities, career demands, relationship expectations, and the constant low-grade hum of not being enough.
Then something shifts, a health crisis, an empty nest, a relationship ending, or a sudden awareness that the life you've been living doesn't reflect your true self. The goals you set from this place of transition often fail because they're still rooted in old programming and decades of accumulated limiting beliefs about what's possible for women your age.
You can't create a new life from an old identity.
This is where most resolution-setting goes wrong. We try to add new behaviors without examining the beliefs driving the old ones. We commit to morning routines without asking why we're exhausted in the first place. We set ambitious career goals without acknowledging the relationship depletion beneath our burnout. We promise to prioritize self-care while still believing that putting ourselves first is selfish.
The neuroscience helps explain why this approach fails. Your brain has been running the same patterns for decades, creating deeply grooved neural pathways. When you layer new goals on top of unexamined limiting beliefs, your brain defaults to the stronger, more established pathways—the ones that say, "People like me don't get to do that" or "It's too late for me." These aren't just discouraging thoughts. They're neural patterns your brain has been practicing and perfecting for years.
Radical awareness asks different questions, not "What should I do?" but "What have I been tolerating?" Not "What goals should I set?" but "What am I ready to change?" Not "Who do I want to become?" but "Who have I been pretending to be?" And critically, "What neural pathways am I strengthening every time I repeat the same limiting story about my life?"
The good news? Neuroplasticity research confirms that these patterns aren't permanent. The brain's capacity to reorganize continues throughout your life. But rewiring requires more than willpower. It requires awareness first, then intentional practice of new patterns.
The three phases of reclaiming yourself
Real transformation doesn't happen through willpower. It happens through clarity, then power, then action. This is the foundation of my Reclaiming You framework, a three-month journey designed specifically for women navigating major life transitions.
The first phase is about seeing yourself clearly. This means radical awareness of what's been running your life, including the self-talk patterns and limiting beliefs you've internalized over decades. It involves energy reclamation to understand what's draining you versus what you've been told should drain you. It requires evaluating the relationships and environments shaping your choices and learning to lead yourself forward instead of waiting for permission or validation from others who may be unconsciously reinforcing your limitations.
The second phase is stepping into your power. This is where self-trust replaces self-doubt, where you design your life deliberately instead of reactively, where you embody your inherent worth rather than constantly trying to earn it, and where you integrate who you're becoming instead of clinging to who you've been. This phase actively rewires neural pathways by consciously replacing limiting narratives with aligned ones—not through affirmations your nervous system rejects, but through experiential evidence that creates new neural connections.
The third phase is living extraordinarily. Not extraordinary in the Instagram-highlight sense, but in the grounded, authentic sense of navigating change with resilience, taking bold action from your center, owning all of who you are, and stepping into unlimited possibility. By this phase, you've practiced new patterns enough that they become the brain's default pathways instead of the old limiting ones.
But it all starts with clarity. Without it, every goal becomes another way to abandon yourself.
The questions that change everything
Radical awareness begins with questions that create breakthroughs instead of busy work. These aren't journaling prompts designed to make you feel better. They're designed to make you see clearly, especially the invisible narratives shaping your reality and the neural pathways you're unconsciously strengthening.
What am I tolerating that I'm no longer willing to accept? This question reveals the boundaries you haven't set and the patterns you've normalized, the relationship dynamics you've accepted as unchangeable, the work environments that drain you, and the internal narratives that keep you small. When you write down what you're tolerating, you often discover you're living according to someone else's script about what women your age should accept.
What stories am I telling myself about what's possible for me? Your brain believes what you repeatedly tell it because repetition creates and strengthens neural pathways. If you've been telling yourself that it's too late, that you're too old, that you've missed your chance, that ship has sailed, you've been practicing those neural pathways daily. Research on self-talk shows that these repeated narratives don't just discourage you mentally, they activate stress responses and create physiological patterns that reinforce the limitation. Awareness of the story is the first step to choosing a different neural pathway.
What would I choose if I trusted myself completely? This question bypasses the "should" and reveals the "want." It exposes the gap between what you know is right for you and what you're doing. That gap is where your power is hiding. It's also where you'll find all the external voices that have convinced you not to trust your own knowing.
Who am I when I'm not performing for anyone? This is the question that unravels decades of conditioning. The version of you that emerges when you're not managing perceptions, meeting expectations, or proving your worth is the version that knows what you need. She's been waiting underneath all those practiced neural patterns of who you should be.
Where did I learn that this limitation was true? This is the radical awareness question that disrupts old neural pathways. When you trace a limiting belief back to its source, you often discover it came from someone else's fear, bias, or projection, a teacher who said you weren't creative, a parent who insisted that practical careers were the only safe choice, or a culture that decided women over 40 become invisible. These weren't truths. They were suggestions you accepted and then reinforced through repetition until they became neural grooves. And you can choose to stop strengthening them.
These questions aren't comfortable. They're not meant to be. Radical awareness disrupts the familiar patterns your brain has been running on autopilot. That disruption is where transformation becomes possible because it's where new neural pathways can begin to form.
From awareness to action
Clarity without action is just rumination. But action without clarity is just exhaustion in a different form. The women I work with often come to me burned out from years of action that wasn't aligned with who they are or what they actually need.
The shift happens when awareness informs choice, and choice builds momentum. When you see clearly what's been running your life, including the neural pathways created by decades of limiting self-talk, you can decide whether to keep strengthening them or create new ones. When you understand that your exhaustion might be less about how much you're doing and more about doing things that violate your core values or authentic desires, you can reclaim your energy differently.
When you recognize that the story about being too old or too late is a neural pathway you've been practicing rather than a truth you discovered, you can deliberately practice a different one. Not through forced positive thinking that your nervous system rejects, but through small experiments that generate new evidence. This is how you create new neural pathways with experiential data your brain can't argue with.
When you lead yourself forward instead of waiting for external validation, you stop abandoning your goals halfway through because they were never really yours to begin with.
This is the work that makes resolutions obsolete. You're not setting goals to fix yourself. You're aligning your life with who you're becoming and actively choosing which neural pathways to strengthen through the stories you tell yourself, the actions you take, and the patterns you practice.
The invitation
If you're tired of setting goals you abandon, exhausted from trying to keep up with a life that doesn't fit, or ready to stop performing and start choosing, the work begins with one question, "What do I want?"
Not what you should want. Not what would make others happy. Not what looks impressive. What do you actually want?
That question is the doorway to radical awareness. And radical awareness is the foundation of reclaiming you.
Ready to go deeper? Take the exhaustion assessment to discover whether your burnout stems from relationship depletion, energy crisis, or identity loss patterns. Or explore the 10 radical awareness questions for women over 40, designed to help you see what's been running your life and begin to sense what you actually want.
The clarity conversation starts now.
Read more from Kathleen Mitchell
Kathleen Mitchell, NLP Master & Mindset Transformation Coach
Kat Mitchell's decade as a family caregiver, navigating her mother's Alzheimer's and helping her brother relearn language after multiple strokes, ignited her fascination with the brain's capacity to transform. Watching her brother rebuild neural pathways sparked her journey into NLP mastery and hypnotherapy, where she discovered that the same neuroplasticity principles could help women rewrite limiting beliefs at any age. Now a board-certified Master NLP Pratitioner, hypnotherapist, and speaker, Kat combines hard-won wisdom from the caregiving trenches with powerful mindset techniques to help women reclaim their lives after years of putting everyone else first.
