The Let Them Theory, from Mel Robbins’ book of the same name, makes you a better manager by releasing the need to control what your team thinks, wants, or feels motivated by. Lia breaks down three specific manager situations where applying ‘let them, let me’ instantly reduces frustration and builds more trust. This episode is especially useful for leaders who over-invest in team members who aren’t reciprocating or who exhaust themselves trying to fix everyone’s motivation.
This episode is part of the Self-Leadership & Mindset for Leaders series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…we don’t get to the end of the year and we’ve accomplished all this stuff, but we’re burned out, but we feel like, ah, what was the point of this? I’m not happy.”
“…when you show your team members, I believe in you, I care about you as the whole person that you are. Then they want to stick around.”
“…take a piece of paper and write a line down the middle. And right. Doing on one side and being on the other and start to list out what are three things at most.”
Episode highlights
Why achievement goals alone leave you feeling empty
Most goal-setting conversations focus entirely on the doing: hit the revenue target, grow the customer base, reach a new title. Lia calls this the rat race trap. You go, go, go, check every box, and arrive at December feeling like, “What was the point of this?” The doing list without a being list is an incomplete plan.
The doing-vs-being split
Lia’s framework is deliberately simple. Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper. Label one side “doing” and the other “being.”
– Doing goals are your achievement targets: a revenue number, a user milestone, a promotion, a specific deliverable. – Being goals are about how you want to feel and exist: anchored in your values, present with your family, in flow, genuinely learning every day.
These two lists are not in conflict. You can grow your business and feel grounded in what matters. You just have to decide in advance what both sides look like.
Why three goals per side (not ten)
Lia is firm on keeping the list short. Pick three doing goals and three being goals, maximum. More than that and nothing gets the focus it deserves. Three is enough to be ambitious and specific without turning the exercise into a wish list nobody revisits.
Run every goal through SMART
Once you have your six goals, pressure-test each one against the SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely. “Feel happier” is not a being goal yet. “Protect two evenings a week for family and exercise” is. Getting specific is what turns an intention into something you can actually track.
How to share this with your team
Lia encourages leaders to bring this framework directly into conversations with team members. When someone says they want to grow professionally, that is a being goal. Now you can help them find a class, a conference, or a new responsibility that feeds that feeling. When you only track what people produce, you miss the whole person, and they eventually leave to find fulfillment somewhere else. Helping your team name both lists is a retention strategy.
Values anchor the being side
Being goals tend to map directly to your core values, whether personal or company-wide. If collaboration and service are central to how you operate, a doing goal that means heads-down solo sprinting all year will feel out of alignment. Checking your being goals against your values is the gut-check that keeps the two lists from fighting each other.
The payoff: no runaway train, no regret
When you finish this exercise, you have a plan where the doing list keeps you accountable for results and the being list keeps you accountable for how you show up. Share your own lists with your team as a model. Show them the doing and the being are meant to be symbiotic. Start the year knowing you have looked out for both sides, for yourself and for the people you lead.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 228: Why ‘I shouldn’t have to deal with this’ is keeping you stuck as a leader. The ‘I shouldn’t have to’ mindset is one of the most common traps leaders fall into, and it quietly poisons every hard conversation before it even starts. Lia’s reframe is simple: shift from ‘I have to’ to ‘I get to,’ and watch how your team responds differently. This episode is especially useful for business owners and founders who never set out to be people leaders but now find themselves managing a team.
- Ep 217: What are you avoiding right now? The question that unlocks your leadership. The single question that separates high-performing leaders from struggling ones is: what am I avoiding right now? Lia walks through three common avoidances, making a necessary hire, giving hard feedback, and actually doing the leadership fundamentals, and shows how naming each one makes the fix surprisingly straightforward. This episode is most useful for founders, owners, and team leads who feel stuck, behind, or like the same problems keep resurfacing.
- Ep 205: Your team is watching how you react. Here is why it matters.. When leaders visibly vent frustration, teams lose morale and disengage before the work even begins. Lia walks through the self-management moves that keep your team steady, including how to acknowledge a hard situation, celebrate effort, and get ahead of setbacks before they knock everyone off course. Most useful for founders, executives, and team leads who set the emotional tone for their people.
- Ep 166: How the Let Them Theory makes you a better manager overnight. The Let Them Theory, from Mel Robbins’ book of the same name, makes you a better manager by releasing the need to control what your team thinks, wants, or feels motivated by. Lia breaks down three specific manager situations where applying ‘let them, let me’ instantly reduces frustration and builds more trust. This episode is especially useful for leaders who over-invest in team members who aren’t reciprocating or who exhaust themselves trying to fix everyone’s motivation.
Want to go deeper?
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Full transcript (click to expand)
And this doing versus being, this is going to give us two categories to really work on, to really build towards so that we don’t get to the end of the year and we’ve accomplished all this stuff, but we’re burned out. But we feel like, ah, what was the point of this? I’m not happy. I don’t want to do any of this. Welcome to the managing mid simple podcast. I’m Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant through this show and my signature ops playbook.
I condense a decade of experience driving team operations and some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes or a seasoned manager ready to up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts, to feedback, to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between.
Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. We are literally days away from 2024. And today I wanted to talk about a simple framework for goal setting. Now goal setting is something we talk about all the time, right? Especially when we’re starting a new year, maybe a new quarter. But it can feel pretty abstract, I think for ourselves, maybe we feel like we, we set goals, but they’re not always anchored to anything, or maybe our team members are saying to us, I want to have goals, but I don’t really know where to start.
And so that’s why I want to introduce this simple framework today. And now when we talk about goal setting, we want to make sure that we are using a kind of framework around it so that it doesn’t feel too abstract. And I love the SMART goals framework, which means goals are S specific. M, measurable, A, attainable, R, relevant, and T, timely. This framework allows us to ground our goals around something that we can come back to.
We know if we’ve achieved it. We know that yes, okay, timely is we can get it done this year or this quarter, whatever is important to us. Attainable doesn’t mean it’s not a stretch goal, but it’s not like something that’s wildly out of this realm of universe, you know what I’m saying? And then specific obviously gets us to. To something that we can kind of come back to relevant as it has to do with us and our bigger vision, whatever, right?
So smart goals is a framework I love to use when, when setting goals. Now, the framework that I wanted to share with you, the simple way to look at this is to look at what goals do we have centered around what we want to do, what we want to achieve, and what goals do we have centered around how we want to show up, how we want to be. And this doing versus being, this is going to give us two categories to really work on, to really build towards, so that we don’t get to the end of the year and we’ve accomplished all this stuff, but we’re burned out, but we feel like, ah, what was the point of this?
I’m not happy. I don’t want to do any of this. And a lot of times that’s what can happen. We only focus on the doing goals. We want to hit this revenue target. We want to achieve this financial milestone. We want to grow to this certain user base. We want to, if there’s many customers, we want to achieve this thing. And we get into a rat race and we go, go, go, go, go. Especially if you’re like me, like an Enneagram three or someone that’s just like type a, like go, go, go, see a goal, hit a goal.
If you get in that rat race, you can get to the end and see any sort of feeling and, and kind of connection to your body and your inner self and your kind of greater, you know, more intrinsic things. Those things can get forgotten about and that’s where we start to feel like out of touch with ourselves that, well, I accomplished all this stuff, but I don’t feel fulfilled. I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel like this isn’t how it was supposed to feel.
And so that’s why pairing those achievement goals with a being goal, something about the feeling, you know, the essence, how do you want to just like kind of exist in the world? If we don’t pair it with that, we can feel incomplete. So as you think about what this next year is going to look like. Think about these two things. What do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? And how do you want to feel?
Because sometimes those things can feel like they’re in conflict, but they don’t have to be because you can serve as many clients as you want to. You can grow as you want to in your career. And you can also do that while feeling like I’m really anchored in my values. I’m spending time with my family. I’m feeling really happy and in my zone and in my flow. I’m having time for exercise. I’m having time for, for myself.
It’s just that we got to think about what those two things are so that we can prioritize it. And now, when I said, you know, this is something that you can use with yourself and your teams, I encourage you to use this framework and share with your team members, Hey, to set goals around both of these things, because this allows us to support our teams and some of those feeling goals that maybe they don’t even lean into enough.
Right? So if they’re saying, Hey, I really want to, um, find, you know, I really want to grow professionally and feel like I’m, I’m learning every day. Okay, if that’s one of our team members being goals, now we can help them find opportunities to learn. Maybe there is a class they can take or a conference they can be a part of or a new, a new kind of responsibility they can take on in the company. Right.
But when we don’t know that we’re just looking towards the doing and the achieving, we might leave something out and someone might decide, well, I’m getting a lot done in this company, but I don’t really feel fulfilled. I’m going to find another job. So helping our team members really tune into the doing and the being is another way to drive higher retention, right? Which saves you time and money because when you show your team members, I believe in you, I care about you as the whole person that you are.
Then they want to stick around. Now, one more thing on the being, you know, the being goals are really centered on, you know, a lot of times they’re really anchored to our values. And that’s why it’s really important as a company to know, well, what are your values as a business owner, as a team leader, what are your team values? Because our values drive how we make decisions. And this is really how in essence we want to be.
If we have strong values around collaboration and teamwork and service, then our being goals are not going to be met if they’re not aligned to those. And sometimes that’s where our doing goals feel out of alignment when we say, well, we really want to be spending a lot of time giving back. And that’s one of our being goals, really being in service. And then we have a doing goal that feels like, which just like drive, drive, drive, don’t look back.
Don’t turn. We have to figure out a way to rationalize that. But again, like I said, these two things can coexist as long as we’ve thought about it in advance. So how would I tackle this? Well, I would take literally take a piece of paper and write a line down the middle. And right. Doing on one side and being on the other and start to list out what are three things at most. Okay. We don’t want to get crazy with it.
We don’t want to go over the top. What are three things that you want to accomplish this year for yourself or your business? Is it a revenue target? Is it a number of users or customers you can serve? Is it a certain seniority in the company you’re at? Why are those three things that are really, really important to you? And on the other side and the being, how do you want to feel? What are those intrinsic things that you need to have accomplished in order to feel good about the doing and get really honest with yourself?
Maybe you close your eyes. Maybe you meditate on it. Maybe you think about those moments in your life where you felt like you were in a state of flow. We really felt like you were in your zone, really, really living in your, in your integrity and your authenticity. What are those things? And pick three things that you really want to feel over the next year and then look at the two lists and see what do I need to do with each of these lists to help achieve the one on the other side.
And again, you’re going to see all of it can come together. All of it is doable. All of it is achievable when you’ve thought about an advance and you’ve gotten specific again and you use that framework specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely. So we want to take those three we have for each and really think through that. You know, have I gotten specific? Is this too abstract? Do I even know what success looks like? And we run through that and we look at how these goals on either side of this list compare with each other.
Now we have a plan that’s exciting because we know we’re not going to get to end of the year and think like, ah, was it even worth it? Because we have that being list. And we know we’re not going to get the year and be like, did I accomplish anything? Because we have that doing list. And that’s why I think this is such a fun thing to walk through with our team members. And maybe we share our own lists with them to kind of get them started and say, Hey, This is an example of what I mean of the doing and the being and how I see them being symbiotic instead of in conflict with each other.
And when we do this again, we can start the year really knowing that we’re not going to let our, our year become a runaway train. We’re not looking out for ourselves and our wellbeing and we really need to feel fulfilled. And again, with our teams, it shows them that we are looking out for the very same thing for them. Okay. So that is a simple, super simple goal setting framework. Again, we use something like the SMART goals, sort of overarching thing, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely, to be able to figure out what are these three goals that we have across doing and being.
And then we can support our team members in setting goals and with the very same framework. And we show them, we want you to have both. We’re not just looking for accomplishments without that feeling of fulfillment and success and inner achievement. We want you to be seen. We want you, we want you to know that we care about you, that we’re going to help show up for you. And we got a lot of stuff to get done.
So we got to have goals on both sides of the list. All right. If you have any questions, reach out. As always, if you want me to help you walk through this framework, go ahead and schedule an SOS call at liagarvin.com/SOS. This is a one hour call where we dive into this or any place that you’re feeling stuck in your business. And we want, and we make sure that you come away with concrete and specific things you can try on your team right away to get unstuck.
So these are really booking up quickly. People are loving them because you can, you can come away with anything. Literally, if it’s a hard feedback conversation, if it’s goal setting, let me talk about today. If it’s how do I figure out these priorities, whatever it is, we make sure we don’t leave that call until you have an action plan. Do you want to schedule that today? It is a liagarvin.com/SOS. All right. See you next time. That’s all I have for today.
Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
What is a simple framework for setting goals that actually stick?
Split your goals into two categories: doing and being. On one side of a piece of paper, list up to three things you want to achieve, like a revenue target, a number of clients, or a career milestone. On the other side, list up to three things about how you want to feel, like being present with your family, staying in your creative flow, or feeling grounded in your values. Then look at both lists together and make sure they support each other. Use the SMART framework to sharpen each goal so you know exactly what success looks like.
Why do I feel unfulfilled even after hitting all my business goals?
When you only set achievement goals, you can hit every single one and still feel burned out or empty at the end of the year. That happens because you have been running on doing without any attention to being. The doing goals track what you accomplish. The being goals track how you feel and who you are while you are accomplishing it. Without both, you can reach the finish line and wonder what the point was. Pairing your achievement goals with intentional being goals is what creates a sense of real fulfillment.
How do I use this doing vs. being goal framework with my team?
Share the framework with your team members and ask them to set goals in both categories. When a team member tells you they want to keep learning and growing, that is a being goal, and now you can support it by finding a class, a conference, or a new responsibility for them. When you only track doing goals, team members may feel like they are getting things done but not actually fulfilled, and they will leave. Helping your team name both types of goals shows you see them as a whole person, which drives retention and saves you time and money.
How many goals should I set for the year so I don't get overwhelmed?
Keep it to three goals on each side of the list, three doing goals and three being goals. Going beyond that tends to dilute your focus and make the whole exercise feel overwhelming. Once you have your three on each side, run each one through the SMART framework: is it specific enough that you know what success looks like, is it measurable, is it attainable, is it relevant to your bigger vision, and does it have a timeline? That combination of a short list and a clear framework keeps your goals grounded and actionable.
Do my achievement goals and my wellbeing goals have to compete with each other?
They do not have to compete, but they can feel that way if you have not thought about both in advance. You can grow your business, serve more clients, and hit financial milestones while also spending time with your family, exercising, and staying connected to your values. The key is to look at both lists together and ask what each side needs in order to support the other. When you plan for both intentionally, they become symbiotic instead of being in conflict.