.png)
Becoming You Again
Becoming You Again is the podcast for women who are going through divorce wanting help navigating grief, guilt, and the challenge of rediscovering who they are. Divorce Recovery Coach, Karin Nelson offers compassionate guidance, practical tools, and powerful mindset shifts to help you rebuild self-trust, reconnect with your intuition, and create emotional resilience. Each episode is a safe, supportive space that reminds you: divorce isn’t the end of your story; it’s the doorway to becoming the most authentic, confident version of yourself and creating the best of the rest of your life.
Becoming You Again
How Minimum Baselines Make Goals Stick
Big goals feel exciting until they demand a brand-new you by Monday. I'm teaching a different route: minimum baselines which are basically tiny, consistent actions that build real momentum without solely relying on your willpower. If you’re navigating life after divorce, this approach respects your bandwidth while still moving you toward the life you want.
I unpack why traditional resolutions collapse after two weeks and how the brain’s energy-saving design sabotages overnight reinventions. Then I teach you to flip the script: create habits that are so easy they’re almost impossible to skip. Think 15 minutes of movement three times a week, one fruit and one veggie twice a week, a $25 transfer to savings each paycheck, or a lights-out time on set days. You’ll learn how these baselines slip past resistance, carve new neural pathways, and steadily reshape identity from “I try” to “I follow through.”
You’ll also hear practical examples across fitness, food, sleep, money, and confidence, plus how to handle the voice that says small steps don’t matter. I show you how to celebrate both the baseline and any “extra” you feel like doing, without tying your worth to doing more. The real win is consistency and the self-trust it builds; that’s the foundation for bigger goals later.
To download your FREE GUIDE: "7-Day Self Trust Reset" click here.
To schedule your complimentary consult with Karin click here.
If this podcast resonated with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts.
You are listening to Becoming You Again, episode number 248, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body, and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming You Again, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast, my lovely, lovely ladies. As always, I am so, so happy that you're here. I hope you had a beautiful, amazing holiday season. And this episode is actually going to be a throwback episode to a previous popular episode about setting and reaching goals. The new year is coming in fast, and goals tend to be on the mind when we head into the new year. And even if you're going through a divorce, that's actually a really great time for you to set goals of the kind of person that you want to be in the coming year, the kind of things that you want to achieve in your life, the kind of things that you want to go after. It's a great time to do that. So this isn't going to be your typical, oh, let's set some smart goals and really push ourselves and really like get to that place that we've been meaning to be at year after year after year that we just never seem to be able to reach. This episode is actually going to teach you ways to set and reach goals that are achievable, that are attainable, that you don't lose interest in or lose motivation for 10 days into the year. In this episode, I'm actually teaching you how to set minimum baselines so that you can reach your goals. Because normally we have these big ideas of all of these changes that we want to make and the person that we want to become, which is amazing and great and keep that. But when we set these aggrandized goals for ourselves, we often expect ourselves to change overnight. Like we want to be someone who exercises six days a week, yet in the last year or two, maybe we've only exercised a few times a week, or maybe once a week, once a month, right? But then we hold this expectation that now we are going to be someone who exercises six days a week and we must meet that goal immediately, right away, overnight. Which often we can do for about a week or two. We white knuckle it through that and then we give up and then we get bored and then we don't know how to keep going, right? So I'm gonna teach you how to set minimum baselines as a more effective way of meeting any goal that you want to set for yourself. And so maybe going into this new year, 2026, you can try something new. It's a much easier way to keep and set goals for yourself through minimum baselines, which are basically small, consistent habits that are going to lead to big changes down the road. All right. I hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you for being here. Let's jump in. So the new year is when everyone is talking about goals and resolutions and the best way to reach your goal for real this time, because we all know what it's like to set a resolution or a goal, right? We have these very grand aspirations. We are doing it this year. We are going to lose the weight. We are going to start waking up earlier. We are going to get the house organized. We are going to get healthier and go to the gym six days a week. We have these big ideas of what we want, which is totally great. I love it when we can have a vision of a more evolved version of ourselves that we are working toward. I think that's a beautiful thing. The problem, though, is we live in a culture where we have been taught to want everything to happen fast, to happen now, immediately. And when that doesn't happen, we get frustrated or bored or overwhelmed, and then we just give up. We make these big resolutions to become something different, someone different, but the only way we know to reach it is to hold ourselves to an impossible standard basically overnight, like in the snap of fingers. And that's just not how most change is made. Like you set the goal to exercise at the gym six days a week when you haven't been exercising at the gym one day a month, and yet you are expecting yourself to be a completely different person overnight. Or you tell yourself you're going to drop 30 pounds by eating healthier, so you fill your fridge with vegetables and proteins, but you've mostly just been eating carbs and treats for the last few years. And you expect that you'll just magically want to eat those other new foods overnight. And then you get mad at yourself when you aren't that person, when you don't do those things. Again, this isn't how change works. Not lasting change, anyway, not real change. You can do this overnight stuff for a little while. That willpower or that white knuckling will last for a couple of weeks, right? We've all done that. But then we go back to who we were because we haven't created the habit of change in our brain. We haven't rewired any new neural pathways. And this is why most gyms stay busy for the first couple of weeks after New Year, or why you might lose the initial five to seven pounds in the first few weeks. You might wake up at 6 a.m. for a couple of weeks and then go right back to where you were. We get tired of trying so hard to be someone that we're not, that we stop. We get frustrated that things aren't happening fast enough, and so we stop. We give up. We haven't done the work in our brain first to create a habit that is going to create change over time. So, what's the answer to setting goals and actually achieving them? I believe it's implementing something called minimum baselines. This is the idea that you set a very small goal that is so easy to do that you're for sure gonna do it. Now, your brain is gonna think that this goal is so small that it's not even worth doing, it's not gonna make any difference. But having minimum baselines is where the actual change and growth and habits are formed in our brain first, which is amazing. And I've talked about this before on the podcast, but one of our brain's main functions is to conserve energy. And one way it does that is to form habits because the more it can do on autopilot, the more energy it is conserving. So minimum baselines is kind of a win-win for you, and it's a win-win for your brain because you are making small incremental changes, which add up to huge things over time, and your brain is doing its job of energy efficiency. So, let me give you a few examples of minimum baselines so you know what I'm talking about. If your goal is to work out more and you eventually want to work up to 45 minutes of exercise six days a week, then instead of doing 45 minutes six days a week for three weeks and then giving up because it's just too hard to keep at that for the rest of the year until New Year's resolution time next year, right? Instead, you're going to set a minimum baseline of 15 minutes of exercise three days a week, or five minutes of exercise six days a week. You get to decide. This is what's really great about minimum baselines. You decide on something that is so easy that you will for sure do it, which then will easily create a habit out of it. Or say you want to eat healthier, you decide on a minimum baseline of eating one fruit and one vegetable twice a week, or adding a vegetable with dinner four nights a week, or six nights a week. Like again, you get to decide what your minimum baseline is, and it's going to be different for every person because we are all different. You want to choose something that sounds doable and pretty easy for you to do. Remember, it's something that is so easy for you to keep that your brain is like, why this isn't even worth doing. But that's when you get to remind your brain, I know, I know you think that, but we're gonna do it anyway. And this is the magic of minimum baselines. You become consistent with this baseline, doing it over and over again, which then creates a habit. And once that habit is created, you can then create a new minimum baseline, which incrementally will get you closer and closer to your goal. And eventually, your minimum baseline is the goal you wanted to achieve in the first place. And then there's this double magic that comes in, which I think is so amazing. And often, once you get started on your minimum baseline that you've set, you might even do a little bit more. But if you decide not to, it's totally not a problem for you. So, for example, if you've set a minimum baseline of working out for 15 minutes three days a week, and you get on the treadmill to do your 15-minute jog, and after 15 minutes, you're like, I feel really good. I feel great, actually. I might go another 15 minutes, and so you do. Amazing. That's a fun little moment to celebrate the additional movement for your body. But if you get done with the 15 minutes, the first 15 minutes, and you're like, ugh, I am done. That was enough. I am not doing any more. And you go take a shower and you get ready for your day. That's also a moment for you to celebrate because you still kept your minimum baseline goal of 15 minutes. You did it. That's amazing. There's no reason to beat yourself up for not doing more because you already did your baseline. It's magic. Okay, so before I teach you how to decide on your minimum baseline and give you a bunch of examples, I want to make sure that you understand one thing. When I say that this should be easy to do, that doesn't mean that your brain is automatically going to just want to do it every day, right? Because we're creating a new habit. And our brains don't like to create change. They just don't. They like what already is, what's already comfortable. And so your brain is going to tell you not to do this thing when you first start out. Because anything that is easy to do is also easy not to do, right? And as with any kind of change, even tiny small change, it's totally normal for your brain to object and try and tell you the reasons why you shouldn't be doing this. One of the main arguments that your brain is going to try and use is this little amount won't make any difference. And I've already mentioned this, but we know that's actually not true. And that small, consistent habits are what add up to big results. So I just want you to be aware, as you begin to implement your new minimum baseline, your brain is not going to be on board at first. And that's okay. Nothing has gone wrong. You just have to be willing to be the manager of your brain and remind it that because this is so easy to do, we're definitely doing it. Your minimum baseline should be something that you are willing to do forever. Let me say that again. Your minimum baseline should be something that you are willing to do forever. Because think about it. If you were to exercise for 15 minutes three days a week for the rest of your life, you would overall have more stamina, have a healthier heart and cardiovascular system, and your muscles would be stronger than if you exercised 45 minutes for six days a week every January, and then not again for the next 11 months for the rest of your life. Do you see how the consistency of keeping the minimum baseline will create a better overall result for you than trying to shoot for the big change all at once and then giving up a few weeks in? And there's the added benefit of creating confidence in yourself, which is always amazing. It always feels good when we feel confident about ourselves because you are doing what you said that you would do. You believe that you're capable of creating new habits. You keep your word to yourself, which always feels good, and you see yourself as successful and capable of creating even the smallest of change. Whereas the opposite happens when you set a giant goal that's so far out of reach, and after the willpower goes out and you stop doing what you said you were gonna do, you then feel like a failure and you begin to believe that you can't change, that you aren't capable, and you continue to beat yourself up about doing it all wrong, about being the worst, about this always happens. You never keep your word to yourself, right? Do you see the difference there? There are so many areas where you can create a minimum baseline. Let me give you some examples to get your brain started. I've talked about two of the more obvious choices like exercise and health, and a few more examples of those might be I'm going to eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm full. That could be your minimum baseline for health and eating. You're still going to eat all the things you've been eating, but you're going to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full. Or maybe you eat dessert every night after dinner and you want to stop doing that. A minimum baseline could be I'm going to eat desserts four nights a week, and the other three, I don't eat dessert. Or I'm going to eat one scoop of ice cream instead of two every night. Some ideas for minimum baselines for being active might be, I'm going to do yoga 20 minutes three days a week. Or I'm going to do some breathing exercises and focus on my breath work for 10 minutes, five days a week. Get specific with what you're going to do, but also make it easy for you to do so that you will stay consistent with it. So, what is it that is going to be easy for you to do on a consistent basis? Maybe you want to have some money in savings. You can start with a minimum baseline. I'm going to save $25 from every paycheck in my savings account or in my glass jar on the counter or wherever you want to put it. And again, you might be thinking that's not going to make a difference, but it does. Remember, if you want to be a person who saves money, then you have to start saving money and it has to start somewhere. It can start with a minimum baseline because little changes consistently over time add up. Maybe you want to wake up earlier or go to bed earlier. You start with a minimum baseline. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'm in bed by 11:45. No excuses made. Or every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I'm up by 6:30 a.m. Ready to start my day. You get to choose what your minimum baseline is. Another idea is wanting to feel more confident. I had a woman in my Facebook group the other day say that when she dresses up in clothes that fit right and feel good on her body, that she feels more confident. And the reason she feels more confident is because she's thinking thoughts like, damn, I look good. Or maybe she's thinking, I've got this. I can do anything when I look like this, right? She's thinking thoughts that are creating a feeling of confidence inside of her. So a minimum baseline for confidence can be I'm going to take a shower and get dressed in clothes that fit and that I like four days a week. Or one that really works for me, that I know you've heard me say before, is I tell myself five things that I love, like, or appreciate about myself every day. Maybe your minimum baseline could be every night before I go to bed, I tell myself one thing I love, like, or appreciate about me. Or I look in the mirror and give myself a high five anytime I do something to be celebrated. The beauty of a minimum baseline is you get to choose what it is. You get to decide the ease. You get to make this as personal to you as you would like. So think about an area of your life that you would like to make some kind of change in and write that down. Then brainstorm anywhere between five and twenty fashion of minimum baselines that you could possibly do, and then pick one. We're not gonna do 25. We're just gonna pick one. We're gonna start small. Easy. Remember, we're keeping this easy. Easy, easy, easy. Pick one and then commit to doing it. So I'm just gonna recap before we finish up here. Pick an area where you want to make some kind of change, brainstorm some ideas for minimum baselines, keep it easy. What will be so easy that it will almost seem not worth it? But it will be worth it over time, so you'll keep doing it consistently. And then commit to doing just the minimum baseline, and then watch yourself transform over the next year. You will be amazed by the results that you can create in your life by just sticking with your minimum baselines. All right, my friends. I love you. You've got this. Have a great week. I will talk to you soon. Hi, friend. I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real life practice, and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to Karin NelsonCoaching.com. That's www.k-ar-in-n, n-e-l-s-o-n coaching.com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.
