Goal Setting for Ambitious Women: How to Beat Quitter's Day and Build Momentum in Midlife (Copy)

Show Notes

Statistically, most people abandon their New Year’s resolutions by the second Friday of January. They call it "Quitter's Day," and it happens because traditional resolutions are built on an "all-or-nothing" light switch that is designed to fail the moment life gets messy. In this season premiere, Rhonda Lavoie strips away the "Instagram perfect" veneer of goal setting and introduces a high-level business and sanity strategy: The Theme Word.

Rhonda gets vulnerable about her own "Real Reel," including tackling a mountain of debt and the pressure of launching her new tech company, Paced, by her 50th birthday. She breaks down the "What-the-Hell-Effect" that leads to total collapse after one slip-up and reveals the specific habit—The Parking Lot Trap—that is likely killing your momentum. If you are tired of the "pass/fail" drama and ready to start living instead of just consuming, this episode is your unfancy guide to 2026.

In This Episode:

• (00:00) - The "Quitter's Day" Statistic: Why Friday is the most dangerous day for your ambition.

• (04:09) - The "What-the-Hell-Effect": How one cookie (or one missed gym day) leads to total collapse.

• (05:25) - Rules vs. Filters: Why a Theme Word succeeds where resolutions fail.

• (11:09) - Roaring into 50: Why Rhonda is launching a tech company when society says "slow down".

• (14:43) - The Parking Lot Trap: The $5 idling habit that is putting your brain in "Park".

• (18:47) - The "Founding 20" Challenge: How to help launch Paced and get lifetime access.

Resources Mentioned:

• The Paced App Waitlist: getpaced.app

• Rhonda's Website: rhondalavoie.com

This Week's Challenge:

Rip up your resolutions. Sit down for 10 minutes and ask yourself: What do I want to accomplish, and what do I want 2026 to feel like? Pick one word to act as your filter for every decision this year.

🔗 CONNECT WITH RHONDA

• Website: rhondalavoie.com

• Instagram: @rhonda.lavoie

• Facebook: Rhonda Lavoie

• TikTok:@ rhonda.lavoie

• Follow the Paced App journey: getpaced.app

·       Music for The Rhonda Lavoie Podcast written and recorded by Wade and Tan Fehr.

Transcript

[00:00:00] I was looking at my calendar this morning and I realized something that actually scared me a little bit. This episode is airing on Tuesday, January 6th, and that means this coming Friday, January 9th is statistically the most dangerous day of the year for your ambition. They actually call it quitter's day.

[00:00:26] It's the day where about 80% of people look at those New Year's resolutions they wrote down last week and just quietly give up. So if you're listening to this on Tuesday, you have exactly three days to change your strategy before you become a statistic. Now, if you're anything like me, you probably stopped playing the resolution game years ago.

[00:00:52] You realize that writing down a wishlist January 1st doesn't actually change who you are when you wake up January 9th. So I don't do them. I haven't done them in years, but I do believe in direction. I believe in knowing where the ship is sailing. So today I sat down at my desk just for a few minutes and I asked myself two simple questions.

[00:01:19] First, I asked myself, what do I actually want to accomplish this year? And then I asked, what do I want the year to feel like when I'm doing it? And when I put those two things together, I came up with one word. And honestly that one word is going to do more for me. My happiness then a hundred checklists ever could.

[00:01:49] Welcome back to season four of The Rhonda Lavoie Podcast. I'm Rhonda Lavoie, and if you're new here, welcome to the show. This is the place where we strip away the Instagram perfect, and we talk about the real work. We talk about the messy, beautiful reality of being an ambitious woman who also wants to have a life.

[00:02:13] We're all about keeping it real and getting it done. And if you've been with me for a while, you know, I don't sugarcoat things. I prefer to get right to the point. So let's dive in. Today is our first episode of 2026, and usually the internet is screaming at you right now with New Year, new Life, or 10 Steps to a Perfect Life. I want us to take a breath. We aren't doing that today. Instead, I wanna talk about why "Quitter's Day" exists. Why do smart capable women, women who run businesses and manage families, give up on their personal goals by the second Friday of January? It's not because you're lazy, it's because resolutions are all or nothing.

[00:03:07] They're like a light switch. They're on or they're off. I will go to the gym every single day, or I will never eat sugar again. I will have a perfectly clean kitchen every night before bed. Great. That works for about four days. And then life happens, right? Your kids get sick or you have a crisis at work, or the dishwasher breaks.

[00:03:34] You miss a day, and because it was a resolution, your brain says, well, I broke the rule. I failed. The switch is off. There's actually a funny name for this psychology. It's called the "what-the-Hell-Effect". You know exactly what this feels like, right? It's when you're on a diet and you accidentally eat one cookie, A rational person would say, oops, it's one cookie back to the salad, but the "what-the-Hell-Effect" kicks in and your brain says, well, I already ruined the diet, so what the hell?

[00:04:09] I might as well eat the entire sleeve of Oreos and order a pizza. This is what resolutions do to us. One slip up becomes a total collapse, and I don't know about you, but I don't have time for that drama. I have a business to run, a life to lead. So if we aren't doing the pass fail resolutions, what do we do?

[00:04:34] Because we can't just drift. Drifting is for people who don't have mortgages and businesses and big dreams we're ambitious. We need to move forward. I use a theme word and look, I can hear you already. You're thinking, okay, Rhonda, pick a word. Sounds like something people do at a retreat where they cry and they fall backwards into stranger's arms.

[00:04:58] And if that's your vibe, I love that for you. But that's not really how I use it . I use it as a high level business strategy. And a sanity strategy, if I'm being honest. Here's the shift. Think of a resolution as a rule. A rule is rigid. It says you must do X by this time, or you must do X every single day.

[00:05:25] But when life gets messy, rules get broken. And when rules get broken, we quit. A theme word is different. It's a filter. It doesn't tell you exactly what to do every single hour. It acts as a screening tool. You run every decision through it. You ask, does this pass the filter or does it get blocked? Let me give you some real world examples because I think people get stuck trying to find that perfect magic word. I want you to listen to these and see if one of them stands out. Let's start with boundaries. Maybe you're coming off a year where you just gave everything away. You were the yes woman, you said yes to the parent council. You said yes to the extra project work, yes to the family drama, and now you're depleted.

[00:06:22] If your word is boundaries, you suddenly have a filter. When someone asks you to bake 400 homemade cupcakes for the school sale, you don't have to agonize over it. You run it through the filter.

[00:06:34] Does this align with boundaries? No. So it gets blocked. The answer is no. You don't feel guilty about it because you're using your filter, or maybe you need to simplify. This is for my over complicators. You know who you are. You don't just plan a birthday party, you plan a gala. You don't just clean the garage.

[00:07:00] You try to remodel it in a weekend and you're exhausted. If your word is simplify, you stop looking for the best way to do things. Start looking for the easier way. You filter out the complexity, you'll ask, what would this look like if it were easy? Here's another big one, finish. This is huge for entrepreneurs and creatives.

[00:07:30] We love starting things. We love shiny new ideas. We buy the domains, but. We have a graveyard of half finished projects. If your word is finish, you don't allow yourself to start a new project until the old one is done. The filter asks, are you starting this new thing? Just avoid finishing the hard thing.

[00:07:55] All right, and then there is nourish. I love this one. As an alternative to weight loss resolutions "lose 20 pounds" is negative. It's about depriving. Nourish is positive. It changes the filter instead of, I can't eat that. You ask, is this food nourishing me? But it can go even deeper. Is this friendship nourishing me?

[00:08:23] Is this scrolling habit nourishing me? Or maybe your word is consistency. Maybe you don't need a, a big change. Maybe you just need to stop quitting. If your word is consistency, you stop trying to hit home runs and you just focus on hitting singles. You show up, you do the boring work, you post the content.

[00:08:46] Even when you don't feel inspired, you realize that boring is where results can be. And finally, one of my faves space. This is for the women who have the calendar that looks like Tetris. You're booked every single second of the day. Your word might be space. This means you intentionally schedule time to do nothing.

[00:09:11] You filter out the noise, you leave gaps between meetings. You create room to actually think so you can stop reacting to everything and start leading. Do you see the difference? You can't fail a filter. You just use it to make better decisions. And one last thing, don't just keep this word in your head. I actually printed mine out and I actually printed a bunch of different ways with different fonts and I tape it up around my space.

[00:09:45] I actually can see probably four or five of them right now. And I even make it the background on my phone. Because if you don't see your filter word, you forget to use it. So I want you to think about that. What is the feeling you're chasing this year? Which brings me to my own answer. I asked myself that same question. Rhonda, what do you want this year to feel like? And first I looked back at 2025. My word was achieve for 2025, and I did achieve. On paper it was a solid year. I kept my business humming. I kept the podcast growing. But if I'm being honest, it felt choppy. I felt like I was achieving in bursts. I'd sprint and then I'd stop, and then I'd sprint, and then I'd stop. And it was exhausting. And when I looked at 2026, the stakes are totally different.

[00:10:44] I can't afford to sprint and stop anymore. I also looked at my calendar and I'm turning 50 this year. Now society has a very specific script for women turning 50. The script says Slow down. The script says start looking towards retirement. But I had a realization a few years ago.

[00:11:09] I remember looking at people who had stopped working, and to be honest, they looked bored. To me, retirement just sounded like stopping or boring. It sounds idle. It sounds like sitting on a shelf and stopping doesn't make me happy. Building things makes me happy. I don't want to coast into my fifties. I want to roar into them. And that is why I'm doing something a little crazy this year.

[00:11:42] I'm not just selling houses, I am doing that, but I'm not just doing that. I'm launching a tech company. Now if you know me or if you've listened to any of my recent episodes, you know, I haven't exactly been quiet about this. I've been telling anyone who will listen. I'm building an app called Paced, and honestly, this is the biggest reason I need a new strategy this year, because building something brand new, specifically something technical that I've never done before, takes a massive amount of force.

[00:12:15] It is so easy to get stuck. It's so easy to get overwhelmed, and I did one more thing when I trying to come up with my word. I had a look at the financial side and there's something I haven't really shared with you guys before. I talk a lot about the wins on this show, but I don't often talk about the holes we dig ourselves. I have a mountain of debt that I'm tackling this year. It's there, it's real. And for a long time I just managed it. But I realized that if I want to enter this new chapter, I can't be dragging that baggage with me. I need to attack it. So when I looked at the big scary app launch and the financial goals and my 50th birthday, I found my word.

[00:13:10] My word for 2026 is momentum. I love this word because it's physics. It's hard to get a heavy object moving, but once it's moving, it's hard to stop it. I want momentum to clear out that debt chip away at everything, so the runway is clear, but mostly I need momentum to get the app off the ground. I have a hard deadline, my birthday, and I need to move fast.

[00:13:38] But here's the catch. Momentum is fragile. It takes a lot of energy to build it, but it can take very little to kill it. And there's one specific thing, one habit that's been killing my momentum for years, and I have a feeling it's killing yours too. It's the phone. And I don't mean using it for work. I mean the zone out.

[00:14:02] For me, the danger zone is a morning. Um, the alarm clock goes off at 6:00 AM and for the longest time, I would roll over, grab the phone, and just start scrolling. Suddenly, before you know it, it's 6 45. I haven't moved, I haven't drank my water, and I feel gross. I started my day by consuming other people's lives instead of living my own.

[00:14:26] So recently I had to fix this. I created a new rule for myself. I give myself permission to check my phone when the alarm goes off, but at 6:10, my phone automatically goes into focus mode. It shuts me out. It forces me to snap out of it and get moving.

[00:14:43] But maybe for you, it's not the morning. I have a friend who has a different version of this. Let's call it the parking lot trap. She leaves a visit, or she finishes a grocery run and she gets in her car. It's winter here, so she starts the engine to get the heat going, but instead of putting it in drive, she opens her phone and 20 minutes later she's still sitting there.

[00:15:05] The car is toasty warm, she just burned through $5 of gas idling in the parking lot watching strangers make sourdough bread. Why do we do that? We aren't enjoying it. It's not fun. It's numbing. It's a momentum killer. Every time we doom scroll, we're literally putting our brains in park. And I realized that if I wanted momentum in 2026,

[00:15:30] if I really wanted to get this app launched and enter my fifties strong, I couldn't just wish the habit away. I needed a tool. So being the slightly crazy person that I am, I decided to build one. Like I said, you guys know, I've been working on Paced for about six months, but I don't think I've ever really explained why I built it.

[00:15:53] I didn't build it to be a tech mog. I built it because I needed it. I needed a way to stop doom scrolling and start living. Here's the philosophy. I don't want to ban apps. I love social media. I love connecting with you guys, but I wanted to stop the mindless consumption. So Paced creates friction. It basically takes the usual suspects, say Facebook, Instagram, or the news, or maybe you're a game player.

[00:16:25] And you group it, in the free version, you get to pick three apps. If you're a Paced Pro user, you can group more together. You set a limit, and once you hit that limit, Paced locks them out. The dashboard literally says Cool down and shows you a timer. Now, here's the magic part.

[00:16:49] Here's the momentum part. Usually if you're locked out of an app, you just stare at the screen waiting. But with Paced, if you really want back in, you can speed up the process. You can walk to unlock. The math is simple. A hundred steps, knocks three minutes off the cool down timer. Think about that exchange.

[00:17:13] Usually scrolling makes you sedate, it makes you sit still Paced, forces you to move. If you're locked out and you wanna get back in right now, fine, go take 500 steps, walk. It trades passive habit for an active one. It forces you to create physical momentum to get back to your digital time.

[00:17:37] And this brings me to a huge favor. I need to ask you. I'm launching Paced on my 50th birthday, specifically February 13th, 2026. That's my deadline. That's my goal, but Google has run a little wrench in my gears. To get an app in the Play Store. They have a rule

[00:17:55] I need 20 founding testers to keep the app installed for 14 continuous days. They basically want proof that real humans are using it. So I need 20 of you. Specifically, I need 20 women who have an Android phone. I don't want 20 random strangers from the internet. I want you guys, I want the listeners of this podcast who understand what we're trying to do here.

[00:18:18] So here's the plan. I need you to join the wait list right now. I'm going to send the beta testing details to people on that list. You download the beta, you keep it installed for two weeks, and as my thank you to you, I'm going to give you a lifetime pro access for free.

[00:18:35] The app is going to cost 49.99 Canadian a year when we launch the app to the public. But for my founding 20, it will always be $0. You'll be helping me build my momentum, and I can help you build yours.

[00:18:47] So here's what I want you to do this week. First, don't become a statistic this Friday. Don't let quitter's day win. If your resolutions already make you feel bad, rip them up. Seriously, then sit down for 10 minutes. Ask yourself, what do I want to accomplish and what do I want 2026 to feel like.

[00:19:11] Pick your word. Is it momentum? Is it simplify? Is it nourish? Find the word that acts as your filter. Second, if you're an Android user and you wanna be one of my founding 20 for Paced, check the show notes right now. There's a link to the wait list or just DM me the words I'm in and I'll send it to you.

[00:19:33] And as always, you can head over to rhondalavoie.com for the full show notes and links to everything I talked about today. Let's make this year count. Let's stop stalling. Let's get moving. Keep it real and get it done. I'll see you next week.