Scenic Route, Social Change and Mental Health Conversations for Perfectionists
You’ve outgrown perfection, but not your desire to grow.
This is the place where high-functioners, deep feelers, and quiet rebels come home to themselves.
We explore:
- Mental health wisdom (minus toxic positivity)
- Social change (that starts from within)
- System critiques (with actionable solutions)
- Inner wisdom (over external validation)
- Mindfulness for minimalists (no crystals required)
Join Jennifer Walter, sociologist (MASoc UCC) and recovering perfectionist, for weekly conversations that blend critical thinking with oh-so-much compassion.
If you’re questioning everything – or just trying to stay grounded in a chaotic world – this space is for you. We make room for your inner critic and collective action. Because personal healing and social change go hand in hand (with a side of potty humour).
New episodes drop every Tuesday.
The longest way round is the shortest way home – and that's exactly why we're taking the Scenic Route.
Ready to walk the scenic route?
The view here is *chef's kiss.*
Scenic Route, Social Change and Mental Health Conversations for Perfectionists
SMART Goals Don’t Work (Here’s What Does)
September rolls in and suddenly life speeds up – school runs, work deadlines, holidays on the horizon. And with it comes the pressure to “get organised,” “finish strong,” and set bigger, better goals.
But here’s the truth: SMART goals don’t work for most women juggling kids, work, and real life. They focus on outcomes you can’t fully control — which often kills momentum before you even get started.
In this episode of The Scenic Route, we’re rethinking goal-setting from the end of summer to the end of the year. You’ll learn a framework that actually fits real life: lead and lag goals. Instead of chasing perfect outcomes, you’ll discover how to focus on the small, repeatable actions that build momentum, create daily wins, and carry you through even the busiest seasons.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why SMART goals often backfire (and why you’re not failing – the method is)
- The difference between lag goals (outcomes) and lead goals (actions you can control)
- Two simple ways to start setting goals using this framework, whether you’re outcome-driven or action-driven
- How to shift from chasing results to building momentum
- Practical examples for family life, work, self-care, and even the holiday season
If you’re tired of feeling like you’re always behind on your goals, this episode will give you a gentler, smarter way forward.
See you on the Scenic Route!
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Visit jenniferwalter.me – your cosy corner where recovering perfectionists, misfits, and those done pretending to be fine find space to breathe, dream, and create real change."
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September arrives and suddenly your life speeds up, or at least mine does. We've got school runs back, homework, we're driving our kids to practice and, yes, I'm a football mom now. Life is great. We've got work, deadlines and holidays on the horizon oh, and it's a lot. And with it comes that voice that says, oh, finish strong, do more, push harder. And that tiny voice inside of you gets amplified by your shitty social media. But, babes, what if the way we set goals is part of the problem? What if the secret to ending the year well isn't about doing more, but about doing things differently? After all, if we keep on repeating the same shit, who are we to expect a different outcome? So in this episode of the Scenic Route, we're rethinking goal setting from summer's end to year's end, with a framework that actually fits into your life.
Jennifer Walter:There's a different way to think about mental health, and it starts with slowing down. Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home, and that's exactly why we're taking the scenic route. Hi, I'm Jennifer Walter, host of the Scenic Route podcast. Think of me as your sociologist, sister in arms and rebel with many causes. Together. We're blending critical thinking with compassion, mental health with a dash of rebellion and personal healing with collective change. We're trading perfectionism for possibility and toxic positivity for messy growth. Each week we're exploring the path to better mental health and social transformation. And yes, by the way, pretty crystals are totally optional. You ready to take the scenic route? Let's walk this path together.
Jennifer Walter:So we've just turned the corner from summer into fall and, if you're anything like me or most women, the pressure already has started to like we've got all these new routines in september back back to school. We're still fucking exhausted from summer but, thanks and october, archer's in q4 and I don't know, it feels like the year's end is already glaring at me from the back. It's not that I don't enjoy kind of like being swept up by this kind of like the end of finishing the end like the year's end is already glaring at me from the back. It's not that I don't enjoy being swept up by this kind of like the end of finishing the end of the year strong. I do want to set some goals, I want to get organized, I want to finish strong. But here's the problem. The way we're usually taught to set goals doesn't always fit into real life. It assumes perfect conditions, it assumes endless life and energy and assumes that life won't interrupt you. And if you're managing kids, work, household, you know that's just not gonna happen. We're adults here, we can be honest. It's like life is life. So we need a goal setting approach that works, even when life is life. And I got something that I've learned from my coach, jessica Ely, a while back. She's been on the podcast many, many times, love her and it's a framework that I've used myself and I've used what in my coaching practice. And it's a framework I would love to share because it can carry you not only out of like this summer smoothly, but also into this year-end frenzy with clarity and compassion.
Jennifer Walter:I think initially, originally, it comes from a book, the Four Disciplines of Execution, back in 2004, by Stephen Covey, and basically they analyzed organizations and they noticed that organizations focus way too much on things like quarterly profit, customer satisfaction, like all these things that are have already happened. They're things of the past. They realized organizations have breakthroughs when they were focusing on things that they could control every day, that those were the things that were moving the needle. Really simple to apply this to your personal life. And it's a framework called delete versus lack goals. So, in a nutshell, lack goals are the outcome. They're what you measure after the fact, like revenue, like revenue or customer satisfaction or weight loss thing, like they're important, and yet they're often not really in your control. Like you, unless you're forcing people to buy your shit, you can't really force them to buy your shit.
Jennifer Walter:Right then, with lead goals, lead goals are the inputs, the actions, the things you do consistently that will lead to you reaching your lackle. So if you think, if you want to increase your revenue, for example, things like reaching out to two past clients a week could be a lead goal to get you there. And the very crucial thing is, lead goals are in your control. We're being honest here Sometimes these lead goals are ridiculously small. But here's the kicker we want you to be consistent and in this consistency, lead goal after lead goal, you will reach your lack goal. So I also kind of like to think it as lack goals are the harvest and lead goals are the daily watering. They get a bit deeper. Ok, you can really also like figure it out as kind of like OK, lack goals show the results, while lead goals show the path to results. What moves the needle and I'm you, can I mean most of the people.
Jennifer Walter:Go luck first approach you start with the outcome you desire. That's usually what is on your mood board or your vision board, right? Like I want to make X revenue this month. I want to run a marathon by next summer. I want to lose 10 pounds. Then you reverse, engineer what lead goals will get me there and how often am I going to check in and evaluate? So if you've run, this is especially easy. If it's something you've done in the past, then you have some data to work on. If you've run a marathon before, you know, okay, last time I ran a marathon I trained this amount of wheat, this, this amount for this amount per week I've. That was my diet blah, blah, blah, and you'd kind of like you. So your first focus point would be I'm just going to repeat and see what happens For the conditions that are the same. Maybe I'm going to reach my last goal. If not, I'm going to change it up.
Jennifer Walter:Or you take kind of like the lead first approach and it's not one is better than the other. It really depends on where you're at. So if you feel really like defeated or really glum about things that you're not hitting your outcomes, switch things that you're not hitting your outcomes. Switch it up right. Don't start with the finish line, start with the action. And the question there is really simple what am I willing to commit to daily or weekly? And be brutally honest with your life, with yourself, right, like if your life at the moment is not doesn't really make it easy for you to commit to one hour yoga sessions every day and maybe it's just a quick morning salutation at the start of your day. So you start with that question. Then you ask what outcome might that lead me to? I like it because it's more experimental, it's kinder, it kind of like draws into your curiosity, it just kind of like it feels very playful.
Jennifer Walter:And here's why, like, this whole lead versus lackle framework is so effective. It shifts your attention to what you can actually control. It gives you real time feedback because you know today whether you walked or not, you know whether you reached out to a client, you know whether you wrote your morning pages. It holds some predictive power. The more consistent you are with your lead measures, the more likely the outcome will follow. And it gives you psychological wins every single day right, instead of waiting three months to see AF, the scale moved or your bank account grew, you celebrate every pound lost, every meal choice you made, every celebration along the way, right, and that's also how you keep the momentum going, because you're like, oh, I could do this, I did this, I'm going to do it again. And sometimes you're going to be OK. But what if this doesn't seem to work for me? It does Like I did this, like I'm not, it's not working for me.
Jennifer Walter:Well, there's kind of like two approaches. One is you're not reaching your goals. So the first question to ask is did I actually hit my lead goals? Did I actually commit to what I said I'm going to commit to? If not, well, that's where you start, right, like you still have to be the one who does these things. We're adults, we're grownups, we still need to do shit. And if you're like, if your answer is yes, I did all my lead goals consistently, but they did not lead me to my lack, my lab goal, then that's just feedback. Then you're like okay, this lab goal, this lead goal, doesn't work right now. Maybe it worked in the past, but now it doesn't. You tweak, you test, you experiment and keep on going.
Jennifer Walter:If you're not hitting your lead goals, that's to me of the sign that that they're too big, too vague, not concrete enough or, I said in the beginning, not small enough. Um, I mean, for me it was so painful how tiny I had to get with my lead goals. For example, I had a client who said like, oh, I make a new website. That's not really a lead goal, that's a whole fucking project. You need to really break it down into smaller, actionable steps, like I'm gonna choose a platform, I'm gonna pick a template, I'm gonna pick a fund, I'm gonna you know all these different kind of steps. Imagine kind of like, yeah, as you were writing like a, what is the actor doing? Make a website. If that's your like, your advice to the actor, act like you're making a website, what is actually going to do? Those are the legal.
Jennifer Walter:So with that, the questions to sit with are did I have the resources, the energy, the skills, the support to actually do my lead goals? If not, then we kind of like look at it to where questions that where my lead goes broken down enough. Did I give myself the time, the energy, the resources I needed? Do I need to adjust the frequency or the consistency or do I need to test a new program. This is what where the framework is so powerful. Right, it's not rigid, it's not about perfection, it's about experimenting, adjusting, finding daily actions that truly move the needle, and the most playful way. And now you're like I get it. It's just a new framework, it's a new method, whatever, like how the fuck is this different from all the other goal-setting advice that's out there?
Jennifer Walter:And a very popular one you probably heard of are SMART goals, where SMART stands for Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and Time-bound. And I don't know, I often hear that framework as on the pedestal of like gold standard for productivity. In some ways, I I like it because it forces you to be very clear about your goal. You can't just say I want to get healthier, right, if you want to do a smart goal, you would really need to say okay, I want to lose 10 pounds by october 30th. So it's clear, precise, precise, trackable and has a deadline.
Jennifer Walter:Again, the catch is most SMART goals, or the way most people define SMART goals, they're actually lack goals. They're focused on the end result. Right, the lose five pounds, the run 10K, the finish the minus grub trip, the 100K revenue and so on. And again we run into the same problem right, the results aren't fully in your control. And again we run into the same problem. Right, the results aren't fully in your control. You can't differently move more, still not lose weight, and the timeline is set for your body because your body's like screw, you don't care. You can write diligently, chapter for chapter for of your book, but life is lifing. The manuscript is not done on timeline, on like by the deadline.
Jennifer Walter:So when the goal is kind of like framed as the only measure of success, you miss all the progress that happens along the way. And if you're already stretched thin with kids, work, homework and another thousand moving parts, missing that outcome can really feel like failure. Even if you have meaningful progress, it kind of just gets blurred over. And if you're not feeling the progress that's often where momentum breaks down you start to feel like why bother? Why give a crap? I'm already behind, like what just might burn everything down. And that's also why so many smart goals, and especially like those fancy, shiny, glossy new year's, new year's resolutions, fizzle out. Where smart goals do you have to replace? I think it's when you already have like stability, support, bandwidth and a lot of experience with goal setting for yourself, like you've trained that muscle. If you have all that, a smart goal can be really motivating.
Jennifer Walter:For me it was just more like absolute buzzkill and I feel that runs true for a lot of my clients. Like it's like if life is life isn't tidy, you have all these like invisible labor, mental loads, and it was just really hard to stick to something because I couldn't see the progress. So it was really also nice for me to be to have something like I have control over that. I can influence. I could influence if I did my teeny tiny lead calls. So it really helped me to build momentum through these teeny tiny wins. And of course, I also had to wrap my head around that that I had to start really incredibly teeny, tiny, small, smaller than I probably would have liked if I would have, if I'd asked my ego check that out at the door.
Jennifer Walter:So let's, let's practice this a bit. Ok, if we say for a family life, one black hole could be peaceful mornings without everyone rushing and screaming. So we could ask, ok, what lead goals could be there? Maybe one is prep lunches the night before, pack your bags the night before, lay out clothes with your kids the night before, whatever Like for work, if your lack goal is finish my year end projects on time for work. If your lackle is finish my year-end projects on time, the lead goal could be I'm going to block two focus sessions each week until the end of december. If you lackle is like I want to host a perfect christmas dinner, one lead goal could be a delegate, one task per week in regards to planning this christmas dinner, starting in october. Or I want to feel calmer during christmas season. As a lackle, a lead goal could be okay, I'm gonna do five minutes of breath work, um, before I pick up my kids from school three times a week. Like notice how each lackle sets their direction. But the lead goals make it actually doable in real life. So here's the kind of like.
Jennifer Walter:Another really important part Black goals. They aren't bad, like there's nothing inherently bad with them. They're your compass, the lighthouse, but they're not a measure of your worth, like if you're not achieving them. That's just data. It doesn't mean anything about your willpower or whatnot. Lead goals are where you build self-trust, where you train your muscle, where you commit to something you're gonna do consistently. They're the place where you get to say I did this thing I said I would do, regardless of what else life threw at me, and what makes this manifesto powerful for us is it meets you where you are really be like. No, you know what? My lead goal in this season, right now, with my schedule, looks like this this is what I honestly can commit to right now with my, with the bandwidth, the resources, the capacity I have available to me right now.
Jennifer Walter:So, as you move from summer's end towards the year end, I want you to really remember first, you don't really need to do it all and I don't know cleanse up your social media feed and get more decent people into it who are not telling you kinds of crap to make you feel about yourself. And you don't need to finish perfectly. There's, I don't know whatever. We don't care about perfection here. You just kind of need to keep walking Tiny, teeny, tiny, steady, leap, leap, steps, just one after the other, one after the other. You got this. So thank you so so much for joining me on the scenic route this week. If this episode resonates, share it with a friend who might need a gentle weight of approaching goals right now. And remember the scenic route is about finding a path that feels sustainable to you, and we really don't care about sprinting to a finish line. See you next week. And just like that, we've reached the end of another journey together on the Scenic Route podcast.
Jennifer Walter:Thank you for spending time with us, curious for more stories or in search of the resources mentioned in today's episode, visit us at scenicroutepodcastcom for everything you need and if you're ready to embrace your scenic route, I've got something special for you. Step off the beaten path with my scenic route affirmation card deck. It's crafted for those moments when you're seeking courage, yearning to trust your inner voice and eager to carve out a path authentically, unmistakably yours. Pick your scenic route affirmation today and let it support you. Excited about where your journey might lead? I certainly am. Remember, the scenic route is not just about the destination, but the experiences, learnings and joy we discover along the way. Thank you for being here and I look forward to seeing you on the scenic route again.
