How to Actually Achieve Your Goals in 2026 (18 Lessons Before I Turn 38)
Dec 18, 2025
I'm turning 38 on December 28th, and after nearly two decades of running my own business, learning Spanish in my thirties, and maintaining a seven-year plan to run a marathon while managing chronic pain, I've learned a thing or two about setting and actually achieving goals.
Whether you're working on trans voice training, transition-related goals, or something entirely different, these 18 lessons will help you create sustainable practices that actually stick in 2026.
Since my birthday falls so close to New Year's, I've always been intentional about goal-setting for the new year. And as someone who helps trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people develop their voices through online courses like Mindful Voice Feminization, I know firsthand how challenging it can be to maintain motivation for long-term goals.
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Prefer to read? Keep scrolling for all 18 lessons broken down into four practical sections.
On Setting Goals
Before we dive into productivity hacks and practice strategies, let's start with the foundation: setting goals that actually work for you.
Tip 1: Make Sure Your Goals Align With Your Ideal Day-to-Day Life
This might not seem like it's about productivity, but hear me out: some people think they want something, but the reality of achieving that goal doesn't align with what they actually want on a day-to-day level.
I learned this the hard way as a professional musician. I released four albums and worked incredibly hard, but when I realized the day-to-day life of a professional musician didn't align with what I actually wanted from my everyday existence, I pivoted.
Professional musicians have to travel constantly, stay up late, and work odd hours. I like to get up early, go to bed early, and have a routine. The actual life of a performing artist was attractive to me in theory, but not in practice.
When you're setting goals for yourself, ask: What do I want my days to look like? Then work backwards to create goals that support those values.
For me, that meant wanting a job where I work from home, set my own schedule, and maintain a routine. That's why I became a gender-affirming voice teacher instead of staying on the path of a professional musician.
Tip 2: Your Starting Point is Relative
Comparison is the thief of joy, and this absolutely applies to goal-setting.
When you're figuring out how long it will take to reach your goal, you might look at someone else and think, "They took a year to get there, so I should too." But your timeline might be completely different, and that's okay.
Whether it takes one year or five years, the time is going to pass anyway.
Make sure when you're setting goals, you're not basing your timeline on someone else's situation. Maybe that person has perfect health, a supportive family, and all the money in the world. Your situation is different, so your goals should align with your actual lived realities.
For example, when you look up training plans for running a marathon, most say you need 12 to 24 weeks maximum to prepare. That was never going to work for me. I had to work slowly and incrementally, and my plan for reaching marathon distance is a seven-year project.
Any running coach would tell you that's ridiculous, but it's what works for me. The same principle applies to trans voice training—your journey is your own, and comparing yourself to others only creates unnecessary pressure.
Tip 3: Done Beats Perfect Every Single Time
I know the perfectionists are reading this right now, but when it comes to achieving goals, you're better off getting something done imperfectly than getting it done perfectly.
I think about my Spanish practice constantly. I have never said a perfect sentence in Spanish in my life. I've never been able to speak Spanish perfectly. But imperfectly, over time, I have improved.
If you make a lot of imperfect steps, you're going to reach your goal way faster than if you wait for perfection.
This applies directly to voice feminization training or voice masculinization training. You don't need to practice perfectly, you just need to practice.
Tip 4: Break Ambitious Goals Into Micro Actions
You've probably heard of SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound), but honestly, your goals don't have to be SMART. They just have to be small.
If your goal is to start a voice training practice, there are many steps leading up to that:
- Research transgender voice training methods
- Find a quiet space in your home where you can practice
- Decide what time in your schedule works best
- Download a tuner app or other tools you'll need
- Talk to people in your life about when you'll need privacy
These are all things you need to write down and check off. Don't take micro actions for granted. They're equally important and should be celebrated as goals in their own right.
Tip 5: Keep Hope Alive in Small Ways
This relates to micro goals, but it's specifically about maintaining motivation during long practices.
It can be so discouraging when you're working toward big goals and setbacks happen. This is something I see with my trans voice students all the time. The practice is long, and you're a little too close to yourself when you're doing it, so you can lose hope.
Find ways to keep that flame burning even though you're on a long journey toward your goal.
For transgender vocal training, that might look like regularly recording yourself and making time to go back and listen to old recordings to see how far you've come.
For me, in my running, Spanish, journaling, and meditation practices, when I look back at how far I've come, I can see we're getting somewhere. Even when I have a pain flare and can't run for months, I might go on a tiny baby run just to keep myself tethered to the practice.
Even if you're not doing it at the level you want, those little micro versions of your practice can keep you connected and keep hope alive.
On Productivity and Time Management
Now that you've set meaningful goals, let's talk about actually getting things done.
Tip 6: No Bad People, Only Bad Systems
This is really important: if you've tried a particular app for planning your to-do items and you couldn't stick to it, and now you feel bad about yourself—STOP!
You are not a bad person. That system just wasn't designed for you.
It's completely normal to change your productivity systems over and over again. Even a system that works really well for a year might just not work well for you later.
Changing productivity systems is not a sign of failure. It's just a sign of your changing life and your changing ability to stay focused using your particular system.
So change your systems unapologetically!
Tip 7: Schedule Time, Not Just Tasks
This is very particular advice, but I believe a to-do list is a pile of garbage if it doesn't make its way into your calendar.
I've been a Getting Things Done devotee most of my life. You filter everything into do, delegate, defer, or delete. But once I have my "do" pile (anything that takes more than five minutes), I can't just put it on a to-do list.
A to-do list means nothing if it's not then scheduled into your calendar.
Here's my system: I write "brain dump" at the top of a piece of paper and unload all my tasks onto it. Then I take each task and schedule it into my Google calendar.
Without that step, nothing will ever get done for me. Make sure you know when you're going to do things, because just having 20 things on your to-do list doesn't tell you when they're going to happen.
Tip 8: Two Things Per Day
This might seem contradictory to the last tip, but when I was really struggling with chronic pain, what helped me continue moving forward was never expecting more than two things per day from myself: a morning thing and an afternoon thing.
I'm not talking about your job and the things you have to do anyway. I mean your productivity list, your personal to-do items.
Don't plan to do three things in the morning and four things in the afternoon, because things take longer than you expect. You get distracted. Life happens. You run out of coffee and have to make a trip to the store.
If you only expect one thing in the morning and one thing in the afternoon, everything else is a bonus. If you do more than those two things, great. But if you don't, you only expected two things, so you don't succumb to disappointment.
Position yourself to exceed your expectations. (Thank you, Tea, for that perfect phrasing!)
Tip 9: Environment Design
I'm a big proponent of environment design. Your space can make or break good habits and productivity.
I know not everyone has access to everything they need (you might not live alone, or your situation might be different), but you can do little things to set yourself up for success through environment design.
Let's say you want to set voice practice as a goal, and you have a practice log where you record your progress. Put that on your desk. Leave it out. Don't store it away.
The energy it takes to go find your practice log might be the stumbling block that prevents you from practicing.
You can create an environment that supports good habits, and this also works in reverse. You can remove bad habits from your space by adding a barrier between you and the behaviour you're trying to avoid.
I've done this throughout my life. I've had rules where certain things just don't enter my house because they create an environment that doesn't help me thrive.
Create an environment that helps you thrive.
Tip 10: Rest is Not Optional
I know you want to get things done. We all want to get things done. But if you don't schedule enough time to rest, the house of cards comes tumbling down.
I've learned this the hard way many times over the years. I find it very easy to go, go, go, do, do, do. But then I suffer.
You need to schedule adequate rest, even if you feel overwhelmed by all your tasks. Without rest, the tasks don't happen at all.
Make sure you're scheduling that rest. It's not optional.
On Building a Practice
If you've been around my channel for a while, you'll have heard some of these before, but they bear repeating.
Tip 11: Consistency Beats Intensity
People really don't like it when I say this, but it's true: doing your practice over and over again is better than doing it one time really hard.
I think people hear "consistency beats intensity" and assume I'm saying you have to do voice training every day or else you won't achieve your goal. That's not what I'm saying.
I know consistency is hard. All I mean is that you continuously return to your practice, no matter how much time passes.
It's ideal to practice as often as you can, but if that's once a week for you, that's fine—as long as you keep coming back.
I took five months off from practicing Spanish, and I didn't lose all my Spanish. I just picked up where I left off. That's normal. Life has ebbs and flows, but consistency just means returning to your practice and putting what you can into it at any given moment.
This is especially important for voice feminization training. You don't need to practice for hours every day, you just need to keep returning to it.
Tip 12: What If It Were Easy?
I love this reframe because many people think of practice as self-flagellation. Like it's this hard thing they have to force themselves through.
But if you approach any practice (voice work, languages, exercise, meditation, journaling) with the question, "How would I do this if it actually was just easy to do?" your brain relaxes, and doing the practice becomes easier.
I use this all the time. When I was in Mexico recently trying to speak Spanish and freaking out, I asked myself: What if this were easy? Suddenly, I relaxed, and things came more naturally.
The same applies to voice work. When you're struggling with a particular exercise or technique, ask yourself: What if this were easy? How would I approach this?
The story you tell yourself matters, and it can make doing the practice easier.
Tip 13: Not Practicing is Part of Having a Practice
This one is for people who punish themselves or feel guilty whenever they fall off their practice.
You can stop doing that.
Not practicing is just a part of having a practice. Having days off, life happening, not doing the thing you hoped to do—that's completely normal and expected.
Having a practice doesn't mean you do it every day without stopping. It means you continuously return to your practice.
Whether that's building a business, learning a language, developing a new skill, or working on your trans voice, it's okay to take days off. In fact, it's normal.
When those days happen, just be kind to yourself. That's all I ask.
Tip 14: It's Normal to Feel Like You're Not Getting Anywhere
This one is tough but important.
When we think about learning a new skill or acquiring a new ability, we expect some clarifying moment. We want one weird trick, a eureka moment where everything suddenly clicks into place.
It will not come. It doesn't happen. That's not what it feels like to have a practice.
In all my practices where I've upskilled in different things, you always feel like you've just scratched the surface, that you're doing the bare minimum, that you're not getting anywhere. Then you blink, and a year later you're like, "Oh—I completed a 10k, I had a conversation in Spanish, I'm a good dancer now."
You don't even notice the progress happening. In fact, you'll constantly feel like you might even be getting worse.
There's this eureka moment people expect to feel, but it won't come until way later in the process, and it won't feel like "eureka." It'll be retrospective. You'll be looking back and realizing, "Oh, I did that."
This is especially true for transgender voice training. Progress happens so gradually that you won't notice it day-to-day. That's why tracking is essential.
Tip 15: Track Progress to See Patterns
I've mentioned this in previous tips (keeping hope alive), but tracking progress is one of the best ways to notice that progress is happening.
Sometimes it's better to track how many times you've done your practice rather than trying to measure if the skill has improved. Just knowing "I've practiced 20 times this month" can be powerful motivation.
For trans voice work specifically, try doing little recordings once a month. Find some way to track the progress you've made, because as I said in the last tip, you will feel like you're not getting anywhere.
You have to find a way to notice the small changes that are happening.
If recordings feel too vulnerable right now, use the Trans Voice Emotions Evaluator from my freebies library. It's a way to track your emotional progress around your voice practice without having to make a recording.
Practice Log Templates
Practice is the key to success, and keeping track of practice sessions is a great way to keep yourself accountable. So grab these cute practice logs to help you keep track.
Progress Tracker
Let me guess: you want to evaluate your progress in your trans voice practice, but you HATE listening to recordings of yourself. It’s totally normal! I made this tool with you in mind.
On Sustainable Achievement
We're down to the last three tips, and these are about making sure your achievements are sustainable for the long haul.
Tip 16: Work Slow So You Never Dread It
This relates to the idea that consistency is more important than intensity, but there's another reason: if you work extremely hard at your practice, your brain learns to dread doing it.
I think about this with my journaling practice. When I first started in 2010, I was doing The Artist's Way, which required three pages every morning. Three pages made me hate journaling. I remember getting up and thinking, "I can't do this."
So I switched to half a page, and that was digestible. That allowed me to approach the practice without fear or dread. Eventually, I built it up to three pages, and now I do whatever I feel like.
You want to make your practice something you like to do, because your practices are your days, and your days are your life. You want to enjoy your life, right?
Tip 17: Invest Before You're Ready
This one is for me specifically (double Capricorn, what can I say), but when it comes to sustainable practice, many of us want to take everything on ourselves.
I want to encourage you to seek out help from others before you feel like you need it.
You don't have to do everything alone. If you're starting to run, go to a run club. You don't have to be a good runner before joining a run club.
For your trans voice practice, this could mean:
- Allocating time in your week to practice, even if you think you need to learn more before you can start
- Seeking out a voice coach or purchasing one of my courses
- Finding another person in the trans community to practice with
Invest in your goals before you feel ready. You don't have to be perfect before seeking support.
Tip 18: Joy Can and Should Be Part of the Process
I might sound like a broken record here, but practices, upskilling, and setting goals are not punishments. These are the building blocks of our daily life, and you want to enjoy your daily life.
If achieving a goal is not contributing to your joy, something needs to change.
It's okay to have a little bit of suffering. I don't always feel joy when I'm running or when I'm getting constructive criticism on my Spanish. But for the most part, I love my day-to-day life.
And so should you.
Joy can and should be part of the process.
Conclusion: Your Goals for 2026
There you have it: 18 lessons for achieving the things you want in life, whether that's gender-affirming voice training, transition goals, or any other meaningful pursuit.
The most important takeaway? Your practices become your days, and your days become your life. Make sure you're building something sustainable that brings you joy, not just grinding toward some distant finish line.
Remember that your starting point is relative, done beats perfect, and consistency beats intensity. Most importantly, be kind to yourself when you fall off track, because not practicing is part of having a practice.
These lessons have served me well across running, Spanish learning, business building, and my own voice work. I hope they help you create the life and voice you're working toward in 2026.
Let me know in the comments on the video which lesson resonated most with you!
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