#WeGotGoals by aSweatLife

Chef Stephanie Izard invited me into the in the basement of her restaurant  Girl and the Goat while the staff prepared for parties, evening service and nationwide expansion. And while we talked about goals, business, family and what it takes to be a boss, we were just steps away from where the the story of an empire sprawling all took place. She's planted her adorable goat logo all around Chicago'...

Maybe you’ll be lining up next weekend at the TCS New York City Marathon, or watching the Bank of America Chicago Marathon has you pondering a big race of your own. Or perhaps you’re facing a job change or another challenge in your life that has you “scited”—scared but excited—hoping you can handle it but afraid you’ll fall short. Coach, author, marathoner, and aSweatLife ambassador Denise Sauriol...

For so many of us, setting SMART goals feels natural. It feels like the most promising way to achieve success. For Paddy Spence, CEO and Chairman of Zevia, there's a time and place for time-boxed, specific goals, but there's also room for much, much more when it comes to goal setting. On this episode of #WeGotGoals, I got a dose of Spence's refreshing take on non-binary goal setting, and heard how...

“There’s something about the power of a group to push you to your limits so that even when you're on your own, you're stronger,” Cindy Kuzma astutely summarized the theme of community through the lens of the marathon world record holder  Eliud Kipchoge . And on this week's episode of #WeGotGoals, we talk through community and how a supportive group can help one person achieve bigger things than he...

When a lifelong learner falls in love with fitness, you get Edward J. Buckley Jr., CEO of Peerfit , a universal account for fitness that is accessed as an employee benefit through major insurance providers. And Buckley and his team didn't just create a better way to do workplace wellness, they did it the hard way - connecting the healthcare and the fitness industries. “How do you build a bridge be...

As little kids, most of us entertain the idea of becoming a pro athlete at one point or another. In 1996, for example, I was seven years old and totally convinced that I was going to become the next Brandi Chastain and spend my days on a soccer field, having abs and shooting penalty kicks. So what if you had that opportunity — the chance to be a pro athlete and achieve a lifelong goal that's limit...

    Caullen Hudson is always seeking to inspire - it's just a little different from place to place. In the gym, he's encouraging fitness enthusiasts and flipping tires. Outside of the gym at the company where he's Founder and Executive Producer -  SoapBox Productions - he's encouraging youth and flipping aldermen. On this week's episode of #WeGotGoals, Hudson talks about the intersection of wellne...

Amanda McGrory rekindled her love for her sport—wheelchair racing—by going back to graduate school. Late July founder and CEO Nicole Bernard Dawes finds sanity and stress management when she steps out of the office and onto her Peloton bike. Exhale executive vice president Fred DeVito never set aside his passion for music, continuing to play the upright string bass even as he built a high-powered...

From the way he talks, you'd think Devan Kline (co-founder and CEO of Burn Boot Camp and author of Stop Starting Over: Transform Your Fitness By Mastering Your Psychology ) grew up in an idyllic suburban community, with plenty of room to play T-ball and adoring parents who cheered him on from the sidelines as he played baseball from elementary school all the way through a minor league stint with t...

Adam Whiting, now a well-known yoga teacher around the world for his smart sequencing and anatomical focus in class, was at one time just trying to understand what was going wrong in his body. After seeing doctor after doctor in Manhattan, trying to diagnose massive dizzy spells, headaches and seemingly random spouts of numbness throughout his body, he was told by all accounts that his body was "f...

Triathlete and coach Sharone Aharon faced some obstacles en route to completing his first Ironman. First of all, he’d never done any type of multisport event. He didn’t own a bike. His longest run was about 20 minutes, done as part of his training for the Israeli Secret Service. The first time he got into the pool, he swam 200 yards—then went to the locker room and threw up. Still, 10 months later...

Some of the best athletes in the world . Founders and CEOs . Authors of bestselling books , internationally known fitness gurus , even reality television stars . For 62 episodes now, we on the #WeGotGoals team have had the good fortune to interview some pretty impressive individuals. We’ve learned so much about what’s powered them to the top (and we hope you have, too!). But the more goal-getters...

Sometimes, we’ll have a guest on the #WeGotGoals podcast who doesn’t actually like or set goals (I’m looking at you, Dawn Jackson Blatner and Josh Katt ). For whatever reason, they don’t connect to the term, or they’ve employed a different paradigm to accomplish great things. Which is fantastic—one of the best things about the show , in our humble opinions, is the glimpse at the wide variety of pa...

There's something to learn by listening to any individual's success story, but when the story starts with being kicked out of high school at 15, one can get pulled especially quickly into hearing how it panned out. I found myself at the edge of my seat while sitting across from Pivotal Coaching Co-Founder Scott Hopson for the latest #WeGotGoals podcast episode interview because that was exactly ho...

Elite runner Jordan Hasay had a goal of winning this year’s Boston Marathon. And she had a good shot—in her first marathon, in Boston last year, Hasay finished third and ran a faster first marathon than any other woman in U.S. history by almost a full three minutes (her 2:23:00 bettered Kara Goucher’s record of 2:25:53, set in 2008). Last fall at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, she once agai...

In December 2017, I called Laura Vanderkam to ask her what I needed to know about time tracking if I was going to attempt to do it. What's time tracking? It's exactly what it sounds like - keeping tabs on how you spend your time all day, every day, for as long as you want - and I was intrigued by the prospect of attempting to do it. After reading Vanderkam's book  I Know How She Does It , I knew I...

Julie Smolyanksy is a tough woman to nail down. Not in terms of her schedule — although she is all over the place, having recently published her first book, The Kefir Cookbook , while running Lifeway Foods full-time as CEO and President. Instead, over the course of our conversation on the #WeGotGoals podcast, I found myself trying — and repeatedly failing — to put Smolyanksy neatly in a box that I...

If there's one thing I've learned from listening to over a year of #WeGotGoals , it's that building a business or achieving a major goal is rarely as easy as these rockstar goal-getters make it seem. But for Katlin Smith, keeping things simple is the secret ingredient to her success with Simple Mills , an all-natural baking mix and foods company that uses recognizable, natural ingredients in place...

As president of the U.S. expansion at  F45 Training - the Australian-born fitness franchise - Marc Marano's job is as much sales as it is strategy. He's here to make Americans fall in love with F45 - and to get more franchisees in the process. And as you'll hear Marano talk through on this week's episode of #WeGotGoals, getting to F45 - the big goal he accomplished - required a giant leap away fro...

Chef Josh Katt, the founder and CEO of Kitchfix , isn’t a goal guy. In fact, when I posed the first of our two big questions on #WeGotGoals—what’s a big goal you’ve achieved, why was it important to you, and how did you get there?—he couldn’t really come up with an answer. Don’t take that to mean he’s achieved less than other guests we’ve had on the show. In about five years, Katt has built Kitchf...

Runners on the Lakeshore Path spend miles with their noses down, but starting August 2017, there was a reason to look up just north of LaSalle Street. The Shore Club is an oasis on the Lakefront that Lisa Jaroscak and her two partners - Robbie Schloss and Nick Thayer - helped to create. The day that this location opened its doors, Jaroscak told us that she accomplished a big goal that took months...

A group of deer or sheep is a herd. A collection of ferrets, a business. ( Seriously .) But what’s the best term for a community of runners? If you’re Tim and Jessica Murphy, you call them the BibRave Pros. And in four short years, you gather more than 100 of them, working to connect them to each other, to races, and to related brands so the whole sport benefits. For this week’s episode of #WeGotG...

One of the more endearing parts of my personality (I hope) is my tendency to go ALL IN on reality television shows, as friends who have been forced to receive my weekly email recaps of The Bachelor and The Challenge will attest to (yes, I still watch The Challenge and am in the Bill Simmons/David Jacoby camp of considering it America's fifth professional sport). But I'm late to the Survivor franch...

Four and a half years ago, Jim Huether saw the potential behind a niche industry before it became one of the most sought-after spaces for brands to play in or companies to launch out of. "In 2014, I remember everybody said the recovery and movement space, it's too small ... you can never create a sustainable global business in the recovery space," Huether recalled. But, as he likes to point out, "...

Some people would view the loss of a leg as a tragedy, or at least, a significant obstacle to pursuing the path they’d painstakingly planned out for themselves. For Melissa Stockwell , my guest on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals, losing a limb offered a second chance at a lifelong aspiration. As a young gymnast, she’d always dreamed of going to the Olympics. She practiced twice a day. Her walls...