You can spend years thinking about the life you want… but at some point, thinking has to turn into doing. Episode 350 of LTAMH is about how to do that.So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!

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Episode Overview:

How do you actually create the life you want? Why do so many of us stay stuck in the same patterns, waiting to feel ready and telling ourselves “someday,” or quietly turning research and reflection into a substitute for real action?

In Episode 350 of the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I explain how to start achieving goals and creating the life you want. We’ll discuss why simply visualising your future can work against you, and I share the handful of simple and practical shifts you can make that will close the gap between knowing and doing; the kind that make starting feel manageable instead of overwhelming, and that hold up even when finding motivation feels difficult. I also touch on how comparing yourself to others and their timelines can quietly pull you off course, and why keeping small promises to yourself is what actually rebuilds trust in your own follow-through. 

If you’ve been feeling stuck in the same patterns and wondering how to take action in your life without waiting for the ‘right’ moment, this one’s for you. And if you’re still working out what you genuinely want first, Episode 349 is the natural place to start.

👉 Ready to stop waiting and actually start building the life you want? Then let’s talk!

💡 TL;DR: Your life won’t change on its own, and waiting for it to change doesn’t work, so this episode shows you how to stop overthinking things and actually start creating the life you want. 🙂

New here? Hi! Let’s Talk About Mental Health is your weekly dose of practical mental health advice for real life. I’m Jeremy Godwin (hello! 👋) and I keep things simple, honest, and doable so you can feel more in control of your life and your mental wellbeing. If you’re not already a free subscriber, sign up below to have episodes and transcripts land in your inbox every Sunday:

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Episode Transcript:

How to actually create the life you want

So, you want to create a better life for yourself. Fantastic!

But then why is it so hard to make it happen?

You’ve probably tried all the tips and tricks, all the systems and life hacks… and yet, weeks and months later, you feel like you’re not making any progress.

That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a ‘knowing versus doing’ problem. You can know exactly what you want and why you want it, and still find yourself in the same place six months from now, wondering why nothing’s moved. This episode is going to help you actually get things moving.

So let’s talk about… how to create the life you want.

Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, where every week I help you understand and improve your mental wellbeing.

This week, I’m talking about closing the gap between knowing what you want and actually building it… because that gap is where a lot of us get stuck; not at the start, and not at the finish, but right there in the middle where things can often stall, usually without us even realising it. It’s the reason why there’s an entire universe worth of productivity and self-help content online and in bookstores. But instead of just telling you the same things that everyone else says, I’m going to be showing you what you really need to know on how to take concrete and tangible steps towards the life you want without relying on wishes and unicorn dreams to make it happen.

Because what you need to know upfront is this: you are not stuck because you don’t know enough yet. Creating the life you want doesn’t just happen. You create it.

We’re going to come back to that idea later because it really does change how you approach everything from here. But first, we need to talk about…

What creating the life you want actually means

So this is one of those topics where we often tend to picture some sort of big and dramatic turning point in our lives when it comes to this stuff, like the day you finally quit your job, or you move cities, or you make a decision that you’ve been avoiding for years. And sure, sometimes it does look like that. Sometimes you can look back at a specific event and go, that was the thing that changed everything. But most of the time, and more often than not, creating the life you want isn’t about one big moment at all. It’s a long string of very ordinary decisions that are made one after another, and which either point towards something that feels real and true to you or that just keep you circling in the same spot.

What tends to catch a lot of us out though is this: if you already know what feels true to you, and chances are that you probably do… if not, that’s something I covered in last week’s episode… then the problem here isn’t actually about direction. It’s, how do you get there? What steps do you need to take? How do you navigate a path that you’ve never been down before? And that’s something that affects a lot of us, right? So no wonder there’s so many YouTube videos and podcasts and books about this stuff… because we’re all trying to figure out how the hell to figure out what we can’t figure out!

So what’s actually going on? Well, usually, it’s one of a small handful of things, and they’re worth naming out loud, plainly and simply, because they’re a lot sneakier than they might sound. Sometimes the problem is waiting to feel ready, as if ‘readiness’ is a feeling that just somehow turns up like a delivery that you order… even though, of course, ‘being ready’ doesn’t work like that. Sometimes the problem is turning all of the research and reflection that we do into a substitute for actually doing anything, for actually taking action; you know, it’s reading just one more book or article, listening to one more podcast, thinking things through “just one more time.” And of course, all of that feels like you’re being productive… but, it genuinely isn’t productive. And sometimes the other thing that gets in the way is just quietly telling yourself ‘someday’… which sounds like it’s a plan, but is actually the complete opposite of a plan, because ‘someday’ doesn’t have anything attached to it, let alone a date. And things without dates rarely ever happen.

Now, by the way, if any of that happens to be true for you, no judgement; none of that makes you lazy or incapable or somehow ‘bad at life’, right, or worse at it than everyone else who seems to have their stuff together. Honestly, most of what that looks like for other people who ‘have their stuff together’ from the outside is just better editing; very few people are presenting a detailed list of their failures to the world instead of the highlight reel that you actually end up seeing, especially on social media.

What’s going on underneath all of this stuff is that action, real action, involves risk… as well as the very real possibility that it won’t go the way that you hoped. Staying in the ‘thinking about it’ phase feels safe. It feels productive, even. But it isn’t building anything. It’s just a very comfortable and very convincing form of standing still.

And look… I’ll put my hand up here too, because I am not exempt from any of this. I sat on the idea for this exact show for the better part of two years before I actually did anything about it, telling myself that I needed to learn more, plan more, wait for the right moment. But ‘the right moment’ is never going to show up! For me, I just eventually got tired of waiting for it and just started it anyway, and decided to figure it out as I went along. And even though it was imperfect… go back and listen to those early episodes of mine when I had the cheapest microphone in the world and did my, well, I still do my own editing, but not quite, you know, I have tools that help me do it, but it was… oh, it was the most manual process, and it was horrendous. Anyway, I digress! It was imperfect. It was incredibly challenging, but it was still infinitely better than spending yet another year just sitting there thinking about it.

So the honest question for you to really think about isn’t “what do you want?”, but “what have you actually been waiting for, specifically, before you’ll let yourself start?” Because just knowing what you want is only part of the equation.

And so, with that in mind, now let’s talk about…

Why ‘knowing’ isn’t enough on its own

This is where things get genuinely interesting, but bear in mind that I’m a total nerd for anything psychology-related so my ‘interesting’ might be different than yours… but bear with me! The answer to creating the life you want is not about willpower. It’s about something a lot stranger… and honestly, maybe even a bit counterintuitive.

There’s a solid body of research on this stuff from NYU psychologist, Gabrielle Oettingen, who spent decades studying the gap between wanting and doing, and I’ll link some of her work in the description… but what she found is that picturing your desired future vividly, positively, and in detail, which is the classic ‘visualise success’ advice that you’ve probably heard a hundred thousand million times, doesn’t actually help you get there. If anything, it works against you. Her studies found that people who spent time indulging in a rosy mental picture of already having what they wanted generally showed lower energy and less drive to actually go and get it… not more.

It turns out that your brain just isn’t particularly good at telling the difference between imagining something and having already done it. So when you daydream about the life you want without ever confronting what’s actually in the way of creating it, some part of you quietly clocks off early… like you’ve already just arrived at the destination.

But look, the fix here is not to stop dreaming. Far from it. Please don’t stop dreaming! The fix is to stop dreaming without also looking honestly at what’s standing in the way.

I talk about realistic optimism and realism a lot in this show, and what her research also found is that pairing the vision with a genuine and unflinching look at the obstacles, and then coming up with a specific plan for what you’ll actually do when that obstacle turns up, that’s the thing that takes people from thinking into doing. So it’s not, “I’ll exercise more,” but more like, “When I get home from work and I’m tempted to just collapse on the couch instead, I’m going to put my running shoes on first before I sit down.” Yes, that specific!

Now, realistically speaking, that’s the part that almost none of us ever do because it’s a lot less interesting than the daydream version where you imagine yourself running a marathon… and often it’s a whole lot more uncomfortable because you’re having to face reality. But… the reality of life is that you will very likely face obstacles. Some of them may come from inside of the building, in other words, from you, and instead of letting those obstacles feel like a total dead end, the challenge is to figure out how to get around those obstacles so that you can keep going… even if it means that things end up looking a lot different to what you might have originally imagined.

So I think that all that actually explains a lot about why so much of the conventional advice on creating your future just doesn’t really stick. Set your goals, visualise success, stay positive, right? That’s most of the advice that’s out there. And it’s not wrong exactly, but it’s just incomplete. It gives you the dream and skips the obstacle entirely and the messy middle, where you actually do the things that take you from point A to point B… and all of that is where the actual living happens.

You can think about the life you want until the end of days, but at some point either those thoughts turn to action or you’ll find yourself forever stuck in “What if?”

And that matters for your mental health, not just for getting things done. Every time you plan something and quietly let it slide again, it doesn’t just cost you the thing itself… it costs you a small piece of your trust in your own word to yourself, in your own ability to make things happen, and in your own potential to create the life you want. And all of that adds up. And eventually, you stop believing that your own intentions mean anything… which is a genuinely harmful thing to carry around with you. Because from there, it’s only a very short step to believing that you’re just someone who doesn’t follow through, or that you’re just not capable, full stop, rather than someone who’s simply been missing one specific piece of the puzzle.

Closing that gap isn’t just about building the life you want, it’s about being able to really trust yourself again. And we’re going to talk about how to do exactly that right after this quick break.

[AD BREAK]

And welcome back! So now let’s get into the ‘how to’ part of this episode, and let’s talk about…

How to actually build the future you want

And first things first: let’s come back to that thing that I said early on in the episode: readiness isn’t a feeling that just shows up on its own, because it’s something that you create by starting. So let me explain how that actually works in practice. First…

Shrink the decision.

Whatever you’ve been sitting on or thinking about pursuing, stop thinking about it as one big decision that you have to work on because that is exactly what keeps it frozen in ‘thinking about it’ mode. Break it down into smaller steps, and keep on breaking each step down further until you find the smallest possible next action to take; the one that’s so small, it feels almost ridiculous not to do it. So instead of ‘start exercising’, make it more like: send one message to a friend who might go walking with me. Instead of ‘write a book’, make it: open a document and write one paragraph, even if it’s a bad one.

The size of the step you take has almost nothing to do with the size of what you’re eventually building. It’s just there to get you moving, and it’s easier to focus on small steps. Because once momentum exists, it’s a lot easier to keep moving forward than it is to create momentum from scratch. OK, next…

Look directly at the obstacles.

Before you jump into action mode, take a proper moment to name what’s actually going to get in the way. That’s what I mean by ‘looking at the obstacles’; it’s not like an eclipse, you can look at them directly! Is it tiredness after work? Is it the fear that you’ll try and it won’t be good enough? Is it that a part of you is scared of what will happen if it actually works? Is it an ongoing case of can’t-be-bothered-itis? Name them in a really specific way. And then, decide right now what you’re going to do if and when it shows up. Because it probably will; if you can name it, very likely to show up!

Very few things in life, though, ever just go exactly the way that we plan and you can never predict what’s going to come your way since we have no idea what’s just ahead. I mean, if you’d have told me that Madonna would have a number one album again in 2026 and that that album would be absolutely brilliant, I would never have believed you. And yet here we are! Nobody has any idea what’s next, but you can identify likely obstacles… especially when they’re to do with internal factors like the examples that I just gave you, and you can come up with a plan for how you’re going to handle them if and when they rear their head. Look… I know this is not glamorous. I know that sitting with the idea of obstacles is a lot less pleasant than sitting with the daydream, but it’s exactly what makes the daydream survive contact with an obstacle. Next…

Build yourself an ‘If-Then’.

Once you’ve got that small step, here’s how to make sure it actually happens… and it’s probably the single most useful thing from the research that I mentioned earlier plus it’s delightfully simple. So instead of setting a vague intention, like “I’ll work on this soon,” build a specific ‘If Then’ plan. So for example, “If it’s Tuesday at 7:00 PM, then I’ll spend 15 minutes on this.” Or another example: “If I get the urge to check my phone instead of starting, then I’ll put it in another room.” It’s really specific, because vague intentions live entirely in your head… and your head is a very, very easy place to talk yourself out of things. You know that. I know that. We all know that! A specific ‘if then’ plan lives in the actual world; it’s tied to an actual moment or event… and that’s what your brain can genuinely act on, rather than just think about. Next…

Lower the bar for ‘good enough to start’.

And this one’s really about giving yourself permission to take the next step. So if you’re waiting to feel fully ready or fully confident, or for your plan to be completely perfect and watertight before you begin, then I need to tell you this very clearly: none of that actually exists, and waiting for it is just procrastination wearing a very convincing disguise. ‘Good enough to start’, however, is a genuinely low bar to set for yourself, and it’s meant to be a low bar… because you don’t need the whole plan in order to start; what you need is the next step that feels most authentic to you, and the willingness to maybe look and feel a bit clumsy while you take it.

Perfection was never actually on offer here, because it doesn’t exist… and chasing perfection is how a lot of good intentions quietly die in the planning stage. So focus on getting to a point where it’s ‘good enough to start’ and then let each step you take reveal the next one. OK, next…

Expect the wobble, and don’t read it as a stop sign.

Because things are going to feel wobbly as you take those first steps, just like a baby learning to walk, and that’s actually a good sign.

Somewhere in probably the first week or two of whatever you do it’s going to feel harder than you thought it would, or you’ll miss a day, or the doubt will creep back in properly, or you’ll make a choice that’s the opposite of whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve… like the other week, when I picked up a pizza for dinner instead of cooking a healthy meal… But that’s not evidence that you failed or that you will always fail or that you’ve picked the wrong thing to focus on or that you’re just not cut out for it. It’s just what starting something new genuinely feels like from the inside for absolutely everyone, every single time.

The people who actually build the life they want are not the ones who never wobble. They’re the ones who treat the wobble as part of the process, instead of proof that they should quit… because it’s not. So… this week when it gets hard, that’s your cue to keep going; not your cue to stop. Next…

Keep the noise out.

And this one is a quick but important thing to flag. Consider this a public service announcement as well, for life in general! While you’re doing all of this and taking the steps one by one to create the life you want, be mindful of noisy things like comparison, like other people’s timelines, like other people’s opinions, like other people’s versions of what this is supposed to look and feel like; that is a whole conversation on its own, which I sort of covered in more detail last week in Episode 349 if you want to go into that. But for now just know that your pace, your version of things, your slightly messy starting point, all of it is completely fine and comparing it to someone else’s opinions or their highlight reel will do absolutely nothing but slow you down. Next…

Check your progress against evidence.

If you did the thing, even badly, even for just five minutes, that counts. It genuinely counts. And it’s worth acknowledging properly, rather than just brushing past it or judging yourself for not doing 10 minutes instead of five minutes. Now, if you didn’t do the thing, that’s useful information too. Rather than judging yourself and letting it be a verdict on your character deficiencies, it’s just data to adjust your plan with… one step at a time, right? So, over time, this is how trust in yourself actually gets rebuilt: not through being perfect, not through one big enormous declaration of commitment to your goals, but through a long run of small promises kept to yourself. And if you ever drop the ball, showing yourself kindness rather than judgement and getting yourself back on track for the next step. You cannot change what has happened; or if you haven’t done something, hasn’t happened, right? But you can learn from it. That’s what matters.

So, take your time with creating the life you want… and remember that small steps really do add up over time to massive results.

I’d highly encourage you to have a read through the transcript for this episode at: ltamh.com/episodes, it’s also linked in the description below, and use it to guide you over the coming weeks and months.

Now, if you’re struggling to figure out what you really want from life, like I said, I talked about that last week, but you’ll also find Episode 343 helpful if you do tend to be quite hard on yourself. So they’re both linked in the description.

Conclusion

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. The life you want isn’t going to build itself while you wait to feel ready for it. Start smaller than feels significant, and start before you feel prepared… because that ‘readiness’ only ever shows up after you’ve begun.

So, what’s the smallest possible thing you could actually do today that moves you one step closer to the future you want?

Because when you boil it all down, nobody’s going to build your future for you… and luckily you don’t need them to.

Each week I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic, and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. This week’s quote is by Maya Angelou, and it is:

Nothing will work unless you do.

Maya Angelou

Let me repeat that.

Nothing will work unless you do.

Alright, that’s it for this week. If this episode was helpful, please leave a rating or review on your favourite platform to help more people discover the show and the advice I share. And come and join me on Patreon to support my work. You’ll find it linked in the description below.

Thank you very much for joining me for my 350th episode! Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!

Join me next week so we can talk about what you’re doing to create the life you want, and check out my episode on why figuring out what you want is so scary next. It’s linked in the description. I release new content every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program. Discover more at ltamh.com.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Find more content at www.ltamh.com

Let’s Talk About Mental Health.
Making Mental Health Simple.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health. © 2026 Jeremy Godwin.

The information provided in this episode is for general awareness on the topic and does not constitute advice. You should consult a doctor and/or mental health professional if you’re struggling with your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll find additional information on the Resources page of this website.