Danielle McGeough
speaker
2,182 appearances
12 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Aug
Danielle McGeough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
The promotion letter sat open on my desk. My office door was closed. Nothing. I remember feeling nothing. And I remember thinking this. This is what I worked so hard for. Why doesn't it feel like more? This month on Plan Go Plan, we're talking about purpose. And last week, we talked about the purpose trap. When purpose becomes purpose.
And this week, we're talking about the inverse of that. We're talking about what do you do when purposed delivered exactly what it promised and it still wasn't enough. If you felt like that, keep listening. Let's do this. Welcome to Plan Goal Plan, a podcast where ambition meets balance.
I'm Danielle McGue. I'm a professor, speaker, mom, recovering overachiever, and self-leadership coach for high-achieving women. At the intersection of research, practice, and play, I discovered a path to planning and goal-setting that's bold, balanced, and sustainable. Together, we'll reclaim your time, empower your goals, and create a life where you thrive at work and at home.
grab a pen let's get started a couple semesters ago a student shared this story with me she had competed in a major dance competition and she placed in the top 10. when this happened her family was crying her friends were screaming
And she remembers feeling nothing. All that she could do is replay a single turn that she didn't land. Haven't we all been there? Haven't we set a big goal and we show up with everything that we got
And we miss the entire experience because we're so focused on what wasn't perfect. Today, I wanted to talk about what we do in those moments where you actually do feel a sense of purpose. So for me, I've always felt an incredible sense of purpose and calling around teaching. The idea that I have the opportunity to be in classrooms and be
in other learning environments with students, with young people, where I can guide them through a huge transitional moment in their life is such a gift. And yet, there have been times where I've felt like
my impact is not what I thought that it would be, it doesn't feel big enough, and moments where I felt really worn out by the work. Because of course, not all of the work is that work that I do in the classroom, or not all work in the classroom feels connected, right? And what I've noticed is when I felt that flatness, and when I talk to other people that have experienced this flatness,
They experience guilt. They think that maybe they just don't have enough gratitude. They think I should be happy. And what's really interesting is I really think that this flatness is structural. So when I think about my student and her dance competition and her response, it'd be really easy to go, oh, she just needs to work on her perfectionism. She just needs to reframe things. But I also think if we would dig deep
into ways that she was trained, into the environment that she was in. My guess is that this was also a model that she was handed. So there is a psychological name for this. Psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert call it the impact bias. So this is when we consistently overestimate how good future events will actually feel.
And for how long? And there's a second piece called focalism. And this is where we imagine a future goal. And we zoom in so tightly that we can erase everything else filling our actual life around it. So one, I think that there are ways in which we make major decisions, what to sacrifice, what to chase after. And we make those decisions based on
Feelings that we have imagined, not the feelings that we actually have. What I found in my own life is that when I'm really in one of those focalism moments where I get really zoomed in on something, I'm locked in, I can start confusing discipline for direction. So what I mean by that is it's so often that we follow these rule books
that we get so committed to doing the things that we're told that we need to do to achieve the thing that we can get there and realize that somewhere along the way, we got really connected to all of those things, all of those rules, but we lost a sense of why that purpose for why we were moving in the direction in the first place.
So I've been talking about this concept of liminality a lot. If you haven't checked out some of my past episodes, especially the episode right before this, where I kicked off the theme around purpose. When we transition, there's always a middle stage. It's the messy middle, right?
And this is where we leave this old status behind, but we haven't necessarily incorporated a new one. And this is structural. It's not pathological. And I think that sometimes what can happen is we can get in these purpose voids, right? These moments where you do the thing and you're like, that's it. But you also aren't quite sure what the new thing should be.
And what I've noticed with so many of the people that I work with, because I work with women who are driven, they want to make a big impact, they want to do good and amazing things in the world. And when they hit this moment of this void, of this, this doesn't feel like I thought that it would feel like, it's really uncomfortable. And their instinct is,
I need to solve this discomfort. We're fixers. And in solving that discomfort, we also have an impulse to go, maybe I just need to set the next goal. Let's grab the next goal and go. Maybe I'll find some satisfaction there. Maybe this will be the thing that I finally feel good at.
the place where I belong. The thing is, if we aren't careful, we might just restart that same cycle. This middle stage though, this discomfort is actually really important. And it's important that we don't just get over it to setting a new goal. I remember a session that I had with a client and I'm thinking about one client in particular, but I hear this often and it's something that I lean into a lot as well.
She came to me and she was really struggling with making a decision. And she says to me, I don't know if I should go part time. Should I consult? Should I take a sabbatical? And what I realized in listening to her talk is that the issue wasn't actually in decision.
It was that every single option really required an evaluation. And she had no filter for which one actually fit her. Right now, I think that we live in a time where we actually have a lot of options. And that can become really overwhelming. And
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