Mastering Your Destiny: From Dreams to SMART Goals - Creating Your Future Self (Part 3 of 3)

Speaker 1: 0:00

These goals aren't just about achievement. I just don't believe that, because we just took a really big vision of the life that you want to live and we broke it down to goals, and now I'm bringing you back and reminding you that these goals are about you becoming the life you want to live, because life is too short to do anything else. Hello, it's me, your host, jen, and fellow journeyer on this path of learning how to reintegrate feminine energy into the boardroom. So we'll talk about things like conscious capitalism and leading with vulnerability and awareness and connection and play. We'll be diving into the bedroom. So basically, we're going to talk about the horizontal bombo. In all seriousness, we're going to look at how to create a deeper level of intimacy and connection in your romantic partnerships, but also in all of our relationships. I think we've become so disconnected, so how do we gain that in our relationships? And then we're going to look beyond that into any tool or practice that helps us become more magnetic and more full. So manifestation techniques, meditation and personal development approaches that will help us move through challenges to step into our brightest, fullest, most magnetic version of ourselves. It's all the things, it is the whole shebang. So buckle up buttercups we're diving in. Hey, oh, party people, we are going to get heady with it today.

Speaker 1: 1:58

So this is part three in a series called creating your future self. Part one was with Robin Voris and her story about how she has manifested and created and dreamed up and is living her wildest dreams. Part two was visualization, the power of visualization, understanding what it is. And then I took you through almost an hour's worth of an exercise to dive really deep into creating a vivid vision using all your five senses for your future. And as you continue to let that permeate and you ruminate on that, that is the same thing as an athlete imagining doing the let's say it's a golf swing swinging their club perfectly, and it actually impacts how they swing their club. So as you play out your future vision that the way that you want it in your mind it starts to shape and create new neural pathways in your brain and impact you in ways that literally shape your reality. So today we're moving from there and I'm going to help walk you through a very logical process. So this is left brain, masculine energy on how to take all of that dreamy fluid stuff and get it pinned, it down. Pin it down and walk it out and execute. Many times we know what we should do, and now you've got a vision and the trick is going to be well, what? What do I do? How do I walk this out? So at the end of this episode, you will have a plan, or at least a part of a plan, and you'll be able to walk away from here and put your plan together for five years, three years and 2024.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Let me start by sharing a little bit here. Research has shown that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if they're written down, and that's for a couple of reasons. One, it's pretty basic and simple, because when we have really easy access, we can review it at any time. And reviewing something we've written down helps it become more concrete and it keeps it obviously right in front of us. So the second thing is encoding, and encoding is a biological process by which the things that we perceive travel to our brain's hippocampus, where they're analyzed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. So writing improves that encoding process. So, in other words, when you write it down, it has a much greater chance of being remembered. So now we're kind of doing a double whammy. You've, in the last episode, used all your five senses to connect in a really vivid way to your future self and a future vision of what you want your life to look like, which embeds in your subconscious mind, and now we're going to kind of double whammy this with the other part of our brain, so that it's going to encode and want to hang on to this information.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Okay, now let's dive into getting these goals pinned down. So I'm going to start by talking about what a smart goal is. Many of you have heard of what a smart goal is. I'm going to encourage you, if you've heard of it, to not just breeze past this, because I teach a lot, I coach a lot, I train a lot and I know that 99% of the time when I get up and share content, if I ask somebody have you fully implemented this? Do you utilize this practice completely or even partially, and most people will say no. So they know what it is, or they know parts of it, but they don't know all of it. So hang with me here. I would encourage you to take notes and we'll work through this. So a smart goal is an acronym and it has five components. So specific S, m is measurable, a is attainable, r is relevant and B is relevant and T is time bound, and I'm going to go through each one of these for you. So a specific goal. Oh, side note, if you do want workbook worksheets for these, you can shoot me an email. I don't have a fancy link yet that will auto send them to you, but you can scroll down in the show notes. My email address is in there and I will send some worksheets out to you as quickly as I can, and then you can use these just for reference or to work through your goal setting. Okay, so specific.

Speaker 1: 6:42

If you're looking at any goal that you have or something you want to become or something you want to do, we want to define your goal in detail and be as specific as possible. So if I was envisioning my five-year future self and I wanted to be really cut and lean, being in shape is not specific. But if I said I would like to be able to do five pull-ups, five weighted pull-ups and 22% body fat, or something like that, I want to be as specific as I can about what I'm doing. I want to be as specific as I can about what the goal is. Sometimes in this part we're going to get into measurable, so these things kind of tend to overlap a little bit too. But if I said I want to have a really vibrant relationship, I want to really write out what specifically does vibrant in a relationship mean to me and that bleeds into the next one, which is measurable. So decide how you're going to measure success in that area. So I kind of did the overlap with the fitness one. 22% body fat might be part of it. It may be, you know, a cholesterol level down, it may be.

Speaker 1: 8:04

So you want something that's measurable, not just the act. We're not just measuring the activity. So if I'm looking at fitness, a measurable goal is not just getting to the gym three times a week. It's actually what I want the outcome of the activity to be. Let's say it's finances. So I want to have all of my debt paid off, except my house within one year. I want to have X the number of dollars saved. Maybe the outcome is I want to have one or two investment properties purchased in the next year. So that is a measure of success, okay. So again, if the ultimate goal is to be financially free, now we're starting to get down to the how how am I going to get there? So these are some of the specific ways.

Speaker 1: 8:54

So that's measurable, attainable. We want to set a realistic goal that's going to challenge you and also be achievable, and there there's a fine line in this. I've heard the saying sometimes that there are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic timelines, and so you've got to kind of feel into where do you think that line is between something that's going to force you to think differently and grow. If my goal, you know, for me I like to use the fitness example, because I, because I know it, because I work out If my goal was that I want to play basketball, it's like literally not attainable for me because I can't jump Like I had, my ACLs are torn, my Achilles are shit. Some things are not attainable for me right now. I'm just not going to set that goal. So you've got to decide where that line is for you, though, like what's challenging but also achievable and attainable. You might realize nine months into these goals that you're like I am well on my way, but I'm not going to hit it by the end of 2024. Well then, you extend the timeline at that point, but right now we're aiming for. You know we're kind of we're looking at a certain period of time and I'm going to come up to the timeline in a second here.

Speaker 1: 10:16

So the third part is attainable. The fourth part is relevant Ensure that your goal is results oriented. So sometimes we set goals that really have nothing to do with the results that we're looking for, which is why we did what we did in the last episode. You've got to be clear about what you really want, because sometimes we just do things because we're like, well, that seems like a cool idea, but it's not working us any closer to what we actually wanted. To look at what you're focusing on and ensure that it's getting you to hit it. Ensure that it's getting you to who you want to become.

Speaker 1: 10:47

And then the fifth one is time bound. We miss this one a lot. It seems it's so basic but easy to miss that we need to set a clear deadline and then monitor our progress along the way, and I'm going to talk about how we can do the monitoring here in a minute. There needs to be a clear end goal to this. So if my goal is to be 20% body fat by when 10 years from now, two weeks from now, like you might be looking at a five year plan and we're going to break that down to three or one year, and even with one year, you might be able to get to where you want to go in a month. So you need to get clear with each of the goals that you're setting on. What is the timeline, what's the deadline that you're also reaching that goal by? So specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound are the five, five tenants of a smart goal. Okay.

Speaker 1: 11:46

So now, if we're looking at your five year vision that you laid out, you've got four priorities in your life. You've got four quadrants or four specific areas that you're looking at and you wrote down a lot of stuff very likely in there, and we're going to just start today with, I'm going to say, one to three goals in each category. So, out of all of the things you were and know that, like these are spiderweb, I know that one thing bleeds into the next. Sometimes you'll start working on one goal. This is a horrible example, but it's coming to mind and what the heck? I'm just going to share it.

Speaker 1: 12:29

Let's say that you're focusing on, like, your intimate relationship and you're also working on fitness, and you start working on fitness and you find that you shed 20 pounds and you got blood flowing in your body again. And guess what? You didn't even necessarily try to improve your sex life, but all of a sudden you're like holy smokes. There's a fire going again, because one thing impacts the next. That is true about everything in our lives, because of how interconnected we are. Our body, mind, spirits are one thing. You're going to find that as you start developing one area of your life, it'll bleed over into every other area of your life. So don't worry about getting everything on that sheet, you know, on your vision, into a smart goal. We're going to start where we're going to start and we're going to prioritize and then we're going to build from there.

Speaker 1: 13:19

So in each quadrant, I want you to go through and circle one to three things in each category, specific things that you want to focus on, our goals that you want to focus on. You might highlight them and know that we're kind of quantifying this as a five year goal. Okay, so I'm not gonna take a ton of time in this podcast episode and leave the time for you, so you might just need to pause it or write this down as homework and then come back to this and do this. But what you'll do with each of those one to three things is make them a five year smart goal. So I'm already telling you that the time, the deadline is five years from now. So for each of those, you're making a five year specific smart goal. So you should have either one thing in each quadrant, two or three, so you'll have between four and 12 goals that you're focusing on. I hope that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 14:30

Okay, then, once you get those goals defined and they are specific, measurable, attainable and relevant we already know the time bound is five years I want you to consider what you could do in three years. So peel that back and it's just about. It's a little over half half of whatever that goal is. So now I want you to quantify that and make it a three year smart goal. Each one of those things should have a three year smart goal, okay, and then again, I'm sure you need to pause it or come back to that. Now we're gonna peel that back to one year. So we're gonna look at that three year goal and all of those three year goals and we're gonna go okay, if I can do that in three years. What can I chip off in one year? In 12 months time, what can I chip off and who can I become in the next 12 months in each of these goals? So turn those three year goals into one year. Smart goals all of them.

Speaker 1: 15:45

And you might wanna just take a fresh sheet of paper out. I'm super visual, so if it was me, I might take a fresh sheet of paper out, draw the quadrants again and then list out my five year, three year, one year smart goals in each of the quadrants. So I can just see sort of the progression of each of them and within the categorized like quadrants. That's just how my brain works. Your brain may work very differently. You might be pulling out a spreadsheet right now. That is not me, but if it's you, more power to you. Go get it. Okay. So now that we've got those goals laid out, we've got one year goals in each of those categories.

Speaker 1: 16:30

I want you to just look at one quadrant at a time and if you've picked more than one goal in that quadrant, ask yourself which one of these things needs to happen first. So what's the one of these that if I do it, it will make the other ones either easier or unnecessary. So usually there's a domino that needs to fall first. Sometimes they're sort of simultaneous, but usually there's one thing that needs to happen first. That's gonna make the other things easier. So we wanna rank them and put them in order of priority. If they're not, if you find that they're just like uh, just, I'm not really sure, then just pick one. It just don't don't overanalyze or get stuck on that. If they feel equal to you, just sort of roll the dice and label them and just decide Um, you again, you might find that one just starts to naturally impact the other. So that's, that's all good. Some of them might work together simultaneously, but I want to give you the ability to kind of tick them off one at a time, and this is probably a good place for me to explain to you this idea of habit stacking. So, um, learning how to build a habit is a real thing.

Speaker 1: 17:55

Habits don't just happen overnight. You're going to find that, as your is your, any of these areas whether it's finance or fitness or emotional health or learning anything that you're doing new is going to feel awkward and uncomfortable. You're going to bump up against what I call your edges, your insecurities. You might bump up again. Imposter syndrome. You know where you just feel like who am I to think that I could be this person or that person? I just talked to a good friend who reached out to me and she said, jen, I just had to share You're the first one that came to mind. I'm so proud of myself. I've, you know, I've been going to the gym and I have not viewed myself as someone that belongs in the weight room. And I got on the floor and got in the weight room today and I was like, fuck, yeah, you do belong there, and so you are going to come up against limiting beliefs and stuff as. But this is where the good stuff is, cause when this, the things surface, that's, that's a gift to you. Then you get to work through that power, through.

Speaker 1: 19:02

Episode number three might be a tool for you. Where you've got some fears and limiting beliefs you need to work through, you can go back and listen to that. So what? But what we want to do is if, if you're not accustomed to you know building habits, it's easiest sometimes just to start with one and to stack that onto a habit you already have. So if I have a habit of drinking coffee in the morning I might stack five minutes of meditating with my coffee drinking because it's a habit that's already ingrained and I can anchor something to that. Then, once I get meditation going, I might decide that I want to stack reading five pages a day onto that meditation. This is literally how my morning routine has grown and it has been a huge vehicle for who I've become. It started as five minutes a day and now it's like an hour and a half of like church to me it's just like my me time and it's the best thing ever and it doesn't feel forced at all. It feels like oh, so lovely to me. Just know that, and maybe I'll do another episode in the next month or so here on specifics of how to build habits that might be helpful for some of you, or reach out if you want more info on that.

Speaker 1: 20:17

Okay, so now that we've got kind of prioritization within each, each of the quadrants, you might look at the quadrants holistically and go which one of these needs to be my first and primary focus and why is that important to me? Another way that this is taken from the book one thing I already mentioned this question, but which is the area that, if I focus on this area of my life. It makes the other else, the other ones much easier or possibly even unnecessary, because things will just kind of unfold the way that they need to. Again, you might be focusing on some of these simultaneously, but I have found that if you're just like I'm going to do all of the things, if I went from never working out to running a marathon the next day, I'd be screwed. I would ruin everything in my body and that I would never want to run ever again in my life. So you need to be smart about this. No pun intended.

Speaker 1: 21:17

With the smart goals in the way of like, don't feel like you have to conquer it all at once. You start with one thing and you build from there. So the next piece that I would do is when you're looking at the goal now you've got your annual goals, you're going to want to break those down monthly so you can just see where it is going to keep chunking it down, chunking it down, chunking it down until it feels very accessible to you. And this is again where more of the how comes in. And this is maybe where you might lean on some friends or some coaches or a group of some kind. You might need some help getting ideas even on the how. So, if I know when I just started, I'm just going to keep using the fitness example. But when I just started my fitness journey I really didn't know the how, I didn't know what to eat, I didn't know what my workout should be, I didn't know when to work out. I just I really didn't know.

Speaker 1: 22:19

And that has been a continual evolution and process for finding what works well with my body as I've gone but listening to podcasts, reading books, talking to friends, trying things out. So you might need to kind of take it a couple of things at a time if you're like okay, well, month one, I'm going to start by walking every single day and I'm also going to chat with one nutritionist. So you're breaking the how down into some very again, smart goals, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound that are one month goals in each of those goals that you made. So what you might do is grab a piece of paper and again, I could email this to you if this is helpful and you've got kind of January, february, all the way to December laid out and you've got a little box for each one of the categories that you have in front of you, or each one of the one year goals in front of you, and then you're going to break it down month by month. Okay, so if you know you want to walk 30 minutes every day, then in January that's 31 30 minute walks. Okay, all right.

Speaker 1: 23:34

And then you're going to break those goals once you get them all laid out for the year and I'm going to throw in a caveat to this we're going to build on a system where you review your goals weekly, but also monthly, because you may move through these faster, you may move through them slower. You likely will come up against some resistance or hurdles or things you need to work through. That will change how you're approaching your goal. You might find that your body is like mine and plyometrics suck for you, and so you planned that you were going to, like play basketball every day of the week, and now you're like I've got a pivot on that. So some of that. That's why I love this idea of evolution, because it's a little less concrete, it's still forward movement, it's still growth, it's still progress, but it leaves room for change and adaptation as necessary. So I would encourage you to put something down for your goals from January through December, but also know that there's some flex in there. As you learn more about yourself, there's going to be flex in there.

Speaker 1: 24:48

So what now? We're going to just look at January as an example. You're planning for the new year. You've got between four and 12 goals that you're looking at for January, and maybe less, depending on what you've decided is a priority and how you want to shape that. Use your intuition here too. This doesn't have to be sticklery. Just use your intuition on what you need to focus on for January.

Speaker 1: 25:17

And then you're going to get your calendar out. Time's really basic, but it's really important. Sometimes people forget that. Oh gosh, I forgot I had a vacation that week or my family's in town for the week, and I just know that that's going to derail me a little bit. So you want to get your calendar out and just figure out like when am I working? When am I not working? What might get in my way? How can I plan this? And we're going to just take it a week at a time, so you're actually not going to set goals for all four weeks. You kind of have to keep that in mind If I'm going to do 15 sessions of reading for 30 minutes. I might go, oh, that third week I'm on vacation and I want to do a lot of reading that week because I'm going to be on the beach and you can kind of plan around that. But then from there we really just want to set goals one week at a time. So, and I'll explain why in a minute, so now we know, okay, jen's going to read three times for 30 minutes week one. She's going to take five 30 minute walks, she's going to do breath work twice and she's going to play piano seven times, or something like that.

Speaker 1: 26:39

Then I'm going to put time on my calendar for these things. I'm going to treat them like appointments with myself and our organization. We say this a lot. If it's not on your calendar, it doesn't exist. And I really do live by my calendar. Again, there's flex in there. I'll move things around.

Speaker 1: 27:00

But if you don't have time carved out for the things you're committed to, life gets in the way and you choose what's easier because you want to go on the path of least resistance. If you're committed to your future self, if you're committed to who you're becoming, then you will make time for yourself and you will make yourself a priority, so you put it on the calendar and then you let your calendar be the boss. It's going to tell you what to do. If you have then a client, a parent, a fairy godmother that wants to meet you during that time, your responses I'm sorry, I've got an appointment during that time and you honor it. Period. They don't need to know that the appointment is with yourself. You honor what's on your calendar and you honor yourself. Okay, it's a lot. I know, guys, this is a lot when I'm coaching people.

Speaker 1: 27:58

We do this weekly, so I'm giving you a lot of content that's going to be self-guided for you. I would encourage you if you have people in your life maybe it's a partner, maybe it's a best friend, maybe it's a group of people or your book club, or you can take other people through this with you and then you guys can meet weekly and share your weekly goals and hold each other accountable to that and I don't just mean hold each other accountable with a hammer. It's can be really like okay, what's your goal? I'm here for you, I'm supporting you, I'm supporting your future self, I'm supporting who you're becoming. And then you guys ask each other questions, curious questions, like if you don't hit the goal, then it's.

Speaker 1: 28:43

We really want to uncover what's getting in the way. Is it a limiting belief? Is it a fear? Is it a lack of timing? Is it a lack of integrity? Is it that I haven't had a conversation with my husband or my kids to let them know that, like, I'm committed to this thing and I really need your support in it? So then, when you've got people that are doing this with you, they're helping you move the obstacles out of your way so you can uncover your best self right.

Speaker 1: 29:12

One of the things that I would say that tends to get in the way is that people might not have boundaries, and it just kind of comes back to that, that idea that if we're not following through on things, it's often because we aren't honoring the commitment we've made with ourself. And I can tell you firsthand that when you honor the commitment you've made to yourself and when you have trust with yourself, you're going to be able to. It's like a superpower. It's like, oh, I can conquer the world. Now, I know I'm going to follow through, I know who I am, I know that I make decisions based on my values and I know that I can say no.

Speaker 1: 30:00

So, honestly, when we don't honor our boundary boundaries, usually we're being short-sighted and we don't feel or see the long-term implications of not honoring our commitments. And I think most often we just sacrifice ourselves in that we abandon ourselves and what we know we need for all kinds of reasons, whether it's people pleasing, fear of losing a client, lack of foresight that's maybe more on the personal side. But when we don't create boundaries around our business goals, I think it's often because we're either not committed to the goal we've set or we've lost sight of our motivation and why we're doing this. So for that I personally have little motivational quotes or post-it notes reminders of why I'm doing the thing that I want to do. And that's where the vision board is really powerful.

Speaker 1: 30:53

So if for business goals or honestly, for personal goals, you've got to have a big enough vision that's going to pull you through the pain that comes back to that moving through fears too. So I'm either running from fear or I'm moving towards pleasure. And if I don't have a vision of what's going to pull me forward, or if I don't have enough, I'm going to say pleasure like a pleasurable vision or a bright future ahead of me, and I also don't have enough pain or fear that I'm running from that. I'm just going to be stagnant. So keeping your vision board in your goals in front of you is really, really helpful.

Speaker 1: 31:31

The last thing that I'll say, on a pretty practical note, is that it's going to be really important for you to remove distractions or temptations. So if I'm committed to a goal or just like with habit building, and I need to ask myself what might get in the way of this, so now that you've got your goals down, you can you already know. You know right now, like what might get in the way of this, because some of these things you've probably tried to tackle before, but this time is going to be different. So what might get in the way of this and how can I ward that off on the front end? So again, do I need other people that I need to get buy in from? Are there conversations that I need to have? Are there temptations? If it's nutrition, what things do I need to get out of the household now? What things do I need to tell my partner not to buy it or not to bring home or to hide somewhere? What old thought patterns might sneak up on me? They will show up. Expect them to and decide now how you're going to handle them so that when they show up because they will you're ready for it. Ask yourself what stopped me in the past and then put a plan in place to hedge that off now. And then, last thing, we all have a dip in motivation sometimes. So trials and challenges are going to show up and a dip in motivation is going to show up.

Speaker 1: 32:59

Discipline always precedes motivation. By the way, a lot of times people say, well, I just don't feel motivated. That's fine, you don't have to feel motivated. You got the motivation and the vision. You already know where you're headed. That's your motivation. But when you wake up not feeling motivation, then you decide to be committed to yourself. Period, end of story. Love yourself enough to be disciplined and committed. And when you do that, the motivation will show up, I promise you, because you're going to start to feel yourself becoming all of the things you imagined and then you're going to be like, oh my God, it's happening. And then the motivation shows up and the motivation feeds the discipline and the discipline discipline feeds the motivation. But when you're starting something new, you might have a spark of motivation, but that will fade and you'll have a dip in that, and that's when you get ready and you get disciplined in it. So we set the goal and then you set up your mind, your environment, your relationships so that everything supports the goal as much as humanly possible.

Speaker 1: 34:19

I tackled like six months of a normal coaching in 35 minutes or about 40 for you guys. But if you've got questions, feel free to shoot me an email. I've considered doing like a weekend workshop, if that's something that you might be interested in, or maybe maybe even some group coaching around this. I would be happy to do that. Shoot me an email, let me know, and I can consider maybe putting like a half day Saturday together or like a Friday morning group coaching session or something like that. So let me know your thoughts, let me know your questions. I keep saying this is the last thing with this is at the last last thing I'm going to say, and I mean this whole heartedly.

Speaker 1: 35:15

I believe in you. I believe that we all have everything we need within ourselves and in the resources around us to become who we want to become. You might not see it now, but open your heart, open your mind, open your eyes to all of the possibility and the resources are going to show up for you. The discipline will show up when you need it. The motivation will show up when it's time. You can absolutely transform any and every area of your life and sometimes we got to let the old things burn and the old things die, and we need to be courageous and work through fears and edges If you want to become somebody new. It is a transformative process. That is like some metamorphosis it's caterpillar becoming a butterfly. It is going inward and flexing muscles and being born, renewed, being born new.

Speaker 1: 36:33

I know I'm going a little out there, from talking from goals to talking about this, but these goals aren't just about achievement. I just don't believe that, because we just took a really big vision of the life that you want to live and we broke it down to goals, and now I'm bringing you back and reminding you that these goals are about you becoming and living the life you want to live, because life is too short to do anything else. Okay, okay, I have love for you. I have a lot of love for you. I might not know you, but I feel love for you. Okay, have a banging day. I'll catch you next time, as always.

Speaker 1: 37:33

Thank you for tuning in. I hope that this episode is supporting you in becoming your most whole self so that you can lead your most full life. You are definitely worthy and deserving of that. All of the resources that we shared today are going to be linked in the show notes. You can check those out there, along with ways that you can connect with us if you've got questions or feedback or people that you think we should reach out to to highlight their story on the whole shebang podcast. In the meantime, please be sure to hit that follow button so you don't miss a beat. Share this episode or any others with those that you think could benefit from this conversation, and you can do the podcast a huge favor by leaving a five star review In the meantime. I hope that you have a fantastic banging day.