2023 January 10 Goal setting, the first steps revisited

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers, and actually for everyone. Thanks for joining me tonight to take the next step in envisioning our future. So let's get started. If you like what you hear tonight, please leave a like and tell your friends or drop me a note.

You may have noticed a slight change in our tagline.  Instead of just saying for Baby Boomers, we're officially welcoming everybody. Why the change? Because I've gotten quite a few comments from people of all ages saying they're interested in reenvisioning their lives and capturing their dreams, and who can blame them for that?

Because of that, we want to make sure that it's clear that what we cover isn't just for Baby Boomers or people over 50, or any specific age group. We might do a couple classes for things that are for people my age, but even those really aren't all that age specific. Life lessons, at least good life lessons, generally apply throughout your entire life.

Things like Don't put off following your dreams. Live life to the fullest. Try to die with no regrets of things you're meant to do, but didn't get around to. Have your life be your own good legacy. These and many others are really timeless advice. I was focused on Baby Boomers because that's my generation, and because many of my peers have kind of given up, thinking there's nothing else they can contribute. 

Then I realized that many younger people feel the same way, often feeling overwhelmed by how they perceive the world. Pretty much everything we talk about applies whether you're 18 or 81. We can all contribute to making the world a better place. We can all live our lives to the fullest extent possible, and we should all have the joy of having hope in the future. So it’s a slight shift in focus, and we're welcoming everybody. I want to challenge you to find the best version of yourself in absolutely everything that you do.

So tonight we're going to be carrying on a little bit with our goal setting, but we're  going to go back and do a quick review of what we've covered up to this point. We've done it on and off over a few weeks and so we're  going to try and do things a little more quickly for anyone who's joining us now. We'll start back at the beginning in a high level place, and then we're going to have a challenge and go through this whole process again, only in a guided fashion and write your own goals down. 

But why start again now? One thing, this is the week that many people will be giving up on their New Year's resolutions. As I record this, it's January 10th, nine full days after many people made a bunch of arbitrary promises to themselves.

Remember last week, we reviewed SMART goals. Take a listen to that episode if you want. It's on the January 3rd, 2023 episode, if you want to review SMART goals and envision it a little bit. Most people don't make SMART goals, and in reality don't really even ponder their resolutions all that carefully.

So after a week or two, in this time period right now, many people realize the things they resolved to do really weren't all that important to them to begin with. So they just kind of bull through it with willpower, and that usually doesn't last very long - usually under three weeks, which puts us in that timeframe.

But it turns out about 40% of the people do keep their New Year's resolutions, according to a story I just read in the Wall Street Journal, personal section. What was the biggest difference in the success of the successful people? Shorter term goals. Remember the time-based part of SMART goals, and they had specific goals that matter to them (specific & relevant). 

These techniques don't just work for New Year's resolutions. We can use them for anything that really matters to us, and especially things that matter a lot. We just seem to have trouble either getting started or getting over that first hump of resistance. So this is really a technique when you have something important in your life to really keep moving yourself forward even when things get difficult. 

So how do we normally do our goals? First we dream, often with little critique of what we choose to pursue. We're all excited about it, and a lot of them seem fun, but we haven't really chosen anything in particular. We just say, Oh, it'd be nice to have a yacht. It'd be nice to retire and go to Venice for the rest of my life. It'd be nice to do - whatever, pick something that you want to do. 

There's not a lot of thought in it. It's just fun things to think about. Maybe we are a little more serious about some of them. So okay, I do want to go to Venice. Then we lay out the initial plan. We've all done this. First I'm going to save $100,000 and then I'm going to find a place.

I'm  going to look online and see where I can stay. Then I'm going to find out how long I can stay there on my first visa. You lay out all these things, and it all seems very nice, and you're still happy and everything's all upbeat and we have this wonderful initial plan. But then almost immediately, once we start on this, we start having our first doubts.

We lay out the initial plan and we try to make believe we can see everything that's going to happen. Of course we can't, and we start running into issues because, realistically, we can't see the future very well. Then we say, Oh, $100,000, I hadn't really thought about how am I  going to save $100,000. Pretty soon, things are out of order, things aren't making sense anymore. 

If you've followed me along, you recall that our brain wasn't really entirely on board with this whole plan from the beginning, most likely, because we're starting to do things that are completely different than we normally do.

And what's our brain programmed to do? We've talked about this a lot. Our brain is all set to keep us safe. It naturally wants to keep us safe from failure. It wants to keep us safe from the unknown. It just wants us to have a nice, simple, happy life and nice easy goals. Once we start hitting some resistance or problems, our brains generally freak out.

They start all those little stories that most of us have told ourselves at some point that're generally designed to give us a reason to stop our attempt to make a big change, and let us go back to being safe without losing credibility with ourselves. Then we think, Well, who could have seen this coming? It was just a silly dream. No one can blame you for trying and being smart enough to quit before things got worse. That sort of skill never ran in our family. I really shouldn't be trying to do something this hard at this particular point in my life. And there are thousands more stories like that, where that one came from.

Those then lead us into that horrible place where we've all been at various times: that dreaded place of overwhelm.  Overwhelm is when we see so many things wrong that we see no possible way out. We can't even think of what we had for breakfast, let alone how to solve all the new problems we created trying to follow our silly dreams. Remember, we've already convinced ourselves they're silly - We shouldn't have tried it. It was a bad time. I should have had more money. I should have had a different job - where we have all these reasons, and finally, you give in. You stop your adventure and you go back to your old life, which is familiar. But the whole reason you started your adventure is because it may have been familiar, but it wasn't entirely satisfying.

Well, we don't have to do that cycle. Remember we talked about ways to get around that. We can go back and do our dreams just like before. The difference this time is that we have the same dreams, but at some point in the process, we start to evaluate them. Then we select the one or two, possibly three, that really, really matter to us. We turn them into SMART goals. We'll talk more about the details of that coming up, probably next week or the week after.

We've talked about the fundamentals a few times, so check it out. One part of it was last week. There've been other episodes before that. We started our freeform dreaming. Now we've picked a couple SMART goals and we've laid them out.

They're specific and they're actionable. All the things we talked about to make our SMART goals SMART. At that point, now we go into the envisionment phase. This is a big change because before we tried to lay out all our plans in advance. We know some plan from here to infinity of everything that could possibly happen, and we try and plan our way around it. 

But by envisionment, we start instead by looking at all the things we thought we were going to do. However we define happiness. We're number one in our group. We are set for money. We have the house we wanted. Life is always sunny because we're on the beach, or it's always snowing because we like to ski. We have a car that doesn't need to be visiting the mechanic more than it’s visiting us. Now we've laid out very specific actionable goals. There's a way to measure our progress towards them, which is the M of SMART. 

With all that, now if we dwell upon this, and this is what we talked about before - and it's really very important - we have to immersively envision how we want to live our life in the future. We're  going to come back and talk about this extensively, because there's some very specific techniques that we should do. You want to imagine that future in enough detail that it almost becomes real. Not only the things, not only having enough money that you can live comfortably, having a house that you're pleased to bring people to, etc.

It's not just things, but it's everything. The other people around you, the sights, the sounds, the tastes, the smells, what people are saying, the music, the wind in the trees, absolutely everything. T the point that you can tell that vision of someone in such detail that they will think it already happened.

When you can do that and keep practicing it, not only will strangers believe it, but your brain will start to believe it too, and it will get comfortable with that concept. It'll realize that it is possible, and then it will start to think in a way that will find you opportunities to live your life in a way that will bring you closer to your dreams.

Like we talked before, when you start at the end and work backwards, now your brain's already all in. It says, Yeah, we can do this. I know we can do this. We've done parts of this before in different ways. We can do this. As it starts coming back towards the present, when it comes across a problem, it already knows we can get there.

So it knows it can solve the problem, knows the shift in mindset. Before it was telling you, Don't do it. It's risky! and you come across a problem and it says, See, I told you there were going to be problems. We better not do this this time. It's thinking from a whole different viewpoint. It is thinking We can do this.

So it comes across a problem and says, I know I can solve this problem. A 180° shift in mindset can make a 180° shift in your life, on how you approach problems when you think they're solvable. Think about things that happen around your house all the time. If it's something little, all of a sudden the faucet starts dripping,  you've seen it before. You know how to fix it. You go to the hardware store, you get a new piece and fix it. It's not something that's insurmountable. The first time you saw that, it may have seemed insurmountable until you read and figured out how to do it. Once your brain knows it's doable, your brain becomes extremely powerful.

There's a lot more to cover, but enough for tonight. We'll pick this back up again next week. So that's it for the evening. Please remember the war in Ukraine. If you're able and interested, please remember the page of donation links is still up at UKR7.com, and the link to the World Central Kitchen is also there. WCK.org

They are still putting out meals like crazy. It's super important. The war is definitely going on in a very active way and anything you can do to help the people of Ukraine would be definitely appreciated. If for whatever reason you don't want to help them, I would encourage you to help somebody, because remember - one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others.

That's it for the evening. Thanks for stopping by. If you found something useful or interesting, please pass it along and please hit that Like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great weekend, and as always, a wonderful new year. We'll restart the resolutions in a much better way if you had some failed ones. 

But most importantly, remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone, and see you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.