2023 January 3 Envision your future (starting with your purpose)

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. Thanks for joining me tonight to take the next step in envisioning our future. So let's get started. 

First, a regular reminder: I'm not a medical professional, but I will be talking about things that I personally find useful and helpful and have helped other people that I've worked with.

If you find yourself feeling truly hopeless or depressed, please seek professional medical help or just dial 911. Dialing 988 or 800-273-8255 should get you to a professional on the phone who can coach you through things in your particular situation, if you're feeling particularly depressed or hopeless. It's always good to talk to somebody. It's always good to know somebody's around. Keep this information handy for yourself or for a friend. 

It seems funny to start a podcast off with something like that, but anytime you talk about working with yourself and your own inner feelings, sometimes things come to the surface that are surprising, so don't be bashful. If you really feel something's out of control, dial one of the numbers, 911 or 988, the new suicide hotline. So keep that number handy for yourself or for a friend, especially over the holidays, especially if you start working on your own inner feelings. 

I do apologize for being late, but sometimes life just doesn't go like we expect. And like I often say, then you have to give yourself grace: you've made the best effort possible and move forward from there. Sitting there and beating up on yourself does nothing positive and certainly doesn't get you in the right mindset to move forward. 

Now tonight we're going to talk a little bit more about goal setting and envisionment, but I really also want to revisit something more basic. How are you positioning yourself in life relative to your most important and truly life motivating goals, your real inner meaning, your purpose of life?

I'm going to steal something from Tony Robbins, whom I totally admire. He has a promotion going on right now about how to become unshakable. Everything I've heard about his work is just amazing. His books are fun. He's great to watch in a film. But the catch line for this one was that to really advance, you need to surround yourself with people better than yourself. People, as he says, who are out of your league. 

I've heard that advice a lot, but I found it curious coming from Tony Robbins, because he (probably more than many other people, maybe most other people) seems to surround himself with people who are far below his league and truly need his help. He works to pull them up, to help build them up. The unspoken, sometimes overlooked, aspect of that advice, to surround yourself with people out of your league, is really when you're trying to improve yourself - yes, learn from those who are far above your league, but never forget that your reason for being should always be to help others if you really want to find true contentment. 

I mentioned this for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that it's pretty common advice. It's often presented as the cost of getting better.

You have to leave your old friends behind and surround yourself with better people, right? I just don't quite buy into that whole thing because - If you have to change friends, it should be because your friends became unsupportive because they really didn't want you to succeed, and were they really friends then? It should never be that you dump your old friends, because now hopefully you can hang out with people that can teach you something. If you really want to succeed together, then you're going to have to be working with those other people.

Hopefully everyone can work together and still be just more successful and content. If your old friends are truly friends, they'll support you as you try and improve yourself, and hopefully you'll support them back, and then you can all improve, and that's really a win-win.

The other reason I bring it up is because we often hear these catchy little shortcuts, like finding better people to hang out with if you want to be successful. I've seen that tagline on Instagram reels and TikToks and various ads on Facebook. But the problem with that is if all you do is try and get info from other people, they will quickly grow tired of you and not want to be your friend for very long.

Friendship is always a two-way street, and both parties have to contribute to it. This is just a reminder, because there’s no shortcut to lasting success. Your friendships should always be sincere, and your plan should always be supportive of others. Your goals should always be noble. Those things should never change, no matter what. You're trying to change your life and you should always treat your friends dearly, and try to move everybody forward to a better place.

But what are the most noble goals of all? Well, those are the ones that support your true life purpose. So how do we discover our own life purpose? It's been said that the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of the questions we ask ourselves. Ask yourself superficial questions, and you'll probably end up with a superficial life.

We all know many examples, such as people who are only concerned about unimportant details, like the shine on their car, how they present themselves in a meeting. You know, there are times when those things may be important, but they're generally not life defining questions, nor answers. But if you ask yourself deeper, difficult questions about your beliefs, your desires, your relationships, and what you want out of life, you'll begin a journey of self-discovery into the very reasons you find purpose and meaning in life.

I'm not going to try and give an example of this, because for every person it's very different. Oftentimes it may not even be obvious to us, when we first start to think about it, what our real meaning is about life. But there's something known as the technique of the Seven Whys.

The first couple of answers you typically give when somebody asks you why, it'd be the answer that you give to a stranger at a party. They're quick and they're socially acceptable and everyone will agree. I changed jobs to make more money or I skipped going to college because it was too expensive.

This technique, the Seven Whys, works better with two or more people, but after the first couple of whys - if you keep asking yourself why and why, and drilling down, the answers start to get more difficult, and they also start to get more real.

This is just a taste of how real life discovery coaching can help you get past the stories you've been telling yourself your whole life, and start to discover the inner stories that are really controlling you. It's those stories, those automations, that often lead us to make the decisions that we do.

I'll be talking more about coaching in the future, but coaching isn't telling you the answer to anything. Coaching is helping you to discover the answers that you already have inside you. We'll come back to coaching, but as I said in the beginning, we're going to switch now and do a quick recap of smart goals.

Life discovery is what should drive you towards your goals, but even once you start to set some goals, you really want to use SMART goals. Now that you've found your early passion and what is going to drive you to move forward, then you have to start laying out goals. But that's hard, because a lot of times they're hidden behind the stories we tell ourselves. Once we start getting down to what is truly important to us, and we say, Okay, I'm going to set two or three goals that really matter, then we want to follow the SMART methodology. 

The goals should be Specific. You want your goal to be defined and explained concisely. Not: I  want to lose weight. That's the first piece. Go back to motivation. Is it that you want to lose weight or you want to be more fit? Or do you want to feel more comfortable? Or is it that you just  want to lose weight?

That's a fine goal, but you should really be clear in your head so it's not just something superficial. It's something very specific. It should be Measurable. I don't want to lose weight. I  want to lose five pounds. It has to be measurable, and it has to be achievable and actionable.

It can't be that, Oh, I  want to lose 500 pounds by the dance next month. Not going to happen. Can't happen. Has to be actionable. I want to learn how to fly. As in flap your arms and fly, probably not going to happen. It has to be relevant. That is, it has to be something that is relevant to your goals, to your meaning of life. I could say, I  want to learn the piccolo, except it doesn't interest me. I have no reason to learn it. I mean, there's just no particular reason. If I try and do it, it probably is not going to last really long.

 But if I say, Oh, I  want to become better at playing the piano so I can fill in at church when the organist doesn’t show up. Okay. Now there's something that's related to things that are matter to me, and things that I can act upon and tie into my inner motivations and goals. But there should still be a reach goal, a stretch goal. If it's just something simple like, Oh, I  want to practice scales on the piano - I know how to practice scales. But I want to learn how to play in front of an audience and not get all wound up because I have a bunch of people that are listening to me and I tend to then start missing notes in the piano - that's more of a reach goal. I'm actually now going out of my comfort zone, and it's something that makes me nervous. Then it’s going to be something that makes a bigger, important difference in my life. 

Then they have to be time-based. They should have a deadline. If you don't give yourself a deadline, you tend to keep putting things off. So it really has to be some sort of time-based. It should be a reasonable time. I  want to learn how to play three major scales, all chords in three major scales, within three months, so that I can play them through in front of an audience of at least 10 people. So now I give my mind something to really think about and to really work towards. When you take all those things together, the specific, measurable, the actionable and achievable, the relevant and the reach and the time-based, now you've given your mind something you can really run with, really take and and say, Okay, now I know what I'm working towards, and now it can really go for it.

These are very different from resolutions or wants or dreams. With SMART goals, you have a definitive target. You can tell if you're making progress. They're relevant to your goals, but they still take some effort to attain and you have a deadline, so you can't keep putting it off. So borrowing from Tony Robbins: Resolutions are just an intention, but most people don't really have the resolve to do what it takes to meet their goals. I would say the SMART framework, coupled with training our brain to envision our goals, helps us to naturally work towards our goals instead of trying to get there by determination or willpower alone.

This is why most resolutions fail. People are just going to power through it, right? I got up today at five o'clock and I went to the gym for an hour. I got up tomorrow at five o'clock and I did it.  Then the third day, it’s more like: I got up at 5:10. I did most of my workout. Then the next day: I got up at 5:30 and it was cold outside. You're just trying to force yourself to do something that your brain hasn't bought into. 

There's a huge difference when you are aligned with your goals, and you've envisioned what you want to do. Now when you pick a SMART goal and you start working toward it, your whole being is aligned with it, and it makes it much easier to keep doing it.

You're not trying to force yourself to do it. Your brain is drawing you forward, drawing you forward so that you do it naturally. We'll be talking more about all of this in our upcoming See Your Future Transformed Course. It will cover the whole process in a lot more detail. But if you  want to get a start on re-imagining your future, then this week you can pick a couple of goals and then, alone or with someone else to help coach you along. Do the technique of the Seven Why's to try and discover why you really picked those goals. Keep trying to dig down into why you gave the answer you just did. Hopefully you'll start to come to some surprising insights into what's driving you forward and, and motivating you along.

But that's it for the evening. Remember, please, that the war in Ukraine is still going on. If you're able and interested, the page for donations is always up at UKR7.com. The link to World Central Kitchen is there right at the very top of the donation page. Ukraine right now can really use a lot of help.

A lot of people send a lot of things. It's all excellent, and I would just encourage you, it's just one more way in the holiday season that you can show your appreciation for what you have in your life and share it with others. So if you can please check it.

Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. That's it for this evening. Thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. Please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week and a wonderful New Year.

Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you again. Have a fantastic week.