Give your Inner Critic a Latte, While You Dream & Do Big

There is a sense of ambition that comes with a new year, or the perception of a new chapter. But setting bold goals can be a challenge when you have experience in an arena, or when it has never existed before.?

You may be all too aware of the constraints, the hurdles that await you, if you even dare to utter a goal that seems too far fetched or fantastical.?

With the intention of powering our ambition, today you get to jump the belief chasm, accessing the seemingly fantastical, through the power of storytelling. This will enable you to give yourself permission to create innovative bold goals for yourself, your team, your organization and then activate them into reality.

I’ll share with you:?

• An understanding of why creating bold innovative goals can be challenging.?
• How to overcome this challenge in order to dream big.
• How to harness what you create from dreaming into action.

The uses of this are infinite but a few include:

• Planing and vision meetings to imagine the future of a campaign or a project.
• Before an important call that you might be worried about desire to go reallywell.
• Personal 90 day, 1 year planning.?

With that said, let’s get stuck in. When creating bold goals, why do need to give ourselves permission to dream? Why does our brain trip us up??

Kids don’t seem to need any permission. They can easily share with you how they’re going to use a ladder to get to the moon. They’re not accustomed to limits, ceilings. They have no experience yet, of why something “won’t work”. We call this the kid-like-mindset.?

Let's flip over to the adult-like-mindset.

We have plenty of experience, plenty of expertise. It's fantastic. It's kept us alive pretty nicely. It makes us really amazing at analyzing and prioritizing things. We know that when we tried to put the ladder to get to the moon, it flew away or it hit somebody on the head which is why we haven’t used the ladder since.

Our experience is what has made sure that we've got all these amazing things done, but when we step back to setting ambitious goal we need to for a moment, step into our kid-like mindset.

Creating anything new requires a suspension of current reality. Our inner critic is there to protect us in these situations from looking like a fool at work, to share with us what is currently happening in the market place, what has happened before based on experience.?

But if you think about any entrepreneurial success, any new product, service which you have grown accustomed to, such as groceries being delivered within the hour (Instacart, Doordash) or sleeping on a strangers couch (Air BnB) there was a moment when the idea was ridiculed, seemed absurd or even dangerous.

This is the birth place of innovation which is why it’s important to give ourselves permission to create the new and the bold otherwise we will be duplicating everything that has preceded. Innovation requires us to live on the fringes.?

In order to do that we need to tap into our child like mindset which is full of curiosity and wonder, uninhibited by reality and gently ask our inner critic to take a seat, have a latte, chamomile tea.?

We need to be able for a moment to push the thinking.

The challenge is that when we look to set goals, our mind is great at sharing with us all the obstacles that we can ensue.?

Think of a meeting, where you discuss the same topics, uncover the same issues. It’s great to have a sense of ‘reality’ but sometimes that reality can just get in the way of really thinking about the potential opportunities.?

When we think about goal setting, like for example if I said I’m going to launch 300 podcasts within the next 365 days. When I say that, as I say that out loud in my body, my mind is freaking out. It's thinking about all the things that can get in the way of me doing that.

With that it's getting in the way of me even proclaiming it as a goal or task. If I think about all the other things that maybe I want to share with you in terms of what my goals might be, I might restrict those as it takes my breath away in terms of all the potential hurdles.

Our mind is like a Duckagogo or Google search engine. When it's looking forward, it's thinking about all the different obstacles. It's collecting all the different data points of why something might be challenging to achieve.

Because again, it wants to be super helpful. Our mind is very generous. One way to shortcut, suggested by transformation coach Kyle Cease, is to step into the future and look back, retelling the goals as stories as if they've already happened.

You can start with something small. We can pretend that it is tomorrow and I am telling you all about the amazing things that happened yesterday, AKA today. So I could say, “oh my gosh, you never guess what happened yesterday. It was the most incredible day. All these amazing things happened.”

“It felt like…. it??looked like….. The meeting was a success because ….. Things flowed because …”I would start to tell you all the amazing things that had happened in that circumstance. The mind has no idea whether you're telling the truth or not and so it generously accepts it as truth when it's looking back.

This is powerful for us because when it accepts it as truth, it's taught us to generate all the other amazing things that can happen. It also starts to think about all the different resources that can be used in order to empower this new reality. We can hack to persuade our inner critic to have a break in order for us to tap into the abundance of our childlike mindset, our dreaming state, that metaphorical kind of language.?

Use this to create your goals, success for any period of time whether that’s an upcoming meeting, quarter or years to come.

Below is a step by step method using this tool, offered by transformation coach, Kyle Cease. You can do this with a partner, or the by yourself.

Step 1: The Three Month Share?

Partner up with someone. Choose who will be person A and person B.?

Person A look at Person B, and say: “You never guess what has happened since we last spoke three months ago. So much has happened since then, let me tell you.” Then you will proceed to share with them all the fabulous things that have happened in the last three months.?

Person B your role is to nod, smile and look very positive. Nothing more. Nothing less. Do not ask them about feasibility, reality, budgets.?

Do this for five minutes and then switch roles.?

Step 2: The Six Month Share?

Then do this for 6 months. And switch roles.

Step 3: The One Year Share?

Then do it for 1 year. And then switch roles.

Step 4: The Super Charge Zone?

After this Person B, your role is to take the strands of what has been shared with you by person A and super charge their story. For example, if they talk about wanting to be a thought leader in their field, you might say, well I hear that Forbes and Fast Company are knocking on your door. Or that Oprah has invited you for dinner yet again.?

Super Charge for five minutes and then switch roles.?

Step 5: The Action Plan?

Based on this new story that you get to tell, ask yourself: “what are the three steps that I need to take immediately to lean into this reality?” This is your activation moment for action planning.?

This process is applicable for all aspects of your life including your team and your organization to get them set for creating vision for a project and the future.?

I’m so excited to hear how you incorporate this into your planning and dreaming.?

This is a wonderful way of giving your team, your organization, a project, orsomething personal the wings and excitement it needs to become a new reality.

Your body can start to feel this new reality. You can get excited, you can get ramped up about it. And then from that space, you can start to take action because it's the little steps that you take that are going to compound over time into creating this new creative, innovative future for yourself for 2022 and for decades to come.

Check out the podcast if you want an audio reminder:?https://bit.ly/3EQs1Bt. Share your stories with me.?