136. Get Off the Struggle Bus: 3 Tips for Gaining Ground on Your Goals

Episode Transcript

Verbs Boyer:
So we were just talking about this. Nick brought up the question about the struggle bus.

Verbs Boyer:
The question is, have you ever felt like you’re on the struggle bus with your goals? But the question was about the struggle bus itself. Even though you’re on the bus, it may not have been struggling at first, but now you’ve realized you’ve pulled the thing down and you cannot stop the struggle bus. So of course, you we want to get off.

Blake Stratton:
Do you want to stop the struggle bus? Do you want the struggle bus…

Verbs Boyer:
The struggle bus has to be stopped.

Nick Jaworski:
Yeah, the metaphor is strange.

Blake Stratton:
Would you be getting off to try to find a better bus or are you calling an Uber at that point?

Verbs Boyer:
Well, at this point…

Courtney Baker:
I would like to call the midnight bus. What’s it called on Harry Potter? You know what I’m talking about?

Blake Stratton:
The Midnight Train to Georgia.

Verbs Boyer:
No.

Courtney Baker:
No. I don’t want to be on that one for sure.

Verbs Boyer:
We actually want to get you into the driver’s seat, so you don’t have to ride the bus. That’s the goal.

Courtney Baker:
Absolutely. Yes.

Verbs Boyer:
Slide into a Tesla or something.

Courtney Baker:
I wanna own the bus. That’s right.

Verbs Boyer:
But, Courtney, have you ever actually felt like you’ve been traveling some miles on a struggle bus in regards to your goals?

Courtney Baker:
Well, full disclosure, listen, I do my weekly preview every Sunday evening. Some weeks probably I do a better job than other weeks, but to me it’s a habit at this point to do it. But I realized this week I was reading through my goal pages and there’s two of my goals for this quarter that I’m so excited about. And I feel really excited.

Courtney Baker:
I’m on pace, I’m doing what I had set out to do. And again I read these every week, I realize this other goal that was further back, but still assigned for this quarter, I was like, “Oh gosh, this is this quarter.” It was like, somehow I had missed it. And so I realized I was like “I’ve got to figure out something here with this goal.” Which choosing my own medicine was questioning, actually should this even be a goal? Because obviously I’ve been much more excited about these other two goals or should I even have this third one? Should I have just had two? And so I think for everybody listening that finds themself here… I found myself here this week, this is a very true story about my goals for this quarter.

Courtney Baker:
So, yeah, I am on the struggle bus trying to determine which action I’m going to take next year.

Blake Stratton:
Well, welcome, dear listeners, to our therapy session with Courtney, as she reclines, we will pepper her with questions to uncover what the struggle bus even is and how she can get off it, stay on it, buy a fleet of them or take appropriate next actions.

Courtney Baker:
Actions? I love those auctions.

Verbs Boyer:
Take appropriate next auctions. So, Courtney, you are in luck because it just so happens that today we’re going to talk about a change of mindset that will completely shift the way you approach your work. So we have three guidelines that we’re going to talk about that will help you set your Weekly Big 3 to reenergize your goal progress.

Verbs Boyer:
Welcome to another episode of Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the internet. So you can banish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. I’m Verbs here with Courtney Baker and Blake Stratton. Happy Monday to you both.

Blake Stratton:
Happy Monday to you.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah. Happy Monday.

Verbs Boyer:
We’re here again on camera, on screen.

Blake Stratton:
Wow.

Courtney Baker:
Yep, and I’m still feeling the pressure of that. I can’t do my normal dance moves. I don’t know when I’m going to shake the “Oh, this is going to be put on the internet.”

Verbs Boyer:
Why not? What keeps you from doing those dance moves Courtney?

Courtney Baker:
My Enneagram Three. It is like, keep it profess…

Verbs Boyer:
Keep it tight.

Courtney Baker:
Keep it tight. We’ll see how long it takes for me to really break out the dance moves here.

Blake Stratton:
Yeah. I’m trying to lead you here. I feel like I’m really stepping out in incredible unprofessionalism, just to make a wide… give you plenty of space.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah.

Blake Stratton:
It’ll always be being in comparisons like, wow. That, I don’t know if that was super professional, but well, maybe it was because look what Blake’s doing over there. Right?

Courtney Baker:
Yeah. Which is really funny because I… I do love to dance. So we’re just going to have to see how of this evolves. So maybe Verbs you can share some of your latest dance moves. By the way, are you still dancing?

Verbs Boyer:
Wait, pause, pause. Don’t try to flip this card on me. This is all about your moment. Your dancing, you stepping in.

Courtney Baker:
Okay. Yeah.

Verbs Boyer:
The kickball chain of who you are. Speaking of struggling, we are talking about what it’s like when you’re struggling and you’re trying to gain ground on your goals and I think we have three steps that we want to walk the listeners through to get past that, get off of that struggle bus so you can be in the driver’s seat.

Blake Stratton:
All right. First and foremost, focus on how high leverage.

Blake Stratton:
When you’re trying to hit goals. I feel like where almost everyone, myself included runs into trouble, is you are essentially becoming somebody different. You’re doing different things. And a lot of times we approach goal setting as this additive thing, but we don’t even realize that’s what we’re doing. We just say, “Oh, I want to do more. I want to be bigger. I want to have a bigger houseboat than the one that I currently have.” I’m sure that’s a common goal with most people.

Courtney Baker:
Totally.

Blake Stratton:
But when we think of it as a purely additive thing… And again, we may not even realize we’re doing it, but you can tell that’s how you’re thinking about it. If you’re so busy doing the day to day maintenance of everything else in your life that you don’t have time “For goal work.”

Blake Stratton:
So this tip focus on high leverage. First of all, you acknowledge that not every task carries the same weight, not everything is of equal importance. Or maybe a better way to say it is, not every domino is as heavy as the next domino. There are some things that will cause a ripple effect. Nick didn’t buy that analogy.

Courtney Baker:
What I love is that our producer Nick is like, “Yeah, that one didn’t hit.” Like he just gives you one subtle shift of the head- [crosstalk 00:07:19]

Blake Stratton:
And like, is this meat good? It says the best buy date is fine, but-

Nick Jaworski:
But you don’t realize that is that I’m very trusting. And so when people say things, my thought was our dominoes heavier than other dominoes. I was like thinking through, I don’t know about dominoes. Maybe they’re.

Blake Stratton:
No. Every domino is the same in the game of Dominoes. But in the game of goals, Nick, each task is a domino, but some are really big, heavy dominoes and some are little small dominoes.

Verbs Boyer:
Unless you are mixing up boxes of dominoes also.

Blake Stratton:
Hey, there you go. You could be mixing up your dominoes.

Verbs Boyer:
If you have a box of dominoes from over here, one from over there.

Blake Stratton:
You could be ordering Domino’s and some Domino’s are going to deliver faster than others. Just to confuse people even more. What I’m talking about is to think about which of those tasks are going to really move the needle on what you consider important. You’re shifting your mindset from… Success is checking everything off of my list to success is identifying what are the highest leverage things on my list and am I accomplishing those things?

Courtney Baker:
I think that right there is like a mic drop. I feel like that is the mindset shift that our culture, didn’t just…

Blake Stratton:
I tried to drop my mic, it didn’t work super well.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah. You did try to drop your mic there. Note for the audio. Yeah. We’ve been so culturally programmed to just check off boxes without any filtering system that says “Actually, no, that shouldn’t be the goal.” Just to check off all the boxes. At a certain extent yeah, that would be great because you would get your high leverage and low leverage things done, but it’s usually not feasible. The list that we could come up with is really probably a mile long. What’s actually important is checking off the most important things and I don’t feel like we talk about that enough outside of this podcast where we talk about it all the time.

Verbs Boyer:
You guys remember that there’s an analogy that people will use towards a story of an older wise, sage type of character. And there’s a younger character and they have this contest about who can chop down the tree the fastest, you guys know where I’m going?

Courtney Baker:
No.

Verbs Boyer:
Okay. [crosstalk 00:09:54].

Blake Stratton:
Is one of the characters, Abraham Lincoln?

Verbs Boyer:
Let’s say it is old honest [inaudible 00:09:59], okay? But so you have this wise gentleman, the goal is to chop down the tree, the quickest. So the young guy he’s in his twenties, he grabs his axe, he’s just chopping at the tree. He’s going for hours. And he doesn’t hear the older guy on the other side, chopping down his tree at all. There’s no noise. So the younger guy is chopping away. Finally, the younger guy hears the older guy chopping at his tree. And finally, within the next 30 minutes, the tree falls. Meanwhile, the younger guy is halfway in. And so he finally gets through and he goes to the older guy. He says, I didn’t even hear you chopping your tree and then 30 minutes later, you start and it’s gone. The clincher is when the guy did not hear the older gentleman chopping, he was actually sharpening his axe. So he could have a sharper blade to get cut further into the tree faster, which cut down his time to get the job done. I probably butchered that story, no pun, but you see what I’m saying?

Courtney Baker:
No, that’s amazing.

Verbs Boyer:
Higher leverage, sharpen the axe. That’s the point.

Courtney Baker:
Yes. I think that’s so good.

Blake Stratton:
What that analogy answers is a mental process that you would do to assess if something is high or low leverage. If I do this, will that make everything else I’m trying to do easier or potentially unnecessary by sharpening the axe it’s significantly easier and making chops 50 through 100 completely unnecessary. And that’s, I think how we have to think about our own task list, particularly tasks that we may associate with our goals. When I’m trying to do a big goal, it’s incredible how big a list I’ll make of stuff that doesn’t matter. But when I look at that stuff that I feel like I’ve got to do, usually it’s stuff that feels really comfortable or that I’ve done before, or that is not vulnerable to failure in some respect, but oftentimes the highest leverage things are those things that are vulnerable to failure.

Blake Stratton:
Meaning I haven’t done it before or I don’t know exactly how that’s going to go, but usually they’re pretty simple. So high leverage doesn’t even mean hard or takes the longest. A lot of times they’re simple things, but they may scare us to some degree. We don’t need to spend too much time on this point, but that’s something that I notice for me is like, actually what’s highest leverage is just to pick up the phone and call this person and ask them for X, Y, or Z. I just don’t want to look like dope. And so I make this whole task list or I do other things on my list instead of the simple, higher leverage thing.

Courtney Baker:
Okay. So the second step to think about when you’re struggling with your goals is to focus on the next steps. And I think a lot of times when we think about our goals, we think about the entirety of the goal. All the things that have to be done to actually accomplish the goal. And really what we need to do is focus on just what is the next step. And anytime I think about this, I don’t know about you two, but it makes it so much easier. I actually do this when I do my weekly preview, which is funny how I got in this spot with this one goal that I was like, “Wait, where did you come from?” What is the next step for me? I find so many times that it’s the tiniest thing needs to be done to get the ball rolling down the hill.

Courtney Baker:
Usually it’s like a phone call, an email. I need to do a tiny bit of research to get clarity about this next step. I can think of a goal this year that I’m pursuing and I think I shared in a previous podcast. And I needed to text a friend to get some recommendations for someone to work with, to help me with this goal. And that was the first step, but the first two weeks was stalling. And I was like, “All I have to do is do a text.” It’s a simple first step to get this going. Either of you fall on this trap?

Verbs Boyer:
Yeah. I think even with that its like, “All right if she sends me recommendations, then I got to go vet those recommendations.” Even though they’re coming to you maybe pre-vetted already, but you feel like the extra work of having to do that vetting process to really find the one that’s going to fit your situation. You can tend to procrastinate on that as well. Because it’s like, “All right, well I want to do this properly, but I don’t have time to do it right now. When can I do it? I don’t know. Let me set it aside and come back to it later.” Meanwhile…

Courtney Baker:
So what you’re saying is you start planning out instead of just… Okay, here’s the next step, it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to get that next step. And then that next step is, this is next step. And next step, next step, next step.” And again, then you’re back to looking at the goal and it’s entirety versus just the tiny little thing that is going to get the thing going.

Verbs Boyer:
Exactly, because your hope was get a recommendation. That’s your step to really get the ball moving. But when she has three or four, it’s like, “Oh, okay. Here’s another thing to sift through before I can get the ball moving.” But really it might not be the case. You can just get the ball moving, take the recommendation and enroll with it.

Courtney Baker:
You know, what’s really interesting. And I don’t know if this is a personality thing. Maybe Blake could weigh in on this. So I got recommendations back and I got four recommendations and I literally read through them. There was one person that I was like, “I don’t think that’s going to work.” And I was left with three recommendations and I literally was like, “Okay, I trust the person that recommended them.” I was like, “Okay. I said a little prayer and was like, all right, I’m going to choose this person. I’m going to go down this path and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll turn around and pick somebody else.” So I think the tip here again is just keep it simple, just focus on the next step. If you find yourself on the struggle bus with one of your goals.

Verbs Boyer:
So the third thing you’re going to want to consider is focus on what’s important. And we’ve talked about this quite a bit on the show is what’s important versus what’s urgent, because there’s always going to be things that feel like they need to be done right now in the moment. Things are on fire and then, hey, everything else goes to the side. But it’s important to take that step back. When you look at your task or really look at your daily big three and you’ve determined what your highest leverage tasks are for your day or for your week and step out of that realm of the urgent and determine what’s important for the role that you play, because what’s important to you is not going to be important… It’s not everybody else’s important necessarily, but that’s the work that you have to get done. And so you want to make sure that you have a system in place to be able to filter healthy, urgent, and focus on the most important task that you need to give your time to in a specific day.

Blake Stratton:
This can be hard if you aren’t used to really thinking of this way, or if you find yourself in a place where life is happening to you a lot, or you feel like you’re always behind the eight ball, this may not come off very well. This tip because you’re like, “But there’s so much. And I’m so behind and everything’s so urgent.” It’s one of those things that’s hard to get started, but the more you consistently focus on what’s important, the less in your life will feel like really urgent. And the more you continue to focus on the urgent, the less you’ll feel able to accomplish what’s really important in your life. So you have to start that trend at some point. Verbs, you or Courtney, do you guys have any examples or feedback of how you even identify urgent versus important?

Courtney Baker:
Well, we have several tools that I think really help with this and sometimes I feel these systems are so ingrained into our process with how we work and everybody in our company uses these that sometimes it’s almost difficult to peel those out and see that’s the reason that works like that. We talk about the Eisenhower Matrix quite a bit, and you’ll find a lot of the teaching on that in Free to Focus, but that’s a great tool that I’ll use to help think through the things that are important versus urgent and a great way to filter. But I think so much of that is built into the Full Focus Planner, the Free to Focus course and Best Year Ever are the framework, the Full Focus Planner is the implementation tool for those. So a lot of that is baked in to what I use the planner for that really helps me have clarity on, especially goals that those things are important. Those things I’ve set out as these things are really important to the vision I have for this year and are really critical for what I want to accomplish this year.

Verbs Boyer:
Courtney, can I ask you this because inevitably this question often comes up about, and maybe you listening are in this position to where you feel like your agency is limited on the structure of your day. So even though you may have predetermined high leverage task for your week, that you may have identified during your weekly preview process. Something happens within that week on a Tuesday or Wednesday to where you feel like this is going to get derailed. And I have to focus on something that is urgent, but you feel like you don’t again, have that agency to continue to focus on what you’ve deemed is important, but now you have to respond to the urgent. So I’m just wondering about how you deal with that from a chief marketing officer role of how you communicate that downward.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah. I think there’s certainly times where the urgent comes up and you have to pursue that. And I think that’s just part of life I don’t think we always have the ability to say, “Yeah, I don’t want to do that.” But what I love for my team is to say, “Hey, I know there’s this thing that’s come up urgently that I need to pursue, but I just wanted to let you know, this is the really high leverage important thing that I was pursuing during that time. I just wanted to make sure that we’re alignment that this needs to be done ahead of that thing.” That allows whoever your supervisor is, just to have awareness of, Okay, this is great. We’ve got this urgent thing that needs to be done, but allows them to know what’s being sacrificed to pursue the urgent.

Courtney Baker:
And then maybe in the future week, they’re able to be like, “Hey, let’s make sure that you get a day next week to really pursue that thing. Or you get the time that you need to accomplish that.” And you have alignment there in what you’re pursuing. And honestly, I think [inaudible 00:21:25] has a great signal to your boss of like, “Wow, they have a lot of clarity on what’s critical in their role and what they should be pursuing.”

Verbs Boyer:
So the fact of the matter is it can be frustrating to have your goals bottlenecked or sideline because of competing work. The good news is that can change through the power of the Weekly Big 3. You can make progress on your goals by focusing on high leverage work, next steps, and what’s important. So Courtney, now that we are at the end of the episode, do you have any renewed thoughts about the struggle bus, removing yourself from the bus, and a clear path forward?

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, I think it’s interest as I think about these steps. I do think this goal is high leverage that it’s important at going back to those different weighted dominoes. I do feel like this is one of those goals that makes some other goals possible and I can even foresee what the next steps would be or just the next step. And I think it’ll be as far as keeping it important, I think I need to remember why this was a goal in the first place. What the outcome was. I think this goal specifically is one of those goals that it’s not necessarily exciting the process of it, but it’s the outcome that’s exciting. And I think if I can focus back on that, the importance of that outcome, that it’ll become a lot easier to get back on the right non-struggle bus, bus.

Verbs Boyer:
The express, you want to be on the express bus.

Courtney Baker:
That’s right.

Verbs Boyer:
Well, thank you for sharing that. Thank you, the listener, for joining us on Focus on This. This is the most productive podcast on the internet. So share it with your friends and please don’t forget to join us on our Full Focus Planner Community right there on Facebook. We’ll be here next week with another great episode, but until then-

All:
Stay focused!