143. “It Starts with Me”: Agency and Goal Achievement

Episode Transcript

Verbs Boyer:
So today we’re discussing this concept that lies behind all achievement agency. And we throw that word around quite a bit here on the show is agency, but help us understand just a little bit more. When we talk about agency, what does that actually mean?

Courtney Baker:
Agency is really about not letting your life just happen to you, but having the ability to influence what is happening. And it’s really about having ownership and personal responsibility in what is taking place. And I think it’s really easy, especially when things are chaotic or stressful, which is a lot of the time for a lot of people, it’s easy to feel like you don’t have any agency. And so this is all about with our goals, how do we have agency, even when things are hard or maybe it’s like, we have a lot of obstacles in our way, how do we still have agency to achieve them? I think it’s kind of a little secret that we can leverage if we’re aware of it.

Nick Jaworski:
Is it just me or I don’t think I learned this usage of the word agency until I was like 30. Is that crazy? Like, I really, I was in a grad class and somebody made it. I like, remember it so specifically. And they were something like, well, and this character, she doesn’t have agency over blank. And I said, I was like, can you say that again? And she said it again and like, just like looking in her face and I went, oh, okay. That’s how you say that. Like, I just, am I alone or did we all use the word agency forever?

Verbs Boyer:
I don’t think I learned it until I got here to Full Focus in the context of, because you always think of it as something external, like you go to a modeling agency,

Nick Jaworski:
Right.

Verbs Boyer:
Or acting agency or somebody else has agency in the thing that they’re doing that you participate in, but never like, oh, I have agency to make moves however I would want to and take ownership over certain things. So no, I’m with you on that.

Nick Jaworski:
Well, that’s what we’re talking about today. Right. That’s great.

Verbs Boyer:
There it is.

Nick Jaworski:
That’s your whole lesson.

Courtney Baker:
I’m glad we all know. Yes, everybody listening, agency, it’s not just a marketing agency. It’s much more. It’s like, it’s kind of like a little, oh my gosh. What would it be called? Like what’s your power? Your superpower. Agency is your superpower. It’s like a real life superpower that we all have when leveraged well. Do you like how long it took me to figure out the word superpower?

Verbs Boyer:
That’s all right. We’re with you though, but I’ll say this too. Now that we’re talking about it, I feel like it’s always a service that you can tap into that you have to go somewhere else to get versus actually owning it yourself and then exercising within your own realm of possibility I guess I could say. So today we’re talking about how we can use our agency in goal achievement. Welcome to another episode of Focus On This, the most productive podcast on the internet. So you can vanish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. I’m Verbs. Here with Courtney Baker. Happy Monday to you, Courtney and happy Monday to everyone listening today.

Courtney Baker:
Happy Monday. I think this topic is especially great for Monday because,

Verbs Boyer:
Yes.

Courtney Baker:
You can kind of go into your week again, we already mentioned, with this superpower in mind and really because guys stuff comes up during the week. Things happen, obstacles happen. And so it’s like, what are you going to do with those things that come up this week? And so I’m really excited that today on Monday, hopefully you’re listening to this podcast maybe on your way to work or getting ready, that you can kind of have this as a tool this week.

Verbs Boyer:
So what we’re talking about today is two strategies that you can implement to really exercise your agency, to exercise your ownership over your week and how that directly affects your goal achievement process. So strategy number one, embrace your constraints. And I’ll say this Courtney, as we kind of get into this, I think this is just a critical concept to understand, because if we don’t understand that we actually have agency, then this kind of colors our whole, even our goal framing process, right? Because we’ll count ourselves out of trying to achieve certain things if we do not believe that we have agency in those things, especially work related goals and things of that nature. So as we go into strategy number one about embracing your constraints, I think a important step in that process is noting and identifying what those constraints are or are perceived constraints. That way we can really exercise the agency in those areas.

Courtney Baker:
I think this is really helpful place to start with embracing your constraints. And it’s probably a whole nother episode to talk about is your constraint actually a constraint, but in this instance, I think a lot of times when we think about not having agency, what we would do with those obstacles is probably just like complain about them. And that may not be actually to someone. It may just be in our own thoughts of like, are you kidding me? Like this? Like, ugh, so frustrating. I can’t get done what I can do. And instead what this says is like, okay, let me just look at what the constraints are and then rather than complaining, it allows our brain to think, okay, what could I do that’s within my control to overcome these obstacles? And I think that’s really what we mean by embrace your constraints is like, Hey, can we open up another way of thinking that allows you to approach it with a sense of power, like empowerment. So hopefully that kind of frames up what we’re talking about here.

Verbs Boyer:
Yeah. And I think it does. And it’s understanding for ourselves that when we try to control things that are literally outside of our control, like how much energy that actually takes up and how much energy we spend trying to control things that are not under our control. Like we can’t affect whatever that thing is. But as we go back and identify, okay, Hey, this may seem like a block or a hindrance to what I’m actually trying to do. But if I understand it, then I can figure out, my energy can go towards figuring out what I need to do around it, to actually get where I want to go. Even if you feel like you have limited agency, you still have agency and it’s worth exploring where you can go with that.

Courtney Baker:
I can think back to one of my goals. Really quickly after I had my second child of, I was trying to do a pretty, I’m going to bring up Peloton again. I was in those early days of doing those challenges.

Verbs Boyer:
Yeah.

Courtney Baker:
And I could have just been angry with the fact that I have very little time in the morning to work out. That like I have children up and trying to like force that goal into that day. But what I did say was like, okay, from seven to seven, that’s my constraint. I can’t work out during those hours.

Verbs Boyer:
Right.

Courtney Baker:
Like those hours, if I try to do it then is just going to be frustrating and I’m not going to make progress towards that goal. And so I said, okay, what do I have control of? These hours before and these hours after. And so it allowed me to think of, okay, what do I actually need to do to be able to achieve this goal and have agency towards this goal? So that’s just one example of like actually just acknowledging the constraint really helped move me forward.

Verbs Boyer:
Yeah. And I’m even thinking about like people in the medical field who it would seem like that your hours, like your week is just seamless. Your days kind of run into each other. So you really have limited time maybe to actually work on the goals or in other domains of your life that you really feel like you want to gain progress in. I have a friend of mine who has a similar job. He’s an over the road driver. Right. A day driver. So he’s running from Nashville to Alabama, Mississippi all in a day. So he works 12 hour days. And so for almost six days a week. And I’m like how do you get anything else done? Because soon as you get back home, you pretty much going to sleep, wake up the next morning, do the same thing.

Verbs Boyer:
And he said, man, I’m just working on trying to work in the windows. So anytime he has a break, if it’s a stop, if it’s an hour here to exercise, he’ll hop out of the truck, grab his weights that are in there and gets his exercise in because he has a physical domain goal that he wants to achieve by the time he hits 50. Or anything else that he would want to lend his time to, he’s figuring out where are these windows within the constraint of my day, that I can actually make some progress in these other things that I’m trying to accomplish. So working, embracing your constraints and then identifying those windows that you can do what you just said, Courtney is, Hey, if I want to hop on the Peloton bike, I have to do it between these other hours otherwise they may not happen.

Courtney Baker:
I love that Verbs. I think that’s really, really good. Another idea might be if you find yourself, and I hear this frequently of people that are like, my week just gets blown up. They’re like day one or day two it’s like, okay, everything I planned, all these like burning fires have come along and I can’t do what I set out to do. So one way would be okay, if my boss asked me to do something, most likely there is some agency there, like you could say like, Hey, here’s what I was working on. Can you help me reprioritize that? But if that happens consistently, it’s probably helpful just to say, okay, here’s a constraint. A lot of weeks, I have things coming in that I wasn’t expecting during the week.

Courtney Baker:
And so if that is happening, then that allows you to say, okay, how can I think about this differently? So like an idea might be, Hey, rather than setting your big three for the week on Sunday night, you actually talk to your boss about having a meeting on Monday morning to get their priorities and then set your weekly big three after that meeting. Is there a creative way? If you just say, okay, these are the constraints. Okay. What does that allow me to do with my thinking to overcome this to actually help me have agency towards achieving my goal?

Verbs Boyer:
Yeah. So in that way we eliminate both the Sunday scaries and the Tuesday jitters when our schedules get blown up after those boss meetings. Yeah.

Courtney Baker:
That’s our new, we got to remember that one. Tuesday jitters.

Verbs Boyer:
Tuesday jitters.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah.

Verbs Boyer:
That’s when everything on Monday shifts and you just don’t know what’s happening on Tuesday, but yeah.

Courtney Baker:
Is that the Wednesday wackies as well?

Verbs Boyer:
Hey, I like that one too. Put that one to the hopper. It’s a…

Courtney Baker:
Let’s workshop it. Let’s try it on a little bit and see how it goes.

Verbs Boyer:
But you definitely don’t want your Friday frustrated.

Courtney Baker:
That’s right. We’re going to cue that one out.

Verbs Boyer:
[inaudible 00:12:06].

Nick Jaworski:
This is actually when we announce our new series of children’s books from Full Focus about organizing your week.

Courtney Baker:
And we have a little theme song. It could teach them the days of the week and how to be productive.

Nick Jaworski:
You know what, let’s cut this part out so that people don’t get in on the, they don’t steal our idea.

Courtney Baker:
This is our idea. We have claimed it.

Verbs Boyer:
Protect that IP.

Courtney Baker:
So strategy number two on how to leverage agency in our goal achievement is to guys, this is kind of a hard one, but it’s to hold ourselves accountable, hold yourself,

Verbs Boyer:
Yikes.

Courtney Baker:
Accountable. Yeah. This is really, we have the most agency when we are owning what we need to do to move towards our goals. Really ownership is important on a lot of levels, including leadership, but especially in achievement. We’ve set out what we want to accomplish. It’s really where the source of all the agency comes is like actually being truthful with ourselves of accountability.

Verbs Boyer:
Yeah. And I feel like it’s, even when you read it out loud, hold yourself accountable. It seems a little bit antithetical because we’re always used to find a peer, have them hold you accountable for whatever your goals are. Or it’s almost like an advanced move. It’s like, okay, now I’m responsible for holding myself accountable, but really nobody else knows the details of what I’m trying to accomplish necessarily. And so it’s realizing that again, the ownership is all in your plate, the ball is in your court to make the moves that you need to do. So let’s say for instance, if you’re holding yourself accountable, you have a ritual setup. Maybe you’re not seeing the gains that you would like to see or a consistency that you would like to see in your ritual. Well, you have the agency and you have the ability to take on ownership to say, Hey, this is not working the way I would want it to work or it’s not producing what I thought it would produce.

Verbs Boyer:
So let me just sit down, maybe readjust some things, readjust the times, readjust the activities, whatever it might be, however you want to update those so that you can be the best version of yourself when you’re going into your work day in the morning. Or the best version of yourself when you’re engaging with your family in the morning, whatever it might be. Don’t just get to the point where you feel like, ah, it’s broke and I don’t have time to fix it. This is where you remind yourself that you have the agency, you’re holding yourself accountable and really leading yourself in this regard to make the adjustments needed to go forward.

Courtney Baker:
A couple weeks ago, Megan Hyatt Miller shared a, it was like a quote from somebody and it was along the lines of like excuses make today easy and tomorrow like harder, the future harder. And discipline makes today harder. Like let’s be real. It would be easier not to work out today.

Verbs Boyer:
Absolutely.

Courtney Baker:
But it makes tomorrow harder. And it really rung true with me. And I say that, I share that with you all to say, it might be helpful like if you have something like that that you can speak back to yourself, that makes you choose the thing that is harder today to do. And so there have been several times lately where I’ve been like, you know what, doing this today, having the discipline to get my daily big three done, really prioritize that. It makes today harder, but the future easier, like it’s worth it for me to do the things, to keep myself accountable to do this and do it well so that I get where I’m trying to go. And I know that’s much easier to say than, and actually do, but I think that’s like a helpful, it’s been helpful for me of just remembering, being able to reframe that up that, Hey, this ritual or this daily big three, I have the prerogative and agency to do it and have a little reminder that helps push me over the edge if needed.

Verbs Boyer:
And even when we’re talking about our daily big threes and our weekly big threes, it’s we should be hitting those if we’re identifying them at the beginning of the week or beginning of our days, we should be hitting those a majority of the time, except for things that are these big unexpected events that there’s no way you could have accounted for. And realizing, Hey, you already know going into it, the moment you set your daily big three, especially that there’s going to be things that it’s going to be a message that pops into your Slack DM. It’s going to be an email that you’ve got that feels like it’s on fire and it’s urgent.

Verbs Boyer:
And if you take this thing on, then it’s going to throw off the rest of your three items that you had set for that day. So there’s always going to be that thing that’s going to try to lure you away to uncommit to your daily big three. It could be something pressing on fire, or it could just be something that you feel like you’d rather do in place of one of your daily big three items. But whatever it is, again, you have the agency to go back on track and recommit to the three things that you want to do because you know the effect of what could happen if you don’t do those three things, or if you don’t do the weekly big three that you set out for at the beginning of the week.

Nick Jaworski:
This is where we introduce a new business or a new branch of Full Focus. It’s called like Full Focus Muscle. And what you do is you tell Full Focus, you say, Hey, I’m going to do this habit goal or whatever. This is my… And then just like randomly, without announcing someone shows up at your door to make sure you’re doing it. And if they’re not, I don’t know what’s going to happen. You just, you don’t want to find out what’s going to happen. So that’s another way that we’re going to help people hold themselves accountable.

Verbs Boyer:
Yeah.

Nick Jaworski:
But you have the agency to set it up. That’s my point.

Courtney Baker:
Yes.

Verbs Boyer:
Available on a monthly subscription today.

Nick Jaworski:
Yes.

Verbs Boyer:
Fullfocusmuscle.co. All right. So many of you know this already, some of you don’t, but we do have a Full Focus community on Facebook. There’s tons of conversation, tons of tips, ideas, hacks about using the planner. And every once in a while, we pull a question that someone has posed, one of our Full Focus community members there on the page. And so today our producer, Nick is going to read one of those questions for us, and we’re going to see how we can help.

Courtney Baker:
Verbs, I don’t know how you feel about this. I mean, we’ve only done this a few times, but I feel my anxiety going up, like we have no idea what,

Verbs Boyer:
Because we don’t know what the question is.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah. We have no idea. Just so you all are clear listening, we don’t know. So. All right, Nick, what do we got?

Nick Jaworski:
Well, this is a question from Teresa. She writes, I just listened to the podcast episode on rewarding yourself when you hit your goals. I need some input on what to do about rewards for some of my goals. I am on my first Full Focus planner. Welcome. Congratulations. All the thanks.

Courtney Baker:
Welcome Teresa.

Nick Jaworski:
Yeah.

Courtney Baker:
Yes.

Nick Jaworski:
I set some habit goals and I have made vast in caps, vast progress on them. However,

Verbs Boyer:
Awesome.

Nick Jaworski:
I set up the goal as a streak of doing these habits for a certain number of days. For a variety of reasons I do not have a streak and at this point I cannot even get the certain number of days before the quarter ends without a streak. Also, I’ll be traveling in June. So I should have known that a streak would’ve been challenging from the outset. Did I mention I am a newbie? Haha in caps. Any ideas, that’s how people say that. Haha.

Courtney Baker:
Haha.

Nick Jaworski:
Any ideas on how I can reward and celebrate my progress even if I didn’t achieve my unrealistic streak goal?

Courtney Baker:
Well, my first thought is it sounds like to me, like it sounds like she’s really made progress and that is exciting.

Verbs Boyer:
Yes.

Courtney Baker:
It sounds like maybe she set up her goal again, she’s new, maybe she set her goal up with what she knew at the time. And I think now it probably at some point with one of your weekly previews and you may not be using that yet since your kind of new, it should have probably, you should have revised that goal along the way to make it more synced up with what was actually happening. And so it’s interesting, even this episode about constraints actually kind of aligns with this. Like if there were constraints that were keeping you from maybe hitting it the exact way you thought, but in the end you’re actually making great progress on this. I think we just need to revise the goal. That would be my first tip. And then it becomes really clear of like, oh I accomplished this. Like I’ve succeeded. That’s my initial thought. Verbs, what do you think?

Verbs Boyer:
Yeah. And I think, and correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I agree with what you said. First of all, it’s progress over perfection. So for the fact that she described her own progress as making vast strides towards that is huge. So we should celebrate that also.

Courtney Baker:
Absolutely.

Verbs Boyer:
But then even how you view the streak tracker, like is it an actual, my goal is to make sure all these dots are connected or is my goal to make sure I’m doing such and such habit that I’m trying to install a certain amount of days over the quarter, because then you’re still making progress. You just may not have all your dots connected.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah.

Verbs Boyer:
Understand that’s what implied in a streak tracker is you want to make sure they’re all together, but if it’s progress over perfection, we used to talk about compliance ratio. Like how much percentage of this goal that I actually accomplished. If it’s 80% then I can consider that goal actually accomplished. So that’s my thought on it.

Nick Jaworski:
Here actually in the, she responded to a comment. She asked, so what if you set up a quarterly goal for a 70 day streak, would you just reset the goal? I think the question to kind of connect to what Verbs just said, and both of you said is how do we celebrate a goal that was sort of incorrectly written? Like she acknowledges upfront, but she’s clearly excited about like the way she’s talking about her progress is excited. And her like that I mentioned I’m a newbie has like this idea that she like understands that this is a process. So then,

Verbs Boyer:
Exactly. Yes.

Nick Jaworski:
How would you, just either one of you celebrate a habit goal that didn’t like land, you haven’t quit on it, but you’re just like, this was crazy. This was never attainable, but I’ve done so much.

Courtney Baker:
Well, when it comes to habit goals, first of all, I would actually say it was achieved or not based on if I would consider it installed, like will this habit continue once I’ve like checked off the habit goal. To me, that is the measurement of success. Again, we’re not going for perfection here. I believe Dan Sullivan always says we measure the gain, not the gap. And to me this is like kind of like, oh yeah, there might have been a gap in those like streak tracker, but the gain was huge. And so let’s celebrate that. And it sounds like if the gain was huge, probably that habit is installed and will continue past your goal being checked off, which is really what we’re going for here and deserves to be celebrated.

Verbs Boyer:
So today we talked about how to leverage your own agency and the goal achievement process. We had two strategies for you. Strategy number one was embrace your constraints and strategy number two was hold yourself accountable. Now we also have a tip to level up your planner usage. So try this, try calculating what percentage of the time that you hit your daily three and unpack why you missed any of those daily big three items this week. Now, if you are a Full Focus planner user, you’re able to do this in your weekly preview in the after action review section where it asks you, Hey, what worked, what didn’t? So if you calculate what that percentage is, and really spend some time thinking and processing through, Hey, where did I miss these items in my daily big three? And what was the cause of the miss? So thank you for joining us on Focus On This.

Courtney Baker:
This is the most productive podcast on the internet. So share it with your friends and don’t forget to leave us a five star review and join us in the planner community. This is the most productive podcast on the internet. So share it with your friends and give us a five star review and go to the planner community and go buy your planner and be friends with us. Cool. How many do things could I try to shove into this thing?

Verbs Boyer:
Thank you for doing that. Listen, we’ll be back next Monday with another great episode. So until then,

Courtney Baker:
Stay focused.

Verbs Boyer:
Stay focused.

Nick Jaworski:
I love the snaps. This like Courtney snap development is very enjoyable to me.

Courtney Baker:
Do I do it every time?

Nick Jaworski:
You’ve started to. Yeah. Yeah.

Courtney Baker:
Okay. That’s funny.

Nick Jaworski:
I can see it on the wave form. This like little peak, this little pop.