178. Change Your Mindset & Accomplish Your Goals

Episode Transcript

Courtney Baker:
All right. Do you want me to go straight in, “Welcome to another episode,” and then..? Okay. Okay. Megan’s here. I feel nervous. Oh gosh. Okay.
Welcome to another episode of Focus On This, the most productive podcast on the internet, so you can banish distraction, get the right stuff done, and finally start Loving Mondays. I’m Courtney Baker here with a very special guest, Megan Hyatt Miller. Hey, Megan.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Hey, Courtney. This is so fun. I’m happy to be here. It’s been a while.

Courtney Baker:
It has been a while. I feel like I need to tell a little bit of the backstory of why you’re here. You and I, we see each other pretty frequently. Obviously, you’re the CEO, I’m the Chief Revenue Officer here. You’re on a podcast, I’m on a podcast. You’re releasing a book, Mind Your Mindset, which we’ve been working on for a really long time. As we got closer to the release, we realized I… Actually, we were doing media training. We were talking about the questions people were going to be asking y’all. We realized, wait, wait, wait a second. All these other people are going to be talking to Megan about this book. Why is the focus on this crew not talking to Megan about Mind Your Mindset? I was like, we got to get on [inaudible 00:01:42].

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Y’all are number one. Here we are. We’re ready to do it. Nobody I’d rather talk to, Courtney.

Courtney Baker:
Well, thank you. I’ll let Joel Miller know. I know, I was just kidding.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I’m saying that I’ll let Joel Miller know.

Courtney Baker:
Well, thanks for joining us. Obviously, there are all these people that you’re talking about the book. As I was preparing for today, I was thinking, I really got to come with the goods here. I can’t be just asking general questions about Mind Your Mindset, which is, by the way, guys, a fantastic book. But I really wanted to come with a different angle here and maybe one specifically for the focus on this audience. As I was thinking about those two things, I was thinking, I would love for you to talk more in depth about the principles in this book, Mind Your Mindset, and how it applies to goal achievement. Obviously, everybody that has a full focus planner, at some point, is probably either really pursuing goals or at least thinking about, “Hey, I’m going to set aside time to set goals and pursue those.” I would love to talk about how the principles and the science in Mind Your Mindset actually help you achieve goals.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Awesome. Well, the focus on this audience, these are our people. You guys are our people. We love all the people, but especially, if we were going to say which child was our favorite, you guys would be our favorite. I’m so excited to talk about this. Actually, Courtney, I don’t think anybody’s asked me this question. I’ve been on a lot of podcasts over the last several weeks, so this is really fun.
What my dad and I have been talking about lately is just how, in a way, Mind Your Mindset is the prequel. It’s the foundational concept that undergirds success in every other area that we have written about or that he’s written about. When you think about your best year ever, which is all about goal achievement, we talk about some mindset in that book, but really, this is the biggie size version of that. This is all the detail, all the systematic process that you can go through to get your mindset in such a state that you really set yourself up for success with regard to goal achievement, but when we think about achieving goals or really talking about taking a stand for a result that we want in our life, maybe that’s a professional result or a business result, maybe that’s in your relationships, maybe that’s with your health or a hobby that you want to pursue, or habits that you’re trying to install, whatever. What we oftentimes don’t think of, the kind of people, you guys, us, Courtney, and Nick and I, are the kind of people who we’re going to go get stuff done. That’s how we’re wired in that action bias, which is what we talk about in Mind Your Mindset, can work for us, but can also work against us because it leaves out a critical part of how our brains work with regard to goal achievement.
That is, our actions, which ultimately deliver the results we’re getting, whether we like them or we don’t like them, are informed by and really directed by the stories that we’re telling ourself. For most of us, this is like something we’ve never thought about, this idea that our brain, what we call the narrator in Mind Your Mindset, is constantly telling stories or giving us interpretations of the things that we’re experiencing in our life. That story predisposes our brain to go and look for certain kinds of solutions to problems. Or let’s say you set a weight loss goal and you have a story in your head about how that’s going to work with your body. Maybe you’ve had past experiences that have been not so successful and you’re not sure it’s really possible for you, or if it were to work this way, it wouldn’t be possible. Well, that’s going to bias toward the actions you take, which ultimately is going to give you the results that you’re getting.
The great news is if you don’t like results that you’re getting, or you’ve been stuck on a goal and not been able to make progress, it might not be that you actually need to work harder. It might be that you just need to go upstream and really consider if the story you’re telling yourself is ultimately helping you or hurting you.

Courtney Baker:
I think that is so helpful. Something that I’ve heard you talk about specifically in Mind Your Mindset in our thinking is this concept of our thinking… We see it as truth versus actually an interpretation. I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about that.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
This is the biggest idea in the book, really. This is the one thing to get your head around, and then all the practical stuff follows in terms of how you can work this out in your own life. Yeah. We have this kind of… We’ve personified it in the book, this kind of character in our head that we call the narrator. Of course, it’s really not a character, it’s just our brain doing what it does. But as we’re encountering facts in our life, and by facts I mean things that are really boring, that in general, these are things like you have a meeting at 3:00 PM today, or you have to turn in such and such by tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM. These are just facts that could be in a police report or something, or a doctor’s report. It’s just not that exciting.
What our brain does, because it wants to make sense of things, is that it then tries to say, “Okay, well what do those facts mean? Does that mean you have a huge opportunity in your career? Do you have a meeting this afternoon and something due in the morning? Does it mean that you’re going to get fired?” Either one of those could be interpretations of those facts. Whatever your brain comes up with feels true. Normally when we say what happened, we’re talking about the facts plus the interpretation. It can feel very true, partly because our brain is uniquely designed and wired for certainty. It loves certainty. It does not like uncertainty, and so it will create an interpretation of events, even if the facts are kind of scant or the connections between a series of facts are a little bit sketchy, it’s going to try to make an interpretation just so it has some track to run on, because it does not like to be without an answer. It would rather be wrong than to not know.
I think the work of this, for those of us who are thinking about goal achievement, is to really develop the skill. The good news is this is a skill. This is not something any of us came preloaded with, we have to develop it, but the ability to identify what are the facts, and then what is the story that we’re telling ourselves about the facts? Even though it feels like that’s one thing together, and even though it feels true, it’s actually not. There are as many interpretations of the facts as there are neurons in our brain. That’s what the science shows. Literally, the number of thoughts that you can think and the connections between thoughts that you can think, which are really the narrative part, are virtually limitless, which is kind of crazy to imagine.
In some ways, this is unsettling because we have to realize that what we think is true in a lot of cases, what feels very certain is actually not, but it also means we’re in the driver’s seat in the way we never maybe understood until now, and we have some agency to affect the results we’re getting in our life in a totally new way. It’s like discovering you have a whole new tool in your toolbox, and I love that.

Courtney Baker:
I love that too. I kind of want to show people how this would work. Megan, if you’re up for it…

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Hey, I’m up for it.

Courtney Baker:
I would love to give you some scenarios. We can just pretend you’ve giving me live coaching on how this would work. I’m going to choose a professional goal here. Let’s say I’m a sales rep and I had a goal to sell a hundred thousand dollars every month last year. Let’s say six times I hit the goal, but four times I didn’t hit the goal. Then I find out this next year that my goal is actually going up to $120,000. Well, all of a sudden I’m like, “I can’t do that. That’s not going to work. I could only do it six times. I wasn’t even consistently hitting a hundred thousand dollars. How in the world…?” My brain starts saying all these things.
You’re here. You’re my coach. I come to you with this. How is this book going to help me, help me? Help me, Megan. Help me. Help me.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay. Here’s what’s awesome. There is a three step process in the book that you can go through to ultimately get to the place where you can tell better stories. Remember, we want to do that because better stories lead to better actions, which lead to better outcomes or results. There’s this three step process. It begins with identifying the story that you’re telling and realizing that that story isn’t necessarily true or false, it’s just a subjective interpretation.
In your case, you would have a story that there’s no way that you can hit $125,000 a month because previously the highest you’d ever hit was a hundred. That is the story in your head. Now, the next step is going to be to go to interrogation. Step two is interrogate the story.
Part of what we’re trying to do in step two is separate the fact from the fiction. We’re trying to say, “Okay, that feels super true.” You probably have a physical response to that that feels like anxiety, that feels like concern, maybe even fear of what will happen if you don’t hit that, all that kind of stuff. But now we want to separate, okay, what are the facts? Well, the facts are six times last year you hit a hundred thousand dollars. Then maybe six times you didn’t hit. Okay, so those are the facts. If we split a whiteboard into two sides, maybe there were some other facts, like you had a certain number of leads, or you did a certain number of calls, or that kind of thing. You’re just going to list all those on one side of your paper or your whiteboard, and then you’re going to list the story part.
On the story part, you’re going to say, “I could never do this because…. I’ve never done it before,” or, “I could never do this because of the economy.” You would come up with a list of all these stories. What you see in that is it gives your brain the ability to objectify, “Okay, here’s what happened, and here’s what I’m saying about what happened.” And you see that there are these stories that I’m telling that are just an interpretation. We can’t factually verify that. We couldn’t verify the fact that you could never hit 125 because you’d only hit a hundred. There’s no way to verify that, only that you haven’t done it yet. That’s all we could verify. We couldn’t draw a direct link between economic conditions and the fact that you hit six out of 12 months of your goal. We probably couldn’t draw a direct link. That’s an interpretation.
Then we’re going to start to imagine to ourself, “Okay, well, what are some other interpretations of these events?” Maybe it could be that you didn’t have enough leads. Maybe it could be that your conversion strategy is not optimized. Maybe it could be that your call scheduling doesn’t allow you to get on calls when people are most available. You just start to brainstorm. What else could be true here? What are the other interpretations? What you’re trying to do is just pry your little white knuckled fingers off this story and how it feels so true, and you’re trying to get your brain to go, “Something else might be true here that’s more empowering.”
Then you go to step three, which is to imagine a better story. Now we’re going to start brainstorming. What else could we say that would ultimately get our brain working toward different actions that would lead to different results? You might do something like a paradoxical idea, which could be, “I haven’t hit $125,000 yet, but I’m sure I could find a way.”
Can you imagine, if you thought that the actions that you would take would be very different than if you said to yourself, “There’s no way I can ever hit $125,000 a month in sales because the most I’ve ever done is a hundred.” Well, your bias of action is going to be very different. What your brain goes to work solving for, it actually likes to confirm what you think. It’s going to look for all the reasons why that’s not possible.
Meanwhile, if you say, “I haven’t done it yet, but I’m sure there’s a way,” it’s going to go look for a way. That’s what happens in this other model. You could also adopt the opposite. “People are selling way more than $125,000 all over the place in this industry. I just have to figure out what they’re doing.” That would be another great story that you could say to yourself.
There’s a lot of different things. We give a lot of specific ideas in the book for this, but the point is, when you get another story in your head that’s better and more empowering, your brain becomes your ally. Instead of it feeling like, and I know I felt like this, like my brain is actually working against me. It’s spitting out all these negative things and it defeats us. What you’re doing is you’re training your brain to become your partner, your ally, so that then it can do what it does best and go to work trying to confirm the story that you’re now telling intentionally.

Courtney Baker:
I love that. I think that’s so helpful just to see it in practice. I think it can be applied for so many of those goals that sometimes we keep running up against a wall. If it’s your health, it’s a professional goal. It’s just like you keep trying to do it, but you keep failing, for a lack of a better word. I feel like this book is so powerful in helping you overcome that and actually see traction. Man, it is good stuff. I will say, Megan, you are so phenomenal with this from… I guess we’ve worked together nearly five years now, Megan.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, we have.

Courtney Baker:
You have always been, when I think of what’s the third option, that is Megan Hyatt Miller. She is always like, “Yes. Yeah, I hear that. Hear that. Okay, what’s the third option?” I feel like this book is such an amazing compilation of that work that y’all have instilled in this company. I’m excited for everybody listening to actually get their hands on it and go to a much deeper level, actually really get some helpful tools on their thinking and see new results in their goal achievement.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. This is the ultimate example, I think, of work smarter, not harder, because there is a whole access point to success, achievement, even productivity that has nothing to do with how hard you’re working and doubling down. We talk a lot about this idea of achieve more by doing less. This is the ultimate. If you can leverage your thinking and get that working for you instead of against you, you’re just going to clear the path like nothing else you’ve ever tried. That gets me excited because I know you guys have some really important goals that you’re trying to accomplish this year, and maybe this has been the missing piece for you all along.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay. For everybody listening in case you’re like, “All right, I’m sold. I’m in. Where do I get the book?,” You can get it anywhere. Amazon, Barnes and Noble. You can find out more on our website at mindyourmindsetbook.com. There are a lot of bonuses that you’re going to get access to. But man, you’re really going to want to dig into this book. Megan, any final thoughts? Any final words on Mind Your Mindset?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, here’s the exciting part, possibility, what you’re capable of, what actually is within the realm of your influence and control to achieve is actually far greater than what you’ve thought up to this point. Even if this is something you’ve thought about at some level up to now, for most of you, probably it isn’t, this is going to unlock your potential like nothing else. I know for me. I know it has for our team. I am so excited to hear those stories and hear about those breakthroughs because that’s what I’ve experienced in my own life. That’s what my dad has experienced. That’s why we were so excited to write this book. This is the difference maker for truly successful people. This is why athletes have coaches around mindset, professional athletes, executives, et cetera, because they know this is the most powerful lever for performance that there is, and it’s available to you now.

Courtney Baker:
Well, thanks again, Megan, for joining us. Again, you can find out more about Mind Your Mindset at mindyourmindsetbook.com. Get yours today. Thanks, Megan.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Thanks, Courtney.

Courtney Baker:
Hey, guys. I am here today with Tricia Sticca. She is one of our amazing Full Focus certified pros. I love having our Full Focus Planner certified pros on. One, because they know so much about the planner, but also, they’re talking to so many people out there using the planner in different ways and have different applications. Tricia, first, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Tricia Sticca:
Thank you. It’s such an honor to be talking with you today.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, we’re so glad to have you. Why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about how you got introduced to the Full Focus Planner and what that’s meant for you for your life?

Tricia Sticca:
Sure. I am happy to say that when I started my business, my coaching business, about a year and a half ago, I hired a business coach. She actually gives all her clients a Full Focus Planner, which is an awesome idea. I fell in love with it. I started using it right away. As soon as the Full Focus Planner Certified Pro program came out, I jumped on board.

Courtney Baker:
First of all, I love that kind of coach. If you’re somebody out there that works with clients, I feel like it’s an awesome gift out of the gate for people. When it comes to using it, I’m just curious, what were the things that you started to see traction in areas of growth or momentum that you started to see?

Tricia Sticca:
Yeah. Coming out of a corporate career, I was in a corporation for… I was in corporate for 30 years. We would do quarterly planning. We would have our vision and then set our goals and then break them down, so it fit what I was used to. What I fell in love with first was the weekly preview, because I am a huge fan of celebrating. I still can get better at this, but a lot of us just don’t celebrate and see the wins that we have every day. I think starting our weekly preview out with the wins, it’s a great way to kick off our week.

Courtney Baker:
I had a very good friend, I mean very, very good friend, very close friend, and he is a huge planner user. He’s all in. He looked at me this past weekend, Tricia, and we were looking at… I was showing him the new interior. There’s a new interior with some of the brand new planners on it. I was showing him. He flipped to the page with the weekly preview, and he was talking about some of the differences. He was asking me, he was like, “I don’t actually normally do the weekly preview.” I was like, “Ah!”

Tricia Sticca:
I’m glad this is on video because, wow.

Courtney Baker:
I was kind of shocked because I know that he gets so much traction from, I guess the daily pages and the goals, but I was like, “You’re actually missing the magic. You just don’t even know. Yes, you’re probably getting better clarity and you’re getting some gains, but you could probably 10X that with this tool that’s just sitting there ready for you to use.” Obviously, you know I love the weekly preview as well, so that’s great to hear.

Tricia Sticca:
Yes.

Courtney Baker:
Well, one of my other favorite things with having certified pros on is just hearing the tips, the hacks. Help us be better Tricia. Tell us your wisdom.

Tricia Sticca:
Okay. Something I came across recently, I decided… I started doing this last quarter. I have a little bit of creativity in me. I would never draw professionally, but I like to draw. I like to make things. Have you heard of Washy Tape?

Courtney Baker:
Yes. Oh, yes.

Tricia Sticca:
I actually use that for my idea week.

Courtney Baker:
Yes.

Tricia Sticca:
I color code. When I have client meetings, they’re a certain color, and working on my contents and other colors. I use Washy Tape for each of those sections. I love it. I actually started using Washy Tape to separate weeks too. I’m going to show my planner. I have… I’ve segregated them. I don’t know, it just feels better. I use Washy Tape in my planner.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, that’s a great… Nick, I’m just so curious because I… Tricia, you don’t know this, and probably most people listening to this podcast do not know this, but I, a long time ago, had a business where I would illustrate stamps like Ink and [inaudible 00:23:57] on paper. Washy tape is in my loved language. Nick, our producer, for everybody listening is looking at me very quizzically. He’s like, all of a sudden, “Do I know you? Who are you?”

Nick:
I don’t even fully understand what that means.

Courtney Baker:
Well, do you know what a stamp is that you put ink, like an ink pad, get ink on the stamp?

Nick:
Yes.

Courtney Baker:
I would illustrate them, send them off to a manufacturer. I would sell them online. This was back when blogging first started.

Nick:
Whoa.

Courtney Baker:
It was that time. Yeah, I’m not saying I was big time, by any means. It was a small thing. I had a full-time job that I did on the side before I had children, but it was really fun. Washy Tape though, for every… Nick, do you know what Washy Tape is?

Nick:
I do, but I learned what Washy Tape is, or was, at the same time. It came up here on the podcast, and then my wife had shown me something and I was like, “I guess everyone’s doing Washy Tape now.”

Courtney Baker:
Yes. Yeah. It has kind of expanded. You can get it at Target now. I’m trying to think of the best way to describe it for people that maybe don’t know what Washy Tape is. It’s almost more like a paper tape. Is that a..? What do you think, Tricia?

Tricia Sticca:
I would call it a, yeah, like a reusable paper tape because you could actually take it off and stick it back on something.

Courtney Baker:
Yes, yes, yes. That’s good.

Tricia Sticca:
I’m incorporating it more and more into my planner.

Courtney Baker:
I love that. It’s a great idea. Just throw them at us. Whatever you got, Tricia, I heard that you had quite a few, so you just go for it.

Tricia Sticca:
Here’s what else I loved about the Full Focus planning system is I was so familiar with Smart Goals, but Smarter Goals was new to me. Okay. I actually want… I run Women Empowerment Retreats. We use the Smarter Goal system. I talk a little bit about that, but I start with the E, why is it exciting to you? Because I truly believe that before we commit to anything, we have to know why we’re doing it and how it connects to who we are and our values and our passions. The E is so important to me in smarter. That’s how I actually start all my goal settings. What’s my E? Why do I even want to do this?

Courtney Baker:
That is a really great tip because so many times I find that when people are confused about a project versus a goal, it’s that E that actually helps separate a project from a goal. Being able to do that out of the gate, that is really helpful. For everybody listening, sometimes if you’re like, “Is this a project or is this a goal?”, that’s a great one to pull out of the hat straightaway. I love that idea, Tricia.

Tricia Sticca:
To expand upon that, working with leaders, they’re high achieving people. They probably have 20 goals they want to get done this quarter, but when we really start with the E, it just helps them prioritize and bump those top two or three to the top.

Courtney Baker:
That’s a great [inaudible 00:27:11].

Tricia Sticca:
It’s just a different way of looking at it.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, I love that idea. I do think for everybody that’s listening, if you’re like, “Hey, what are they talking about with Smarter Goals? I’ve never heard that concept before.” Or maybe you’re new to using the planner or new to listening to this podcast, one, we have some great episodes on that. Nick, we can link those in the show note. But also, that’s why we have certified pros like Tricia. If you’re like, “Hey, I want to go deeper on learning that concept.” If you want to get there fast, that’s when we have certified pros. You can find our full listing at fullfocus.co/directory. Just make sure that you’re searching for our earners. Those are… It means they’ve earned the certified pro stamp of approval. That’s where you can find people like Tricia. Okay, Tricia, what other hacks do you have for us?

Tricia Sticca:
What I find in working with leaders that the one-on-one conversations, they don’t always happen. Sometimes managers and their direct reports, they don’t really have a strong cadence or a structure for one-on-one conversations. The weekly preview, to me, is an awesome tool, because we’re celebrating together, we’re talking about what worked and what didn’t, what we’re keeping, improving, starting and stopping. It’s a great guide for a weekly, monthly check-in.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah. Wow. That is a great hack and absolutely true. I love that.

Tricia Sticca:
Just one more piece of advice for Full Focus Planner users. Give yourself grace. Some weeks are going to be better than others. If you don’t hit your big three, or you just… Just let it go. That’s last week. Move on to this week. That’s my final tip.

Courtney Baker:
Such a good word and so true for all of us because I’m sure, Tricia, you, like me, sometimes weeks are harder, or things come up. I’ve started to compare it to yoga. It’s a practice. It’s something that we stick with. Some weeks, my tree poses in yoga class, it’s nine good. My planner is, it’s not great, but there’s tomorrow. Just get back to it.
Well, thank you, Tricia, for being with us. Thank you for being part of this community, being part of teaching more people about using the Full Focus system and hopefully, having them win at work and succeed at life. It’s a privilege, and I’m sure you feel the same way, to get to share tools that hopefully steward that in people’s lives. If you’re out there listening and wondering about Full Focus Planner certified pros, again, you can find them in our directory at fullfocus.co/directory, but also, almost all of our Full Focus Planner certified pros are in our Full Focus community on Facebook. Certainly come there. You’ll find Tricia there in the community as well, and see you about working with them.
Tricia, thank you again for joining us today.

Tricia Sticca:
Thank you, Courtney and Nick. It’s been my pleasure.

Courtney Baker:
Nick, it’s just me and you here at the end of the show. Megan had to jump off because she is talking to a bunch of other people about…

Nick:
She’s busy. She’s a busy lady.

Courtney Baker:
She is. She is. But I loved this conversation. It is something that you learn it and you keep practicing it and seeing it in yourself, especially as you lay out goals and maybe you hit that messy middle, that point where it’s hard, or even sometimes just going into a goal. Sometimes as you’ve decided this is the goal, you can kind of get a little overwhelmed. There’s so many helpful tools in this book to help you overcome that. It’s something that I don’t think we talked nearly enough about.

Nick:
Well, I would say that your tip for this week, then, dear listeners, you need to go check out MindYourMindsetbook.com and go, “Is this for me?” Just try it out. What would it look like if I bought this book and read this book? You’re not committing to anything. You just go and you say, “Yeah, this feels good.” That’s MindYourMindsetbook.com. Thanks for joining us on Focus on This.

Courtney Baker:
This is the most productive podcast on the internet. Share it with your friends. Don’t forget to join us in the full focused community on Facebook. We’ll be back next Monday with another great episode. Until then, stay focused.

Nick:
Stay focused. That’s the new thing. I have to be careful of the…

Courtney Baker:
Oh, you doing a spin. For all the listeners, he’s spinning. Okay.

Nick:
You got to look at the video.

Courtney Baker:
That’s right.

Nick:
Stay focused.

Courtney Baker:
Bye.