Focus On This Podcast

183. Remember Why You Started

Audio

Overview

The “messy middle” is a place where we’ve come too far to go back but we can’t yet see what’s up ahead – and it’s normal. In fact, if you haven’t hit the messy middle yet, you probably will soon.

The messy middle is typically where we feel we’ve hit the end of our own resources. It’s at this moment that you have to start getting creative and asking for help. But the most important resource in the messy middle is motivation. And that’s at the heart of what we’re talking about today.

Blake, Courtney, and Verbs talk about two reasons that it is important to remember why you started. After that, Courtney speaks with Full Focus Planner Certified Pro, Valeria Gray. They talk about how she uses the Full Focus System with her clients and offers some tips that you can use right away.

For more information on how you can work with Valeria, visit https://valeriagary.com/fullfocusconsulting.

To find other FFP Certified Pros like Valeria, visit www.fullfocus.co/directory.

Make sure to visit the Full Focus Planner Community on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ffpthinktank

For more podcasts, visit www.focusonthispodcast.com.

Episode Transcript

Courtney Baker:

Hey guys, it’s Courtney. I wanted to tell you about a free download that we have for you before we get into the episode. If you are looking for ways to keep your goals visible in 2023, we’ve got a great download that you can utilize and it’s totally free. You can get it at fullfocus.co/downloads. Just look for the 2023 goals download. Now to the show. I’ve always wanted to say that.

Verbs Boyer:

Hi guys, so today we’re talking about the messy middle. What is a messy moment that you can reflect back on, think about, and maybe even how you worked through that, if you did indeed work through it?

Courtney Baker:

Yeah, I feel like I almost always have a messy middle on most goals, but I think probably for me it’s more pronounced when it’s a habit goal. Is that true for you too?

Blake Stratton:

It can be. I feel, maybe I’m just more messy than the average bear. I feel like any goal is going to come with a moment where there’s an unexpected setback that’s hard to deal with, that makes you want to go, “okay, can I even do this?”

Courtney Baker:

Yeah, I guess traditionally I always think of it usually when I’m pursuing something, I want to say athletically, and that seems so weird to say, but when I’m riding in a challenge group and I am in the middle of the challenge and it gets hard because I don’t want to wake up at 5:00 AM. It’s like you feel it so physically. I do not want to move. Your body is encompassing the idea of the messy middle. But I think you’re right. I think there’s always a time with any goal because of the risky nature, if you’re setting smarter goals, that you’re going to have those moments where you either don’t know the right next step or you’re stuck or you’re just not motivated anymore.

Verbs Boyer:

That’s a good point about habit goes just because of the nature of, I think the length of time that it takes to get to the point where you want to be or when you consider that thing accomplished or installed is along the way when you actually feel yourself asking the question, “why the heck am I doing this?” That you’ve arrived at the messy middle because you’re far enough into it to where you had that initial burst of momentum and energy to get it going. And then when you start to fill that grind, it’s like, “man, why did I want to do this in the first place?” Which is a good question to ask yourself.

Courtney Baker:

Well, and it’s usually at that point where it’s too far to go back. I’ve actually already invested in this. At this moment, it doesn’t feel super exciting to move forward, but I also don’t want to lose the progress that I’ve had. I will say, I don’t know what this says about me, when it comes to sports or working out. If I get to the messy middle, it’s time for new gear.

Verbs Boyer:

To encourage yourself along the way? Yeah.

Courtney Baker:

A new pair of shoes, and I am right back with it guys. $120 can do a lot in the messy middle.

Verbs Boyer:

So here’s what I feel like it’s like, right? So let’s say you’re driving in the middle of nowhere. You look at the gas tank you say, “I should have, or I should stop for gas soon.” You thought you had enough to go and you find yourself out of fuel in the middle of nowhere, so now you have to walk to the next exit, right? Halfway through that walk, you were like, “why am I walking this far for gas? Oh, because I want gas so I can go back and put it in my car so I can go to the place where I was actually trying to get to in the first place.” That’s what the messy middle feels like to me, is if I stop here in the middle of nowhere, it’s hot outside. What do I have left to do?

Courtney Baker:

Yeah.

Verbs Boyer:

Oh, finish so I can get to where I really want to go.

Courtney Baker:

I think something you said in that story, that analogy is really profound, which is it usually happens when we’ve hit the end of our own resources, the gas in the tank is gone and we have to start getting creative. We have to start asking for help. We have to look for the other resources, and the most important resource in the middle of it is motivation, and that’s really at the heart of what we’re going to be talking about today.

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 all.

Blake Stratton:

Happy Monday unto you, Mr. Verbs.

Courtney Baker:

Happy Monday. That was a deep breath right there. That was a big sigh.

Verbs Boyer:

It was a messy sigh.

Courtney Baker:

You know what? That is, probably. Yeah, I think it is the sigh I probably make in the messy middle of a goal, just what have I gotten myself into here?

Blake Stratton:

That’s right. You take a deep breath and then you’re going to do these two strategies to get motivated again, Courtney, how’s that for a transition?

Courtney Baker:

That sounds great.

Blake Stratton:

That sounds great, right? We’ve got two powerful strategies to reconnect with your why. Verbs, you want to hit us with the first strategy?

Verbs Boyer:

Sure. So strategy number one is to revisit your vision for who you’ll become. Revisit your vision for who you’ll become. And I think we say this quite a bit on the podcast, just really looking at goal achievement as not just getting the stuff done as we say on the intro all the time, but who do you really want to become in the process of that goal achievement journey? And so goals aren’t just what we do, they’re who we become.

And so it’s important to revisit the vision of your future self. I’m out of gas in the middle of nowhere. I have a destination I want to get to, and if my only resource is walking that extra two miles to the gas station to get back to my vehicle to go there, then that may be what it’s going to take to actually accomplish it. So it helps you show up in the world differently when you revisit who you want to become. And you have that as we call Blake, not as we call you Blake, but as you refer to it as your future self. We hop into the DeLorean, go to the future to remind ourselves where we want to go.

Blake Stratton:

Yeah. I remember going after this goal when I was working in sales, and if you’re listening and you work in sales, you know that road is paved by rejection moments and moments where you’ve got to reconnect with motivation and a why. And I remember my most successful year was when I took this strategy to heart Verbs because I got clear on who I want to become, and I started doing this thing I now call a scene of success visualization. And I can remember in between sales calls, I’ve had a couple of appointments, “oh, I thought this deal was going to happen.” It doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. Then I start looking, start doing the math in my head, going, “I don’t think I can hit my goal this month. If I don’t hit my goal this month, I won’t hit it for the year.” And then on and on. That type of thinking and energy is only going to tear down my productivity and the likelihood that I’ll make progress.

And so in that moment, I remember I started to pause and just take two minutes, five minutes, literally just close my eyes and go in that DeLorean, so to speak, Verbs, but to imagine, okay, what’s it going to be like when I’m on the other side here? How am I going to celebrate with my friends or with my family when we’ve hit this goal with my team? What is my boss going to say to me? “Blake, I see you have done this and this and this,” and actually just get familiar with that reality, even if it’s mental, even if it’s in my imagination. Revisiting that vision is so powerful. I highly encourage you to do that if you’re in sales or if you’re just in the messy middle right now.

Courtney Baker:

I think that’s such a good word. And I also want to remind you, when you wrote your goal, if you used your gold detail pages, you’ve actually already done the work here. You’ve put in your motivation for why you want to run that half-marathon. Maybe it is you just want to cross the finish line, but it may be that, hey, I want to be a healthier person this year. I want to be stronger than I was last year. I want to be able to show up for my grandkids in a way I haven’t previously. There could be a thousand different reasons, but you’ve actually already done the work, if you use those pages, it may be time to just revisit those and maybe revisit them often while you’re in this season.

Blake Stratton:

So the first strategy, revisit your vision for who you’ll become. Flip back to those gold detail pages. Remember why you’re doing all this. Strategy number two, remember what’s at stake. Remember what’s at stake. So this is an interesting take because we just, in strategy one, Courtney and Verbs, we talked about, well, here’s these benefits. Here’s what it’s going to be like. Here’s who I will become. But this strategy, we’re sort of looking at, well, what’s the cost? What’s the cost if I stay exactly where I am, if I don’t make progress, if I don’t get over the hump here and reach this goal? What is truly at stake?

Courtney Baker:

Yeah, and I think right out of the gate, I want to be clear that we don’t want you to be driven by fear. That’s not a great right state to be, but what we do want to help you understand how the cost can help us keep moving forward. Again, not out of fear, but just acknowledging, okay, if I don’t finish this out, if I don’t get to where I’m aspiring to be, what will that mean? And I think sometimes we don’t really think that all the way through. It may be a simple, hey, if I don’t hit this health goal, I may have trouble keeping up with my kids the way that I want to. Or I may not be ready for that big hiking trip that we want to do next year. Or it may be the cost of a failure to meet a career goal.

The cost of that might be the inability to move into the type of career that you want to have or that dream job that is on the horizon if you can hit certain milestones. So again, it’s more not driven out of fear, but out of acknowledgement that there is a cost when we decide in the messy middle that like I’m going to piece out on this goal.

Hey guys, I am here with Valeria Gary, one of our full focus planner, certified pros, and out of the gate, first of all, welcome to the show. Will you tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what type of clients you work with?

Valeria Gary:

Sure. So again, I’m Valeria. I’m a speech language pathologist in the Atlanta area specializing in Parkinson’s disease, but I’m also a behavior change coach and a full focused planner, certified pro. As far as with the planner, the main populations I work with are early career professionals and in mid-career professionals, particularly healthcare professionals. So helping them to really navigate the healthcare system, create goals, clarify the goals, and with the mid-career, helping people to either make a shift with specialties if they start getting burned out with what they’re doing, but they can’t retire yet, that balancing the work life when you’re as part of the sandwich generation. So those are my two main areas.

Courtney Baker:

Well, when did you start using the full focus planner?

Valeria Gary:

I started using it in 2018. A colleague of mine was using one in a meeting, and I was like, “what’s that? I want one of those.” Just the aesthetics. I don’t even know anything about the system, but the aesthetic is what got me, and then I’ve been using it ever since.

Courtney Baker:

That is amazing. I’m curious, was there something, so it was just like, “hey, that’s a pretty planner,” as you dove into it. What was your kind of favorite thing out of the gate?

Valeria Gary:

Out of the gate, the weekly preview, and it’s still my favorite thing. I thrive on the weekly preview. I love that. And even just the daily big three was not something I was doing prior to using the planner. So that has really helped me narrow things down because I have a multitude of side gigs. I do a gazillion different things, and that just helps me to reign everything in so I’m not overwhelmed or not forgetting half the things I’m actually supposed to do.

Courtney Baker:

I can only imagine juggling all those different things that without a tool to help you kind of clarify and really have a process for figuring out what you need to approach next, it wouldn’t be possible.

Valeria Gary:

Right. Yes.

Courtney Baker:

That’s awesome.

Valeria Gary:

And definitely the streak tracker too. That keeps me going.

Courtney Baker:

That’s awesome. Well, tell us, we love to hear about tips and tricks from some of our professionals, people that are really expert at using this system. What’s your favorite tip or trick or thing that your clients use?

Valeria Gary:

So for the clients, definitely the streak tracker because when we think about goal attainment, it is all about behavior change. And it is those small things we do, those actionable steps every day that leads us to that. So somebody might come to me and they might have a goal to get a promotion, and we look at, okay, what are the control levels?

So with some of the coaching that I receive, there’s something called the sphere of control. So things we have total control over, some control or no control. So we look at, okay, promotion, you really don’t have control. You have influence but not control. You might have some control on getting on project, and we can create goals and activities towards getting onto projects that might lead to that promotion. But total control would be, for example, learn a new skill and then how can we make that a habit. Like to spend 15 minutes a day reading research journals or watching portions of webinars so that by the end of the month you’ve gone through a certain number of webinars to get these skills or additional certifications. So I definitely use the streak tracker a lot with the clients that I see.

Courtney Baker:

I love that. And even you talking through spheres of control, I think is a really powerful tool even when you’re thinking about your daily big three or your day-to-day, because I feel like so many times I hear from clients that they have something they want to achieve, but they haven’t really used that methodology to figure out what the things are that they can actually control. Is that something you hear frequently from people?

Valeria Gary:

Yes, and also sometimes people, they see big three and they think it’s got to be big, got to be like this huge thing. And so I really try to stress the importance of those small daily actions because the more successful we are, the more successful we believe it can be. So it’s self-efficacy. So if we can just have some days where it’s like, “oh, I checked off my big three,” and maybe that big three was just sending an email to someone in the field that has information that you want, that’s a huge accomplishment, and that can get you towards your goal. It doesn’t mean that you’ve written your own research paper on that particular day.

Courtney Baker:

Yeah, that is really profound. And I don’t know that we’ve ever talked about it in that context around the daily big three. I think we’ve talked some about sometimes you only have to have a daily big one, but I think so many times, even in my own usage, it might be that I’ve got a day full of meetings, and so my daily big three aren’t always big things because there’s actually not space to achieve big things in that day. Sometimes they are pretty small things, but they are important things because they move something forward or they’re just the next step in the process so that when I get to a time where I’ve got bigger spaces to achieve things, I’ve got all the ducks in a row to actually get some deep work done.

Valeria Gary:

Yes. In fact, one time one of my big threes was to write a review on, it was a healthcare podcast that was pretty new out. And I was like, “oh, this is a great podcast.” And they were doing a giveaway, a drawing. So I was like, “okay, I’m going to do that.” And I did that, and then I ended up establishing a relationship with the owner of the podcast, and then she built this business and I’m actually working with her. So that one thing led me to one of my side gigs that I have.

Courtney Baker:

Yeah. It’s so interesting how sometimes we get stuck with a goal or a weekly big three, and when we really just take the time to say, “what is the next thing I need to do?” So many times we don’t take the time to do that, and so we just stay stuck. And sometimes it’s a tiny thing that could certainly be a daily big three that moves us forward. Something as easy as writing a review for this person or making a call to ask, “do you know someone that does X?” Sometimes it’s something really small. I love that. So the tip being, hey, it doesn’t have to be huge to hit your daily big three. I love that.

Valeria Gary:

Exactly, yes.

Courtney Baker:

Any other tips, tricks, hacks you want to share?

Valeria Gary:

Yes. So with the weekly preview on the weekly calendar thing, one of the things I have my clients do sometimes is at the end of the day, just kind of write a sentence, who was I today? So maybe for me, I’m an athlete, I’m a professional in a healthcare system, I’m a private practice owner. So some days it’s like, “oh, today I was an athlete. I ate to fuel my body. I didn’t put a lot of junk in there. I exercised.”

Other days maybe I was really the business owner today, I didn’t exercise, but I did knock some things out. Some days I’m like the self-care queen and I relaxed and maybe got a massage with the therapy. Other days, I’m the fun girl. I ate a lot of Mexican food, watch Netflix, and all of those are fine. There’s nothing wrong with any of those identities. But then what happens is we look back over the month and if we see a lot of fun girl, fun girl, fun girl, fun girl, self-care and yet there’s an athletic competition that next month, we know that that’s not lining up. So if we decide who do you want to be? And is that goal still in alignment or are the behaviors going to need to change from that?

Courtney Baker:

I love that. We’ve talked a lot about how, especially in the business world, we don’t really think of ourselves like we’re performing or that we’re really our version of professional athletes. We’re professional business people. And so an athlete, you would, again, to your point of if you looked back on the days before the big game and they were out every night, fun girl, fun girl, fun girl, you know, wouldn’t expect them to perform very well for that big game. But we don’t really do the same thing for ourselves in the performance, in our roles. And I think that’s a really creative way to look at how you are preparing yourself, how you’re setting yourself up for success to pursue your goals, the things that you’ve established are important for you.

Valeria Gary:

Yeah.

Courtney Baker:

All right. If you’re somebody out there and you’re thinking, “hey, I would love to work with somebody like Valeria,” you can find all of our full focus planner certified pros at fullfocus.co/directory. You also can find them in our community on Facebook. So definitely reach out to them, get some help utilizing the system in your life. And really the idea is that they can help you fast-forward applying this in your own context. Valeria, it’s been so nice to have you today. Thanks for joining us.

Valeria Gary:

Thanks for having me.

Verbs Boyer:

All right. We’re coming to today’s tip to level up your focus, and we’re going to do something just a little bit different today. Normally we ask you to do something after you listen to the podcast, but today we’re going to ask you to do something while you are listening to the podcast. So think of a goal right now that you might be in that messy middle moment, you feel stuck. You don’t know where to go from here, but get that goal in your mind. And now spend the next 60 seconds envisioning who you’ll become by completing that goal.

Courtney Baker:

If you find yourself in the messy middle and really needing a moment to reconnect to your why, commit to your goals again, and maybe even think about how to make them more visible as you continue to pursue them. We have a free download for your 2023 goals. It’s totally free. You can download it at fullfocus.co/download. Just look for the 2023 goals.

Verbs Boyer:

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 join us over in the Full Focus Planner community on Facebook. We’ll be back next Monday with another great episode. Until then, stay

Group:

Focused.