How to Get Unstuck and Make Your Life Happen

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello everybody, it's Tami Green.

Welcome back for our next installment of how to have a great time and have a great brain and a great life. And a piece of that which we're going to discuss in a minute about making your life happen, is taking the steps and you start with little steps.

So last about six months ago, I reentered into the public arena and I've been building and if you've been watching me, I've taken little steps to up my game along the way. I didn't start off with millions of dollars and professional everything. It's been incremental, incremental, and that's really important for you to understand as we're going into this. So we're going to talk about getting unstuck today and then making your life happen. So there's two pieces to this. The first step is getting unstuck. And then the second step is getting the steps in order and keeping the motivation to make your life happen.

So you may be a person that already has a vision for your life. You just don't know how to get there. 

Maybe you want to lose weight or you want a better relationship or a better job. You just don't know how to get there. Or maybe you're really not clear, you're just unsatisfied, but you don't know what you want. We're going to address all of that today.

Now in this episode, we're not going to go into an eight or twelve week course with me or one on one coaching where you can go deep into this, but I'm going to give you my best tips in one episode and if you want the worksheets on this so you can take this home and really dive into everything I'm talking about. Go to my website, controlthefuture.tech/unstuck, controlthefuture.tech/unstuck.  I've got some really cool worksheets that you can really dive into this and spend more time on this because this is really good stuff. 

When I got certified as a life coach with Martha Beck, many years ago now, the two elements that I really learned about life coaching one on one was the first thing that we do with our students is we help them reach into their own inner guidance system and find out where their true self is leading them. We don't do it as life coaches. We give you the tools to do that and I'm going to give you some of those tools today. One of my favorite tools I'm going to give you in a minute.

The second step that we do with our clients is we help you make a clear, actionable plan to do what ever you want to accomplish. If you're a doctor and you want to get out of being a doctor and you want to be an artist, we're going to make the plan to get there. 

Whatever it is, if you want to have a baby, if you want a new job, if you want a girlfriend, whatever you want, a new house, whatever it is, I'll help you make the steps to get there. That's the second part of being a life coach, and in that second part, a huge, huge piece of it is to help you stay motivated. In executive coaching, we call it intrinsic motivation. Reaching in and helping you find your motivation that really sustains your efforts because that's a lot of it, isn't it? Trying to get you feeling like you really are enjoying the process and you're really making good progress and that you're on track rather than losing motivation. We're going to go over all of that today, so welcome.

Ready? Here we go. The first thing that we're going to talk about is this one little exercise, and honestly I may have gotten this from Martha. I've been using it for so many years. Or I may have created it myself. Sometimes I create a lot of things myself. Sometimes I borrow them and try to give them credit. Some things I can't. I can't remember how I've developed over the years. Sometimes my clients teach me things as well. 

First of all, whether you know exactly what you want or you're just feeling unsatisfied with your life now and you want more, this little exercise will help you get very clear on what you want out of your life. So when you're doing this in a quiet place, you're going to want to close your eyes. If you can't do that now while while you're listening because you're driving or whatever, get my worksheets at controlthefuture.tech/unstuck. What are we talking about? Unstuck. Controlthefuture.tech/unstuck. Sit down quietly and do this exercise. It's the best way to do it, but listen to what I'm going to tell you now.

Take two minutes if you can, and listen this little exercise. I'm going to have you envision your best life ever five years from now, so if you can close your eyes and envision five years from now, the first thing I want you to remember is don't put any judgments around it or say I can't do that. I really want you to really daydream, okay? Daydream about what your best life would be five years from now, and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to have you think about waking up in the morning, in your bed first thing in the morning. You're waking up in your bed five years from now. 

Where are you? What does your bed look like? Is there anyone in bed with you? What do your sheets feel like? What's the air temperature? What's the furniture in your room? Are you in a house? Are you in an apartment in a hotel? Your very, very best day, five years from now, you wake up. Now I want you to think about walking to the window and looking outside and I want you to tell me what's out there. What is outside your window? Is it the suburbs? Is it the countryside? What season of the year is it? I want you to think about all of that. I want to think about when you've looked outside, what's the season of the year? Are you looking out in to the city or is it your yard? Is there a swing set out there or lake? What's your very best day? You can have any thing you want. Now what I want you to do is I want you to walk over to your closet and tell me what's in that closet, 

What kind of clothes are in your closet? Do you have workout clothes? Do you have the business suits? Do you have casual things? Are someone else's clothes in there or just yours? This is your life. You get to decide. Now, look on the floor and tell me what kind of shoes are there? What kind of shoes do you see? Maybe you have some random other things in that closet. Now look up on the top shelf. What's up there? 

This little exercise is going to give you so much insight into what your true self really wants and is calling you towards and the fact that it was a dream and not what someone expected of you helps you get in touch more with what you really want, not someone else's expectations.

So this is a really cool exercise that you can do and trust me, I do this exercise with myself every once in a while, every few years. What I want to address now, and this can happen at any phase of life, is when you just don't know what you want. If I gave you that scenario and you still felt like it was missing some elements, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that. One thing is we have so many options these days and that's why getting in touch with your true self and this exercise helps clear some of that clutter. 

But if you were really young, for example, it's life experiences that really point us towards what we really want to do. If you're just graduating from high school for example, or in the middle of college, you don't even know what all the options are out there for you. And so when we get into the next piece, making your life happen, my advice for you is just to get out there and do stuff. Get out there and do stuff and I'm going to talk about that in a minute and some of the fears that we have about just getting out there and doing things, but know that life experiences for all of us, like in my book, Control the Future: Thought Technology for Influencers. I talk about how problems always lead us to solutions in our life and the role, the beneficial role of problems, and it's the same thing. 

Life experiences keep refining our desires so we have this heart for being a certain way or doing a certain way, but it keeps getting refined. So if you don't know exactly what you want to do, we're going to start going along the path best that you know. I'm going to tell you how to do that in a minute and the first thing I want you to do there is to start with what you love to do. What is it that you love to do? If you like to go to the aquarium and look at fish, go work in a fish place. Not like the kind where you eat fish, but where you clean out aquariums, you just go towards what you love. That's how you get started. If you're not very specific. I hope all that helps you. Now the bigger piece here and the piece that can be terrifying, is how to make your life happen. 

So at the beginning of this I said maybe you want to lose weight or want a new job. In that exercise I just gave you, you got clear on if you wanted someone in your bed or not, if you wanted a swing set in the backyard or a sailboat, so you're getting clear on all these things in. What I want you to think about is one major goal that you might have that came out of that little exercise. I talk a lot about Yin and Yang and dialectics, right? Opposing viewpoints, both here and in DBT, a kind of therapy I use a lot of the skills from. There's a tenant of it that says you have to accept and challenge both. It's a dialectic. The dialectic here is you have to envision and you have to create, you have to daydream and you have to do the work. 

Some of us work hard without getting clear in our minds on what we want. Some of those daydream all the time and don't do the work, so you have to do both to make your life happen. Okay? You have to take steps to get there and this is where we can feel stuck. Again, we can feel all kinds of feelings at this point. Here and when you start doing. I'm going to tell you how to get started in just a minute, but let me tell you, when you're doing something new and changing something big, it can be terrifying. It can feel terrifying. It can feel overwhelming and you can feel incompetent. I've really decided to do some big things and there have been days where I felt with out as many tools as I had, a lot of anxiety, or even downright fear, but I was sure on what I wanted, so I pushed through it and I did it. 

I did it anyway. I didn't listen to those emotions because they weren't true and I did some work with my self coaching on that, so I want to let you know you're gonna have all kinds of emotions that come up that don't feel comfortable, it's okay. Take action anyway and you're going to fail. You're going to make mistakes, and that's part of it. I think a lot of people don't try new things because they don't want to fail or they don't want to look incompetent, but I know the startup community in Silicon Valley, having been there, having clients and friends and family members that work in startups, startups are all about testing and finding out what what works and failing fast, so if you can change your mentality too, I'm just going to get out there and I'm going to learn along the way. It's slightly terrifying. 

I'm just going to do it instead of, Oh, I have to appear competent and I have to have it all together. When I come out here and I do these live shows, I have all kinds of stuff that goes wrong all the time. I trip up words. I say I'm too often, I say so all the time, whatever it is, don't worry about it. Get out there. There's a little song by Shakira that my little four year old twin girls listened to all the time is called Try Everything and that wouldn be a good song to just get the lyrics to at this point if you're struggling with just going out there and doing it, so you're going to have these emotions that come up, that feel that reminds you. This is hard. This is scary. I feel incompetent. The most successful people try new things. 

They break out of their comfort zone and they fail. Now the word fail is kind of a negative word, but if you just say it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to learn. I'm just learning. We're all learning. I hope we're always learning or it's going to get really, really boring. Now you have this goal in mind. Let's say your goal is to start your own business. You can have any goal you want. I'm just going to use this as an example. You want to start your own business and I see myself five years from now getting dressed to go to my business in the little exercise I just gave you. I'm getting dressed to go to my business and it's going to be a good day. It's already established, so I know I want to start this business. I know what my business is going to be about, but how do I get there? 

The next step you can do with post it notes. You can do it with a project management system system like Trello. You can write it all out. I like to get a white board or a notebook and write it all out. You're going to have a lot of ideas at first on how to get there and you're going to weed out a lot of those ideas over time, but first, let me say this, how do you even get your ideas on how to get there? I want to start a business. I don't even know how to do it. You're going to listen to podcasts. I was listening to podcast this morning too. I was listening to podcast on things I don't know how to do. Things I'm working on right now as I build out my course even more and improve it even more. 

There are things I don't know, so you can listen to podcasts, you can go on the Internet, you can talk to people, you can read books, just go out there and research and collect ideas and it feels like you don't know what the hell you're doing at first and then you'll get an idea and you'll get clear on it and get closer. So when the example of starting a business, you know, you will kind of like start gathering data, oh I need to do the administrative and financial stuff. I don't know where to start and there'll be maybe like a column or a pillar of it. I need to learn or hire out marketing. I know to do that. Say you want to be a coach like me, you need to get certified. You don't even know where to start. So you start building out some foundational pillars of how to do it and then you're going to break it down even more and start going through that. 

When you get more advanced, like the next step in this would be to put it in your time management system with even smaller pieces. So you're going to start off big with the big idea. You're going to get a little bit more like chunks of the next steps, and then you're going to drill down in those steps and then you're actually in. What I do, and I can go over this specifically in another episode, would I do, is I put those little steps weekly and daily and hourly on how to reach all those goals. So that's how you start building momentum on this. But let's use an example of losing weight. Let's use an example of starting to work out because here's where the motivation comes in, especially if you're feeling intimidated or if you're feeling incompetent or just unmotivated. Here's where it comes in. 

Let's use the example of starting to work out. You've gained some way and you really want to get in shape and work out. Now there's two pieces to losing weight. There's the working out and there's the Diet. Let's just take one of these here in. It's good to just take maybe one thing at a time. The first thing I'm going to tell you, which I've told you in previous episodes, is you want to find stories of inspiration. People that have worked out kept the weight off, that's doing the getting unstuck part, and then when you start taking the steps, here's what I want you to do. I want you to take that first step. Say I'm going to work out at a gym and then take that tiny little step than half it again and then half it again, so whatever that first step you thought, I'm going to go workout at a gym. 

You're going to start off with maybe five percent of what you thought was your original first step. So let's start this. All right, I want to start an exercise program. Day One, what do I do? I researched Jim's on the internet. That's all I do. Or I talked to my friends about their gyms day too. I visit to gyms to see if I like them. Day three, I sign up for one gem day for I buy a workout outfit. Now, if this is all too much for you, you have this and half day one you researched, Jim's take a day off, day to you, visit to Jim, see if you break it down, but if you keep moving momentum, think about if you add five percent every day, how fast you're going to get to 100 percent, and this does something in our motivation. So let's play this out a little bit. 

They five, go sit in the parking lot, trust up to workout. Day Six, go in and pick a class. Day seven, go in and sit in the back of the class. Day Eight, go to the class and do five minutes a day. Nine, go do seven minutes and build up. You see what I'm. What I'm trying to get you to feel here is that it's. It's easier, not harder, and it's more rewarding. You're wanting to feel way better about yourself. If you go to a gym class and your goal is five minutes and you're probably going to stay for six, then if you say, I'm going to start that class and it's an hour long crossfit class and you feel like you're going to die and you can't get through it and you feel like a failure, that's one way and there are many that you can motivate yourself. 

There's one other piece of this that I want to bring up before we close up and again, if you want this information, go to control the future.tech forward slash unstuck. And I've got all this written out for you so you can follow it and do it yourself. My website's control the future.tech forward slash unstuck. Sometimes we have a piece of something that we want to achieve that we don't like doing. I like doing marketing. I don't like doing administrative things by nature. Um, some people love accounting. I have a friend, she's an attorney. She loves the studying the law part. And I have another friend who's an attorney who loves getting up before the judge and the jury. So even even a great attorney may not love all pieces of what they're doing and you may not love all pieces that are going to get you to where you're going. 

You may not want to go back and finish your degree, but you decide that that's what you need to do. You may not love all of it. You're going to love a lot of it, but the way to motivate yourself to do things you don't want to do is to remember your longterm goal that will help keep you motivated to do that little piece you don't want to look. If you just think, I just want to finish this class and I'm hating it, you may not be very motivated to finish that class, but if you can envision the final thing or the reward that you're going to give yourself after that class, then that helps. Helps you be more motivated. So those are just a couple little tips and tricks on how to keep yourself motivated. So again, let's just summarize, get unstuck by thinking about your future, forgetting about sugars and other people's ideas and why you can't do it. 

Just really getting clear on what you want for your life and then the second piece is breaking it up into steps to get there and to research your options and to start off really small with little baby steps and kind of trick yourself or keep yourself motivated. So those are a few tips I have for you. I hope you liked it. Some of the stuff I use on myself every day and things I use with my clients to keep them on course along their path to make whatever goals and dreams they have come true. I hope you have a great day and that your son was summer is going really well. Okay, I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks everyone. Bye.