4. 3 Steps to Get What You Want - Step 1: Decide What You Want and Why

 Hi, it’s Deidrea Kiesling and you’re listening to The Success Minded Woman, episode four. In today’s episode I am going to share with you my proven process, a three step formula in how to get what you want so stay tuned.

Hi, I’m Deidrea, wife, and mom to three teenagers, coffee snob, and certified life and business coach. If you’re a high-achieving, goal-oriented woman and you know you were meant for more, then you are a success minded woman and you’re in the right place. I’m here to help you make the money and the impact you’ve been dreaming of, to step into your confidence, create habits and systems to support you, ditch that imposter syndrome, and harness the power of your mind. If you’re ready to create a life and business you love, then let’s go. I’m so glad you’re here.

In last week’s episode I talked about how to program your life like a GPS with the two points of where you are and who you are and where you’re going and who you want to be. So now you have your vision. And now in today’s podcast and over the next few weeks I’m going to share with you my proven practical process that I have developed using the discipline of project management along with productivity and mindset and habits and putting it all together. I have been following this process for the last few years and my life has changed exponentially. Are you ready for it?

It is simple but not easy and don’t let the simplicity minimize the power of this process. So here it is. Step one, decide what you want. Step two, make a plan. Step three, take massive action. This is how you apply project management to your life. I like to call it, project you. So in today’s podcast we’re going to be talking all about step one, decide what you want. Now it’s time to take that big dream and break it out into goals. I like to say dream big and plan small. And to plan small we need goals. And you all, I don’t know if I made that up or if I heard it somewhere, but I love it, dream big and plan small.

Okay, so Google says a goal is an aim or objective that you work toward with effort and determination. And Google also says that true success is all about working towards meaningful goals and dreams. And I agree with you, Google.

Okay, step one. The first thing that you need to do when you're setting a goal is to pick one. We take that dream, that vision you have for your life, and we pick one area that you want to focus on. I know you’ll probably want to skip this part. If you’re anything like me and I think you are, then you think, yeah, other people should just pick one but I have big dreams and I know I can do more than one goal at a time. There is no way I can get where I want to go focusing on one goal at a time. But hold on, if you have a lot of goals and dreams and you keep chasing them without a lot of results then you need to constrain to one goal.

Or maybe you have a lot of starts and stops, you make some progress and you get some momentum going but then life happens or you change your mind or you start focusing on something else. Listen, you can always add another one after you get solid on your one goal but please listen to me. After years and years of trying to lose weight, start a coaching business, declutter and remodel my house, stop overdrinking, stop overeating, develop solid morning and evening routines. Spend more quality time with my children, have planned activities and outings as a family and on and on and on.

One way you can use to decide what goal to focus on is to look at your dream and look at your vision for your life and business. It usually falls into one of these three categories, health, wealth, or relationships. So focus on your vision and why you want what you want. That reason will inform what to focus on. And this may change over time based on the season of life you’re in and that's okay.

You can have your big dream and your big vision for your life, and you can also have smaller goals for a year, for a quarter, for a week or a day. Or just a season of life like when your kids are a little before they go to school or when you're getting ready for your kids to graduate and go to college. So all of this plays into how you pick a goal and focus on one goal. So pick one area that you want to focus on, either health, wealth or relationships and then pick one goal from there.

So you want to ask these two questions. What do you want and why do you want it? And you need to make a decision. Pick that one goal. Making a decision, this by itself is probably about 50% of the goal achievement or more. And part of making a decision is in deciding to be 100% committed to your decision. When you are 100% committed you don’t quit. You find a way. You do what is needed no matter how you feel about it or how much you don't want to do it in the moment.

And knowing your reason, your why, that gives you the motivation for the vision that you want for your life. That why, that reason is the driving force for your goals. So there is this exercise that I learned about from Dean Graziosi. And he learned it from one of his coaches and it's called Seven Levels Deep. And what you do is you keep asking yourself why when you set a goal. Why do you have the goal? And then you say, “Okay, why is that? Why is that? Why is that?” You keep going seven levels deep. You keep asking yourself why.

And what happens when you get to the seventh question and probably even before the seventh question is you get to what is really your reason for wanting what you want. This is such a powerful exercise and I always have my coaching clients do this when we first start working together. So do this exercise, the answer may surprise you. And it also will help you. It will give you fuel for your dreams.

When I did this, I found out that my deepest level why was to be an example of what is possible for my children. Seeing their mother go after her dreams, seeing their mother overcome all the obstacles and come out the other side. Seeing their mother do hard things. I am teaching my children the exact skills that I know will be the most important for them, resilience, determination, self-love, discipline, courage, responsibility, vulnerability, self-awareness and self-coaching and being willing to be wrong, to drop judgment and defensiveness and to receive guidance from wherever it comes.

It's not about how much money I will make or the impact my business will have or all of the material success because I know that real success for me is making the world a better place. And for me the best way I can do that is being an example of what is possible for my children and the ripple effect of that will impact everything that I do like this podcast and my coaching groups. And of course I'm hoping to do that for you all too, to be an example of what's possible. But please do this exercise, just Google ‘seven levels deep’ and there’s a website that you can do, and it gives you the prompts to go through this process.

So I really encourage you to do this because it does give you meaning to understand really why you want what you want. Okay, so after you go through that exercise and you figure out your big why, you will pick one goal. So pick one goal from either health, wealth or relationship that supports that big vision that you have. This is where you start bringing that dream into reality. I finally really started achieving my goals when I focused on one major goal at a time.

So remember how I told you earlier that I was doing, I was trying to do all of these things at the same time, and I was just exhausting myself and really wasn't ultimately making a lot of progress. this is what I want for you. Pick one goal and focus on that one goal. I realized as I was thinking through this that I had always achieved my career goals but I never could quite get the other areas of my life together. I realize now it’s because in my career goals I followed a proven process, the career ladder and I did it day in and day out no matter how I felt.

Now that I’ve created this process that’s similar to how projects are managed in corporate I figured it out. This is why it works in corporate because you set a goal, you make a plan and you keep working the plan until you get the result that you want. So when I was focused on my career and career ladder and creating career success I centered my world and my life around that goal. And that is how you can really get so powerful and achieve so much is by picking one goal and just surrounding yourself with that goal and using that goal to filter what you’re doing with your time.

Now, obviously you have other things going on besides this one goal but once you’ve decided and committed to that one goal it creates a filter for how you want to spend your time and what you want to focus on. So I want to give you an example. So last year I focused on weight loss as my primary goal and I lost 20 pounds. The reason for my focus on weight loss had changed over the years from wanting to look good in my body or in my bathing suit. I really wanted to feel good and be healthy and strong as I age, as I get older.

I plan to live to be at least 100 and I'm setting myself up for success now in my 50s by taking care of myself and my health and my body. That for me was a goal worth working on and that is why your why is so important. Your why is what will get you out of bed to go on a run when it's cold and rainy outside. Your why is what will have you stay up late to work on your memoir. Your why is what will help you reach out for help and support. If the why is not big enough or meaningful enough it will be easy to quit.

So you all know I love a quote and I absolutely love Oprah. So here’s the best of both. I love this quote from Oprah. She was being interviewed and I can’t remember who it was. But the interviewer asked her, “What makes people successful?” And this is what she said. “People get to where they want to go because they know where they want to go. Most people don't know where they want to go. Most people are driven by what they think they should do, what other people say they should do, what they have carried in their minds for a long time of what they should. But the most important question you can ever ask yourself is what do I really want?

And the answer to that, once you can establish that for yourself and have everything you do, every choice you make move you in the direction of what you say your vision is. And when you do that the forces of life rise up to meet you. The reason why most people have such chaotic lives is because they're living in chaos in their head. And as soon as you get clear it clears up.” So powerful. I just love Oprah. And that is the reason why Oprah is so successful. And it’s made and continues to make the impact that she has all over the world.

She knows her why and she knows her skills and talents and abilities and how she can make the most of her life and make the biggest impact that she wants with her life. And so what I love about this process I’m going to teach you is that once you learn this method and start applying it you can repeat it over and over for every goal. And that is how you create your dream come true, that big vision you have for your life and your business. You do it one goal at a time. Remember, dream big and plan small. So I hope I have convinced you to pick one goal.

So here we go, the next step, so step two after you decide what you want and why you want it is to break it down into smaller goals. So we plan small by taking that one goal and breaking it down into smaller goals that we can track, measure and evaluate. And the reason why goal setting is so important is because it tells your brain what to focus on. Your brain needs direction and supervision or will go in a million directions with a ton of ideas and no action. It sets the direction of your life and focus. It gives you a baseline to measure results and you can create your future instead of repeating your past.

And I love this one. Living your life intentionally, deliberately by design instead of by default, without goals, without a sense of direction and where your life is going you will keep repeating the same year, the same week, the same day over and over. And that is fine if that is what you want. But if you're listening to this podcast you probably want more than just a status quo life. You want a dream come true life. You want to be the best version of yourself and create the best version of your life. And in order to do that, to create that you need a goal.

So there are a few different types of goals that I want to talk about, and you’ve probably heard most of these. But I want to break it down for you so you’re clear because it's important to know what type of goal you're working on. And it helps you to break it down into smaller goals that you can take action on. So the first type of goal is your impossible goal. So this goal comes from your vision, from that dream of where you want to go, where you want to be in your life, when you have your best life, that dream life that you’re imagining.

Some people call these outcome goals, so that is a term that you might be familiar with, like an outcome goal for let’s say a football team might be to win a Super Bowl. But I like to think about it as an impossible goal because it kind of relieves your mind from needing to know how to do it all. It opens you up to the possibility that you can figure it out, that information will flow to you as you start taking action. So it feels impossible because you have no idea how to do it. You see other people doing it so you know it's possible to achieve it, but it feels impossible for you and that's okay.

Big dreams and goals require you to learn and grow and evolve. Big dreams and goals are how you create a million dollar business. You have a New York Times bestseller. You travel around the world no matter what it costs. For an athlete this could be winning a gold medal at the Olympics. Speaking on stages to sold out audiences. Making the impact you dream of and changing the world. Receiving a Nobel Prize. Winning the Masters golf tournament, whatever it is for you. These goals are big impossible.

They’re goals that would take probably at a minimum five years, probably 10 years or maybe 25 years. But the goal, the vision, these big impossible goals, it creates a life worth doing, goals worth pursuing because they’re in support and in alignment with this big vision, this big impossible goal. The thing about impossible goals is it will lead you and guide you as you start taking action on your smaller goals. The path will start to become clear.

So you’ve probably heard the saying that you only need to know the next step or the next few steps and that's where the more tactical and strategic goals come in. So just know the next few steps and then you'll start figuring it out and figuring it out. I love this idea, I’ve heard this from several different people that action creates clarity. So what we want to do is get you out of the visioning and the dreaming and the impossible goal and we want to start bringing you into reality with realistic goals that we can start taking action on.

So the next type of goal and this is one you probably have heard about before and if you’re in corporate or if you were in corporate then you know all about these goals called SMART goals. So SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant and Timebound. So putting these parameters around your goal helps ensure that your goal is achieved within a certain timeframe.

So an example of a SMART goal is I will lose 20 pounds and weigh 125 pounds by December 31^st, 2023. So that is specific in that the goal is to lose 20 pounds. It’s measurable that the goal is to weigh 125 pounds at the end of the year, and you know that you’ve achieved it by looking at the number on the scale. You could also have a revenue goal and you would know that you’ve achieved it by looking at the balance in your bank account or your investments or a financial statement in your business.

So the measurable is really how you can track it, how you can be accountable and how you know when you've achieved it. Okay, so that’s specific, measurable. And the next one is achievable. So this is that if you think and feel that it is doable, that this is in the realm of what you are capable of achieving. So you want to have a sense that you can do it, that you can create this goal. And the next one is relevant. So how and why is this relevant to you? You might want to lose weight to be healthier, stronger and like the way you look in your clothes or in a bathing suit.

It doesn't matter what it is, it just needs to be relevant to you. This is connected to your why that we talked about earlier. So relevant means it's the goal worth working on for you, not for anyone else. And timebound, so that has a specific date that it will be achieved. So in that weight loss example I gave, it’s by 12/31/2023.

Okay, now you know the different types of goals and why they’re important. It's time to get to work. Take that goal that you picked from step one when we talked about what do you want and why do you want it. And now break that goal out into smaller goals. So an example to continue the weight loss analogy, the big goal could be to lose 30 pounds in a year. You can break that out into smaller goals. I like to do this by quarter and then by month and then by week.

So in this weight loss example, 30 pounds in a year would be, so let’s do it quarterly, which would be 30 divided by four, so that would be 7.5 pounds per quarter. And then let's do it by month which would be 2.5 pounds a month. And if you did it by week. So that would be taking the 30 pounds and dividing it by 52, that would be .57 pounds a week. Do you see how it makes it more manageable when you break it out into smaller goals? I need to lose 30 pounds can seem like too much, especially if you’ve been trying over and not getting the result.

But losing .57 pounds per week seems doable. And this is actually about the pace of weight loss. It's getting you into the routine of having a goal and tracking your goal and being accountable to yourself and measuring your results. And that gives you the motivation, the incentive to keep going. And the other thing that I really want to say about goals is that I know that they're timebound and they’re specific. And sometimes let’s say you don't meet your goal, what I want to encourage you to do is don't change your goal just change your timeline.

So that example of weight loss was actually mine. I wanted to lose 30 pounds last year and I lost 20 pounds. So this year I am losing the last 10 pounds. And I have actually given myself really the whole rest of the year if it takes me that long. It doesn't really matter for me how long it takes because I know I’m getting there because I have a process that I’m following. And so that is why these SMART goals work so well is because they have it broken down into a process that you can follow and it's manageable enough and small enough that it’s doable.

It creates a framework to take your big impossible goal and break it out into smaller doable goals. And this helps create and sustain motivation. Your big impossible goal, your big vision, it doesn’t give you an immediate reward. It's not something that you can just check off your to-do list which makes it harder to focus on and do what is needed because it’s so far off and it’s so big.

But when you break it down into smaller goals and you track your results that helps with the motivation because you see progress and you’re getting rewards, a dopamine hit when you check your list off at the end of the week and you achieved your weekly goal. Now, we have something doable, that is trackable, measurable and it gives our brain something to focus on. You know what you want, you know why you want it, and now you just need to make a plan and take massive action and I’ll be sharing with you on the next few podcasts those next parts.

So now onto step three of goal setting: write it down. Here are some statistics about why writing down goals is so important. Studies have confirmed that people who write their goals down are more likely to achieve them than those who don’t. The studies conclude that anywhere from 50 to 80% of people who have written goals down achieve them, while only 10% of people who are not writing down their goals achieve them. Dr. Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at the Dominican University of California did a study and she found that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals just by writing them down. Now that’s a big advantage to goal achievement. And finally, a Harvard Business study found that 3% of graduates from their MBA program who had their goals written down ended up earning 10 times as much as the other 97% put together just 10 years after graduation. So I hope I’ve convinced you to write it down.

You want to get this goal out of your head and onto a piece of paper. And I recommend that you write out your whole big vision so that big impossible goal, you write it all down. You write out all the details as much as you can, how you’re thinking and feeling when you have created that. The act of writing it down, it starts the creation process. Those words on a piece of paper are now something, they exist in the world, they are separate from you.

And this is always the first step in creating anything, taking an idea from in your head to an actual result in the world. You can read this to yourself every day or write about it in your journal every day but definitely write it down and keep it close, read it or write it or review it so that you stay connected to it. So just do something to keep it in your mind so your brain knows you are doing this. Creating the feelings of how you will feel when it’s achieved and is actually how you make it happen. That creates the motivation, the desire to keep going.

Your subconscious mind doesn't know the difference between imagination and reality. So the more that you can be in the thoughts and feelings of your future the more you will start creating it because you're telling yourself, you’re telling your subconscious mind what it is what you want and it's your subconscious mind's job to make it happen. So that’s a lot and I will talk lots more about this in later podcasts but for now just trust me, it works, so write it down.

So however you want to do it, write it down and then read it again as much as you can but keep it in your imagination. Keep it in your thoughts and in your perspective. So that's part of what I want you to write down. And then the other part I want you to write down is that SMART goal, that one goal that you’re focusing on right now. So write that out and write all the parts of it, the exact goal, the date you will achieve it and exactly how you will know when it's achieved.

So like I said, it could be what the scale says, the number in your bank account, something being published or so many clients in your business, whatever that is. Just make sure that you have it measurable and that it’s something that you can look out in the world and see that it's done. So that part of being measurable you just want to be very, very specific. We don't want to be vague about it.

So for me just to give you another example for my weight loss goal. When I was doing my weekly planning, and I actually still do this because I’m still in this process. But I do my weekly planning on Sundays where I assess my previous week and plan my next week and that’s when I do my weekly weigh in. And when I'm planning for the next week with the goal that I want to achieve in my weight, I imagine myself, how I'm going to feel, how I'm going to be proud of all the work that I did during the week and stepping on the scale and how I'm going to feel.

And even if the scale doesn't give me back the result that I want I know that I did my best and I know and I trust myself in the process that I will achieve my goals. And that’s what I want for you. When you really get into this process and into the groove of it, it helps build self-trust and self-integrity. And that's such a key piece to these goals. So I love this concept that I learned from my coach and mentor, Brooke Castillo. She says that you should feel like you're in a relationship with your goals and dreams. .And you should treat your goals like you’re married to them.

So you wouldn't just decide to give up on a marriage or a relationship when you had a problem, or something wasn't working out or you just weren’t feeling it anymore. The same with your goals, if you want to drop them you should think about it like getting a divorce. So of course it's okay to get a divorce but you want to give it thoughtful consideration and really like your reasons before quitting on a goal. Don't quit because it's hard. You can think about your goals like your dating, how do you show up on a date? That is how you want to show up for your goals.

So anyways that might be helpful. It’s helpful for me to really have the sense of importance of your goals. So I recommend writing out your goals daily. I write mine out once a day in the morning. So, Grant Cardone, who’s one of my mentors says to write out your goals twice a day. He says that he's been doing that for over 30 years twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. So I tried that, and I just couldn’t be consistent at that so I chose to just do it once a day but do what works for you.

But I have been doing this writing out my goals daily for the last few years and I know that's one of the reasons why I have achieved so many goals in the last few years and why I’m so confident that I can achieve more.

Okay, so I know that was a lot and thanks for hanging in there with me. So in summary for today we talked about step one of the three step process on how to get what you want. So step one is to decide what you want and why you want it. And we talked about why goal setting is important and the different types of goals and that knowing your why, your reason for wanting what you want will keep you in the game when it gets hard, and you feel like quitting.

So now your homework, your mission if you choose to accept it is this. Get out a piece of paper or better yet, get a journal and dedicate it to your dreams and goals and write out that vision for your life and pick that one goal that you’re going to focus on, that you’re going to date and why you're focusing on it. and use that to write your goal out daily.

So then next week I will teach you step two which is all about the power of planning for results to achieve your goal. So thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you all next week. Bye.

To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m going to be giving away five $100 Amazon gift cards. That’s right, five lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show. It doesn’t have to be a five star review, but I do hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create the best show possible that provides tons of value. Visit thedreamacademy.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in episode 10.

Thanks for joining me this week on The Success Minded Woman podcast. If you like what you heard on the podcast and you want to know more, then head on over to thedreamacademy.com where you can sign up for my weekly success and mindset tips to help you create your dream come true life. Talk to you all next week, bye.