Tools to INVEST in Your Dreams

This week on the podcast, Coach Kelly shares 10 steps to INVEST your best energy in your important goals.

When you take the time to decide what is important to you, you can align your energy from a place of loving presence and clarify what is important in your life. 

Your dream matters!

The 10 steps are:

1. Review How Your Got Here

2. Recognize Seasonal Sprints

3. Brain Dump:

4. Choose Your Future Vision 

5. Create an Ideal Week

6. Name Your Days: 

7. Create an Energy Budget

8. Get detailed about your days. 

9. Design a Daily Plan

10. Color-Code your calendar

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Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Kibbitz, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Welcome my friends today, I'm going to be sharing with you 10 steps that I do to help me align to loving presence and decide in advance what's important. I call this 10 step process re-think goal setting. So if you have a piece of paper and a pen, you can write these down. The first step is to always start with a review. To look back and say what worked, what didn't work. What would I like to do differently? While we're asking ourselves those questions, what we're trying to find the answer to is what kind of energy do I want to be in now? What would aligned energy look like? In order for me to be in aligned energy, looking back, what worked, what didn't work and what would I like to do differently? Next is to decide that life is full of seasonal sprints. And we are used to calling things like winter, spring, smer, and fall seasons. But what if there, throughout the year, are more than just four seasons? In my coaching program, one of the Series is called the Holiday Harmony Series. And that's recognizing that November and December, with all of the holidays in it, become its own season. It's not quite fall, and it's not quite winter. My oldest daughter is getting married. There'll be a wedding season. Maybe your children have gone to high school or college, and there's graduation season. It could be something at work. When I was a teacher, there was definitely report card season. And when I was a pastor, there were things like Christmas and Easter and vacation Bible school. So what if you took a moment, and you just noticed the different seasons that are coming for the year ahead? And write them all down. In addition to spring, smer, winter, fall, what else do you notice for seasons? After you've listed your seasons, under each season, maybe give them each a page, could you take a few moments and just dp all the information in your brain onto a piece of paper? So, for winter, do you have birthdays? Is there travel? Are there big events at work or in your family that you need to remember? For instance, some people may have a lot of work to do in the smer if they have a pool to get open, or maybe you are somebody who likes to go skiing and there's work around getting the skis ready and all of the parts of that. So for each season, take a few moments and see if you can notice anything that's important that you want to remember about the season that is to come. Once we have our brain dp, we've noticed the seasonal sprints. Now we want to take a little bit of time and look out into the future. The purpose of my life coaching program is to partner with you to help you live a brave, creative, purpose filled life. I think you were made on purpose for a purpose. I think the dreams inside your soul matter. Where we often get frustrated is we overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term. So what if you took some of those hopes and dreams and said, I'll think about that in the spring. I'll create some action steps for the fall. I'll work towards a goal one year, three years, five years from now. We want to just take a moment and notice, is there anything we'd like to pause and put the thinking time, the action step time out into the future, six months, 18 months, three years, five years, begin to think about what's important to you. And then notice, when would you like to put some energy towards that? Very few of us have enough time in our current space to be able to add a lot of things. That's why we want to say, maybe you want to have a podcast and right now there's just no time. But if it's important to you, what would a podcast that's up and running look like three years from now? Well, what do you need to be doing a year from now, six months, three months from now? Next, we want to take our daily to do lists and start to put them into what we call an ideal week. One of the most important things about our ideal week is not every day is the same. When my children were younger, there was a schedule that we followed Monday to Friday when there was school. There was a different schedule on the days when there was no school and then weekends looked very different, especially as my children became older and I started to work in churches on the weekend. My work was actually mostly on the weekend, my work for pay. And then the work that I did around the home, which was not for pay, was on the Monday to Friday schedule. So we want to begin to notice, do you have a typical Monday to Friday schedule? Do you have a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday schedule and a different one Wednesday, Friday, begin to just pull apart what your ideal week would look like. And then we want to start to name the different days. I learned this tool back about 2016 from Carrie Newhoff. And it really helped me in a season when I was working full time as a pastor, but also my children were still at home, so I wanted to be giving them my best energy. And so I started to notice things like if I could put finances to Friday, generally people at church were not looking to connect with me on Friday. The sermon was done, the different meetings were finished, so that was a day where I could close the door and really focus. Now that I don't work in a church, I do things like, on Monday, really focus my energy in one area, and then focus it on a completely different area on Tuesday. And naming those things, like Tuesday being podcast day, where I connect with guests, and edit, and post, Could you name your days and give them all one big job? And then when your brain offers you, Oh, what about that bill that you need to pay? Or that person you need to call? You'll already know what day you've designed and decided in advance to give energy to. So we're going to begin to name our days in our ideal week. there are so many areas in life that you and I are responsible for that don't even sometimes arise to the top. Do you have relationships that are important to you? Maybe you want to decide Saturday mornings are relationship time and twice a month, they're going to be for relationships that fill you and twice a month they're going to be for relationships that are important to you, but you notice you might get a little depleted as you spend time with those people. Maybe you have responsibilities around your home and you want to name laundry day, Tuesday, Thursday, and that's when the sheets are done and make sure that all the towels are put back. Whatever you're noticing, begin to give different, responsibilities, relationships, hopes and dreams, different blocks of time and energy, and begin to name the day and set it aside. One of the best gifts we can give ourselves is decide in advance. These are the days that I don't do certain things. next we have what's called a protocol and that is the way that our calendar works with our energy budget. So just like a financial budget says, this is how much money goes into each area of my life. Where do you want your energy to go? If you decide in advance, we call that a protocol, I'm going to give three blocks of energy to my home, and it's going to be Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. I'm going to give six blocks of energy to my company, and it's going to be on these days, and it's not going to be on other days. So just to smarize the first seven steps, we're reviewing, then we're deciding the seasons. Step three is we're doing a brain dp and allocating those different important things to the season that we want to give it to. Next, we're noticing that some of the things that are important to us may need a future date, six months, 18 months, three years out. Nber five, we're looking at our ideal week and we're noticing the difference between perhaps weekdays and weekends, holidays, days when your children are in activities and days that they're not. Step six is to name the specific days and give them a task like finance Fridays. nber seven is making a protocol, which is a budget for your energy. So rather than just writing a to do list, knowing in advance how much energy you want to give to the different important areas of your life, writing it down and deciding that's when the task will get done. Nber eight is in that ideal week, we're going to begin to become more specific. So what's happening at two o'clock? What's happening at four o'clock? What time during the smer is your last block of the day? And is that different than in the winter? Once you have an ideal week, then you want to go and work on your day, your daily plan. Now, before I learned any of these different tools from the coaches that I learned from, I did what most of us did, found the first scrap of paper, did a brain dp of all the things I wanted to do, and began to do them in the order that my brain thought to put them on the paper. With no regard to, is that the right aligned energy? Is it the most important thing, or is it something that's urgent? Could I defer it? Could I delegate it? Could I decide this is not for this week? So as you begin to make your daily plan, there's a lot of good questions you want to ask yourself. So you, of course, are just going to do the brain dp and get what's in your brain onto a piece of paper. But then you want to have an intentional tool that helps you decide what you're doing and when you're doing it. Because as often as possible, we want to match our energy to what is important. And not just do things because that was the order we thought of it when we scribbled it on a piece of paper. And then the last step, number 10 is to decide that it's worth taking the time to color code the different areas of our life. Use actually a calendar that's on my wall and different colored post it notes. If you use a Google calendar, you Could allocating things with colored blocks say, the responsibilities of your life are green and the work that you do that's purposeful and meaningful to you is blue, and the relationships that are important to you going to be yellow. Right away by allocating things with colored blocks. You can begin to see if there's the balance and the harmony that you want in your life showing up on your calendar or accidentally, are we giving too much energy to one area of life just because we haven't given it any attention. So those are my 10 steps. We're going to be going through them slowly and carefully in my group coaching program. I'd love to have you join us I hope thank you for joining the live a vibrant life podcast. I hope our time together encourage you and we'll equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave creative. Purpose filled life. And if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly Tibbetts life coach, or visit my website, kelly tibbetts. com. I look forward to connecting again soon.