One Dream at a Time

This  week on the podcast, we are looking at the areas of our life through the lens of a “Life Wheel” so that we can remember our goals matter.

What is important to you deserves your best energy, even if life often tries to pull you in multiple directions.

Here are 3 takeaways:

• Focus on ONE priority: You can’t drive in seven directions at once. Choose one area of your life to invest in for the next three weeks—a focused sprint makes your dream more achievable.
• Make your goals small and specific: Break big intentions into tiny actions that fit your real energy and capacity. (Sometimes, the first win is just putting on your sneakers!)
• Balance grace and accountability: Give yourself flexibility, but hold yourself lovingly to your commitments. The goal is progress, not perfection.

Your dream is important, simply because it’s important to you.

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program
• Join Kelly’s Free community on Skool

 Let's connect.

 Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

0:00

Growth happens over time. I want us to have a dream and know that it's worth taking the small steps to move in that direction- to set aside 30 minutes every single week, to remember what's important to you. Welcome to the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Tibbitts 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. Hey friends. Welcome to Invest in Your Dreams. My goal is for you to set aside 30 minutes every single week, to remember what's important to you. The urgency of life comes with urgent energy. We find a way to do it. Many times urgency is outside of us. Somebody else has something that's important to them, and they come with their energy, and we end up putting aside what's important to us and focusing on their urgent needs. My hope is you would put 30 minutes aside to Make a small decision with action steps that feel aligned to the time and energy you have and move your dream forward. Investing in your dreams is so important. And it can be so frustrating to begin something new that you've never done before without a clear plan or without a system that helps you move with the ebbs and flow of life. The goal of this system is to help you have both clarity and a realistic timeline so that you're not pushing yourself past your capacity. Pursuing your dream is the same as investing with money. Very few people end up making a lot of money by putting money into the stock market one day and then a week later having the result they want. They take the small amount of time each week to think about their decisions and to know that the exponential growth happens over time. That's what I want for us as well. I want us to have a dream that maybe is six months, one year out. And we know that it's worth taking the small steps to move in that direction, but we're not asking our nervous system or our body to do more than it's able to do. Before we even begin today, we'll take the time to notice you probably have so many dreams, so many goals. We're going to think about those every week, but then we're going to choose one to be the priority. It's not realistic to work on seven things at once. The metaphor I like to share is if on Saturday morning you had seven chores you needed to do, it would be so unkind to get in your car and try to drive to seven places at once. You'd not get to any of the places you need to. We're going to focus one dream at a time. We're going to rethink and pivot and then take the time to reflect and notice what worked, what didn't work, and what would we do differently. The most important thing I want you to hear today is that your dream matters. What dream am I talking about? If you have a paper and a pencil, I would love for you to do this exercise with me. Draw a circle and then cut the circle into pie slices. And so we're going to cut it into eight slices. We're going to think about different areas of our life for a moment. I'm going to give you some ideas. You might have your own. I'll tell you, as I was creating this today, I was thinking back to when I had an older dog and the amount of time and energy she needed would've been a whole pie slice by herself. So just because I'm offering you these different areas of your life, you might have something completely different. Okay, the first area is me. I want you to write those two letters, ME me. Make sure that you are getting the best energy of your life that creates the results that allow us to be people who are not resentful and overwhelmed and exhausted and depleted. But instead, we're the kind of people who show up with purpose, with energy, with excitement, with authenticity. The next section that I put was my home. That seemed to take a lot of time and energy for me to think through everything from organizing to meal planning, to just getting my clothes swapped out. As the seasons change, the next thing that I put was I do some work for pay. Maybe you have a volunteer job that's important to you. That was the next block of energy that I wanted to notice. The next thing is my coaching company. It's incredibly important to me. Maybe you have a book, or as we talked about before, a substack that you'd like to be working on. Maybe there's a project that's important to you. Maybe there's a primary relationship that's important to you. And then I have one for family and one for friends. And fun because I need to keep that as a focus or I don't get to it. Other people might put creativity. You might put your pet or travel. There might be something that's super important to you and you don't want to forget it. All those areas of your life require energy, not just time. You need emotional and mental and physical energy, and then you have seasons of your life. Sometimes the school season affects the amount of energy you can give to each of these areas. Sometimes it's the weather, sometimes it's the season of your business. As you look at all those areas, I know your brain is going to say they're all equally important, and I want to offer you an idea. What if you could choose? If you could decide for the next three weeks, which of these areas would you like to prioritize? All of our sprints will be, 21 days, three weeks at a time What would your dream be for one area? Maybe it is, I would like to be able to fit into my spring clothes. That's my dream. So I'm going to make my closet my friend. If the clothes don't fit and I don't feel comfortable wearing them over the next three weeks, I'm going to donate them and choose clothes that feel comfortable and make me feel good about myself. That's what I'm going to prioritize for the next three weeks. Maybe you're going to decide to put a lot of energy into a travel opportunity that's coming your way. You need to plan it and take the trip and unpack whatever you choose. A lot of people that work with me have a dream for something that has to do with a business. Maybe they want to write a book or create a community, have a podcast. Whatever it is that you're choosing, choose one of all of these beautiful parts of your life. We're focusing on one for three weeks, for 21 days, a sprint where we reflect, we take those six action steps, and then we decide to review what worked, what didn't work, what would we do differently. Draft a timeline. If you have a notebook, that's a great way to do it. You can do it in, an app, you could do it on your phone, whatever works for you. I want you to be pretty specific. We're going to take these 30 minutes every week to be specific. To make decisions. Our brain loves indecision. It makes it feel like everything's still possible. Once we decide and we tell somebody else, and we have people around us to support us, we're more likely to follow through. This important goal maybe doesn't have any urgency. I know for me, there's nobody standing next to me saying, did you work on that next thing that you said was important to you? Over the next three weeks, what day of the week would you like to check in with yourself? Maybe you're deciding that you're going to join my community and join me on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and you're going to put those dates down. Maybe you already have a coffee date with a friend where you check in with each other, and that's on Saturdays. Over the next three weeks, pick five dates that we're going to check in. So you could decide every Tuesday and Thursday for the next three weeks. You could decide I'm going to talk to somebody on Sundays, and then I'm going to look myself. On Fridays, we're just going to pick five dates. Then when you're making your goals, you want them to be what we use the acronym Smart to talk about Small, measurable, achievable. Relatable. Time bound. Time bound is so important. We want to be able to not just say sometime over the next year, but maybe by Tuesday at two. And then we're going to decide the smallest action step possible. I'm going to go back to the dream of every time I open my closet, my closet is my friend. It's set up for the season that I'm in. I don't feel bad when I walk in. None of the clothes is too big or too small. Everything is just right. It needed days of time, mental energy, physical energy, spiritual energy, emotional energy. So we want to make small action steps. The way you'll know it's small enough is it'll feel at ease for you. James Clear in his book, atomic Habits describes it like this. If you want to be somebody who works out on a regular basis, your first small action step might be, I wear sneakers. I get up in the morning and I put my sneakers on. That's an action step that's so doable. Then it might be I drive to the gym. Then it might be I walk in the treadmill for 30 minutes. Did you choose your priority of all these areas of your life? Did you choose one of those pie slices? Now, in that pie slice, you might have 10 things that are important to you. I know I do. When it comes to me, there are books I want to read. I want good skincare. I want to use my sauna. I want to go for a walk every day. It feels like I'm choosing one thing- i'm going to focus on me, but inside of that one pie slice were 10 different things. I could focus on 10 different priorities, but if I decide something small, like I'm going to go in the sauna five times in the next three weeks, suddenly it becomes really doable. Once I see the value of it and the benefit of it, it would probably increase. Our goal is three weeks. You put today's date and then three weeks from now. And so if you're listening to this live, that's April 5th, and you're going to decide the smallest action steps that feel like it's something that you have the emotional, mental, physical, spiritual energy to do. Don't make them too big. In fact, when you check in with yourself, if you're even slightly confused, make it a little smaller. One example with make my closet my friend, is instead of doing all your shirts, maybe on the first day, you only think about the shirts that are sleeveless, just to get that quick win. If I'm thinking about launching my podcast, I might decide by two days from now I'm going to have listened to three podcasts. My action step will be listen to three podcasts. And my smart goal will be, I'm going to specifically listen for intros that I like, or an outro that I like. My next action step would be the following day, I'll record my intro and outro. And if that feels too big, I can break that into two different action steps on two different days. One day is the intro and one day is the outro. Only you know how much energy you have. The goal is to match your energy to the task. Don't make it too big. This is why we end up overwhelmed and we end up giving up. It's not that we don't have the energy to do it, we just try so hard to do too many things in not enough time. One of my favorite sayings is this. We overestimate what we can do in the short term and we underestimate what we can do in the long term. I've been working on my podcast for five years. When I first began, I did one a month, had to pay somebody to produce it. Then I took a course and learned how to produce it myself, and moved to twice a month. After I got better, I moved to every week. It's okay to take the time we need to take. We want a flexible timeline and we want to hold onto our goals. If you wanted to draw a picture of this, you would draw a line down the middle of your paper that represents a road, and that road I think represents love for yourself, love for your dream. On one side of that road is the word grace. We want to have grace for ourselves. We want to have flexibility, but sometimes we can be so full of grace for ourselves. We keep putting off what's important. On the other side, we have truth. No, I said I was going to do it on Tuesday. I'm going to hold myself to that standard. Sometimes we can be so tied into that truth, we end up being cruel to ourselves. We're overtired. We are too busy. We don't have the energy match, and then we do things without the energy match and it doesn't work out. We get frustrated with that. We don't even want to continue on. I want you to hold that love for yourself the same way you would for your dearest friend who is also creating something important. Maybe they're a new mom and you have such grace for them. They get so frustrated that their house isn't clean and their baby isn't sleeping through the night, and you just see all the good that they're doing. See if you can turn that energy back towards yourself. Today we're going to decide of all these different life areas you picked one to focus on, and that's your dream for the next three weeks. I love talking about a closet that you love and treats you like a friend. I've known so many women, and I've been part of that too, where you walk in your closet and you have all these negative thoughts about yourself because the jeans that fit four years ago don't fit. And every time you see them, you think negative thoughts about yourself. Having a dream of a closet that's your friend can make everything else in your life begin to move in the right direction. Because if you're kind to yourself there, you might start to be kind to yourself in other areas. Maybe you want to have a podcast, and the purpose of the dream is to unlock your voice and to be able to share the information that you have with the people who want to listen to you. When you think about why you want to focus on this dream, can you notice what the purpose of the dream is? And there's no wrong answer, but I'd love for you to notice. I would like to do this, whatever it is, because it's important to me. That might be a new power thought that you haven't repeated. It's important because it's important to me, and so I love that. As a mom of three adult women, that's one of the most important things I was able to share with them, is that if it's important to them, that makes it important. Your dream is important. Let's not forget it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I look forward to talking again next week. Thank you for joining the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encourage you and will 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 tibbits life coach, or visit my website kelly tibbits.com. I look forward to connecting again soon.