SUMMARY

Do you just take off on a journey and hope that you end up somewhere better than you are now, or do you decide where you want to go first and then put a strategic plan together and take the action so that you get there?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around planning and finishing strong in 2020, so that we can have an even greater 2021 than we thought would be possible by unpacking the first element of my R4 method, and that is choosing your destination.

What I want to do is I want to unpack some thinking with you and show you the steps that I take to set those results and therefore choose my destination.

Step number one is to just brainstorm your thoughts.

Step two is to confirm by elimination.

The third thing we want to do now is we want to commit to our choices.

By using this process of setting the results and choosing your destination. You've got a greater chance of ending up where you want to be at the end of 2021, rather than just turning up somewhere and hoping that it's better than where you are now.

Well, that's it from me for another week. Next week, we will go into the second area and we'll have a look at your reality. So, make sure you hit the subscribe button and the little bell so that you get a reminder to let you know to come back and to join in again, where we reconcile your reality. I'll see you then.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Do you just take off on a journey and hope that you end up somewhere better than you are now, or do you decide where you want to go first and then put a strategic plan together and take the action so that you get there?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around planning and finishing strong in 2020, so that we can have an even greater 2021 than we thought would be possible by unpacking the first element of my R4 method, and that is choosing your destination.

For many years, I would go on road trips with myself, which wasn't so bad, but with the family, where we just head off and I wouldn't book a hotel. I wouldn't plan where we were going to stop for lunch, where we were going to get fuel, all those things. I would just take off because that was just fun. That was free. That was just doing what you wanted to do. The challenge with that though is on more than one occasion, we got pretty close to being caught out with no fuel, no food, kids in the car, tired, hungry, wanting to go home. And I remember this one time in particular we'd plan to stay at this beautiful place on the beach, which was about two and a half hours from our home, and invest a night there as a family, get up in the morning, have a great breakfast on the beach before we went home.

Unfortunately, because I didn't plan the journey, I just was winging it, and because that's what freedom is all about, right? Yeah, wrong. And what happened was there were no hotels available. I went from hotel to hotel, to hotel, to hotel, and there was a big event on in the area and we had nowhere to stay when we had little toddlers in the back of the car and my wife was less than pleased.

So, what I ended up doing was foregoing our night at the beach and we drove home the extra two and a half hours so that we could put our kids to bed. So, it was a great idea to be free and just go out there and take things as they came. However, the result that I got wasn't the one that I wanted. So remember last week, we started talking about this and we started talking about this being a process, and we're going to look at the year of 2021. And whether you're looking at this for your life in its entirety, or you're doing it with particular parts of your life, the first thing we need to do is decide where we want to land.

What are the results that you want to have at the end of 2021? And then we looked at the fact that we need to look at, "Well, what's my current reality?" How does it look different to that right now? And we'll talk about that next week. Then, we talked about the fact that there could be some roadblocks that are going to stop us from going from where we are now to where we want to go. And then we looked at the fact that we need to add some resources for ourself and around us so that we can overcome those roadblocks and get the results that we want and get to that destination at the end of 2021. Planning is a good thing. This running by the seat of your pants and hoping that things will get better is not a strategy. So, what I want to do is I want to unpack some thinking with you and show you the steps that I take to set those results and therefore choose my destination.

Step number one is to just brainstorm your thoughts. There's a lot of places where you could go, there's a lot of destinations that you could go to, and there are many dreams that you may have had. There might be a bucket list just like you have with your travel and all those sorts of things. So, the first step is to get them all out of here and get them onto paper. And I'd love to go analog with this. I don't go near the computer. I just get out a piece of paper and I use some mind mapping and I just get it down on paper. These are the things that I could do, these are the places that I could go, the results that I could strive for. And the key when doing this is to make sure that we control that inner dialogue, and we talked about that weeks ago.

If you are having challenges with that, go back and listen to that episode. But by controlling that inner dialogue, it means that our big voice is the one that is in control. So when that little voice is in control, we got to write something down, we go, "No, I couldn't possibly do that. I'm not good enough to do that. Look at the results that I got this year." So once again, this goes in tandem with that process of forward-focused reflection that we talked about last week and making sure that we go into the past only to look at our wins and the lessons that we've learned to take forward. So using our big voice, we think of somewhere where we'd like to go, result we'd like to have, and get it down on paper and just come up with a big list. It doesn't matter how many things are on there. Just get them down as many as you can. No need to put them in any order at this point. We're just brain dumping our thoughts.

Number two is to confirm by elimination. You might have plenty of things down on your list that you could do, some places that you could go, some results that you could have. However, not all of those will serve your overall picture, your overall plan of what you're doing over the next 12 months as a part of your three year plan. Some of them you might be doing for the wrong motive. So, what I've done is devised myself a filter that I use with myself and with all my clients. It has two sides of the ledger. On one side of the ledger, I asked myself the question, "For what purpose?", and on the other side of the ledger, I asked myself, "At what cost?"

So, let's have a look at those two things. So, "For what purpose?" means, "Why do I want to go there?" Why is that a result that I want? And we check the motive for which we are doing it for and make sure that it's a positive one and it's not feeding some negative sabotage strategy, some inner uncertainty that we have, some lack of confidence, some people-pleasing Performance Trap, all those things that we continually work through. What I want you to do is have a look at the things on your list and write down the reason you want that. If the reason is something that's going to take you forward in your true priority goals, the things that you truly feel that you're on the planet for, then they get a tick. If they are found to be less than, where they're feeding one of those unhealthy habits that you have, then we push it aside and we eliminate it. And therefore we end up with a list of things that we are doing or want to do for the right reason.

Now that we've got that list, the second thing that we do is we apply "At what cost?". Now, I'm not just talking about a financial cost here or even a cost in time. What I'm talking about is looking at it from a perspective of the overall plan. We've talked about this before, where people have to do lists that never end, and they've got so many things on their list and they look busy and they feel busy and they're overwhelmed and they think that they're moving forward because they're ticking things off, but they're not really ever achieving things, and that was me for many, many years. So, what we want to do here is use this as a second level of elimination and pay her back on the things that we're going to put in the results column and therefore plan to achieve in 2021.

So if the cost takes us away from our true priorities, if it's a shiny thing, something new, because we feel that the path that we're on, we're not good enough to do that, if it's something that's going to give us a full sense of significance, or it's going to make us feel better about ourselves to overcome what other people are saying or anything like that, then we give it the flick and we take it off the list. So by using the process of "For what purpose? At what cost?", we ended up then with a list of things that we could do that are going to serve us, the people around us, and the greater good.

The third thing we want to do now is we want to commit to our choices. Now that we've got this list of things that we're doing for a great purpose, that fit and are in line with our overall vision and mission or whatever it is that we use for our life, what we want to do is make a commitment to ourselves, not to anybody else, to self that these are the things that I want out of 2021. And then we can go back to that R4 model and in the results column, we've got those things ready to go. How do we commit to them?

Well, the first thing we do is we put them in our calendar somewhere. We put them into our plan. We take them further than just going, "These are things that I'd like to do", and we put them somewhere that reminds us that we're going to do them. Another thing that we can then do is come up with a statement that's in the present of what things look like in 2021 at the end of December.

So, we start off by writing out a statement that says, "It is the 31st of December 2021 and...", and we list out then the things that we have achieved. And at the end, we put the icing on the cake and we finish it off by going, "And I feel fantastic, fulfilled", whatever it is for you. What we've now done is we've taken a look at what we would like to do, what are our priority things to do. And now we've committed to putting those things into practice, we can then formulate our plan, put projects together and actions for each of those projects step by step by step what we need to do to get there. This is what we need to do first though. We need to have a list so that we can reverse engineer the year.

By using this process of setting the results and choosing your destination. You've got a greater chance of ending up where you want to be at the end of 2021, rather than just turning up somewhere and hoping that it's better than where you are now.

Well, that's it from me for another week. Next week, we will go into the second area and we'll have a look at your reality. So, make sure you hit the subscribe button and the little bell so that you get a reminder to let you know to come back and to join in again, where we reconcile your reality. I'll see you then.