By Linda Clement
If you missed the January 2025 meeting, you missed as fun and tasty lunch!
If you missed the session A Vision for Your Goals, presented by Gina & Linda, you missed so much I can’t stand it. So here:
Gina kicked us off with a quickfire brainstorm about what we’re aiming at, want, or think about –by finishing the sentence ‘This Year I Want to…’ with a page full of the next words, with a line beside them to complete. Words like Be, Have, Act, Quit, Try, Stop, Get, etc.
So, sentences like ‘This year, I want to be… more active… happier… free … rich’ or whatever.
After that, I talked about creating a vision for our lives that includes goals that are SMART… or maybe just goals that are HARD.
Giving out the image above, I worked through my ‘visual speaker’s notes’ …
From the upper left, you can see a Permission Slip. You have now got permission.
The key issue, for many people, is a combination of ‘I’m not that’ –whatever that is– an author, a business builder, a painter, and international traveller… and the other is ‘I’m not authorized.’
While it’s difficult to step out of the little boxes we put ourselves in, that sense of ‘someone else is in charge of who can’ really needs to be disrupted.
Hence: I am officially giving you permission.
Gina reiterated: “I give you permission, right now. You’re allowed.”
Now comfort has come up and that takes us to the image on the top right — our whole lives have trained our minds. What we are. What’s acceptable. The truth about money and success.
The problem is, most of what we’ve trained our minds to believe isn’t true.
Our survival brains have recorded everything –tv & movies, other people, kids, even our own thoughts and conclusions. When we think, ‘I’d like to try…’ our survival brain presses PLAY on any recording that refers to any fear that smells familiar.
What we recorded doesn’t even have to have happened to us. Back in kindergarten or on the playground, we recorded things we saw and overheard –where kids pick on everything from names and shoes to noses and tries.
Knowing this is where these thoughts come from can help to disperse their power: oh, that’s my survival brain trying to keep me safe.
‘Nothing bad is happening.’
Gina added: ‘Ask yourself: whose voice? It’s never our own voice.’
This is not the Voice of Wisdom, it’s the bully in grade 2, some news commentator, a brat character on tv… We can counter these voices just by saying, ‘thanks for trying to keep me safe, brain,’ and shift to thinking a more supportive way.
The start of those sentences there, beside the brain in the image: ‘I am… I decide… Now that I know…’ are helpful to begin with.
While we’re going through all this growth and stretching, let’s look at what people really want and get energized by. For many, keeping our heads down and getting through the day is all we aspire to, but surviving another year isn’t deeply satisfying –with or without a load of cash.
We want to feel alive, we want to do things that make us feel alive, energized, curious, satisfied, even a bit daring.
I suggest you think about one level higher.
If you can imagine and hold a vision in your mind of what THRIVING might feel like and be like, I suggest this could be the best part of your life, ever.
A vital part of any goal or vision is how it will feel to achieve, so make sure your vision of this accomplished will feel rich, full, epic, vivacious!
Now on to how to make a goal –not a wish or a dream or a New Year’s Resolution–in a way that gently pulls you toward it.
We’re all familiar with SMART goals, but lots of people –ADHD brains and often women, don’t really work well with the linear, logical, left-brain, step-by-step, tick the boxes every day kind of goals.
HARD goals are more effective for many. Starting with Heartfelt. We need goals that we care about. Right-brain, global, big picture, save the world, transform our lives visions. Heartfelt is the H in HARD.
Animated is the A. We need goals that involve life. Relationships, other people, accountability, collaboration, encouragement and community. ‘Specific’ and ‘time-bound’ aren’t enough. Find a tribe of others with the same goal, or tell friends what you’re doing and ask them to check in on how it’s going, or to ask what kinds of stumbling blocks you’ve uncovered so far.
R is not for ‘realistic.’ It’s for Required. ADHD brains are activated and energized by pressing deadlines. We can write the 15 page term paper in 3 hours before its due because it’s urgent and required. If we can discover our own ways to make deadlines feel required, we can move the world.
Which brings me to D. No one is lit up by a goal they can do in their sleep, or a vision of what’s super easy and comfortable.
D is for Difficult. As nice as it may feel to be blissed out on an easy achievement like ‘playing 4 hours of solitaire on my phone,’ it isn’t satisfying the way a real challenge is.
People love accomplishing things that are just a little harder than they think they can handle. This is my new mantra for myself when I feel me shrinking to my comfort zone because something is ‘hard’:
‘I can do hard things.’
So pick your target, grab the bow of your energy and take the action of your arrow and take your shot.
‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one, wild and precious life?’ ~Mary Oliver, Poem 133 The Summer’s Day
