Elevate with Grace

S1, Ep4: Hacks for How to Create your Purpose

• Elevate with Grace • Season 1 • Episode 4

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It was a cliffhanger ending last week, thanks for coming back to ensure you have the all important second half of your WHY. 
Last week we shared why it was crucial to knowing your vision/why and the danger of a life in autopilot.  This week we reveal all the good tools to uncovering and starting to live your vision.

* Find your vision & provide a clear path for your future self to live by

* Articulate your vision & see it start to come to life daily

* Value of strategic goals 

* Creating a purpose statement or mission

* Finding a guiding word 

* Give you tools to uncover your strengths & personal values

* Elevate weekly challenge


ELEVATE WEEKLY CHALLENGE:

Take your draft from last week (or start one today - no judgement) and start to rumble with the words.  Interrogate and test the key concepts you have in your vision statement.  Remove repetition, ensure your why / vision is big enough that you can live by them in all facets of your life.  If you need to dig into one of the models discussed to help refine your statement please do. 

Ideally you want to get your vision/why to one sentence, maybe two max, or perhaps you can pull it into a word you can present consistently. 


CONTENT MENTIONED

Carolyn Tate, The Purpose Project https://carolyntate.co/ 

Simon Sinek, Find your Why 

Ali Edwards, One Little Word https://www.aliedwards.com/one-little-word-2021 

Tom Rath, Strengths Finder (Gallup Strengths Finder Survey) https://www.tomrath.org/book/strengthsfinder/ 

Brene Brown, Dare to Lead  https://daretolead.brenebrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Values.pdf

Jeff Hayden, The Motivation Myth
https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-motivation-myth-jeff-haden/book/9780399563768.html

Nick Leighton, Forbes 5 Reasons Why you need a Personal Mission Statement
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2019/10/08/five-reasons-why-you-need-a-personal-vision-statement-and-how-to-write-one/?sh=18e254f61ab5

All of our designs are from Canva.  An incredible Australian success story.  If you are keen to elevate your design for a CV, website, work presentation, etc check out Canva: https://partner.canva.com/elevate  

Music created by Claire's daughter Hannah

Claire:

Welcome to the Elevate with Grace podcast, for people who are short on time and long to take steps to create success on their own terms. At school university. And in our early careers, we work hard and we approach those challenges with courage, ambition, and passion. We have lots of hope and energy for creating lifelong success on our own terms. And then something happens as we head into our thirties and beyond. We start to hold ourselves back and put limits on ourselves and what we can do. We put our head down into work tasks more and outwardly promote ourselves less. Fear and worries about standing out from the crowd start to set in. There's lots of research that supports the phenomenon that women become less inclined to take risks, career leaps, and maintain financial independence as they move into their thirties and beyond. This is what we want to explore with you on at Elevate with Grace podcast. We are going to be laser focused on curating and sharing, action based ideas, insights and knowledge on the topics of smart risk, taking cultivating career success and creating financial freedom. At the end of each podcast, we want to leave you feeling inspired and pumped up to take action on some bite-sized steps for you to slot seamlessly into your life each week, that will help propel you forward in reinvigorating your path to success as you've defined it.

Miranda:

Welcome to Episode Four of the Elevate with Grace podcast. I'm Miranda and with me is the ever talented Claire. In today's pod we are delivering what I think a is absolute gold and I'm excited to be sharing this with you guys. In the same way that it can be challenging to work out your why we found we were jumping into the solve far too quickly that can limit our achievement in this area. We tick off our to do list and end up right where we start the next year. Weight loss is a very relatable example for many. So after many years of study and trying different things out with limited success, we are bringing you the best of what helped propel us forward long-term and a couple of new ideas that we searched far and wide to uncover. If you haven't quite solved your Why last week don't stress as this episode might be the one that unsticks it for you. You can be evolving And growing your why as we go, and your intuitive style may need more tangible actions to inspire that why. So wherever you are have comfort This is the right place for you, it doesn't matter how we get there as long as we show up and get started.

Claire:

Good morning, Miranda. I'm really looking forward to delving into what are some great tricks tools and hacks to help us narrow in on our personal purpose. We only have this one precious life, so we need to make sure that we're doing things that make us feel like we're in flow with that. But first, as is our MO, let's do a quick recap of last week's pod topic and action challenge. Last week, we called out some of the benefits that will happen if we set aside some bite-size time slots across our days and weeks to get clear on our, why, our vision, our personal purpose, whatever you want to call it, that makes you get on with the job of creating it for yourself and not come up with those yes, but excuses for not doing it. We gave you three thought starter hacks to help you leap into some immediate action. We spoke about starting small with some ideas, for certain elements of your life. Using something like the moral inventory framework created by Dom Price from Atlassian. Or you can start really big and broad and get out of your own way to get that shitty first draft, that SFD down. Or you can just start where you are by asking yourself some self discovery questions building on your love it and loathe it activity from our first pod episode. The, action challenge for this week was to use the thought starter hacks to get started with an SFD of your personal purpose and come up with one action that you will do to get started. So for my SFD of my why, I came up with it's to help as many women as I can each day achieve success on their own terms. My one action commitment I've made is to start my day quietly making a cup of tea and reminding myself of my why and intentionally making sure I set some small activities into my day, which are related to that goal. Whether that's to call or meet up with a friend I know who's working through a change and see if I can do anything, or to come up with some inspirational words, to share it on socials, to help people remind themselves, to look after themselves and their own success. How did you go with your SFD, Miranda of your why? And what action did you come up with?

Miranda:

What I loved about this one is going back over my previous work, into my why and pushing myself to dig deeper. Starting on our own path and varying degrees of work that we've done in this area before, has been really interesting to dig into. I don't believe anyone's really finished or done regardless of age or roles so hopefully everyone got something out of last week's pod. In tackling our weekly challenge, I used all of our hacks, making a start by just writing down everything as an SFD and using the seven pillars and the personal moral inventory. I revised my draft why, so this is just still in very draft form. I was seeking impactful, purposeful fulfilling life, where I give more than I receive. I elevate my actions and thoughts always, a student of this world and its many cultures and lift up as many peers in my life as I can reach to all be better humans. I'm driven to creating creative solutions to every challenge. Be thoughtful in my footprint and empathetic in this journey of life well into my nineties and perhaps even beyond. My focus has been a little narrow up till now so it was really nice to dive into my why, interrogate this from all angles before the next few weeks of really targeted action. Now the trick will be to pull this into a single sentence, but it will do for a first draft. So last week we explored why having clarity around visions and intentions was so key to moving you in the right direction, offering you a clear sign post when you reached crossroads for decision making. These are not new years' resolutions, although you are anytime resolutions, as I prefer to think of them will fall out from these. These are those big picture views of your world, how you want to show up in the world and how your tangible actions for the world and your community, evidence of your big why. So others can find support and build on shared visions. For many of us, we learned to jump straight into the what, be this, what do you do for work? Or, what are you seeking to do? Before unpacking the why and in this instance, once you've unpacked, you will see how all the other elements you have working together, either towards or against you achieving this why, because of that clarity. Hopefully some of those actions in episode one and three have given you some of those good pointers as to your why. In achieving such a big vision, we need to first firm up some strategic goals before we get stuck into specific tasks. That's for future episodes. So strategic goals should fire you up and be realized through a number of task orientated goals and should have high impact. Think a bout the weight loss dilemma. If we focus on losing a few kilos or running five ks, we can achieve this, but chances are life will kick us back into about the same weight and fitness as last year. If that's where our focus stops. Instead, if we seek the bigger vision to live a life of fitness and vitality, to find and embrace exercise that brings joy and discover your health and wellness regime that aligns with your way of life, this is a sort of a version of a strategic goal. For me, this is shown up slightly differently each year, training for challenges, joining coaching groups, trialling different foods. And I stumbled when I've stopped telling myself other priorities are more important. Overall, when I reflect on the view of how I want to show up in the world, It's not about weight. It's about energy, pure joy, and discovering new ways to work towards your bigger vision. The decisions you make, the challenges you agree to, the outsourcing you select underpin your single vision year on year.

Claire:

It's good that you're pointing this out Miranda is I think it can be a tricky but important difference to get your head around. I was listening to an audio book recently called the Motivation Myth by Jeff Hayden. The main premise of the book is that motivation isn't a feeling that just comes to you like a bolt of lightning, which I was disappointed to find out, but anyway! It's that you get motivated by taking small actions each day consistently, and the satisfaction you get from taking that action gives you more willingness to take the next action and so on and so forth. So he talks about the distinction, like you mentioned, between setting your big audacious goal. And then from there you can create processes around the what and the how to make it happen. So you can't create the processes until you've decided on your purpose. And when you've created your processes it's then that you can focus on your daily work plan, forget about your big why, and just do the small actions that you need to live your purpose. So I really liked your example, Miranda of exercise and health and wellbeing, and the distinction. Hayden uses an example of getting a university degree. So you might decide for example, that your why is to be, I don't know, to be a family law professional, to help families in some of their life difficulties and so you need a law degree. The law degree will take you about four years, which can seem overwhelming. So once you've decided that you want to do that as your why, then you simply focus on the two subjects or however many, you have to pass that term and you plan your study and your time and your days and your weeks on those two subjects. And then you keep through doing that process for yourself of how you allocate that time and space to get the subjects done each term and all of the terms. And then before you know it you've smashed through a four year degree. So as you said earlier Miranda in today's episode, we're going to serve up some great content that you can use to refer to and have a play around with in order to figure out your why.

Miranda:

Absolutely. So, let's start where we started, which was a concept from Simon Sinek, the book"Start with Why". In a followup book,"Find Your Why", and again, loads of video resources are out there. So don't think you have to go and read them all, describes how in doing this work for himself he actually asked a few friends to describe him and then dig deeper into the how you show up for them, how you make them feel. And in his case, he discovered that he was inspirational to his friends, they found him inspiring. And so that set him on his path and he's inspiring the world. So I guess that was a great"why" to really uncover. Another tip from his book is to write down stories and moments in your life that are still quite present that light you up and then ask a person maybe a friend, but someone that's not too close to you, to actually listen really hard to these stories and to help you find synergies, to finding your why. So I think if you're a really extroverted person or you're really social and it needs to talk these things through to unpack them, then this is a really great tip. I do recognise that some people Prefer a structured checklist and doing that work internally. And so if you prefer this, then there's a couple of different tools out there. One is around a mission statement. Forbes published a piece from Nick Leighton to help us to dig in to our why by identifying and writing up your personal mission statement, which can really tap into the why. This will support that deeper knowledge and understanding of yourself. It will help to align your personal and professional vision. I think it's interesting that a lot of people start with a personal and professional vision and at some point try to merge them. And I think Simon Sinek and Nick both very aligned that they need to be aligned. So aligning personal professional visions and then pointing that focus to help when things get cloudy. I think that's Probably the most important thing about this why is really helping us to get where we're going with the fewer write road blocks possible. Because for most of us, I think it's been a windy path up til now. A little bit of clearer direction, a little bit of, efficiency would be great And also to help you identify when you hit your champagne moment to celebrate those wins in the moment and go yes, I've achieved this. Which is exactly what we say, Claire the achieving that success on your own terms. I included his checklist in the show notes, but for me the tips as I ran through them, it's not quite serving me. But Claire, I feel your model, actually, aligns with our listeners Did you want to talk through that one?

Claire:

Yes. In last week's pod, I mentioned the book,"The Purpose Project" by Carolyn Tate and in one of the chapters in that book, she talks about how to write a powerful purpose statement for yourself. And so I found a blog article on her website that is basically the same approach that she sets out in the book. It gives you 13 essential ingredients for a powerful purpose statement. It's written for creating a company purpose statement, but I think it works just as well as a guide to help you create your own personal statement. The article has a bunch of great examples of purpose statements, from companies that have great ones and I think that this can help your brain get into a creative mode to come up with what your purpose statement can be. I always find that seeing examples can help you work through how you could translate that into an example for yourself. I think the key here with all of this stuff is not to overthink it. No analysis paralysis, just grab one of those articles or both of the articles, find 30 minutes or an hour to use these articles as a springboard of ideas, to get that SFD of your own why down on paper. You can keep building on it and working on it over time. The main thing is that you get something written down as you're starting point. If you're finding it tough to convince yourself to do this, then in last week's pod episode, remember that we talked about the benefits of doing this. So maybe hop into there, just to give yourself a bit of ammunition for doing the hard work on this one. A second technique that we've come up with that you could use to quickly try and shake out your why is what we're calling"The Power of One" hack. In a nutshell, you pick one word, one idea, one challenge that you will set yourself to focus your energy on. Miranda, I think you've had a bit of success on the idea of the"One Little Word". Can you share why you found that to be a good approach to getting out your why?

Miranda:

Absolutely my personal frustration and something I'm committed to setting right. Is asking too many esoteric questions without clear guidance of the journey that follows. My journey of one little word started a couple of years before I found an actual tool around it. Probably relying more on strategic goals to realize my bigger vision beforehand, by setting this clear vision and with most targeted strategic goals, I noted feeling a greater feeling of control in more areas of my world. So encouraged by this clarity of vision and these strategic goals, but unsure how to dial up the needle so to speak, I went on a hardcore search over several months and eventually came across the idea of one word. This is the idea that you live with a word to guide you. Some years, there'll be a fairly passive word, other years, a strong action word. And when I first found this pitched this idea of take control and wow, work and family life moved from snail's pace to lightspeed. Instead of waiting for things to happen, I'm envisaging how to live the word in every area of my life with these monthly prompts, holding myself to account each month, week with prompts from one little word, a class by Ellie Edwards, it was so powerful that by May I chose to slow things down again, very happy with the outcomes that had been dragging me down the past few years. Imagine that. Four months, two years, the difference was incredible. It was absolute clarity on my visions, my goals and what I was prepared to accept going forward. I'm still planning or both setting these before, but without that clear vision things were going really pear shaped. I realized that I was waiting for others to be ready and in doing so I was holding back. I think that's what underpins this necessary finding your why, if you don't, other people are going to implant theirs on you. And so that clarity is like cracking open an egg it's like lifting open the curtains and seeing the sun. It's quite incredible. Taking control also meant that I had to let some plans go. Some things that I was really working hard towards. And in hindsight it has proven absolutely the right thing to do. So I'm so grateful for getting the clarity when I did. In getting there I think it's really important to write down the plans So I wrote them down. I checked in weekly, I did the prompts and I achieved what I achieved In Four months, like I said, just quite inspiring. So visions and strategic goals in your head without a plan, it's not going to give you the results that you need. Resolutions written in a book at the start of the year, and never referred back to probably still not going to get you the results, but a big audacious vision to help guide you and taking small, actionable steps consistently have proven the most successful to me.

Claire:

Yeah, I think, we spoke about this out of the podcast and I can see how that would work. So for my 2021 vision board, which by the way is actually still in draft. So it's a shitty first draft of my vision board, but it's not too bad and it gives me some guidance. But I have three, words on my vision board, which have balance flourish and inspiration for 2021. And, listening to you talk, I think I could just make it flourish. Like my 2021 word could just be flourished because in order to flourish, I need to make sure that I'm doing the work to feel like I'm in balance on any given day or week, and reminding myself to be mindful of finding inspiration as I go about my days and weeks for the year will also feed into whether I'm flourishing or not. But I think in reality too, it's great. If you can get down to one word and one thing, but it's not that big of a deal to have three words to start with and then checking on them, right?

Miranda:

Absolutely not. I so agree that you just start where you start and some years it's so a word some years is its biggest strategic goals. So I think, I really encourage people to do what's working for you in the moment. If this is really not serving you, then put it away. If this is like, oh my goodness, if I could just focus on this I'm going to get somewhere. Take it and run with it cause this is your year for that. So this year I started with three, I really couldn't narrow it down. By March. I was same sort of thing as you'll flourish. I was like, of course, by doing this, it's going to serve all of these points. So I think if you've never tried it, I was definitely worth a try. It was very helpful for me. And we'll put the details in the show notes.

Claire:

Right. So our last hack on how to get quickly stuck into some action steps on your purpose this week is to spend a bit of time cementing for yourself, what your superpowers are. And also the two or three key values that you live your life by. In the reference articles that we suggested you check out before for how to create your personal purpose statement, some of the questions the authors recommend that you work through is to identify your strengths and your personal values. This in itself can invoke that eye-rolling groany feeling, we then put it in the too hard basket and move on mindset. Plus, a lot of us have been conditioned to not talk about how great we are. And so we don't really think about what our unique strengths are that we bring to our personal and work lives every day. And you do do this, you probably just not thinking about it much of the time in terms of what those things are that you're bringing to the table whenever you're going about your day and week at work and at home. A really great free diagnostic that only takes maybe about 10 or 15 minutes to do is the via character strength survey. The basic premise is that there are 24 character strengths that make up what's best about our personality. Everyone has all of those 24 character strengths, but in different degrees. So you answered the questions and you get a report back, which gives you the combination of your top five strengths I think, maybe it gives you 10 in the free version. I've done this survey quite a few times over the years in different contexts, and I've found it to be really helpful bit of information about myself that I can reference in various ways when I'm thinking about strengths that I bring to that type of role. If you find yourself getting quite into this stuff, which we really hope our podcast is convincing you to do. I also recommend the Strengths Finder book by Tom Rath and the Gallup group. When you buy that book, you get a code to do the Gallup strength finder survey online, and you get a very comprehensive report back, which you can use with the book to get clear on what your natural talents are. So you can start to make decisions about what you do and you don't do that, leverage your strengths across your work and your life. So the concept in the book is that you really do become your best self, not by focusing on getting better at the things that you're not good at, but by really capitalizing on your strengths. And finally, I think a really good compliment to this is to get solid on what your two to three core values are. Miranda, you brought up Brene Brown in the last couple of pods. And she produces a really good content on this, in her books, like"Dare To Lead" and also on her Dare to Lead website and some of her YouTube videos. If you're finding it hard to narrow it down and your two to three core values, that's completely okay and prettynormal, it can actually be quite a hard thing to do. But like the power of one hack that we chatted about before, one way you can do this is to circle 10 or so values from the Brene Brown values list that we'll stick in the show notes and you can just quickly look at the list, pick 10 that maybe resonate with you off the bat. And then over time, work out which ones are the two to three key ones that you truly live your life by. You can do that over time so for example, when you get annoyed or irritated about something, it can be a bit of a flag to take a quick pause and think to yourself, why is that annoying me so much? What is it about that thing that somebody is doing that's annoying me so much and often it will be because it contradicts one of your personal values. And those things can really lead into writing out your personal purpose statement, coming up with your one little word and that sort of stuff.

Miranda:

No, a perfect reminder. I think it's been a little while since I've done a character study so check out that VIA one. I think it's something that we should be asking other people to help you to dig into is certainly one thing that can also be their view and their vision. So it certainly helps to compliment that with doing some of this work on your own and really digging it. Because as you mentioned, we think about our unique selling points. The way we show up in the world, we think about day to day, what are we doing? The what, what, what, so yeah, all this work around purpose is so powerful. All right. Well, as we've promised, there is some absolute gold to help you on your way to finding your vision and setting up your clear signposts to help your future path come clearer, I get this like visual of Dorothy landing in Oz, reaching that iconic signpost and just knowing which way she needs to go, leading her companions with confidence and this is what we want for you all as well. To help you articulate and see your vision come to life, we've explored the value of strategic goals before reaching in for those short-term band-aids, we've explored the personal mission statement or a powerful purpose statement to help you define your why. We've shared the value of dialing your vision into your guiding words with a weekly or monthly action to help you realize your vision much faster, and offer tools to uncovering your strengths and your personal values to further unpack your why. By this point, I am hoping you are so excited to get some big ideas down, so we'll jump straight into the action challenge for this week. What we want to do this week is to really seek to articulate and refine your vision to a clear statement that you can relate to. So take that first draft you created last week, possibly rumble with those words, and test it. You can do this with someone as per the Simon Sinek method, or you can go a little broader, understand your values and refine your why. And at the end of these, come back to that first draft really try to tighten that vision statement or perhaps use the purpose statement to really get something nice and tight and clear. Generally, you want to aim for one sentence, but be a rebel, you can have two, or you can have one word. Once you've done this start to think about those big strategic goals and how you are going to execute on your vision. Is it about having that one word guide you. Next week, we will get started on realizing your vision and their strategic goals to make it happen.

Claire:

Challenge acceptance for this week's action challenge. I'll give it a good red hot go. Like everyone, it always makes me feel a bit cringey and uncomfortable to create big audacious goals for myself, but we've talked about the benefits of it. So, as I mentioned earlier, and it's worth hollering out again, a hugely important thing for us all to remember is to make sure we're not letting ourselves getting our own ways. Big time channeling of that concept from Brene Brown and Anne Lamott of getting that shitty first draft of your personal purpose statement down on paper. Remember that perfectionism kills creativity. And you just need to get over yourself and write down your shitty first draft. So peeps go forth and find even just a short slab of time this week to create those SFDs because it will really come in handy for next week's episode. Next week, Miranda and I are very excited because we're going to be doing our first book review of the podcast series, which is: The One Thing, the Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller and Jay Patterson. There are some really great synergies between The One Thing and our Elevate with Grace purpose of curating the amazing content that's out there in the world, into bite-sized actionable steps for you to take on your journey of leading a life of success on your terms. Miranda and I are pretty pumped about next week's episode so we hope you can join us. We've put all the curated content we've mentioned today in the pod episode notes so you can check them out over the next week and dip into some of the stuff that resonates with you and inspires you to take small, actionable steps on yourself. Also check out our website, elevatewithgrace.com.au or hop onto our Instagram account for more curated content. And we love, love, love to hear from you and how you're going. So please drop us an email at elevatewithgrace@gmail.com. And please, please, please like, and subscribe to this podcast and tell your friends. We can't wait to chat to you next week. Thanks so much for listening.

Miranda:

Thank you. Thank you.