Download Otter for your meeting notes

Momentum call: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Momentum call

Jessica Mehring55min

Jessica Abel

00:00

Right? Because it is scary to do when you don't have all your ducks in a row, and you don't know what all the things are, and you're not prepared for everything. But pilots are powerful, you know, going in and saying, like, I, you know, I'm, I'm testing this out. I think it's going to work. I'm really confident about the basic idea. But, like, the details may be a little fuzzy, but I know I can do this, and I'm going to be there 100% of the time, you know, like I am so there for this. I'm there to test. I'm there to get results, you know, no matter what. And personally, I've run a bunch of pilots for different things. They've always been so cool and, like, the best, even if, like, the curriculum was completely finished, in some cases, I was writing it as I was writing it as I went, you know, like, I've did it. I did a pilot with a marketing course that I designed at one point. And the whole job, the the brief, the thing I told people when they came in was, like, I'm gonna literally write this as we go, like, you will get the new lesson right before we talk about it, and I will live teach it, and then you go do it. And so that was what I was doing, and people knew it, and they were excited, and it was the best possible cohort of that group. I mean, they all bonded together. They kept meeting together afterwards. So it's, you know, that I'm saying all this to encourage you to just be confident and be like, it's going to be cool. It's going to be fine. I know you know you can do this. And I know you can do this because, because you've done it already, you know, and defining what the outcomes are that matter to people, and coming up with the language and all that kind of stuff will partly come out of just doing the work and just actually working with people. Yes,

Garima Goel Lal

01:37

thank you. That That makes sense.

Jessica Abel

01:39

Great. Awesome. Okay. Bri,

01:44

yeah, thanks. Um, I just, um, I've been enrolled in a in a training. That's a, it's, it seemed like a kind of subsequent training to do to my craniosacral practice. And I decided in the last few weeks that it wasn't for me, and just emailed the teachers yesterday that I would be stepping away, and I got a wave of just like disappointment and frustration and panic that it was the wrong choice, although I really I took my time. I felt into it. I talked internally about this, internally, like I just when I realized I was going to step away, I felt so relieved and so much space, but the second I said no and got their confirmation that it was a no, yeah, and I'm just like, Why do I have to do that? Like, I don't want to be in that course. But I like, now I have longing that I just lost something precious. So I just, yeah, I just

Jessica Abel (she/her)

02:45

sunk costs.

02:46

Sunk costs.

Jessica Abel

02:48

You know, this is one of those things where you have invested time, energy, probably money, in this course, and you had an idea that this was going to lead you to something you realized in your, you know, logical brain, and the stuff that we're doing today for the Collect phase is the perfect, you know, place to be talking about this stuff, that this was not going to be a good fit. It was not a good use of your time. And the relief that you felt in saying no is true, that's the true relief, you know. But then there's this other part of you that's like, Yeah, but what about all this that I put in? Does it not mean anything anymore? Does it not matter anymore? And the main thing to know about this, and it's a it's a really hard lesson to learn, is the only time you have is the time that's in front of you.

03:40

Yeah? Yeah, no, I mean, and that was why I stepped away from it, because it was like, I have something else to do with my time. Yeah, okay. It's just good to have that reflection, because there's like, I can make myself crazy with second guessing, yes.

Jessica Abel

03:53

And part of the process we're learning here with the creative focus workshop is a really robust decision process, so that when you feel those waves of like, oh my god, what you can actually trace back and go, This is why I did this. This is the reason these reasons are still true. There's nothing else that's come up that has made these reasons not true, you know, or you know, given counter evidence. And so you can ride that wave and be like, okay, it's fine. I'm going to be fine, you know, whereas without that, it's very hard, sometimes, you know, to do that. Awesome. Thank

04:27

you. Yeah.

Jessica Abel

04:31

All right. Welcome. Jennifer, hi. Anybody else have a question or something you want to bring up before we get started with collect phase stuff? Yeah?

Jessica Abel

04:45

Okay, great. All right, so the mission today is just to go, basically go through the lessons in the Collect phase, answer any questions you might have you may or may not have gotten to these yet, totally fine, either way, and talk about why, why we do the Collect phase at all, and why we do them, why we do it the way we do it in the creative focus workshop. So just to roll back a little bit, if nobody's even looked, if anybody has not looked, let me put it that way, the Collect phase is the first of the four phases of the creative engine. So the creative engine is the framework that I've developed to talk about finishing projects, any kind of projects, really, you know. I mean, I apply it to creative projects, but it also applies equally to not, you know, not particularly creative projects, like, you know, planning a big event or something like that, right? So it's the same, the same four phases. And the four phases are collect, decide, act and reflect. And so we're going to talk about collect today, which is the first phase. But it is a cycle, right? It goes around. And so in some ways, the beginning of the cycle could be, you could think of it in the reflect phase, because we're all, you know, midlife people. We have a lot of history. What we're coming into this with is understanding and reflections on, you know, stuff that's happened in the past that influences our decisions going forward. And a lot of the stuff we're doing in the Collect phase, in some ways, really is reflective, you know, it's really thinking about, you know, why this and not that, and so on. There's also information gathering and very, very clearly, collect stuff. And so the Collect phase in general, is where you research and where you get training and where you get preparation, and you put everything together. You put all the materials together you're going to need in the decide phase, then you figure out what's relevant out of that, and what you're going to pursue. And so you're setting yourself on a track in a particular way. In the Act phase, then you're implementing you're trying to do, to follow through on your decision. And then in the reflect phase, you are saying, well, how did that work? Was that good bad? You know, what did I learn? What can I do differently next time? And then you use that to go back into collect and so you can see how that would apply to an entire like writing an entire book or creating an entire program or whatever it is. But it also applies on like, the daily basis, you know. So like, in the morning, what am I, you know, like, maybe the day before, what am I going what are the materials I'm going to need for tomorrow? And hopefully you're deciding the day before with your top three is what you're going to do. So you're thinking you're going through decide phase, okay, I'm going to focus on this. And then you're acting. And as you act a lot of times, you go, Wait a second. I don't have enough information here, or I don't know something I'm going to need to know. And you're right back in the Collect phase, and pick something up. And then you're backing, decide, you know. And so you kind of are going through these different phases over and over again. I think one of the biggest values I've seen in making this explicit, because we've all done it a million times, right? It's part of just how we do things, but making it explicit as a framework highlights things that we tend to skip. And we tend to skip deciding, in particular, like making a conscious decision about something, and so we're trying to force our selves from here's a bunch of stuff to now I'm acting on stuff, but I'm not sure what, right? So that's what we're going to be going through when we go through these implementation sessions. Is like, how to sort of conceptually go through these things. Obviously, I'm not going to be teaching you through every single lesson individually. And another thing that came up, so I did a lesson brief today on the criteria lesson that's posted already. So if you want to go back and look at it, it's 20 minutes now, I just kind of talked through criteria lessons. Specifically last week I did the capacity lesson. Next week I'll be doing collect. So in that lesson, interesting question came up from Lisa, who's in the CFW, who was like, Okay, well, I know I'm writing my book. I don't need to decide about my book. What I need to do is I need to make sure that it's actually happening in my life that, you know, like her husband asks a lot of her and her father's, you know, needs her help and whatever. And so she's just like, uh, you know, so how does she make sure she preserves this time? And so we talked about how there's actually different tools that she may need to use, which are in the decide phase, that are like habits and creating templates for your week and structures that you know where you you've made, you need to make certain kinds of decisions that then get implemented into patterns and structures for your days. And so the thing I wanted to say that that reminded me of is that, depending on what's going on with you, these tools will or will not be relevant at the moment. I think everything in the creative focus workshop will be useful at some point or another, but I don't want anybody here to feel like I need to go through this mechanically, every single lesson. If it's not relevant to you right now, put it on the back burner. Don't worry about it right now. Maybe listen to it on the podcast and not do the work, you know. So if your problem right now is like, what do I do? I don't know how to decide. You really need to be focusing on the Collect phase and then the first lesson of decide which is the prioritization matrix. And I do want you to learn how to use it, because it's really powerful. Because it's really powerful. But if you know what you're doing, that's not the problem, then it's going to be more like habit, building templates for your week, you know, doing project planning, laying out the projects over time, that kind of stuff. So be aware of that. So like the danger of doing what I'm doing now with implementation sessions is making you feel like, Oh, my God, homework. I'm behind, not trying to do that to you. Okay? So I'm trying to say, like, be thoughtful about what you need to finish and what you don't need to finish in terms of, like, doing the work in the creative focus workshop, versus other things in your life. If you're really busy, if you don't have the time, you know it's okay to say, All right, I don't need this right now. I'm not going to do this part right now. That said, I do think that the capacity lesson, everyone should do it, capacity and criteria like everybody should do this, and everybody should redo it regularly, because it really is like this. It is a reflective exercise. It's in collect, because you're literally getting stuff together. But it's reflective. It's you thinking about, where am I at right now, and what's happening with me. So let me go over what the 3c are and how we do this. So we talked about the creative engine. The creative engine is these four phases. They apply to all kinds of projects, and in different projects they look different. So that if you're doing like a historical non fiction book, you know, the Collect phase is literally research and decide is like, which things are I'm going to talk about. Act is like writing the book and reflect. Is like, Well, what did I learn from that and what I want to do next? Right? So simple, when you're talking about the creative engine applied at a meta level to how do I do projects? That's what we're doing here, right? So the Collect phase is. The most important thing about the Collect phase to know is, this is where you answer the question, how does my reality inform what I want out of my life? So how does my reality reflect what I want out of my life and inform what I want out of my life, instead of what we usually do, which is, like I thought of a bunch of things and therefore they need to happen. Or people say this should be possible, and so they it should be possible, and something's wrong with me because it's not, or here's a planner or a system or a whatever that says I can get everything done, but I'm not getting everything done. So what's wrong with me? Like, that's what we don't want to do. We don't want that. And so what we're trying to do is create this container, again, that is your life and your reality, and you're making you're using that then to make decisions and to build structures and to build systems that are relevant to you and reflect your reality. So that's the purpose of what we're doing, big picture in the Collect phase. Collect phase has three pieces to it, which all very conveniently for me, start with the letter C. I did not do that on purpose, but I was very pleased to find out that that was the case. And the 3c are capacity criteria and commitments, not only three C's, three hard C's. How lucky could a girl get, you know what I'm saying. Anyway, so we capacity again. There's a lesson brief on this already posted. But what capacity is is is essentially the the lesson the capacity audit is about really thinking through, what are the things that are going on in your life? What does that mean for you in terms of time, in terms of your emotional capacity, in terms of your financial capacity, you know, do you have money to invest or allow to not come to be in order to make space for yourself? You know, can you use money in order to make space like there's all different kinds of ways that financial capacity goes into this. And also, what are your preferences about how you want to be in the world? You know, do you want to be doing stuff that's, you know, creating more connections with people? Do you want to be finding ways to create solo space for yourself? You know, there's different kinds of ways that that might come into this. And so that's in the capacity audit lesson. And I got this metaphor initially from

Jessica Abel

14:06

a friend who was running a webinar with her, and she she had this like image of a container, like a like a thing, you know, a physical holder of stuff. And ever since then, it's like, that's what really makes so much sense to me, is that when you are thinking about your capacity, really is your capacity, which changes on the daily, potentially, depending on what's going on in your life. Like you can get a phone call that kills your capacity for a week now or longer, or you can get, you know, like an offer of doing something in the mail that's going to or in the email, which is going to, like, you know, pay your bills for the next six months, and all of a sudden you're like, holy crap, I'm good. I'm golden, right? So there's, like, different ways things can happen very quickly, and so I just want to make sure I'm emphasizing that. But it is the container in which you get to do everything in your life. Your Capacity is what it is, whatever it is right now, it is what it is. You can affect it by making different decisions about how you're using your time. So that, if you are actually actively trying to say no to certain kinds of things that are really draining and do other things that are helpful and whatever, you can change your capacity. But right now, it is what it is. It is what it is today and and the image of, like, using your capacity to decide what you're going to carry, what you're going to do, what fits inside that capacity. Instead of saying, I have all these things, how can I get them all in there, you know, and dropping stuff, and it's like, you know, overflowing and whatever. I almost picture it like there's a picture in the in the lesson, of this amphora, you know, like a Greek amphora. And I just let it like this picture of, like, you're carrying this giant jug, and that's what you can carry. You have two arms. You got to hold this thing. And you can't just, like, you know, juggle a bunch of other stuff at the same time. So that's the idea of capacity. And I wanted to pause there for a sec and ask, first of all, have you guys gone through this lesson? And second of all, what kinds of things came up for you, any kind of questions you may have had as you went

Garima Goel Lal

16:20

through it? So I actually realized I have been tracking my time for the past couple of weeks, I mean, off and on for typical days and typical weekends, I found that I am not lacking in time as much as I'm lacking in mental energy to focus on that particular project. So I am doing my work that I'm doing. I'm doing my, you know, house shows or whatever, and then after that, I do have time, but I think I'm lacking mental focus to start so, so I think I need to increase my capacity in a different way. Yeah,

Jessica Abel

16:59

I mean, I mean, I think that's very common that, you know, people are in a situation where they're like, I should be able to do all this stuff, because I have the hours. But those hours you're tapped out, you're tired, you don't, you know, you're just not ready for it. And the kind of thing that you're doing right now, garima, where you're trying to start something, it requires a lot of you, you know, it's not something where you just like, you know, once you're in the middle of this, you'll probably be able to sit down with less capacity and get some stuff done. But as you're trying to start, there's like, this really enormous resistance that's going to come up there for for lots of reasons, for emotional reasons, but also cognitive reasons. Like, you have to think new thoughts, and, like, do new stuff. And while nobody here is lazy. There are no lazy people here, but our brains, physiologically are lazy. They look for shortcuts. They don't want to do work, because work takes calories, and we are physical beings that want to survive. So it's not it's normal to have like resistance to heavy cognitive work, you know.

Garima Goel Lal

18:05

Okay, so maybe I'm asking too early, what's the work around to I mean, well,

Jessica Abel

18:10

we'll work on that more specifically as we go along. But I think the basic thing is you need to look at the pattern of your day. So if the pattern of your day is you're using up your best cognitive energy somewhere else, doing something else. Well, you need to flip it. You need to pay yourself first. You need to give yourself the chance to use your best cognitive energy on the thing that you're really interested in. And when you're a little more tired, you're doing something a little bit more routine, whatever that is. And maybe that's, I know, you do your work for your job first thing in the morning. Well, you know, it's nice to get out of the way, but on the other hand, what if you waited two hours, you know, and did it later. So, you know, that's the kind of thing you're going to want to look at. Is that is, and I think that one of the lessons that's in a deeper dive in collect is creative conditions. And creative conditions is where you think through, how do I work best? Like, how what conditions, physical conditions, you know, environmental whatever, contribute to my best working environment. And how can I make those things more available to me? So that might be a good one to go to, yeah. And as we go along, we can definitely add more detail to that and talk about it in a more specific way, yeah. Jessica,

Jessica Mehring

19:32

yeah. So this was such an interesting exercise for me. I have to admit. I mean, I'm a very analytical person, like equally analytical and creative, but I'm a data collector. I'm always assessing everything. I've been time tracking for probably five years. I love this stuff, and yet the way that you kind of framed things made me look at my life very differently, which is really interesting. And in the criteria, the collect, define your criteria worksheet. When I got to the end and I was putting my criteria in order, and really just thinking about kind of what I need in order to do my best work, I was really surprised that input and output had to be in the same place for me. So I have to be writing and I have to be learning. Those are two things that I have to be doing at all times to be me, to feel like I'm an okay, you know, healthy human being. I have to be writing and I have to be learning. What I didn't realize until this exercise is that they have to go together, so when I'm only doing one or only doing the other, I start getting out of balance. And I realized that's probably some of my resistance with with kind of traditionally how coaching programs have worked, and how in other programs, I've been guided to create a coaching program where it's all about output, you know, kind of pouring into people, where I need to be learning too, and that I can get excited about. So garima, I'm feeling a lot of resistance about watching my my coaching offer too, and it's going out into the world this week to my very tiny little list. It's very, very scary, but I'm I'm trying to reframe it as, okay, I'm putting this out there. I have all of this, all of this experience and knowledge and all these frameworks that I can, I can share and really help these people with, but I'm also going to be learning about them and learning about their challenges and taking in new information that I can then, you know, the cycle begins again to produce more output specifically to those challenges. So I just wanted to put that out there that these exercises seem really simple, but I'm having some major breakthroughs here.

Jessica Abel

22:11

That is fantastic. I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah, I really, I mean, I try to keep them very, very simple, but they're all asking really deep questions, you know, like really major questions, and I would with this particular thing of coaching. I mean, I've been a teacher for 25 years, right? And, and I always say the first iteration of anything you teach is dog's breakfast, like, it's just a mess, and often really fun and awesome, but also just like, kind of a mess, and you just kind of got to live with that. But you learn so much from every single student, client, whoever you work with, and like, if you were to go back to the original thing that I put out from the creative focus workshop, you know, which was not even called that, like the very first thing I did, which is now almost nine years ago. And look at the thing, the emails I sent out to that group, they were, I mean, there were things, there were things you'd recognize in there, but overall it was like a completely different thing. And I did not understand the kind of stuff we're talking about today. I'd not know any of this stuff. I learned this from teaching and from working with people, and from hearing the kinds of, you know, this, this, this thing we're doing right now where it's like, you say something, I say something, and then you say something else, and I'm like, oh, like, those things come together, you know, and I go, Oh, and immediately, it's because of my experience, I can tie it Back to other things and suddenly come up with what's really new intellectual property, like new ideas, new new thoughts that can help people so, you know, like the 3c that's from this year. That's from like, I mean, I was starting to work on the idea of capacity as far as, like, maybe 18 months ago or two years ago. But like slotting this into this very specific like, these are the three lessons I did that this year. I did that in, like, February, March, and this is eight years into this program. So there's a massive amount of learning to be done, for sure, and it's, it's always it can be frustrating.

Jessica Mehring

24:18

That's reassuring, though it's really reassuring.

Jessica Abel

24:21

Yeah, it gets an ongoing and that's why I say just start, because you can't be ready. You can't know ahead of time. You really can't and that's true of any project. You really can't know. The second, you know, the wheels hit the road, you were like, Oh, this is a different road. I didn't know what was going on over here, you know. And everything changes. Yeah, all right, great. So let's talk about criteria, which you just brought up. Criteria are the factors that contribute to success for you. So the idea with criteria is that within a domain, and so let me talk about the idea of domains briefly. Within domains are an area, sort of a consistent area of focus, or attention, or work or something like that, right? So it's a little it's a little fuzzy idea. It can be flexible. Sometimes these domains overlap quite a bit. But, you know, you might have a domain, which is, you know, family relationships, like your immediate family, like this is a domain. I want to focus on this. I want to spend time making sure I'm spending time with my children. Like, in my case, my daughter's gonna be leaving for college, and, like, less than two years. It's insane, and I'm so unhappy about this. And so, like, I need to be focusing on spending time with her, you know, and with my my son, who's two years younger. And so that's something I've been like, putting my focus on more explicitly over the last few years, as I realized that my like timer was ticking down, and that's a domain, right? Another domain is like, you know, marketing efforts for my business, like, writ large, right? That whole domain, like, there's so many different options, different things I could be doing to promote my business, different individual products or overall, like, this is our world, or whatever. Like, there's so many options. And so when I'm looking at those options, I want to be comparing apples to apples. And I want to be saying, like, well, what are my goals? What are my what constitutes success in marketing my business? So one of those markers of success would be growing my audience. But more than that, growing my customers, like actually making more customers more than audience members. And so if I were to put those two on a list, I would make sure customers like making sales to people and growing an audience of customers would be above just growing an audience like I don't really care about having a giant audience. I want people who are really engaged. And so that's a way to order those things, right? That's different criteria that sound the same, but they're not the same. And other criteria might be, this needs to be something that I can do in X amount of time a week. You know? I can't be taking on something massive because I only have this amount of time available. That's a criterion for something that is successful for me and will work for me. You know, that there's a good relationship between the amount of effort I'm putting in and the output that this is something that leads to dollars. You know that this is whatever like, there are all kinds of different ways that I can look at the criteria within that domain, and again, to compare that to like time with my kids and my husband. You know that that, like, my relationships with those people in that domain, there's nothing to do with any of those other things, right? That's all about, am I spending time just like hanging out with them, like, not on a mission, you know? Like, how am I doing that on a daily or every other day kind of basis, and so on. So the creating a list of criteria like that. Here's the thing you will and I'll get you in two in a sec. Liz, but don't worry. The the first pass, as you go through this, you will not know everything, and you will not remember everything. This is a very iterative process. The whole collect phase is where, as you start doing stuff again, like, second the wheels hit the road, you're gonna be like, oh, wait a second, that's not quite it. And you're gonna go back and realize you missed a criterion, or you were weighting something differently. Like, you said this is more important, but actually this is more important. Or you put something on your list that you're like, I don't really care about that. Like, especially given this other thing, like, that's not all that important to me. There are all kinds of things that will become visible to you as you use them. And so I encourage you to again objectivity come to add it with an open mind and just kind of like brain dump whatever it is if you're having trouble with it, there are several deeper dives that can help. Elizabeth, what was your question? You're muted.

Lisbeth Frølunde

28:45

Sorry. There it was. It's back to the question of success, because it's such a riddled word, or how to say it, it's riddled with, is it meaningful to any one else? Is this creative project that I'm doing high, high risk of failure. Am I willing to ride with it or devote myself to something for years that may end up with, like nothing or be worthless, not just, you know, even though I put the time into it that I invest might be, might be, you know, quality time for me. But you know, what comes of it? I mean, success, it's always both the internal and the external. And I just wanted to add another comment to that, because something I've been thinking about, I don't think you just said it just before. I mean, half an hour ago at the other meeting, maybe it was something else, but, but there was this connection about shame, about being overloaded, having too much to do, feeling disorganized, scolding oneself, blaming oneself, and then you get into the shame. So the thing about success, for me, it's a little bit related to this trap kind of into, yeah, totally. Success entails not just my own. I might be successful at something that nobody else would find successful.

Garima Goel Lal

30:08

You know

Lisbeth Frølunde

30:10

what I mean?

Jessica Abel

30:12

I want to say about that the word success is very fraught, and I apologize for that. I've had a hard time coming up with something else that slots into that place. And so if you have any ideas, let me know. But like, the idea is that the outcomes are what you want, you know there's matching up with outcomes that you want. And so you mentioned a bunch of different things that are potential success markers, but may not matter to you. And this is what we're trying to get at with criteria. So you said, you know, maybe this really, you know, feels really satisfying to me to work on, you know, that is very, very much is like, you know, fulfills my creative vision. That's a success marker that matters for sure. You know, other things are, it doesn't have an audience, like it doesn't land. Somehow. That's a danger with the project, like that's something. And so you said that. And so what is the criterion? It has an audience. It will have an audience. Like it is likely to find an audience. Is a criterion? Does that matter to you or not? Right? So you get to decide if that's important or not, and in some cases it may be important, and in other projects, it may not be important at all. And so the important thing is to like, say, Okay, this is something that's like swirling around my brain that like a project, to say a project is successful, means these things to me, personally, and these things in the world. So let me list all those things out, and then I'm gonna put them in order. And what matters to me, you know, what are the criteria that matter to me? And so it makes money. Do you care? Do you not care? You know, my old professor thinks it's amazing. You know, do you care? Do you not care? Like, these are all kinds of things that could be seen as success markers to someone. Are legitimately success markers to some people. But may or may not matter to you, and if you once you decide that this is the thing that you know, like Rhys thing from earlier of leaving this program and then feeling terrible, like, what if I left this? Once you get this all laid out and you're like, oh, money is actually not important to me for this project. It is a an external success marker that people say means success, but I can see it's not important to me with this project. I don't need to make money from it. I don't, kind of don't care, you know. So if it comes great, but if not whatever, you've already decided that you know that clearly for yourself. So when it starts not making money, you can go back and say, like, Oh, my God, it's not making money. You go, Wait a second. I said it was fine that it does not make money, you know, look at look at what I said about this. Look at how I decided this. Here's how I decided this. Here's why I decided this. When you have that backup, when you have that evidence for yourself, it helps you reinforce your sense of security with the decisions you're making, and then that helps you actually follow through on them and act on them, and not question them, you know, not second guess them, because it's going to get hard and it's going to get boring and things are going to happen that don't go the way you want. You know you need to be able to go back to your reasoning and say, like, Okay, this is the right decision, and this is why you also can go back and say, like, oh, this project is going in a way that I totally didn't expect and is now not aligned with my success criteria, and therefore I'm going to quit, and I'm going to quit proactively. I'm going to quit now because I don't want to put more time into this thing, because it's not aligned with what I want out of my life. And when you know that you can ride that wave of like, FOMO and doubt and whatever, and say, like, it's cool, it's fine, I know it's true. You know, deep breath, it's going to be fine, because we have so many, you know, the sunk cost fallacy is one part of that, but it's also like so many cultural, you know, prohibitions around quitting. You know that it's like bad to quit, that you're weak if you quit, that there's, you know, something problematic about you if you quit. I disagree. I think the strongest thing you can possibly do is quit something you should quit. Like, quit it quit it early. Quit it fast. Quit it hard. Because, like, the worst thing you can be doing is pouring a whole bunch of time into something that you just it does not align with what you want out of your life. So that's, that's where I'm looking at that's the position I'm taking on criteria is that that, like this, is what helps you verify you know what you need out of something. Oh, and the question of shame, yes. So there's so much shame around projects and doing them and not doing them, and quitting them and starting them, whatever, whatever, whatever. There's so much of that stuff, and a huge amount of it comes out of, like I was saying earlier, this kind of sense of like I thought of it therefore it should be possible. Or people say it should be possible, and therefore it should be possible. Or, you know, this, this system says, if I use the system, it will be possible and and doable, and I'm going to be able to do it, and it's all going to be fine. And anytime we're not following through on something, we've got some kind of sense that there's like, both internal and external expectations that thing is going to should happen. When it doesn't happen, that triggers a shame response. I'm not up to it. I'm not good enough that there's something wrong with me, because everybody says this should be doable, and it's not doable. Why is it not doable? It's me, mine the problem. And I want to point you to Brene Brown's work on shame. She's excellent on all this, yeah, and there's a very key distinction that she makes that I love, which is between guilt and shame. That guilt is feeling bad about not having done a thing, and is a useful, painful but useful emotion, because when you feel guilt, you can say, like, Okay, I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen again. I'm going to put things in place to make sure it doesn't happen. Because you know, that was a mistake, and I wish I had not done that, or had done that, or whatever it is, right. Shame is I'm a bad person. There's something broken about me, like, it's like, inherent to me. There's something to matter with me, and I don't deserve, you know, love or appreciation or whatever. As a result of that, there's like, very different, like, the action is bad versus I am bad, and there's nothing. There's completely understandable. No shame about having shame, because we all have it, but like, it's, it's, there's nothing useful about shame in our current context. I think it evolved probably because there was such a need for group cohesion as we evolved, as, you know, biological beings that having a shame function to, like, excommunicate people who weren't following the rules might have had a survival, you know, function. That's just my, like, pseudo scientific thoughts about this. I mean, I think there's probably reasons why it's so strong, right? Because it basically, it is. It's a social function of like, keeping you in line, keeping you doing, you know, like toeing the line, doing the thing and and we as advanced, you know, humans have set up all these systems around productivity, which is, like so much shame around not doing more work, not doing more stuff, just not more not completing things, not being like a contributing member to your family or to society or to whatever, whatever. And so much that comes out of, like, the Puritan work ethic. And, I mean, there's, I could go on and on, like, it's, it's a mess. It's a mess. So if you feel it, very understandable. I feel it too. It's a normal thing. But I think again, identifying like, Oh, I'm having a shame reaction to this, and trying to get a little objectivity from it. Talking to somebody who's a safe person to talk to about this feeling, just saying you have it you know that you're having this feeling can be really helpful in unwinding the feeling and just recognizing that there are certain triggers that have been, you know, implanted in you genetically and also societally, that will trigger this kind of reaction, and it's just going to happen, and You have to figure out how to negotiate that. Yeah,

Jessica Abel

38:43

any other comments before I move on, just one more little bit here. So the third C is commitments. And the commitments piece, as I teach it in the creative focus workshop is primarily a list of your ideas, like all the ideas, the things you want to be working on in a given domain. And one thing that's come up frequently already in this group is, yeah, but I have like, these ideas in this domain, and these ideas in this domain. How do I decide between those things? And that's also a question right to look at, what is your criteria for, like, where you want to be spending your time? So again, it's sort of like at a meta level, like, how much time do I want to be spending on this area versus this area? That's a different kind of decision making. But the list of ideas of like, these are the things I want to be doing within this domain. Helps you. Then put those into prioritization matrix and figure out what what rises to the top. And that's what we're going to do next in the in the side phase, one of the biggest problems I see with people coming into my world is all the ideas, all the things, and again, feeling like because you had the idea they need to happen. And one of the biggest things that I want people to walk away with is the ability to permanently say goodbye to certain ideas, things that either would just don't serve you, they're just not going to be helpful, things that belong to a different version of yourself, that is a past version that's no longer relevant. And you know, with great respect and love, you can sunset these ideas and say, like, this was a fantastic idea for when I was 25 but it does not. It's not relevant to me right now. It's no longer going to be something that I want to be doing with my life and a lot of times. And I have these two, you know, like, these are ideas. I have ideas that I've been holding on to for 25 years, or, you know, 20 years or something like that. Do I work on them? No, but they're still there. Like, I haven't some there's a couple things, a few things where I'm like, maybe, maybe, you know, and there's, for the most part, it's not an active weight for me, because I don't pay any attention to them. One of the things I wanted to talk about is the green room, which we're going to get to in the future, like taking these ideas, and we're going to get to that once we do the prioritization ideas you're not working on, and put them in a waiting room, put them somewhere where you're not looking at them. And my green room for ideas, it's called Green Room, and it's a table, you know, it's like a database with like ideas. I could put notes in it, and whatever. Once they're there, I almost don't ever have to think about them. I will look at them if I need, like, Where was that thing? And I'll go find it, and it's there, you know. Or once a quarter or once a year, I'll be like, do I want to do any of these things? And I'll look at them and and see. But putting them someplace like that, and having made the decision that this is not what I'm doing now, it's not what I'm doing in the near future makes it so much easier to not have them on my mind, because there's so much cognitive weight to carrying these things around and feeling like, Yeah, but this, yeah, but that, yeah, but this, yeah, but that. Those are, you know, it's a lot. It's a lot more weight than we give it credit for, and that's what I want to encourage everybody to be aware of and thinking about here, the deeper dives for the Collect phase are time tracking, which I've already recommended to a few people. And to be clear, the time tracking that we're talking about here is a very specific kind of time tracking where there's a layout, a basic plan, for your day, and then do your day and figure out what the differences are, so that it's starting to highlight areas where you think something's happening and it's not, or you think something's not happening and it is, and it's really useful, highly recommended for everybody. But also, like, if you're particularly like, how do I fit this into my day, or what's happening with my time, or whatever, you can add, like, garima, you're talking about your energy at various times of the day. You could add a layer, like, add a column, or something, which is your energy, you know, like, where do I feel creative? Where do I feel energetic? Where do I feel tapped out? And I need an app. Like, you can definitely do that kind of tracking Alongside this, and can also be extremely useful. It's not part of the lesson, but it's really it's a great thing to do. And then there are three deeper dives that are related to criteria, especially if you're struggling to figure out what your criteria are. One of them is the creative conditions, which I already mentioned. One of them is values, which is very similar to other values exercises you will have done, potentially in a business program or whatever. I'm just getting you to take a little more time over it and kind of ruminate, you know, think about it over time and assess it. There's also a blog post that's related to this that I did not put into the course because I didn't want to make anybody feel like they needed to do it if it's not for them, which is about operationalizing your values. How do you take these values and put them into action in your life? And the example I gave of this earlier in the lesson brief was one of my values, one of my core business values, is objectivity. And so you can already see today how objectivity is a huge has a huge influence on how I'm teaching. It also has a huge influence on how I collect data, you know, about what works and what doesn't work for people, how I talk about what we do, you know, the sort of my voice and the things that that I talk about in in my marketing and so on. So that's the idea of operationalizing values. It's there if you want it, you want it. You definitely can just put a pin in this and do it some other time. But it is because it takes time. That's why I didn't put it into the course, because I didn't want to make it like this big, heavy thing for people, but it's available if you want it. And then the other criteria related things is vision charting. We kind of touched on that a little bit like thinking about your five year vision. And again, very important that this is not a plan. It is not a five year strategic plan. And you're going to do all these things, and God damn it, you're going to get through it all, and it's all going to happen, for sure. This is a how do I hope I am living? How do I want to be living in five years? And then, how do I need to be adjusting what I'm doing now, in order to kind of go in that direction, what do I want in my life in five years? And so how can I start building the structure for that now, knowing that as soon as you start building it, you're gonna learn things, and you may change your mind, and that's completely fine. And then the final thing here is has to go do with commitments, which is open loops. And so if you are somebody who has just, like so much stuff around, like all these things, and you're constantly, oh, my God, this, oh my god, that open loops is a super useful activity for calling through all that stuff and sorting out what you what are you? What have you committed to? Usually, unconsciously, like, you're not, like, I have this letter I have to return to, like, Social Security for my mom, and it's like, keep forgetting about it. I have to do it, and that means I have to go to a neighbor and get them to sign as a witness. And there's, like, a mini project. I'm like, oh, you know. So I have to, like, get it out where I can see it and put it on a list, or it just always bites me in the ass. I go downstairs and see the letter and I'm like, that thing again, right? So that's an open loop, right? So open loops can be big, they can be small, but if you're finding yourself constantly like, oh, wait, that thing, Oh, my God, it's a really good exercise to do to kind of get all those things visible to you. Also, if you if your space happens to be super duper messy and that's driving you crazy, if it doesn't know crazy, that's fine. But if it's driving you crazy, it's a methodology for going through it in a very orderly way to, like bit by bit, figure out what's going on there and decide what to do with stuff. Okay, that's my spiel. Any other comments or questions about the other parts of the Collect phase,

Garima Goel Lal

46:46

yeah. So when I did the Collect phase, so I had started a blog or seven years ago, and it did really well for a while, but then I dropped the ball on it, and I just keep, I mean, you're right, like, you know, sunk cost. But I was also going to say, going back into when you start something, actually, people told me you shouldn't be starting a cooking blog. You are an analyst. You are a business person. I mean, you don't, you don't fit into that identity. So I I started anyways. But what I learned from doing that is that there's some, you know, we have all these creative, impulses, and that blog really, you know, worked as a creative outlet. But then I think at this point I've outgrown but I still have some lot of projects that I associate with that blog. But when I chose this project of, you know, coaching with, you know, women over 40, I realize it has actually immediate, kind of like benefits to them and to me as well. So I think when you're talking about open loops, I do feel like I do have lot of open loops connected to my blog still. And what will be the most effective way to, sort of like, drop this, drop the projects that you think you have in your mind.

Jessica Abel

48:05

Well, so this is, yeah, those projects you're talking about having do with your blog. They belong in your commitments, your idea inventory. Put those things in there, because when you have a blog, you're constantly having ideas out this post, that post this, right,

Garima Goel Lal

48:18

right. I do have that list. But right now,

Jessica Abel

48:22

next, we're going to go through the prioritization matrix, and you're going to decide not to do those things. Then to sunset those things, you're going to either delete them and be like it never existed, or you're going to put them into a project Screen Room, either under like I am going to consider this within the next six months. I might consider this at some point in the next couple of years, or this is just a thing I thought of one time, and I don't want to forget about it, so I'm putting on an archive list, and those are the kind of the levels there. But you need to be making the point here is to make a very conscious decision not to do these projects. Because right now, you're like, I'm probably not going to do these things, but I don't know, and they keep coming back, so you have to, like, quit them someplace, saying, like, I have decided this. This is why I decided this, you know, so that then you're able to remind yourself, because for a while they're going to keep popping up, but after a while they won't like, at first, they'll be like, but this, but this, but that, and you're like, No, no, it's on the list. I know. Fine, you know. And then gradually, your brain will get used to the new reality, and it'll calm down. But it doesn't happen like, you know, on a dime,

Garima Goel Lal

49:33

right? Okay, so I just need to just keep putting them off. That's the thing, right? Yeah.

Jessica Abel

49:39

I mean, keep putting them off, but very clearly say, I am not doing this. This is a no, I am not doing this. I'm either not doing this now or I'm never doing this. Okay, and that that's the key, is not to just like, oh yeah, I'll deal with it later. Don't do that. Make the decision, and very clearly assign this to a category of like never, or at least, you know, I'm not even going to look at this for a year, you know. So where, where does it fit?

Jessica Mehring

50:12

Yeah, good.

Jessica Abel

50:15

Other questions or comments. Okay, so those of you have had roadmapping calls with contingency plans, let's talk about those next time. So just think of one thing on your contingency plan that you want to bring up next time, like one item which is like, this might happen. And here's what I'm going to do. And let's have a discussion about contingency plans. Next session is open session, so whatever questions you want to bring, obviously, every session is an open session to a certain extent, but so next session does not have a curricular element. And then after that, we'll be doing the decide phase. And yeah, for those of you who have not yet scheduled your roadmap and call, I encourage you to do the onboarding form, and shouldn't take too long. And as soon as you do that, the thank you page gives you the link to schedule, and that's the way to get to the next step. So it's been really great to meet with everybody individually and and and lay out some very specific goals, which is great, and the rest of you, I will do that very soon. Um, okay, any other things? There's something here. Lisbeth, what were you looking for?

Lisbeth Frølunde

51:31

Well, I got a little confused about what you said, the clutter methodology, and then, oh, yeah, open letter, I'm a little confused also about the green rooms, because I did do a sheet about green room, and then you mentioned green room in another

Jessica Abel

51:47

Yeah. So there's two green rooms, context, okay? There's a tasks Green Room, which is just, like, daily stuff, and like, oh my god, the giant list of blah, blah, blah, all the things, right? And then there's a project Screen Room, which comes up when it isn't yet. You haven't seen the lesson yet, unless you're already in decide phase that comes up in the saying, no lesson. So there's so basically we have the three collect lessons, which we talked about today. The three decide lessons are the prioritization matrix, which is the methodology for making these big decisions. Then saying no. How do you say no? What you committed to? What is the one thing you are going to do? What are you not going to do? And that's where the green room comes up. And then the third design decide lesson is pre deciding. So that's habits, templates and so on, like lay making decisions that are category decisions for how you want to be doing stuff regularly. Those are the three decide lessons. That's what's coming next. So for now, if you have these things and you want to put them somewhere, just make a just make a make a document, call a green room, put a list. You'll have it there when you need it, whatever. The other thing we were talking about is the open loops lesson, which is in a deeper dive. So I did not put some of these lessons directly into the curriculum the deeper dives. The idea with these is like you go to them when you need them, you don't need them. Don't worry about them. I'm trying to make the actual core lessons short, very useful, simple, but also then offer you the opportunity to continue going deeper, doing more if you want to. But you know, the most important thing we're doing here is your own work, you know, so I don't want to get you too tied up in finishing stuff for the creative focus workshop. I was listening to a podcast episode the other day, and the woman was like, talking about different styles of coaching, and she's she's calling them different names. I forget what they all were, but basically she's like, my way is to just constantly be throwing more stuff at people. I have like, five coaching sessions a week, and all this new curriculum coming up and challenges and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, How does anybody do anything in your group? How does anybody actually finish anything when you're constantly teaching them new things and learning new things, you know? And I identified my style as, like, try to get it boiled down to a thing and stick to the thing, like, that's That's it. You know, there's always more layers to this. This is a very iterative process in all kinds of ways. So we started off this whole session talking about just, just do it right? Just try something, just go and that's exactly how I want you to treat what we're doing with the creative focus workshop as well. Just do it. Just do some. It doesn't matter if you do it perfectly. It doesn't matter if you do it all. Anything you do will contribute towards learning more about yourself and how these things are going to help you. And you can always come back to it, and everything's interconnected. And so it's going to constantly be like, Oh, I'm in, you know, module 16. There aren't 16, but anyway, like module eight, and now Module two is relevant again, right? So you'll see how things are all interconnected, so you don't have to worry about perfection, because there's no such thing. Great. Okay, awesome. See you all, thanks for being here, and ri I will see you later on. Yep. Okay, bye everybody. Bye.

00:0000:00