EMOTIONAL AGILITY: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life By Susan David, PhD.
Susan David is great and I’ve loved reading a lot of her stuff and I found this concept so helpful.
Walk your why by setting want-to goals, not have-to ones.
Have-to goals are goals set for you by others in the form of pressure, for example your doctor telling you that you must lose weight, your mother telling you XYZ, you get the point.
Want-to goals are those you set out of conviction and after careful reflection of your true values.
Example: post-partum: I was 25 pounds overweight, with a back and hip out of whack and I couldn’t exercise like I wanted. My goal was weight loss, I told myself that I had to… and I dreaded it. But when I got more present to my why: I wanted to be able to run around with my kids and feel good doing it; I didn’t want to hurt. Suddenly, losing weight was relatively easy. I sought help for fixing my back. I started to put better boundaries about how much I would lug my moose of an 18-month-old around… and I cleaned up my over-eating/ drinking act.
How can you align yourself from within? From a place of self-love: tap into your want-to goals. And then take actions that align. Of course, you’ll hit hiccups. You are human. Can you celebrate failures from a place of ‘experiments fail’? Or wow: that was wildly unsuccessful! Redo time.
When we live from the present with a forward focus on who we are becoming, it’s so much easier to create fun and joy. Failure doesn’t have to reflect us or our worth. When we are past-focused, it’s so easy to get stuck in our own misery. For me, this is coaching in a nutshell. It’s about growth and not from a “this isn’t good enough space” but knowing that growth is possible, fun, and amazing!
Try on some want-to goals. Make “moving forward” lists instead of “to do” lists. Have fun with progress, not perfection.
Coaching has made such a massive difference in my life; it really did give me so much clarity on what I valued and wanted for my life. It gave me back time by helping me say no thank you to things I felt like I “had to” but realized I had control over and simply didn’t align with who I was or who I wanted to be. It ultimately gave me a lot of peace of mind. This brings me to one of my want-to goals: get this info out there to spaces who have never heard of it. I want to help create a community to support people to thrive rather than merely survive.
The Life Coach School taught me the thought “model” and this was the first step when I realized I was holding myself back. And it all tracked back to my thoughts…
Here is my summary of how I view and teach the “model.” Next week, I’ll give some details on how this has helped. It can be so powerful.
