Focused Fran is the third character in the self-discovery phase of the Change Journey. We've already talked about doing your stocktake then we talked about Inspired Isabel which is all about deciding which goals you want to work towards. And then last week we looked at Dedicated Debbie and what derailers might take you off track when you're heading towards your goals. Now Focused Fran is about what are we actually going to do to get to our goals.
You’ve set off on our journey but what are you actually going to do? Focused Fran is here to help you chunk down (that’s a technical term) all the little things that are going to lead you towards your goal. Her flower is the Marigold and I'm sure you know what a marigold looks like, they come in yellow and orange colours. The Marigold symbolises breaking situations down into manageable pieces, which is perfect for Focused Fran because that's exactly what she's about.
When you are focusing on your goals they might seem like this massive thing that you want to achieve, or something that's really off in the distance, to get there is definitely not a one step process. In the book I use the example of how I worked with a client and her task was to write a book, and she thought that that was her to do list, but writing a book is not a task that's the end result, the goal she was heading for. Hence why she was stuck and couldn’t move forward.
Let’s look at another example. if you've read the book, you'll know that one of my husband and my goals is to move to the south coast of New South Wales. So that's a massive goal for us, we're not quite ready to do it just yet. We're in the process of deciding when and how and what and where and all those kinds of things. So if the end goal is moving to the south coast of New South Wales, what are the things that we can do right now to work towards that goal?
Some of the things that we're currently doing are:
Watching the market; I have all my real estate alerts set up. I watch every house that comes on the market, I see if it's a good fit for us and what prices they are selling for.
We’ve taken numerous drives down the coast to look at properties, talk to agents etc.
We’ve poked our noses into every town to see which ones feel right for us.
These are all really obvious steps to take and if you're looking to move, these are all standard things that you would do. But, have a think about some of the other things that we might be able to do. Things that aren’t as obvious. One of the things we are doing is putting a lot of plants into pots so we can take them with us when we go. Things that we normally would have planted in the garden are now going into pots so we can have some established plants when we move.
Focused Fran is about thinking about your goal and what are the steps that you can do to get there.
Another example is obviously The Change Journey book and getting my message out to a lot of people. So, how do I do that? I try and do one activity every day towards the goal; if you're watching my social media, you'll see I'm doing a lot of posting and I'm trying to post every day. I'm making sure that I'm really consistent in my messaging because the people that I want to attract are out there in social media land and they’re not going to find me if I don’t let them know I’m here. So that's one action step I'm taking.
Another one is to continually clear my fears and journal. Every time a fear comes up, I'm using all the techniques that are in the book and clearing stuff, which is really helping me move towards the goal of getting this message out there to a really big audience.
My intent is to make the world a happier place one woman at a time, and that's all it takes. If one woman can be happy and that ripple effect branches out through her family and friends then they become happier. Then what if another woman could do that and another woman could do that, so all these individual women have this amazing change where they decided to live happy lives and that energy ripples out to all the people around them. Then imagine how much better our world would be? That's really what I'm working towards.
I'm just doing that step by step, being really intuitive with what I do and waiting for guidance and then going with it. Today I was watching some videos on how to do media releases and things like that. So these are all little steps that I'm taking towards my big goals.
Debbie, one of the Change Journey community also has a great example; unfortunately Debbie got really sick last year and had chronic fatigue, so she spent a lot of time in bed and her goal was to go camping again. She joined a woman's group and got a lot of inspiration from them even though should couldn’t actually do anything yet. When she started feeling better, she got a job in a camping store, which is perfect step to take if you want to go camping. The more you can stay in the environment that you are heading towards the better, even if it’s different to how you thought. Then she bought a van and started to deck it out. And the best thing of all is that next week she’s going to do her first solo camping trip, and that is amazing.
So you've got here's someone who's gone from being in bed with chronic fatigue, to having their very first camping trip in 12 months, that's an amazing feat and an amazing example of just taking little steps towards your end goal.
We will get into manifesting later on, but basically the essence of manifesting is… if you're taking baby steps towards your goal, the Universe is going to respond tenfold. So for me it’s putting my plants in my pots, for Debbie it was getting a job in the camping store. All these things are little examples where the Universe says, “You know what, that person's really serious about that decision, they're really serious about moving forward towards that goal, let's speed up the journey a little bit, let's start to bring in more momentum and give them more of what they want because they're actually taking action, and they're actually moving towards their goal and I can see that they're committed.”
The actions that you take don't have to be massive and your goals don't have to be massive.
One of the examples I used in the book is to talk nicer to yourself and be kinder to yourself, because one of the things that we all do as women, is we put ourselves down and we have this self-talk of, “you look fat”, “you look ugly”, “look at that pimple on your face” all those kinds of things.
So if your goal is to be kinder to yourself, maybe one of your action items is to have an awareness of when you do say something bad to yourself and turn it around by saying something nice.
The aim of Focused Fran is to just chunk down your big goals into manageable little steps. They don't have to be big steps. One goal might have three steps while another might have 100 steps, it really depends on what your goal is and what you're heading towards. The secret is momentum and consistency… do one thing, when you've done that thing, do the next thing. When you've done that thing, do the next thing.
If you're struggling to do your tasks and to keep on track, then having an accountability partner, or being accountable to somebody can really help. I encourage you to use The Change Journey Facebook group. Jump in there and tell the group what you are heading towards, what steps you are taking and what accountability you’d like from them. It’s as simple as that.
You can also have multiple goals at the same time, as long as they're cohesive. Goals that can easily happen in conjunction because they're not overpowering each other or creating a conflict of focus for you.
If you have a goal and you're not really sure what are the steps that you should be taking, then please put your goal in the comments and I'm more than happy to have a chat and give you some ideas about the steps to take.