14 2 practices for more energy for your goals
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[00:00:00] And welcome to the scary goals club. I am your host, Hazel Robertson. And I believe that to make the impact that you know, you're called to make in the world, it requires setting bigger, scarier goals, and then becoming the person who creates them. That is what I am here to show you how to do. That's what we're diving into.
Mindset tools, tricks, really simple, practical, actionable steps. You can take and start applying straight away. Cause. Or whatever you believe, we have this one life that we definitely know about. Start making the impact you know you want to make in the world. Fear is not a reason to stop. We keep going. We work through the fear.
That is what we do in the Scary Ghouls Club. So come on in, come join, hit subscribe, and let's get started.
I am welcome to episode 14 of the Scary Goals Club podcast. How are you doing today? How are you doing on this? Hopefully sunny Friday or when I'm recording [00:01:00] this weather forecast, certainly where I am. You might be listening to this actually. from wherever in the world, but the forecast looks amazing and it looks sunny tomorrow and I'm going on this like networking, walking, meeting thing, which should be really fun in the morning.
It's going to be sunny and I'm like, do I need to get my shorts out? It's almost like shorts weather. Where are the shorts? And like literally just put away the fleecy trousers, fleecy leggings and to like get them back recently. And it's like, okay, I think they're like officially away now. for the rest of summer.
But anyway, got this lovely networking thing tomorrow morning and I'm getting my hair done in the afternoon. So yeah, it's like my quote unquote working Friday, but it feels very luxurious and very luxurious way to spend a Friday tomorrow. I'm so looking forward to being sunny. It's just so nice and all the leaves are coming out in the trees.
Some of them are still in bud, but the leaves are at the flowers. There's so many dandelions at our garden anyway. ease [00:02:00] around and it's just, I love this time of year. I always think so. I used to live in Alaska as a kid for like four years and I loved winters. I learned to snowboard. We'd like it. Woken up in the middle of the night, we'd go and watch the Northern Lights, like snow would be everywhere.
It was this like white blanket of snow and the Northern Lights would be dancing above our head. I mean, it was magical. I think I was always like, Oh, I love winters, but I think I love real winters where it's really cold, it's dry, it's snowy, you know, you're outside wrapped up and properly in the snow.
It's just been really wet here this winter. And so now like proper spring, it just like coming into summer. What are we now? May. Okay. Yeah. We're in spring. I think. Just feels so good. It's almost like this big sigh of relief. I don't know. Just something about longer, lighter days and the sunlight.
It's just, it's so [00:03:00] good. I'm feeling so energized is at the moment. And today I wanted to talk about. Practice that is a favorite of mine that also helps me stay energized because I'm not energized all the time. Sometimes I have low energy days, but I can't even put a podcast on that. And certainly over the last, the last few weeks have been a bit more energized.
The few weeks before that. I was not, I was in a real funk and I'm going to talk about that in a future episode when I have worked through enough to really pull out a lot of the lessons. Like I'm pulling out a lot of the lessons, but there's a lot of shifting and changing and evolution going on behind the scenes that I will share with you at some point when I have properly worked through it and can draw out some really useful and coherent lessons.
Lessons, but I'm still kind of in the middle of it at the moment, but this practice I'm going to share today has just helped me just feel a bit more energized, feel a bit more focused. I've just made, I don't know, my days [00:04:00] just feel a little bit lighter as well. And it's so helpful. What's this is gratitude.
So you may have practiced this before you may have not, or like me, you may have practiced it, stop practicing it or forgotten to go out of the habit of it, notice the difference and then got back into it. I'm going to talk through what it is and then some specific ways that you can practice it and why it is so powerful in helping you as you're creating your scary goal.
So gratitude, the practice of gratitude, I think of gratitude as like a feeling when we are feeling grateful for something, we are appreciating something, we are taking a moment to really sink in and Give, yeah, give gratitude, feel appreciation for something that we have in our life, something we've done, something someone else has done, something we just have, and we sink into that.
even just right now. If you just think for one minute, like one moment, what is something you are truly grateful for? [00:05:00] Maybe you have somewhere amazing. You can sleep, maybe you have food and water, maybe you have a loving family or a partner or whatever it is, or a dog for gratitude, which is so amazing.
I love my dog so much. She's so entertaining maple and it's just, she literally brings me so much joy and I am so grateful for her. Like. ridiculousness, like everything yesterday. I was up super early with Flynn. He was up like five and I went downstairs. I was like, And she always comes to meet us and she's always wagging her tail.
And ever since she's been a puppy, I will get back to the gratitude. This is just a slight tangent, but ever since she's a puppy, whenever we have walked into the room, she goes and picks up, it used to be her blanket.
It still would be, but we've taken the blanket away because sometimes she chews it, but she will pick something up and like those little lapping circles around the room, um, wagging her tail, carrying this thing, just going round and round. It's, it's just the best. We were like, I hope she doesn't grow out of it.
And she hasn't, she still does it. She's over three now. [00:06:00] Yesterday, like five 15 in the morning, she picked up, he's got these really sweet, like wooden blocks and they're in the colors of a rainbow and they're different, like sort of semi circles that stack like a rainbow. So you can separate them out and put them different places.
Anyway, she picked up the yellow one, which is like one of the bigger ones and bit it in her mouth. Like upside down. So it was like you shaped and she was walking around with it wagging, but it looked like she had this, like the biggest smile. It was so good. I was like pissing myself laughing so much.
Lynn was laughing. It was just, oh yeah. So grateful for that dog. Dogs bring so much joy. They're so good. So thinking of something now that you feel truly grateful for and just really bringing it to mind and sinking into that. I'm like, what does that feel like in your body? That's how we can check in what different so feelings are just patterns of energy we have in our body.
They are signals. They are signals from something that's [00:07:00] going on in our brain when we are thinking about something we feel grateful for, like I don't know about you, but when I really think about like maple, for example, I just feel like such an it's almost like my chest is expanding outwards and like, I feel like I'm filling up with like energy and like love and appreciation.
I've just got, there's almost like, I don't even think how to explain it. It's like. energy just like pouring out of me. That's what it feels like. It feels so good to be feeling gratitude. It's a very, for me anyway, a very energizing feeling to be in versus something like anxiety where our body is in very much a stress state, a fight or flight state, which just uses so much energy, like physiologically in our body when we are feeling anxious.
It is exhausting. It is draining. We have lots of like adrenaline and cortisol, like stress hormones going around. We can get a burst of energy from it, but then it quickly drops off and we can feel really exhausted afterwards. Whereas gratitude, it's almost [00:08:00] like it just, things feel like they flow. There's like overflow of.
joy and feeling and all of these things. I'm not really explaining that well, but anyway, that's how it feels for me. So even thinking what that feels like for you and the reason that this is so powerful, not only is it an amazing feeling to cultivate before you are Going on a call with someone or having a meeting with someone or doing something or just being in the world, it's going to make you more like approachable and people want to be around you.
Like people, it's like feelings are contagious. We have things called mirror neurons. Other people can sense how we are feeling and that can, they can pick up on that as well. And so even when we're feeling good. grateful and just like, so appreciative of our life exactly as it is right now. Other people can pick up on that right now as well.
So not only does gratitude feel amazing for us, but it helps others as well. Like it brings other people along. People are [00:09:00] interested in what you're up to and it's just so much easier to go through the day. Feeling grateful, feeling lighter, having more energy. It's just such an easier way to do things and especially when you're working towards your scary goal because oftentimes we think when we get to the goal that we're suddenly going to feel better and that everything's going to be amazing and then our life will magically change.
overnight and we will feel completely different. The thing is, we won't be grateful for that goal if we haven't practiced the gratitude along the way. So if we don't feel grateful for our life exactly as it is right now, we're not going to feel grateful. We're not going to enjoy when we get to that goal because when we reach the goal and actually achieve it, Some things are different.
There's also more problems. I'll give you a very specific example.
a few years ago, we went from having a flat to buying a house. It was like, Oh, we can have this house. I'm going to have all the space. And yes, we did. And it was amazing.
And we suddenly had to be like, [00:10:00] Oh wait, we need to get slates on the roof replaced. Oh, we need to sort the garden out. I know it sounds like a luxury problem and it completely is. It's like, we think, Oh, that will just magically fix everything. And then we'll have all this space. But we have to do something with that space.
it's like more space to clean, more garden to like have to do something. We were like, what do we even do with the garden? We had to sort that like a hedge and stuff that is enjoyable, but it's extra, not even problems, but there's other aspects of it. We don't always consider. Sometimes we're like, Oh, everything will be different and better when we have a house.
And it's like, yes. But I remember like, even the first few months of being in that house, I missed the simplicity of the flat. I missed. Like not having to worry about a roof and repairs and maintenance and like the flat was very easy. We'd lived in it for a few years. Like. We had it done exactly how we wanted, I missed that simplicity.
So it's just knowing that things are going to be good and things are going to be bad wherever [00:11:00] we are and wherever we get to. So even when we get to our goal, it's not magically going to be different. And the more that we can really appreciate where we are right now, the more we're going to appreciate when we actually get there.
And the more that we can appreciate where we are now, the less rush we're going to be in together. Because when we are rushing to try and get the goal and thinking that it's going to be so much better when we're there, we're missing the moments right now. We are missing enjoying our life right now. And the practice of gratitude is so powerful because it brings us into the present moment.
And there's two parts of gratitude and I will talk about the second part but the first part is being grateful for what you have right now and realizing wait everything like everything in the past has been leading up to this point like at some point you you have the life right now that at some point you wish you had had whether that's you have a house or a partner or this or a job or whatever whatever the things are or you're working [00:12:00] on certain projects, or you have a certain goal, whatever the things are that you're able to do right now, at one point you weren't able to, and you wish that you could, now you have that.
And so it's even just taking those moments to be like, wow, okay, I have these things, I created them, I am so grateful for them. Because the more that we appreciate what we already have, the more that we see that we can also appreciate. I think there's a phrase, I can't even remember where it's from, Heard it from a mentor, it's like what we appreciate, appreciates.
So when we appreciate things in our life, like we see more in them. Our life just feels richer and more vibrant without changing anything. When we are focused on finding the goodness, finding the things that we are grateful for, we don't have to actually change anything around us, but our life feels richer.
We feel better, we feel more satisfied, we feel happier, like all of these amazing things happen because essentially we're rewiring our brain to look for the good, to look for the things. It's a bit like, um, [00:13:00] with the previous episode I did on celebrating wins, similar thing. That's like your own progress, but gratitude just can be for anything like gratitude for living where you live or for having access to clean water, like the simple basic things that some other people don't have.
You know, things that we can often take for granted if we can pause and be truly grateful for them. It just, it's so much more energizing. It just like help set up our day so much more and helps us feel energized to keep moving towards our scary goals. And so that's the gratitude for where you are now.
Now the other gratitude practice that you can do, and I'll talk through at the end some kind of ways to do this in some exercises, is having gratitude. right now for your goal. Okay. Now this sounds a little bit out there and this has only been something I've been practicing in the last few months, but it is so fun.
So it's yes, appreciating where you are now and having gratitude for that and [00:14:00] imagining the goal and having the goal or it already being done and being grateful for that. So you're almost like going into the future, but imagining It's kind of in the present, so you're like, okay, so for example, with the, this, my scary goal of these 30 podcast episodes, it's like imagining I have like, I'm looking on Spotify and I can scroll down and I can see 30 episodes that are there.
I'm just feeling right now so much gratitude for that. So much appreciation for me who. Keeps showing up, keeps recording them every single week, puts them out, is willing to show up on camera, is willing to talk, is willing to put herself on video and put it out there and have people listen to it. And it's giving gratitude in advance where you are going.
And Not only does it feel amazing, but it also makes it so much easier to imagine yourself there. It makes it so much easier to keep moving in that direction when it's not [00:15:00] thinking anything's going to be different, but you're imagining like, Oh, it's already happened and I am so grateful for this. And it means when you create it.
You're also going to actually enjoy it. You're going to sit in it and be like, that was amazing. That is amazing. And you're going to enjoy the whole process towards it. Because again, it's not going to magically be different when you're there. We think it is time and time again. I have literally just gone through that.
I mean, I am a coach. I get coached. I coach people still. I need coach because my brain's like, yeah, but it will be different. Like I'm going to feel different when I have this thing. And it's like, no, no, it doesn't work that way. We think it does. We think it's going to magically change. So practicing gratitude in advance means we are slowing down.
We're enjoying the process as we go along the way because these moments are our life. Right. Like what you are doing today, what you have, what you already have in your life right now. Like there is amazing things to be grateful for all around you. [00:16:00] However hard things feel right now, there's always going to be at least one thing that you can be like, okay, I am actually grateful for that.
And just find one thing and then find another thing and then find another thing. And then you'll start to notice more things that you can be grateful for. And once you feel more energized, you will start to create more things you can be grateful for. So it kind of works. It's like, Once you can shift into that energy of having gratitude and being so grateful for what you're right now and grateful for what you are also creating, you'll just notice that it's so much easier to show up and do the scary thing, to put yourself out there, to take action towards your scary goal, to make decisions, to say no, to say yes.
Whatever those things are, it's going to be so much easier when you're in a place of just loving your life for what it is right now. No matter what situation you're in, even if you want to change it, even if you want something different, the more you can appreciate where you are right now, the easier it is going to be to create something else because you're not going to be in a rush because you're not going to be [00:17:00] needing the goal or something else to feel better.
You're already feeling gratitude, which I think is one of the best feelings we can feel. It just feels so like giving and nourishing and overflowing and expansive. It is such an amazing feeling to sink into and to cultivate. And also we don't feel that all the time. Like I could practice gratitude all the time.
Sometimes I'd be like, F off. I'm like, this is stupid. And I'll get really annoyed at it and not want to do it. It's not like I float around feeling grateful all the time at all. I very much have a human brain. I easily go to like things that are not working and things that are hard and things that I didn't do right.
Like all of that is completely normal. And I noticed that when I'm in that, if I can catch myself and really sink into what I'm grateful for right now. Everything just feels easier, so much easier and I have so much more energy to go and do the hard thing. Go and do the scary thing to give [00:18:00] more to others rather than like feeling like I don't have any more to give.
Like when we are feeling grateful, that's when we can help others more. So, here are two ways that I want to suggest you can try and take them, practice them, see what works for you. There is no right or wrong. Test it out. If you have never tried it before, I want to encourage you, what if you just did it for two weeks every day?
Try it and see what happens. And if you have done it before and it's not worked, or you weren't sure about it, then But if you just try it again and really listen to the steps I'm going to talk through and why to do it in this way, and then try it out for yourself. Okay. So the first one is practicing gratitude for where you are right now.
So I really suggest writing it down because when we write something down, we're like writing it, we're seeing it in different parts of our brain. Like it sticks a bit more. It also helps us remember it a little bit more, but even saying it out loud, [00:19:00] even just thinking about it, that is going to help more than.
Do nothing at all. So sometimes even when I'm feeling myself be like, Oh, I don't have a pen and paper around. I don't want to grab my phone. I'll just close my eyes and think of like three things I'm grateful for. I'll be like, okay, and I'll just sink into it. So either grab paper, grab your phone notes, speak it out loud in a voice note or just have it in your head, write down three things that you are grateful for.
Okay. And it's not just writing them down and being like, cool, cool. Done. Onto the next thing. That's what we often do. It's like, cool. I've done my three things next. It's really taking the time to slow down and feel what it feels like. So writing out one of them and almost like closing your eyes and sinking into it and feeling the feeling of gratitude.
So we'll feel probably something like this expansiveness in your chest. This like bubbling up this lightness. That's what it will feel like really feeling it. That's when you know that you're truly embodying that feeling. And it's not just a practice of writing it down on the next thing [00:20:00] and write the second one down, do the same in the third and just sink into that.
And that energy will carry with you throughout the rest of your day or whatever you're doing. It can be helpful before, like in a work sense, before a meeting or before you're logging into your emails. It's like being grateful for where you are now, what you have right now. It's going to be so much easier to, you know, show up and be more of who you want to be.
So whether it's in the morning or at night or at some point in the day that feels good for you, it can also be really nice to light a candle, make almost like a ceremony, a ritual with it. You can put on some nice music or just, you know. Doing it like so it feels like a really nice process to do. Not that it feels heavy and hard and you have to do it.
You don't have to do this at all. Your life will be just fine if you don't do this. I wanna offer you to test it out because it is the most amazing thing. It seems so simple, but it's so, so powerful. Three things. Either writing them down, speaking them out loud, whatever that is for you. of [00:21:00] where you are right now and really sinking into that gratitude.
And then the second part is practicing gratitude for your goal. Okay, so this is taking a couple of moments, closing your eyes. I find it really helpful to close my eyes and almost visualize the goal. And whatever that is for you. So for me visualizing 30 podcast episodes is going on Spotify and being able to like scroll through or uploading the 30th one.
Like what is the visual of completing your goal and then just really sinking in and imagining like you already have it and giving such gratitude just feeling again that expansiveness for wow I've done it. Like how amazing. I am so grateful for myself for showing up. I am so grateful that I have created this and really just sinking into that.
And from that place, you're going to find you have so much more energy and clarity and focus of being like, Ooh, this is what I want to do next for the goal. Or like, this is the next scary action I'm going to take, or this is the next step. It's like the more that you can practice feeling that [00:22:00] gratitude for right now, the easier it's going to be to move towards that.
And then you'll also realize that you don't need the goal to feel amazing. It's the key thing with all of this. You will learn the skill that feeling gratitude, that like happiness, that expansiveness that feels amazing. It doesn't come from a goal. It comes from your mind and you'll have proved that to yourself because you will have generated it by achieving the goal.
Like you could achieve and that's when it becomes, it's like the goal is just a bonus because you have learned all these skills along the way. It is so powerful. So even for that, I want to encourage you to practice this so that you have this as a tool that you know you can feel amazing and feel expansive and feel gratitude right now, even if nothing changes.
And then you can change things because you want to. You can have the goal because you want to, because it's fun, not because you're going to feel any better, because you already know how to create that feeling right now. It [00:23:00] is the best thing. It's so good. So that's what I want to leave you with. So let me know how you get on.
I would love to hear it and I hope you have an amazing rest of the day. I hope if you're listening to this on Friday when it comes out, I hope it's sunny for you like it is in Aberdeenshire and have an amazing rest of the week as well and I'll see you next time. Bye. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If this was helpful, please hit subscribe and leave a review. This helps get this work in the hands of more purposeful people. That is more people creating bigger, scarier goals, making an even bigger impact in the world. And if you want to take this work deeper and work with me directly, head to the show note and I put all of the information there.
If you've got any questions or if there's anything you're like, ooh, I'd love you to talk about that on the pod, please just get in touch. I love hearing from you guys. And I'll see you next time in the Scary Ghouls Club.