2 – Create Bold Innovative Goals: Daring to Dream

About

Setting bold innovative goals can be a challenge when you have experience in an arena, or when it has never existed before. In this episode you get to jump the belief chasm, accessing the seemingly fantastical, through the power of storytelling. This will enable you to give yourself permission to both create innovative bold goals for your organization and then activating them into reality. In this episode we unpack why creating bold innovative goals can be challenging. How to overcome the challenge and then from that space harness what you have created into an action plan. Creating anything new requires a suspension of current reality. Our inner critic is there to protect us in these situations from looking like a fool at work, to share with us what is currently happening in the market place, what has happened before based on experience.  It’s important to give ourselves permission to create the new and bold otherwise we will be duplicating everything that has preceded. Innovation requires us to live on the fringes.  In order to do that we need to tap into our child like mindset which is full of curiosity and wonder, uninhibited by reality and gently ask our inner critic to take a seat.  The challenge is that when we look to set goals, our mind is great at sharing with us all the obstacles that we can ensue.  But wait there is salvation. If we step into the future and look back telling the stories of all the incredible things that have passed, our mind also accepts it as true. It works in our favor to make it all a reality.  This tool, is a great short cut to access the met While the inner critic does that, we cue the Kyle Cease technique for creating goals:  Step 1: The Three Month Share  Partner up with someone. Choose who will be person A and person B.  Person A look at Person B, and say: “You never guess what has happened since we last spoke three months ago. Since three months ago so much has happened. Let me tell you.” Then you will proceed to share with them all the fabulous things that have happened in the last three months.  Person B your role is to nod, smile and look very positive. Nothing more. Nothing less. Do not ask them about feasibility, reality, budgets.  Do this for five minutes and then switch roles.  Step 2: The Six Month Share  Then do this for 6 months. And switch roles. Step 3: The One Year Share  Then do it for 1 year. And then switch roles. Step 4: The Super Charge Zone  After this Person B, your role is to take the strands of what has been shared with you by person A and super charge their story. For example, if they talk about wanting to be a thought leader in their field, you might say, well I hear that Forbes and Fast Company are knocking on your door. Or that Oprah has invited you for dinner yet again.  Super Charge for five minutes and then switch roles.   Step 5: The Action Plan  Based on this new story that you get to tell, ask yourself: “what are the three steps that I need to take immediately to lean into this reality?” This is your activation moment for action planning.  This process is applicable for all aspects of your life including your team and your organization to get them set for creating vision for a project and the future.  If you would like help creating a Roadmap of the Future for your team, get in touch at hihellosura.com

Transcript

*This Transcript is Autogenerated

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Welcome and join me today on the HiHelloSura Show podcast, where I decode and deconstruct the stories, secrets, and skills of the creators of our time. If you are looking to challenge the status quo and get new perspectives, join me as I share with you practical ideas. That you can use to impact your life and help those around you today.

Hey, back on, welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Sura Al-Naimi. Today we are going to be focusing on dreaming. That's right. You had me dreaming when we think about the year ahead and the decade ahead. This is the perfect opportunity to dream. If not now, when I ask you. And so often as adults, when we think about dreaming, AKA setting goals, we sometimes limit ourselves.

It's natural for us to do that because we have a lot of experience. We have. All the reasons, all the obstacles of why things won't work. And so in this episode, I'm going to be unpacking that in terms of innovation and creativity at work, um, within your personal life, if you want to be creating those leaps, you are going to need to think differently.

And be able to touch into different resources in order to even set those goals, to begin with and give your mind access to all the resources that it needs to be able to fulfill these beautiful, bold, audacious goals. So I'm going to be covering the spectrum of thinking and how on the outer edges, that's where all the amazing GCs creative ideas live.

And then from that space, we're going to be talking about. How to tap into that type of thinking so that you actually give yourself permission to open up that window and a little bit about also, why is it that, you know, we all hindered and we don't let ourselves go into that space to begin with. And as I mentioned, these are things, these are tools that you can use within your personal life, as well as in business.

And so here we go. Well, let's get on with it. So why is it that we need permission to dream to begin with? That might sound a little bit funny if you've ever watched a young child play and tell you a story that doesn't seem to be any limit, any ceiling to the ability to think of bold, audacious. Super creative things.

And the reason that is, is that kids are naturally creative in the sense that their mindset is curious. They ask a lot of questions. They don't have any experience that inhibits them in the opposite direction. So they don't understand that, you know, Putting a ladder, a step ladder next to a building and using it as a tool to get up into space, uh, might be a little bit challenging.

They have no, no faculty around that. And so the cool week we call it the childlike mindset. So what our kids really great, our kids are amazing at being curious at, uh, being imaginative, being on inhibited. And then let's flip over to the adult light. We have plenty of experience, plenty of expertise. It's fantastic.

It's kept us alive pretty nicely. It meets us really amazing at analyzing things and prioritizing things. And we know that when we tried to put the step ladder next to the building, it flew away or it hit somebody on the head. And so now we don't really want to use that step. To do things with. And so our experience is what has made sure that we've got all these amazing things done to begin with.

And so the adult, like mindset is very, very important, but when we step back to our goal, which is permission to dream dreaming big, we need to, for a moment in time, the step into the kid, And so in order to that, we need to engage with that element of curiosity and we, our adult life mindset, or maybe you were going to reframe that and say our inner critic, if you will, we want to ask our inner critic to, to have a break, to take a load off, maybe have a latte, say, have a cocktail just for a moment.

And. And why do we want to tap into this kid light mindset? As I mentioned? Well, if we think about the things that have been truly innovative in our time and really create. At that moment of inception when they first came to be, they didn't really seem very realistic. They didn't seem that they would work with the current reality that we, we were faced with, that we have around us.

So I'll give you a perfect example. If I was to tell you that you could go to. And sleep on a stranger's couch and it will be a wonderful experience and that you would still come out alive. You know, at that moment in time, it would have seen very upside, probably, uh, quite illegal and probably quite dangerous actually equally, if I'd said you could get into a stranger's car at three o'clock in the morning and they would just magically appear and they would take you where you wanted to go.

And again, You would remain intact and alive. You might thought I, you might've thought I was a little bit crazy. And so this really relates in innovation to this concept of, of the spectrum of thinking. So in order for us to be truly innovative, we might start in the world of analogy, metaphor, things that seem really absurd.

So we're really in our wishing. And then once we've thought of a concept that seems very fanciful after that, that's when we can bake in the feasibility. So we always say that you can bake feasibility into something that's new and intriguing, but you can't bake you and intriguing into something that's already feasible.

And so that's why we want to start in that space and then work backwards. And that relates really to this concept that I'm about to share with you, which enables you to. To dream big and also gives you permission to dream. So that's one aspect of why we want to go into those fringes, uh, in order to really create something new.

Now, the other aspect of that is that when we think about goal-setting, like, let's say, I say to, I am going to launch, you know, 800 podcasts within the next 365 days. When I say that, as I say that out loud in my book. My mind is freaking out. It's thinking about all the things that can get in the way we're doing that, thinking about all the different obstacles.

So really it's getting of the way of me even proclaiming this goal or this task. Right? So if I think about all the other things that maybe I want to share with you in terms of what my goals might be, I might restrict those. I might restrict those because it just takes my breath away in terms of all the.

That I won't even say them out loud. Right. And so this comes back to the way that our mind works. So our mind is like a Google search engine. So when it's looking forward, it's thinking about all the different obstacles. It's printing all the different data points of why. Something might be challenging to achieve, because again, it wants to be super helpful.

Our mind is very generous and it wants to be very helpful. So one way to shortcut that is by stepping into the future and looking back and looking back and retelling all the stories as if they've already happened. So I haven't gone crazy while I'm suggesting you. Is that you pretend we can, we can pretend this was something very small.

We can pretend that it is tomorrow. And I am telling you all about the amazing things that happened yesterday, AKA today. So I could say, oh my gosh, you never guess what happened yesterday. It was the most incredible day. All these amazing things happened. I felt like this. It looked like that this person called me, this was a success.

This flow. And I would start to tell you all the amazing things that had happened in that circumstance. The mind actually has no idea whether you're telling the truth or not. And so it generously accepts it as true. When it's looking back. And so this is so powerful for us because when it accepts it as truth, it's taught us to generate all the other amazing things that can happen.

And it also starts to think about all the different resources that can come to POS in order to empower this new reality. And so what we want to do is we want to holler miss this trickery or this generosity of the mind, and this, it did not moment. That the mind is actually willing to, you know, take a break.

The inner critic Grada is willing to take a break and we are actually able to tap into the abundance of our childlike mindset, our dreaming state, that metaphorical kind of. And so what I wanted to share with you is that this is a phenomenal exercise that you can do to map out your year. You can make out Mack out or map out role that the success of a project, um, anything that is on your mind, you can start to visualize how incredible it is.

And so this wonderful human called Kyle cease introduced me to this exercise and he is a comedian turned transformation coach. And I did this exercise with him in a room with 3000 other people, and it was such a powerful exercise. And since then, I've been doing this with clients, for myself personally, and we're friends.

And again, it's just a great way to give ourselves permission to dream and then get into action. And so it goes a little, something like this. I mentioned earlier that you're stepping into the future and you're looking back. And so what you want to do is you want. First of all find somebody else. Who's willing to do this with you.

Just go and grab somebody, but don't get arrested. Find somebody who's willing to do this with you, and then choose who, who is going to be person a and who is going to be person B. And it's, it's very simple. So at the beginning, you're going to kick it off your personnel. You're going to kick it off. And you're going to say to that person, oh my gosh, you never gaff all the amazing things that have happened since I saw you three months.

And then you're going to share with that individual, all the amazing things that have happened. So, as I mentioned, it could be, you know, you felt a certain way, things looked a certain way. You worked with certain people. These projects came to pass. People were bragging about certain things. You're proud of certain things, and you would go and talk with that individual and share with them all the amazing things that have happened.

And we're going to put a place marker. We're going to put a place marker for three. So all of the things that happened in the last three months. And so here's the trickery, the other individual person. Your role is to not profusely be super excited and just look super, super positive and not say anything other than that, apart from maybe some oohing or some orange, or that sounds amazing.

That's incredible. And so at this point you are not going to be offering any solutions or any feasibility or any bills, nothing like that. Absolutely nothing. So today you're going to talk for a total of 10 minutes and I know that seems like a lot. There might be moments where you're going to pause and that's totally fine in those moments you can say.

And I totally love that. So if you can't think of anything to say, you can say, oh, I totally love that. And so you will talk for 10 minutes and then at the end of those 10 minutes person B it's your turn, it's your turn to tell the other individual what you have been loving for the last three months. Got it.

Got it. So. Wonderful. I suggest you set a timer because you you're really going to get going on this. Then you're going to switch roles. They're going to practice with six months. You got to tell you under the vigil, all the amazing things that have been happening within the last six months. And again, just wherever your mind wants to go, wherever your mind wants to go and then switch.

And then finally, we're going to do this with one. You've got it one year. So another 10 minutes to tell the other individual, all the incredible things that have been happening in the last year and then switch. So this is, this is the first part of the exercise, right? Three months, six months, one year back and forth, back and forth.

10 minutes. Now, this is where again, it gets even more exciting. I know that you didn't think it could get even more exciting. This is where you are going to be able to supercharge the other person's story. So you've been listening, you've been super excited and maybe somebody said to you, you know, I have become a thought leader in my industry.

I'm recognized people want to talk to me. So maybe when you're supercharging that person's. You say something like, you know, I know things have been going really amazing for you. And I hear that fast company really wants to talk to you. And so do Forbes and Oprah Winfrey and eat on mosque are inviting you over for dinner.

And you're not quite sure if you have time and this is the story that you're going to be super charging for that other individual. And you are going to do that for the other individual for a total of 10 minutes. I think it's so much fun, so much fun. So beyond the fun of. All of this time, I'm going back and forth, back and forth.

You finally given your mind access to this childlike mind, mind state you've asked the inner critic to politely have arrest. And then from that space, that's when you can bring out the adult like-mind fat, right? And so you formed this beautiful story of what can be, you've told it in the past tense. So your mind has accepted it as.

Now you can sit down and action plan. Now you can sit down and say to yourself, okay, based on this future that I want to lean into, what are the four steps that I can go and execute on within the next week to 10 days? You know, who do I need to call? What do I need to read? What tiny step do I need to take to lean into making this future a reality?

And so this is the task. Everybody it's called Kylego. Kyle cease is the individual who shared it with me originally. And this is the wonderful way of giving your team, giving your organization, giving a project, giving something passel that you want to achieve wings, right? So that you can really create this new reality.

Your body can start to feel. This new reality, you can get excited. You can get ramped up about it. And then from that space, you can start to take action because it's the little steps that you take that are going to compound over time into creating this new creative, innovative future for yourself for 2020.

And for decades to come. So I highly recommend it. Let me know if you have any questions. Let me know if you would like to try this out with me. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please, please, please, please feel free to rate it for us because we always appreciate that until next time have a wonderful day.