(13) The Power of Process - for Success & Happiness with Imogen Roy

The power of process - for success  and happiness

--- Katie Stoddart, Host of the show
      Website: www.thefocusbee.com
      LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiestoddart

--- Imogen Roy, Guest of the show

Imogen Roy is a Strategy Coach, who helps entrepreneurial people to be more prolific, productive and present in their life and business....without burning out. Imogen uses unconventional methods & tools to help her clients break free from mainstream, patriarchal narratives about business and performance to create success and personal well-being on their own terms.

-- Video of the episode:
You Tube- The Focus Bee Show Episode 13

--- During this episode, some of the topics we covered are: 

• Why focusing on the process leads to greater happiness & success
• How only aiming for goals can lead to burnout
• The importance of experimenting, and seeking answers within
• Why it is key to maintain body awareness, and connect with our feelings
• Imogen's Productivity with Purpose Framework
  
  

 --- You can find Imogen:
Follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imogenroy/
Connect with her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imogenroy/ 
Download her 'Could-Do List' productivity template: www.imogenroy.com/could-do-list
Subscribe to her Success Strategy newsletter: https://imogenroy.com/success-strategy
Course on Productivity with purpose framework: https://imogenroy.com/align-and-flow
YouTube video by Imogen on 4 tendencies (Rebel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQuEwsT8oRw

Transcript

[00:01] Katie: Welcome to The Focus B Show, where Katie Stoddart, high performance coach, interviews experts around the world in performance and mindfulness. Now here's your host. Katie.

[00:32] Katie: Welcome to a brand new episode of the Focus B show. Today I'm here with Imogen Roy. Imogen is a strategic coach and she supports entrepreneurs to be more prolific, productive and present in their business without burning out. I discovered Imogen thanks to her YouTube series on the four tendencies that I thought was absolutely fantastic, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining the show today, Imojen.

[01:01] Imogen: Hello, Casey. It's great to be it's really, really.

[01:06] Katie: Great to have you. In your interview with thes Godin, you discussed the importance of focusing on the process in comparison with focusing on the goals. Why do you feel this is such an essential part of high performance or success in business?

[01:26] Imogen: Great question. To start us off, yes. So this is a big foundation of my whole philosophy, actually is kind of over questioning and then chucking out this idea we have about no pain, no gain, which really is only relevant in a very few specific situations. I'm all about falling in love with the process rather than the result. And there's a few reasons for this. One is that in this sort of more old fashioned or mechanistic way of goal setting, there's this idea that you fixate on an external object or a specific result, something that's outside of you, in the aim that once you get there, then you're going to feel a certain way or become a different person or somehow transform your life. But between now and there, there's a very unpleasant journey that has to take place that you just got to get through. And then when you get to the goal, then you'll finally arrived and you can finally enjoy yourself and finally live right. And there's a few things that feel wrong about that to me. One being that, well, all we have really is our day to day. All we have is our health, our creativity, our general well being. And if we're not enjoying the journey, then what's to say that we're actually going to enjoy that destination in the first place? And the second is that when we really fixate on an external object or a certain point of arrival, whether that's getting a job or earning a certain amount of money or some other kind of arbitrary signal of success, it's very much focused on perfection. And you risk actually creating this prison for yourself where it could actually be the wrong thing. So really when we talk about falling in love with the process rather than the result, it opens us up to improving the process as the goal as opposed to the point of arrival. And that in the course of enjoying the process, we can stay open to the people and the opportunities and the changing of minds that may be necessary for us to actually flourish at our highest potential?

[03:58] Katie: Absolutely. I really love everything you said about how the process differs sort of the way we think about our day to day life, but also in some ways makes us more open or more fluid because there's a certain rigidity that comes with being too focused on the goals. Was there a time in your life where you were too focused on the outcome and you felt how this impacted you?

[04:24] Imogen: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that all coaches and teachers and therapists and any kind of teaching people, we teach the lessons that we have found the hardest to learn ourselves. I'm definitely someone who is very ambitious, very results focused. When I was younger, I was trained as an athlete, and so I've always had this mindset of pushing myself, reaching the next level, always working, working. And it really got to a point where I was really sacrificing my body and my mental health. And I ended up not just having two stress related spine surgeries, but also having a major professional burnout and having to rebuild my whole life and work from scratch. That I realized that maybe I was going about this the wrong way and that if I was burning out, sacrificing my body, having health crises, then that this wasn't a sign of success, that it didn't matter if I was having ten K months. As you're constantly told, that's something that you should aim for, or that you have a certain number of clients or you're reaching certain professional goals, like speaking at conferences and so on. If I felt terrible in my body and if I felt like I had lost control of my own being so it really called me to question the way I was going about things. And so, yes, I have absolutely lived this extreme downside to being completely results focused and losing touch with the process and the living part and the journey part. And in my journey of greater self awareness and recognizing that there are actually a million ways that you can go about something and that the greatest gift we can give to ourselves is to identify what is the recipe. To make ourselves happy? What is the recipe for us to harness our own unique expression of energy in the way that we're designed for and seeing other people's ideas or blueprints or systems or strategies as sources of inspiration or sources of teaching, but not necessarily the ones that we should adapt for ourselves? So this is what I help people with now, is helping them work out for themselves whether they believe they are someone who actually does require a lot of structure and routine and specific market like breaking goals down into little pieces to follow, or whether they are actually someone who is not wired that way. They are wired more to be in the flow, to be open to others, to not necessarily fixate so much on specific things that they want, but be kind of investing in their relationships instead and allowing things to come to them. Because we're all wired so differently. And I want everyone to be able to follow their own path and not get too caught up in what they believe they should be doing for success.

[07:49] Katie: Yes, I think it's a really important part that you just mentioned how we're all differently wired and it's great to have inspiration from all the different people but take what suits us. And it's interesting also to see that you had to sort of reach rock bottom in some ways to wake up and realize this is actually not success. Even if I'm reaching some goals that I'm aiming for because I'm not enjoying it every day or because I'm feeling stressed or burnt out or it's impacting my body, therefore this isn't really success. What sort of mindset shift do you feel people can have without reaching rock bottom to realize why the process is so much more important than the end result?

[08:37] Imogen: Well yeah, I want to make a point first which is you do not need to reach rock bottom to make a change in your life. And I always say to people please do not take as long as I did to figure out what I actually wanted and needed because it's not worth it. You don't have to reach rock bottom to make a transformational change and you don't have to reach rock bottom to finally get on the right path. Not at all. In terms of a mindset shift I would say the first place to start is always with awareness and actually asking yourself am I sacrificing or compromising something in my being to achieve these results? So in my case it was very much about body. I had completely lost connection with my body and was pushing my body in ways that were completely unsustainable in order to achieve the results that I was getting. And my problem was that I didn't have awareness and I would say that mindset was not actually my issue, the mind was taking over completely. It was actually body awareness that I had lost touch with and I really believe that those two things are key. I think in this industry we do talk a lot about mindset and that's great and it's very important but it's not the only thing. And I really believe that the body is actually in the driving seat and the mind is simply an assistant to the body. The mind exists to hear, interpret and provide feedback on the signals coming from the body as opposed to the mind controlling the body and getting it to where it wants to go. And so for me I think the mindset shift would have been actually it was about tuning down the mind a little bit and actually practicing listening to my body more and developing that mind body connection. But beyond that I would say we're talking about mindset in terms of thoughts and beliefs. Once you've recognized, okay, are there places where I am sacrificing or compromising or working against myself in order to achieve these results? Is okay, so I'm going about things this way and it's not working because of said sacrifices. So questioning, is there something else I could do? Is there another way I could try this? Is this really what I want? And I think really, it's that once you've got that foundation of awareness, it's really questioning, asking resistance, okay, where is it coming from? And why these emotions I'm experiencing? Okay, what's the message behind them? My body is telling me this, okay, so what's it trying to say and is actually listening and interpreting and starting to tap into a bit more of imagination of, okay, so what am I going to do about it? What can I try? And then this is where the inspiration piece can come in, because rather than looking outside of yourself to go, okay, what's the guaranteed blueprint? What's the productivity planner? Just give me the tool so I can just use it and just forget about it. Is wow, look at all these people using all these really unique tools and strategies to get what they want. Let me try a few things on for size. Let me experiment a little with other people's tools and see if it actually works for me or not. Whenever I teach a class and whenever I start coaching someone, I always say to them, do not take anything I say as truth. Everything I say is to be questioned. Every single tool or idea or strategy I share is to be tested in your own life, and then you can decide whether it's good or not. And if it doesn't, then toss it. If you come back to me and say, imogen, that thing did not work at all for me, it's rubbish. I'll be like, great, I'm so glad you tried it and you found that out for yourself and now you can put it to the side and go, no, that's not for me. I need to try something else. And this is the mindset I want to cultivate more in people is everything is up for questioning, everything is up for experimentation. Take what's out there and try it on for size until you find something that works and also recognize that you are going to be changing as a person so much, your needs are going to be different from one year to the next. And I think a lot of people have experienced that this year. Maybe what was really working for them in 2019 in terms of getting their goals, meeting their desires, plans, et cetera, has completely fallen apart in 2020. Not because there's anything wrong with them, but because they have different needs. A different game is afoot, and therefore we need different tools. And so I hope that this year, people have tried a few more things, actually, and maybe this has opened people up to a different way of doing things.

[13:54] Katie: Yes, I think that there's two really key points that you mentioned here. One of them is a mind body connection. And sometimes, like you said, if we're too focused on our goals or external results that we're trying to achieve, we forget about the body part. And the more we tune into our body, the more we exercise meditate, take care of ourselves, eat healthily, the greater impact you also have on your mind and just your general well being. So that was great. And I also loved what you said about experimenting and not taking what anyone says as the given source of information you have to follow. I had this a lot when I started my coaching business. All the marketing people telling me to have the Facebook group, the Instagram page. I don't have Facebook or Instagram, I use LinkedIn. But there's this sort of obligation of, this is how you do it, this is how you achieve success as a coach. Well, what if it doesn't suit me? So I feel it's like you said, you don't only question what your coach can recommend, you question all of it until you find what suits you. To come back to the process part. Do you have a specific framework, perhaps, that the listeners could tap into that could help them with this?

[15:10] Imogen: Well, I think let's begin with this. I want to paint a picture for your listeners. So really my ultimate philosophy is returning us to as close to nature as possible. What's happened with humans over the last 200 years or so is we're so smart, we're so genius. We've created all these amazing machines to do things for us, but we're also not smart enough to recognize that our greatest skill is mimicry. So what we've done is kind of adorably. We've created all these machines and then started mimicking them and trying to keep up with them. And so what we end up doing is instead of allowing these machines to carry off our workload and free us up to be human, to create, to have pleasure, to connect, to spend more time with each other, we end up basing our measures of success against the pace of those machines. So I really want to help my students and clients remember that there is nature inside them and to align with that as much as possible. Now, when we think about the natural world, and we think about, let's say, a really strong, beautiful tree, it has a strong trunk and this really wide, beautiful canopy. And obviously once a year or twice a year, like wonderful harvest of fruit. Now, do you think that the tree focuses a lot on producing the fruit? No. Basically there's this enormous ecosystem where in order to have this canopy, you've also got this enormous root system growing under the earth that we can't see that is often at least as big as the canopy, if not larger. It has this enormous foundation of support. And then there's also the soil, there's the microbiome. And that is really like the fuel and the recipe of success for the tree that we can't see. And there's a lot going on in there. And as soon as that soil, that microbiome becomes compromised, the whole health of the tree is at stake. And I like to encourage people to think more like this when it comes to their own success and their own goals, is we tend to focus a lot on the fruit, on the outcome and applying mindset and applying strategy to try and force this fruit into being, like, visualizing it and making the fruit happen, when actually we're missing the essence, which is the microbiome. Our overall health and well being, our relationships, our connection to our body, the, the root system, the really wide base of support, building resiliency, building strong relationships and partnerships with people who will hold us when things get hard. Fruit is simply the outcome of taking care of all of those things. It happens on its own. It's kind of effortless. It just arrives when the time is right. And so that's really where I want to start with is getting people to switch their focus from trying to create this fruit from scratch to actually focusing on how am I nourishing my ecosystem, how am I keeping my, you know, you mentioned keeping your body healthy, keeping your mind healthy. This is the fertile soil from where which all this success and creativity and results is going to come from. And then how am I building my wide base of support? What's my community like, how are my relationships? Am I investing in them? Will people help me? Will people come together when I have a tough time in my business or my life? And then in terms of creating a process for yourself. Well, I think a good place to start is starting from the inside out. We've talked a lot about. Yes. There's so many people out there. And I love how you mentioned when you're starting a business, the enormous. It's almost like as soon as you register your company or whatever, it's like the whole of facebook knows, and you get targeted with so many adverts about all these things you need to spend money on, all these things you need to do. And it's totally overwhelming. And exactly as you pointed out may be completely irrelevant for you. Maybe you can see wild success without Facebook or Instagram. Maybe you can see wild success know, having a funnel or doing any public know all of these things are possible. So I would say that before looking outside of yourself for the answers is to start with inside out thinking. And if you'd like, I can share a simple but really effective goal setting process that I teach with my clients.

[20:17] Katie: Yeah, that would be fantastic. Yes, I'd love to hear it. I'm curious, and I'm sure the listeners can benefit from it too.

[20:23] Imogen: Great. So I actually invented this for Seth Godin's audience, actually, because I was speaking at an online conference last year and we each had to create a 20 minutes workshop. And I thought, what can I teach about goal setting and creating a process in 20 minutes? And so I came up with this framework which I now call Productive with Purpose and effectively has four you draw a table with four columns, and the headers of those columns are Feelings, Purpose, Habits, and Success. So we start with feelings. So the first question you ask yourself when you're wanting to decide where to focus your attention or what goals to choose is, how do I want to feel? How do I want to feel? And so the first part of this exercise is writing down as many words, as many feeling words as come to mind of how you want to feel in your body, in your career, in your work, in your day to day, in your relationships, and just write down as many feelings words. I want to feel calm. I want to feel joyous. I want to feel wealthy. I want to feel inspired. I want to feel connected, I want to feel strong. And just writing down as many, many words as you like. And then the second column is called Purpose. And what we're doing here is we're going to choose three of those feelings words to focus on. And so you either choose three words that really stand out to you from your first column, or perhaps you've noticed that in your first column, there are some families emerging, like families of words, and you want to pick a word that kind of summarizes each of those families. And then those are going to be your three areas of focus for this period of time ahead. And then you've got your three purpose words. It's okay. The next column is, what habits will I need to do on a regular basis to generate those feelings in my life? So let's say you chose Inspired as one of your purpose words. It's like, okay, what habits do I need to put in place to generate these feelings of inspiration? Maybe I need to be having more conversations every week. So maybe a habit is I'm going to schedule in a call with someone as a friend or someone in my network once a week, or I'm going to listen to a podcast from a new podcaster twice a week. You're like, right, what action am I going to take to get inspiration? How am I going to go and create that feeling for myself rather than waiting for it to happen to you? And then finally, in your fourth column, success. And I don't use the word goals because again, this is a process is how will I know that I have achieved success in this area. What are the benchmarks? Are there any milestones? Or how will I basically be able to measure success in this area? And for you, it may be maybe you want to feel prolific. So your habit is creating content or writing chapters of a book, or putting a book proposal together, or creating a podcast or something. Well, for you, it might be slightly easier to measure your success because you can go, okay, I know I will feel prolific when I'm writing a newsletter every week, or I have written 6000 words of my book or whatever, but for some of you, it may feel a bit less tangible than that. It may be deciding that when I've done three months of this, then I'm calling that success. Or I'm doing an experiment for this amount of time and committing to this experiment is how I will know I will achieve success. And so really, in four steps, what you end up with is three habits for each of your purpose words, how you will measure success, and a clear sense of how you want to feel. And so, in a short period of time, you've created a little map for yourself where you have desires, actions and how to measure success. And what I love about this exercise is that it's so stretchy. You can do this exercise for the new year, you can do this exercise for the next five years. You can also do this exercise, as I sometimes do on a Monday, to set the week ahead, especially weeks where I have a lot going on and I'm like, oh, I can easily get into overwhelm here, so much to do, right? How do I want to feel? And then how will that help? Once I have those three words, it really helps me to prioritize and choose because I'm only going to lean into the things that were going to help me generate those feelings. If I'm like I want to feel in charge and I want to feel like I've completed something, well then I'm naturally going to go and finish the things I've already started in order to generate those feelings as opposed to looking, starting a whole lot of new stuff. So, yeah, if you're listening to this, do try this out. It's called the productive with purpose exercise. And actually, if you want more support on this, I have just recorded a short online course taking you through this process. And another one called Vision of Success, which you can probably find on my website depending on when this comes out. But yeah, I found this to be a very reliable way of setting goals. And what I love is getting feedback from people. Even just a few months ago, I got contacted by someone who was in that first Seth Godin workshop with me and used the process and it just completely transformed their year. Even if it was 2020, even though lots of things kind of went crazy, they stuck to their three words, and they were like, it's just been one of the most productive years of my life. So feedback like that just makes me so happy. So, yeah, go ahead, try the exercise.

[26:49] Katie: I absolutely love this. I think it's fantastic. It gave me goosebumps. I think part of the magic here is how a lot of the times, we focus on goals, and then we sort of link an emotion to them to make them stronger. So it's sort of want to write a book. Okay, what emotion will I give me? I'll feel happy and successful, and I've achieved something I've always wanted to do. And so we tend to or we learn a lot, especially as coaches, to focus on the goal and add an emotion. Tony Robbins talks a lot about this. Having the emotion makes it stronger, and then you're more likely to do it or want to do it. But what I love about your approach is we focus solely on the feeling and emotion, and this chosen changes the way you view each activity, and the activity is actually linked to the emotion. So it's sort of the other way around. It's the sort of counterintuitive in some way. Yet, of course it's going to make us happier because it's like our aim is to be happy or to have the feelings that we want in our life instead of aiming for the goals to give us those feelings. So sort of the other way around. And I think that's fantastic. And I will put the link to the courses also in the show notes for the people listening. Yes. So thank you so much for sharing that framework with us. I think it's hugely valuable, and I haven't heard of a similar approach, to be honest. A lot about emotions, a lot about feelings, but not about that being sort of the main focus.

[28:19] Imogen: Right. And you know, what I'll say is, every time I've taught this exercise in a workshop or in a class, the feedback I always get is a lot of people struggle with the first column. They're like, oh, I don't know how I want to feel. I've had a mind block. I can't think of any words. I'm stuck. What is wrong with me? I don't know. And some people can get very emotional. I've had people almost in tears because they are like, I don't even know how I want to feel. I've completely lost touch with that side of me. I know how to perform, but ask me how I want to feel this year, and I don't even know what to say. And we can't underestimate how powerful the prohibition against emotion is in our culture and how we've been so well trained from a very, very young age to completely disregard our own emotional experience, to override these internal biological messages. That are coming from our body to look outside of ourselves to leaders, to teachers, to people telling us how we should behave, what we should feel and what we should want. And I love how you reference that Tony Robbins method and of course that's very common know, decide on a goal from the outside and then make it into an emotional story for yourself afterwards, which is, I've kind of been so out of that world for such a long time that it kind of makes me laugh now. But it's like such a long winded way of going about something when in fact, if you are able to tap into that desire, that's coming from you from the beginning. Because the thing about desire and the emotions that therefore express that is that we can't help what we want. It just is like, any child will show you this. All young children go, I want that. I want that. I want a cussle. I want a pony. I want that toy. I want to play. I don't want to wear that outfit. I want to do this now. They are so emotionally and well expressed. They're so well self expressed, and they always know what they want at any moment. And it doesn't matter if it goes against what other people want and they don't feel like it says anything about themselves. They don't have any prohibition against their own desire. They're simply like, I want this. I'm going to ask for it. And they're just going to keep doing that. And when we look at a child, I think it's a beautiful reminder that that is actually who we are at our core. We do have this ability to tap into our own desire. It's just been trained out of us very well. And so what we end up doing now as adults is going, you know what? I should write a book because I'm at this stage in my business and all of my competitors have written a book, so I think I should write a book. So how am I going to trick myself into wanting this? What's the emotional story I'm going to create to force myself to write this book? But what about if for you, you just have no desire to write a book and you're never going to have a desire to write a book, and that's okay. And actually tricking yourself into making yourself want to write a book means that the process of writing that book is going to be horrible. And then the point of arrival of that book is going to not be enjoyable because the work of having a book only really begins at the promotional stage. And this is how people end up knots, tying themselves up in knots and having external success, but not enjoying it because it's not the right expression. And in the meantime, there are all these uncovered, unfulfilled true desires inside of them that are not being heard and are not being expressed. So yeah, it can. Feel strange or unconventional, maybe even a bit silly, to start a goal setting framework with feelings. But that's exactly why I encourage people to try it, because it's breaking a pattern. It's breaking a pattern. And whatever the outcome of taking the exercise is, interesting things always come up, even if it's simply an awareness that you don't even know enough words for feeling.

[32:51] Katie: That's also a very good point. And what you said about the emotions and how we're taught from a very young age to either repress them or we don't understand them. And right now, what you were saying was also similar to what you said at the beginning in terms of questioning what we're told from the outside. So in the example of writing a book, for instance, if this is an outside expected result of someone, then it's to be questioned, like I mentioned with the Facebook group or the Instagram. And I think sometimes people imagine that they have goals that they want, but they don't really. But it's just because they think this is what they need to do, and then they need to add the emotions and the feelings in the Tony Robbins sort of way to make it happen. But by doing that, it makes you feel disaligned with what you truly want to be doing, which is essentially what you're talking about. So I loved how we've wrapped up from the process start and linked it to the emotions and feelings, because I feel this is directly tied together, because if you're more in your feelings, you're more in the present moment, and therefore you're more likely to enjoy the process. So maybe if you could say a short statement around this link before we conclude the episode, that would be great.

[34:08] Imogen: Sure. Well, I think ultimately it's about moving from an outside in method of living where we're always looking outside of ourselves for the next thing, for the next pointer, for the next direction, and reminding ourselves at every moment that actually there's more inside of us than we take credit for. And actually, if you reverse that order, where you go from the inside out, and that you can actually create your world and your career and your business or your life from your own experience, take what's inside and realize it on the outside, manifest it on the outside. It's just a more holistic, engaged, connected way of going about things, and all sorts of doors open up to you when you start to allow yourself to be your own inner compass. So, yeah, I hope that listeners today have got some interesting nuggets to take away with them. And I would love to hear from anyone who's that something in this episode resonated with you. Please do get in touch. Or if you try the goal setting exercise, let me know how that goes for you. I always love to hear feedback.

[35:29] Katie: Thank you so much, imogen. I have learned so much, so I have no doubt that all the listeners have taken away at least one gold nugget, if not more than one. So thank you so, so much for being on the show today.

[35:41] Imogen: Imogen absolute pleasure.

[35:44] Katie: Thank you. Bye bye.

[35:47] Katie: Thank you for listening to the Focus be show. We would love to hear your feedback. Let us know in a review how this episode inspired you. Keep buzzing.