[00:01] 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.

[00:34] Welcome to a brand new episode of the Focus B show. How can you fall in love with the process? How to not be fixated only on the goals and results? This is a question I have asked myself for a while. For years I have worked on this as I am a very results oriented person. So if you're like me, I sympathize. I know what it's like to be super driven by your goals, by your dreams, and to be impatient to get there. And this can sometimes get in the way of actually enjoying the process and taking your time and just having fun along the way. What I've learned and realized is that when we only obsess on the goal, we might reach it. And then it's a what, one day celebration, one week if it's really amazing, and then we're back in a new process for a new goal, and sometimes we don't even celebrate it at all. Does this sound familiar? You reach your goal and then, oh, well, now I have a new goal. I have another target, another ambition, and you're no longer satisfied with the result you have. This is another reason why only focusing on goals is not necessarily the best approach. James Clear talks a lot about this in Atomic Habits, on the importance of building habits instead of focusing on the goal and end result and how important it is to make this journey enjoyable. So I have five tips, five tricks today to discuss how you can make this enjoyable, how you can fall in love with the process. Tip number one look for a process that you are already enjoying. Let's first have a look at things that you're already enjoying and maybe make it even more fun. And look at what it is about this process that you enjoy. So let's say you have a great gym exercise routine. Look at is it because you're in a group and you like the group of people you're with? Is it the type of workout you're doing? Is it the time of day that makes a difference? Look at the different aspects of a process you're already enjoying. And this leads to tip number two directly, which is how can you apply some of this to make all your processes more fun? Essentially, what we want to do is gamify our work and our life so that everything feels fun, everything feels rewarding, and you get that dopamine boost all the time and not just when you kick your end goal. Let's say, for example, I'm making this both video and audio podcast. If my aim was only a certain amount of views or a certain amount of subscribers, then I would feel constantly disappointed until I reached that goal. However, if I'm already enjoying filming this, recording this, then I am already enjoying the process. So it's looking at what elements can you learn from the processes that you're enjoying in the example of the gym? Or it can be other processes, habits that you have in place and taking these elements and making pretty much all of your processes fun. If you can manage to gamify your entire workflow, then you're in the right track for success, for ongoing enjoyment and flow. Because if you spend most of your days in flow, not only will you be super productive, you will actually reach your goals and you will enjoy it a lot more. So this was tip number two gamify your work. Tip number three track your progress. So for certain people, keeping track can be a bit of a downer. It can put them off as they will feel that it's too controlled or too structured. But if you're the other type of person who gets a huge kick out of that green tick or the tick on your to do list, then you might also enjoy tracking your progress. For this you can use a habit tracker, you can use many different systems. Calendar, digital one or paper one. Full focus planner that I have here with me that's fantastic. Is also a way of keeping track of your progress. This is super important because then you can actually see how you are progressing and how close you're getting to your goal. And this leads to step number four, which is do mini progresses, incremental progresses. Breaking it down when you have your big goal, maybe even if you're doing a daily journey, this might still seem a bit overwhelming and might still be a bit of a huge task. So you want to break it down in a way that's a perfect balance between easy but still challenging. If it's too easy, you'll get bored, and if it's too challenging, you'll be frustrated. So you want to break it down in these perfect mini habits, little chunks of goals that you do every day and then you reward yourself. So this is where the fourth step is so important, is reward yourself. And this can be either a gold star in your calendar or something that you want to treat yourself with, that you particularly enjoy a meal, out, whatever it is that you fancy as a way of rewarding yourself. And you can do this on milestones along your journey. So if we think of goal as your end result and you're breaking it down into monthly or weekly milestones, that then leads to daily habits, then maybe every week or every month when you've been exercising every day or meditating, or you've made great progress in your business on a daily basis, then you can reward yourself. So they're sort of milestones along the way to your goal. If we take the analogy of a marathon, it would be like when you reach your quarter of a marathon, when you reach your half marathon, or if you've been running on a weekly basis. These are the ways you can reward yourself as milestones go along. And these are a really effective way to keep this dopamine going, to keep yourself energized and motivated by your goal. And last but not least, tip number five is turning your dislike into like. And for this, you can use an NLP trick, which is visualize a part of the process that you don't enjoy. So, part of the process that you dislike. Now visualize it. Close your eyes and see what emotions come up. Where do you feel it in the body? What colors are there? What are the sounds? And fully visualize this part that you dislike. Once that's really clear, you stop. And then take a process you really like. Visualize it. Whether it's your gym routine, whether it's the weekend hobby way that you arrange your weekends, take a part that you really like. Visualize it and do the same process. Look at your emotions, add some color, texture, how do you feel in the body? Where do you feel it? And once this is really clear, you put both images together by taking the feelings and emotions from the activity and the process you like and putting them in your mind on the process that you dislike or don't enjoy. And what will happen is, neurologically speaking, your brain will think differently about this activity and you will suddenly find that it's more enjoyable than you thought it was. This is how we can trick our brains and it works. You can also alternatively, if you don't want to use the NLP technique, you can just make it more enjoyable by putting some music on or doing something you enjoy at the same time, or just before and just after. Which comes back to one of the first tips, which was make the process enjoyable. So let's recap. Let's look again. How could we enjoy this journey? How can we make it fun and not all about the destination? Tip number one look at processes you already enjoy and learn from them. Tip number two make it more enjoyable. Gamify your work. Tip number three track your progress. Number four make sure that you reward yourself. And number five turn your dislike into likes. I hope this is useful for you. Please subscribe to my channel or to my podcast. Leave a review or a comment. Let me know what works for you. I love to hear from people and know what inside they have from each and every episode. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Wishing you all a wonderful day.

[09:45] Thank you for listening to the Focus B show. We would love to hear your feedback. Let us know in a review how this episode inspired you. Keep buzzing.