Learnings and Missteps

Why Your Personal Goals Keep Getting Pushed Aside (And How To Fix It)

• Jesus Hernandez • Season 3

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The Guilt-Free Future Planning method helps prioritize personal goals that consistently get pushed aside when we're busy making things happen for everyone else. This three-step process—Brain Dump, DAMN Matrix, and Walking the Plank—creates a framework for getting your goals out of your head, prioritizing them, and committing to action.

• Brain Dump: List all your goals in three categories—business/professional growth, personal growth, and meaningful connections
• Focus only on what YOU want, not what others expect of you
• DAMN Matrix: Prioritize goals based on impact (high/low) and effort (high/low)
• Start with high impact/low effort goals to build momentum
• Walking the Plank: Commit to goals one at a time in priority order
• Block time in your calendar specifically for your personal goals
• This method is part of a larger Self-First Time Mastery approach
• Momentum matters more than completion—just start making progress

If you want to try this method, download the template using the link provided. For those who prefer learning with community, sign up for the full Self-First Time Mastery workshop where we'll cover guilt-free future planning, strategically selfish scheduling, and daily domination.

Check out the Video Demonstration on YouTube: https://youtu.be/EXj7NpfBpzo



Download a PDF copy of Becoming the Promise You are Intended to Be
https://www.depthbuilder.com/books

Speaker 1:

So I want you to think about the list of goals that you've had just for this year and we never make the time to make those things happen. But what's happening is we're doing all kinds of other things, making stuff happen for everybody else. Putting yourself first is the way to overcome that. I know it's super uncomfortable. That's why I'm calling it the guilt-free future planning, because I'm going to take all the guilt for you and you don't have to worry that you're like the first person ever to go through this, because we've had people go through this before. What we're going to talk about today is the guilt-free future planning and it has three pieces to it. So we're going to walk you through the brain dump. If you're like a make it happener self-starter actually that's kind of perfect because you can sign up and download the template I'm going to walk you through kind of the basics of it. We're going to do the brain dump, then we're going to go through the damn matrix and then we're going to do the walking the plank, which are the three elements of guilt-free future planning. It's a way to prioritize and make stuff happen.

Speaker 1:

And if you're wondering like how in the world did this ever come up, it was because I struggled. I was looking at a list of things that I had on the wall. A friend of mine was like Jess, you're so organized, you've got all these things, all your big projects, big ideas, and you're just knocking them out. And I'm like, okay, thank you. And she said, but I think you wrote down the wrong year. And I said, no, actually that's the year I made the plan. I just haven't done those things. Yet it was five years had passed and I hadn't made any moves on the things that filled my cup because I was putting everybody else first. And so the analysis was this I know how to make things happen. I'm kicking butt in my career. I'm kicking butt in the community. I'm doing good in my job, I'm getting promotions. I know how to make things happen for everybody else, but I need to make things happen for me. So this is the template. Again, if you want the template, there's, there's a link. Go get the link and sign up. What's most important to me is that you use it so that you can get more we'll say, fulfillment out of life.

Speaker 1:

Now, there are three elements here. The first element I'm going to refer to as the brain dump right. And so that's this first top part here. And, like I said a little while ago, think about all the things, all the objectives, the ideas, the projects that you have been like oh, I would love to do that or that you committed to doing this year and the ones that you haven't made any movement on. The idea is to get those things out of your head, and I have three buckets there. Right, this is the brain dump.

Speaker 1:

One bucket is like what are the things in your business or professional growth right In that segment of your life, what are the things that you've been wanting to do, that you keep thinking about, that you keep putting off? That would be awesome if you actually had the time. Dump those in this little box here. Right? Examples of that are certifications. If you run your own business, maybe you want to expand services, or you want to expand your business, you want to hire people, you want a new promotion, you want a side gig, like all of these kinds of things that are like in the professional space. Write them down in that bucket and don't worry about it. Right, I'm not going to tell on anybody, just write them down, get them out of your head.

Speaker 1:

The other bucket is personal growth. Now, I know that's kind of close to what we're talking about a little while ago, but when I'm talking about personal growth, I'm about me, right, like what new skills do I want to learn? Maybe I'm going to start a YouTube channel. Maybe I want to pick up running or exercise or spend more time journaling these kinds of things that we all kind of think about. Someday we're going to do it. Dump those out, get them out of your head and put them in that little box.

Speaker 1:

And then the last box is like meaningful connections, relationships, personal, romantic, professional, community, engagement, stuff with your church. If you're a church person, like these types of community things are meaningful connections. Cause why? Because they're valuable, right? Or maybe maybe you're surrounded by turkeys and a bunch of scrubs and you want to upgrade the people that you are connected with, that you spend time with. That's a good plan. I highly highly recommend it, and so you would get all of these things out of your head, right. This is the bring them.

Speaker 1:

What are the things that you've thought about, that you've flirted with the idea but then you suppressed it because you had to pick up the kids or because you have a deadline, or because you have an email or because you have a media, and so those things just stay cluttered in our head. Get them out of your head. If you got a question, if I'm going too fast, if I ain't making sense, drop it in the comments so that I can respond back to you. And if you don't have any questions about the brain dump segment of the thing, we're going to transition into the damn matrix. So this is the second part of the guilt-free future planning.

Speaker 1:

Now, one thing that's really, really important is when you think about these things the big ideas, the goals, the things that you want to invest in yourself, about what do you think about? Not what other people want you to do, not what you should do, what exactly, what the hell you want to do. And I am here to absolve you of any and all guilt, because guess what, as soon as you're done with this piece of it, you go back and do whatever you want to do, like go back to normal. But just for now, when you're sitting through this piece, I want you to think about it from your perspective. Only, not what other people expect, not what you think people want. What you want, period. Okay, I had to say that Got to say that, right. And so after you do the brain dump this is the idea you come in here to the damn matrix. Right, and I'll explain the damn matrix real quick. This is going to help us prioritize all of those things the stuff, the business, professional related stuff, the skills, the skill building stuff and the community relationship stuff, all of those things like man, that's a lot of stuff, I know I get it. So now we want to prioritize it and this is a way to prioritize it and we're going to kind of weigh them based on impact and effort.

Speaker 1:

I am a huge proponent of looking and focusing on the things that are going to bring the greatest impact with the lowest effort, right, like, if it's hard, we can do that one later. And so if we think of the scale right up and down high impact at the top, low impact on the bottom. If we think left the scale right up and down high impact at the top, low impact on the bottom. If we think left to right effort low effort to the left, highest effort to the right. And so what that means is the top left quadrant. What we want to put in that quadrant are the things that are highest impact, lowest effort.

Speaker 1:

Is it going to be easy Pulling the trigger, making that decision? How easy is it? Low effort, boom, let's put that bad boy on it. We think it's going to have a high impact. Good, like you don't need to do a data study or any of that. Just what does it feel like? What do you think? Get it out of your head, dump it there. Then we have high impact still on the high impact side of it. But it's high effort, right, it's going to take some, maybe some, some sacrifices, some commitment. You might have to get out there and run a few miles. Whatever it is your target is.

Speaker 1:

But think about it. If it's got high impact and high effort, that's going to be on the top right-hand quadrant, okay. And then we go down to the bottom, where the M, which is lower impact but still low effort. Right, like it's not going to be as impactful as the other things. Like this is a relative assessment. We're going to be as impactful as the other things. This is a relative assessment. We're going to put that down there low impact and low effort. If it's not going to take a lot of effort and it's not going to have great impact, it may not be the end of the world to invest time and resources there.

Speaker 1:

And then, lastly, is high effort. It's going to take a lot of effort to do the damn thing and it's going to have low impact If anything falls in there. We need to evaluate that. And so why is it the damn matrix? Because D everything in the top left quadrant. We want to do those first.

Speaker 1:

Anything that is high impact, low effort, pull the trigger on that bad boy. Because it helps us build momentum. It helps us build momentum and I know most of us out there are no bueno. We are not good at making ourselves a priority. We have been conditioned to make everyone else a priority and put ourselves last. And if you're one of those people out there, you know what I'm talking about. Give me a high five or some thumbs up, some hearts and all that other beautiful stuff, so that I know I'm not the only one.

Speaker 1:

Now, anything that landed in the top right quadrant is what we're going to do after whatever is in the D quadrant Right the D quadrant high impact, low effort. Once we get those balls rolling, then we can go on to the next one. Why? Because there's still high impact and the effort might be a little bit higher, but they're still very, very impactful. Then we think about the low impact, low effort. Right, let's think about it. Maybe we want to do them or maybe, after we've pulled the trigger of the high impact things, we found a new path and we say, oh my God, I just all that other stuff, I don't need to worry about it, this is what's filling my cup. I'm going to just go double down on these things. Anything that falls in the high effort, low impact quadrant, we need to evaluate it right, because it's going to take a lot of time and resources and you are already like a super, super committed overachiever. Make it happener. You don't just need to be picking things up to do things. You got plenty going on, so maybe it just needs to come off the list. Boom, bam. So that's the damn matrix.

Speaker 1:

Again, I want to remind you of this three pieces, three steps in here, which is the brain dump right, get the things, ideas that we've had in our head, that we've been kind of procrastinating on deprioritizing someday. I'll do it whenever I have the time. And then, once we do that, then we slide them over and we weigh them based on impact and effort, right, boom, put them wherever they need to be. And guess what, if you put it there now and it doesn't make sense, it's okay, you can move it. I'm not going to tell anybody, I promise. And then, lastly, we get into walking the plank. And this is where we get to like commitment time. We've covered the brain dump, we've covered the damn matrix, effort and impact, and now we're going to do walking the plank. And so I know I'm going like super, super speedy, talking a million miles an hour, because that's me, that's the way I do it.

Speaker 1:

I need to tell you this is one piece of the whole workshop, the self first time mastery workshop we go into guilt-free future planning. After we do that, then we get into strategically selfish scheduling and after we do that, we slide into daily domination. And so it's big picture, future planning, future outlook. How do we do that? All with the purpose, or maybe with the philosophy of self-first right, of reinvesting into ourselves and making ourselves a priority. We start high level, big picture. Then we say, okay, now let's get it in our calendar. And then we say, okay, now it's in our calendar. And then we say, okay, now it's in our calendar. How do we go and make things happen every day so that we get that momentum and we're clicking on all 12 cylinders and making stuff happen. So what I'm showing you today is just one piece of that. Again, you don't have to sign up for the workshop. You can sign up and download the damn template and start using it yourself and modify it and customize it for your own needs. But if you like learning with the community and my energy doesn't disgust you you should probably sign up for the workshop.

Speaker 1:

All right, so let's go into the final piece of the guilt-free future planning. Let me find my thing. I've got so many clickings going on over here, and so the last element of the guilt-free future planning is walking the plank. And so the funnel, right. How does this thing flow? Well, we did the brain dump. We got all the stuff out of our head in terms of, like, our business and professional growth, the things that we want to do, personal growth, meaningful connections, all right. Then we said, okay, we're going to prioritize them based on effort and impact. Yay, awesome, we're moving forward now.

Speaker 1:

And now what you would do is walk the plank, and this is the hard one for me. Like, if you're super, like, I want to do everything right now. I get you because I have that problem, but walking the plank is what's helped me transition from like starting fires all over the place to like actually getting stuff done and making progress and meaningful impact on the things that I want to have impact on. And so walking the plank means one at a time, and so I got all this stuff out of my head. I've weighted them based on impact and effort, and now I take the one that's going to have the highest impact with the lowest amount of effort and I put that first, and then I pick the second one, and then I pick the third one and I just put them in order and that's that's the deal. Now, again, highly recommend to start with the highest impact and lowest effort, because there's less friction there and you'll be able to get like make real progress and start taking action and get that momentum and get excited and energized. You don't have to complete the thing. This is all about momentum and getting the ball rolling.

Speaker 1:

A lot of people get hung up like, oh, I can't start because I can't finish this and it's a big problem. No, no, no, no, it's just about making progress. So, one at a time we put it down. Number two, put it down Number three. Bring it from the damn matrix and put it down there and you can choose to walk the plank and put the things in the order that you want. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:

Again, I'm not going to grade this and nobody's going to get mad at you, but the idea is this is to transition that all of that stuff. We've got it out of our head, we've prioritized it. Now we're like we're closer to commitment time. We're saying this is going to be first, this is going to be second, this is going to be third, so on and so forth. If that scares you a little bit, I get it. Some people are like, oh, we're getting closer to commitment and commitment is where it's at right. Like the whole point of this thing is to help you commit to you, and I know it's really uncomfortable. But if you download the thing and you start using it like shout out and props to you, because I think that's like the first step in making those types of commitments, once we've done this, we all of a sudden discover a brand new problem. Because why? Because we're human beings.

Speaker 1:

The next step is to take each of those things that you've walked the plank on one at a time and find empty space in your calendar, right, like?

Speaker 1:

Open up your Outlook calendar or your Google calendar or your.

Speaker 1:

If you have a daily planner that you use and you plan, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:

Open that thing up and go find empty space, space that's not committed, and start committing to yourself one at a time, whatever. That is that one thing. If it's a 30-minute thing, if it's a 10 10 day project, if it's a six month training thing, all you need to do is dedicate a block of time to it into in the future, because right now I know you ain't in your calendar Block some time for that thing, and then you take number two block some time for that thing, then you take number three block some time for that thing. Now what normally happens is people get stuck here. They get scared because they know when they open up their calendar, their calendar doesn't have everything in it. There's a whole lot of other commitments that are still wrangling, binging, banging around in their brain. They haven't got it out of their head and that's why the next step is strategically selfish scheduling, where you will get a framework to wrangle all of that stuff and get it under control and get clear about what's important and what's not.