If you were really serious about it...

Do you have a mental list of things you want to do or say you want to do—big goals, small dreams, ideas that surface time and again? I always have a list like this in the back of my mind - things like learning a new language, mastering a handstand, or completing a project that's been sitting half-done for way too long.

While it's great to have goals, sometimes they can hang over us as evidence of 'one more thing I haven't done!' and can even mess with our identity and sense of being enough.

In today's episode, I share a simple but powerful exercise to help you get clear on what it would really take to achieve these things. When I did this, it became obvious to me which goals to pursue at this time, and which ones to let go of for now. And honestly? The whole process felt pretty freeing.

This episode is an invitation to take a closer look at what you truly want, what it would really take, and choosing whether that's a commitment you're ready for make. Both 'yes' and 'no' can be empowering when they come from clarity.

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Transcript

A big welcome to you. Thanks for being here with me. I am coming to you from Naarm. I am on the land of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, and as always, I want to pay my deep respect to their elders past and present.

Do you have a list of things that you would like to do or to achieve? Of course you do. We all do big things, small things. I've definitely got a list. Today I want to talk to you about a little exercise that I've been doing and have really found helpful for myself that is about addressing the gap between what I say I want to do or want to achieve and what it would actually take to do that thing.

And this is not for me, just about pumping up your tires and getting you fired up and ready to, to actually do it, but so many of us live with a feeling of not quite keeping up, not quite hitting the mark, a sense of not enoughness, and there are so many different things that contribute to that. Our patriarchal capitalist society and those values definitely contribute to that, but one of the contributors is this list that we all hold, whether it's explicit or not, of these things that we want to do or achieve, or that we feel we should do or achieve. And those things can kind of hang over us lurking often in the background, but just like a bit of a weight on our shoulders. And whenever they come to mind, really, they just perform the function of reminding us that we are not quite cutting it, that there's this thing that we know that we want to do, at least on some level, and yet here we are not doing it or not progressing towards it. And so that can start to not only affect just our feeling of enoughness, it can really affect our sense of identity.

We can start telling ourselves things like, "Oh, I'm just lazy, or I'm incapable, or I have no willpower." So those are just whispers that kind of stay in the shadow for us. But this exercise that I have been playing with is about bringing it into the light, laying it all bare so that we can face it. So I'm talking about different things ranging from I want to cut back on alcohol, or I want to start a business or scale a business, or I want to build a meditation practice or what else could it be? I want to record an album. All of these different things that might be on your to-do list might be, New Year's resolutions or goals that you might set for yourself, or could just be things that pop up in your mind from time to time just like, oh yeah, I do want to do that.

If that ever comes with a feeling of I'm not quite cutting it, then I think that you'll find this exercise really helpful. We start with grabbing a paper and pen or a journal and writing down these words: ‘If I were really serious about (insert the thing that you want to do or say you want to do or achieve) I would…’, so let me say that again. You write down, if I were really serious about, and then you insert the thing that you want to do, I would ..., and then you just brainstorm everything that you would do. So for me, I've just been doing it in dot points. Here are the different things that I would do if I was fully serious about trying to achieve this particular thing.

So let me give you a few examples that I have been playing with for myself, and these are real ones that are- some of them, the things that do show up on those kinds of lists for me, when I think about one day I'd like to, or maybe this year or perhaps next year or I really ought to, these are some of the real ones for me.

So first one is I want to learn Swahili. And I have done it a bit. I've done some Duolingo time and then it has dropped away, but it's something that I would like to do and it comes back to me from time to time. I would like to learn to speak Swahili. So I wrote down, if I were really serious about learning to speak Swahili, I would, and these are the things that I wrote down.

I would get back onto Duolingo or get onto another app for learning languages. I would commit to four times 30 minutes of practice each week. I would find someone to practice speaking Swahili with. I actually have a husband who can speak Swahili, so I could just practice with him. But I would lock in a regular chat with them.

And that's coming from past experience because Abdo and I have had times where I'm like, let's practice speaking Swahili. But maybe because we are just around each other all of the time, it just sort of gets dropped by the wayside. Whereas if I had an appointment with somebody once a week or once a fortnight, then that would be part of me really taking it seriously and actually making some more progress with learning Swahili.

Something else I wrote here is that I would potentially give myself a goal, like plan a trip to Kenya or another country where they speak Swahili and have that as something to prepare for that would really motivate me to keep practicing so that I could speak Swahili in the country that I would be visiting.

So those are some of the things that I wrote down for that one. Let me give you another example. I have regularly had it on my list of things to do one day to build up my handstand practice, so I like to incorporate arm balances and handstands into my yoga practice, but I would love one day to build towards having a more solid handstand practice where I could do a good 30 seconds of hands standing away from a wall. So not needing the wall for assistance. So that's something that shows up on my list from time to time. Here's what I wrote down. If I were really serious about working towards a 30 second handstand away from the wall, I would, here's my dot points. I would practice handstands every day.

I would attend regular handstand classes, and then I wrote that down, and then underneath that I wrote I would attend three times per week, because I think even just saying I would attend regular classes is almost an example of me not being that serious about it. If I was really serious, I'd be like, I'm committed to a particular number every week, and so I wrote down three weekly classes.

I would also do some private handstand classes where I could get really individual support and feedback to help me to develop my practice. The last one that I wrote down is I would sort out my wrist and finger injuries. I have had some injuries that were old and that don't really affect me in my day-to-day life, but when it comes to doing extended periods of hand standing, they flare up a bit.

And so I would need to do some rehab, and some strengthening around that. Let me give you one more example, and this is one to do with Eve my business. So we have an online course that is a yoga teacher training that we were offering during Covid and Lockdowns, and has evolved a little bit and there are parts that we need to adjust and change for it.

And basically the idea is to edit it enough so that it is usable now. It's an amazing course and it's really just about kind of tweaking it, cutting out a few bits, adding in a few bits to make it more appropriate for the setting that we are in right now. And that has been on my to-do list for quite a while.

And so I thought I'd use this, little exercise to see how I go with that. So I wrote down if I were really serious about getting our online course ready, to make available. I would dot point number one, give myself a deadline, set a date for launching the course. I would possibly even, and maybe I need to remove those words now that I say that. I would start to promote the course with that launch date in mind.

So that would apply the pressure for me to actually get it done, and I would block out three days to deep dive on it. I estimate it would take me about three days to do this if I could just completely dedicate my time to just doing this task. So those are three of my examples. And before we get to you and yours.

One thing that you might wonder about is whether you could use AI for this, and certainly it's a possibility, could be useful to type it into an AI program like say, complete this sentence for me if I were really serious about running five kilometers I would, and ask the chat GPT or whatever to complete the sentence for you or to give you dot points.

I did do that just for an experiment with this in preparation for this episode and my personal take on it is that what chat GPT offered to me just kinda washed over me a little bit. It's like, yes, and a lot of what it offered were things that I had already written down, but it kind of felt quite generic and almost just like I'd flicked open a magazine and just seeing like 10 steps to blah, blah, blah, which is fine and not entirely unuseful.

But for me, I think a lot more helpful and powerful was the process of me really inquiring of myself. What would it take if I were really serious? What would I do to achieve this thing? So you can experiment with that. So what this exercise does is a couple of things. First of all, it illuminates whether or not you know what it would actually take.

And if you don't know, so if you go to do this, if I were really serious about achieving this, I would. You're like, uh, I have no idea what steps I would take. That in itself is great information, and of course you haven't achieved it if you actually don't even have an idea of where you would begin with that.

So that can show you it's not laziness or it's not a lack of discipline. It's literally a lack of information or a lack of knowledge. And so in that case, you can decide, well, what then would be my first step? So it might be I'm going to commit to spending an hour researching online how to get started with this particular thing, or to book in an appointment with someone who is a specialist in this area, or someone you know has experience in it to get some support or information from them.

So that's the first thing. It can show you what you know and what you don't know, and that is illuminating and empowering in itself. The second thing that this does is that it lays it all out in front of you what it would take. So if you have managed to write a little list of dot points or a big list, then you can see with full awareness what it would take for you to do this if you were really serious about it. And then based on that, make a decision about whether you want to commit to that at this time. And there's no objective right or wrong here. So you might look at the list of what it would take to achieve this if you were really serious about it and recognize that it's way more than you have capacity for right now or that you are interested in right now when it's laid out clear in dot points for you, you might be like, you know what? I don't care that much about achieving this thing if that's what it would really take to get there, you know, I think I'm okay to let it go.

And in doing that, making that decision to not take those steps. That can be really freeing. It can free you from that mental load and that sense of burden around the fact that you are missing the mark or not quite achieving it when it comes to your mind, rather than just feeling like, oh yeah, I should do that one day, or I want to do that, but I just haven't got to it or I haven't been able to, or whatever the story is that you tell yourself now you can tell yourself, "Yeah, I looked at what that would involve and I decided that it's not a priority for me right now." And that's freeing in itself. To be honest, my experience when I did the handstands one, looking at that, it's like, yeah, the kind of commitment that I think it would take to really intentionally built towards doing a 30 second handstand away from the wall is more than I'm actually willing to commit right now. And so that's good to recognize that. And it puts me in a place where I decide that I'm okay to dabble in handstands and just to kind of keep enjoying them a little bit in part of my practice and maybe gradually improving my handstand skills.

But having done this exercise and seen the list of things that would be required if I were really serious about it, I'm willing to let that go, those activities, and also the end goal of the 30 second handstand. At this time, I recognize I don't want to put in the work, and so it's okay to let go of the outcome that that work might have yielded.

And that means when it pops into my mind, "Oh yeah, I want to do a 30 second hand stand." I can tell myself, "Yeah, but I know what it would take and I have decided that that's not a priority for me right now." And that in itself eases that mental load and just that kind of lurking burden of stuff to do, stuff I should do.

It's like one less thing weighing me down in that sense. It's one of the things that I've really appreciated about this exercise, that it really highlights the gap between what would be required if I were really serious and what I'm currently doing. And you might do that and realise that actually you are doing a lot of the things that you would do if you're really serious about it.

And maybe it's just about adding those extra one or two things that you have written down. Or you might have the opposite experience and realise I'm doing none of this stuff, or so little of it that you realise it's actually not important to you at this time and you're willing to let it go. Either way there's no right or wrong outcome here, but it's just about helping you to get more clear and again to lifting off some of that weight that you might be carrying unconsciously. Something else that I've found really cool about doing this process is doing it across a few of my different goals, things that I want to do or achieve, and then putting them alongside each other.

So you might have seven different things that you want to do or achieve, and you could do this process for each one of them and then hold them up next to each other. And you'll probably realise that of course you can't achieve all of these and it might actually help you to get more clear on what is a priority and what's not.

So again, to come back to my own example. If I look at those three different things, me learning Swahili, and what that would take me getting to my 30 seconds of hand standing and what that would take, and me preparing this course to release it online again, what that would take? When I look at them all, it's like they actually don't fit in the available time and energy and focus that I have right now amidst the rest of the things that I'm doing in my life.

So the one with the online course, that is a more contained commitment, and so that feels really doable. It was helpful for me just to write that down and kind of go, okay, I think that's been one of those things that feels bigger in my mind than it actually will be. And so now it's just a matter of like, yep, just make it happen.

But when I look at the Swahili learning and the handstand practice, I actually don't think I have capacity to do both of those things at the moment. Like I said, I already said, I don't think I have capacity to even do the handstand thing right now, but putting them next to each other, it's like, I definitely don't have capacity to do both of these things.

And so if I wanted to give myself a good shot of really, let's say learning to speak Swahili, then I would do well to let go of the idea of trying to build my handstand practice and really focus my attention and my effort on the steps that I know I'd need to take to learn Swahili or vice versa. If I wanted to go all in on the handstand practice and building to that 30 second handstand, then I don't have the capacity and the time right now to also be doing all of the things that would be required if I were to be really serious about trying to learn Swahili.

So I find that quite freeing. It's like a burden off of my shoulders. I don't need to worry about those things. I don't need to feel any sense of pressure when they come to mind, because the illumination of what it would really take to do these things means that I can either jump right into it and do it, or I can let it go and feel released of that pressure.

So I hope this is resonating with you. You probably already have a list of things that you know, or those things that sit there in the back of your mind, but let me give you a few examples. So you might explore, if I was really serious about rehabbing my injured ankle, or if I was really serious about learning to skateboard.

If I were really serious about being an ally to First Nations people, I would. If I were really serious about doing my masters, if I were really serious about working on my relationship, if I were really serious about saving a deposit, if I were really serious about moving to a four day work week, if I were really serious about taking care of myself. What are yours?

Ask yourself the question, if you were really serious about doing this, what would you do? I'm so keen to hear how you go with this. I hope that you find it helpful. Like I said, it's been a good one for me and I hope it will be for you too. Sending you loads of love and I'll look forward to chatting to you again next week.

Bye.