Today’s episode of Creating The Path is about how you can create a life you love in 3 steps. These are the 3 steps of my Intentional Energy Framework that I use with my clients - Dream, Discover and Design.
Topics discussed in this episode:
[02:00] Creating a list of your dreams and goals
[03:58] Creating a list of your top values
[04:40] Asking yourself WHY
[06:24] Looking at where you are now and where you want to be
[06:50] Tracking your time and energy
[08:43] Separating activities into 2 lists according to your energy
[09:30] Designing the life you love based on your vision, goals and values
[10:21] Redesigning your day based on your energy tracker
[10:41] Daily self-care and why you’re feeling burned out
[11:14] Designing a joyful daily routine
Free Resources:
Get your FREE Energy Tracker here!
Noteworthy Quotes:
“The key to creating a life you love is being intentional on how you spend your energy.”
“Keep asking yourself ‘why’ until you get to the heart of why that goal is important to you.”
“It's important to know exactly what tasks and activities you’re doing on a regular basis and how much time you spend doing them because we often think things take less time than they actually do. Which is how we get into this cycle of working too much and never getting through our to-do list.”
“You want to schedule your day to follow your natural energy flow. When your energy is down you’re better off taking a break rather than pushing through to get more work done. That’s just going to burn you out.”
“Stay curious as to what feels good and right for you. That’s what really matters. Remember that you’re creating your path, your ideal life, not what someone else thinks is ideal.”
Summary of the Podcast:
Creating the Path is a podcast that challenges multi-passionate entrepreneurs to achieve their goals by working less and eliminating overwhelm, so they can create their own unique pathway to a life they love.
My mission is to transform hustle culture and assist others to shift away from living life on auto-pilot to living intentionally and following your own path to a life you love instead.
Host Bio:
Heather Grace Hanson is a certified positive psychology-based coach and creator of the Intentional Energy Framework, a system that empowers you to create a life and business you love without burning out.
Heather is obsessed with all things personal development, running and walking in the park, interior design, salsa dancing and most importantly, spending time with her pup, Barclay.
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Episode Transcript:
Hello and welcome to the first official episode of Creating the Path podcast. Today I want to talk about how you can create your path to a life you love in 3 steps. These are the three phases of my Intentional Energy framework that I use with my clients.
I truly believe that the key to creating a life you love is by being intentional with how you spend your energy. It’s the foundation of everything you do because if you don’t have any energy you can’t do anything.
So my intentional energy framework outlines how you can use your energy intentionally to live the life you want, and I’m going to go through that framework with you today.
The first phase of the framework is the Dream phase. This phase is really fun and it's what allows us to be intentional. This is where you create your vision for what your ideal life looks like.
The goal here is to go deeper than just what comes to mind immediately. It’s highly likely that at least some of your goals or part of your vision is something that you’ve just absorbed from the outside world, society, and others’ opinions about what we should want in life. This is natural to absorb things from our environment, so then your job in this first step is to question your vision and goals to be sure it’s what you really want.
But let’s backtrack for a minute because first we need to create a vision or a list of goals and dreams to start with.
You can start by just creating a list of whatever comes to your mind but if your mind goes blank when you start to create this list, which is very common, it can be helpful to think of your life in terms of categories because this will usually spark some ideas as you think of specific areas of your life.
You can choose whatever categories you want, but they might be something like Health and Wellness, Family and Friends, Romance, Money and Finances, Business and Career, Hobbies or Freetime, Learning and Education, etc. Those are just a few common ones, but you can create any categories that make sense for you.Then you can start brainstorming what each one of those areas of your life would look like in your ideal situation.
Another way you can do this is to think of what you want to accomplish before you die. You can do this by either writing your own obituary or you could just write a simple bucket list of things that you want to accomplish in your life at some point.
You can also choose how far into the future you want to envision. You can choose to just create a vision for what you want your life to look like over the next few months or year, in which case maybe you don’t need to create your bucket list right now. Do whatever feels right or good for you. Just remember that this should be fun because you want to envision a life that will bring you joy. Also, don’t limit yourself to what feels possible at this point. Dream big, write down all the things, even if you think it’s something you can’t accomplish right now. You’ll worry about how to create this life and accomplish these dreams later on.
Next, you want to create a list of your top 3-6 values. You can google a list of values to get some ideas and you basically want to start by writing down every value that feels good to you. Then you’ll start narrowing down the list by looking for words that are similar and grouping them together and picking one word to represent all of them or just simply looking at all your values and start deciding which ones are more important to you than others. And you’ll do this until you narrow it down to about 3-6.
Now, once you have your list of values and a list of things that you want to accomplish in your life and a vision for what your ideal life will look like, that’s when you want to start to explore if these are truly things that you want.
So you’ll want to start going through the list and asking yourself why do I want to achieve this or why is this important to me. And then once you have an answer, ask yourself why again and keep asking yourself why until you get to the heart of why that goal is important to you. You’ll know when you’ve gotten to the root of why it’s important to you when you can’t answer why anymore. At that point, it’s likely that your last answer was closely related to one of your values.
As you’re asking yourself why, at some point you may actually realize that this is something that’s not really that important to you and you won’t have an answer for why you want it, not because you’ve gotten to the root of why it’s important to you but because it actually isn’t or you’ll realize you don’t like your answer to why. Like if your answer is something around wanting to impress other people or wanting validation from someone.
Once you realize which goals or which parts of your vision were absorbed from other people or society or somewhere from the external world, then you can choose to remove it from your list.
But if it truly is something that’s important to you..
By asking yourself why, to get to the root of why it’s important to you, that’s really going to reinforce the importance of it in your mind so you can be confident knowing that you’ve created a really solid vision for yourself, and it’s going to help later in the process when we start to redesign your days.
And now that you’re finished creating your vision, the next step is to look at where you are now. In order to create your path to a life you love, we need to know both ends of the path, where you are now and where you want to be. So I call this step Discover, because we’re looking at what your life looks like now and we’re discovering what are the things that are holding you back.
And the best way to get a good and accurate picture of your current life is to track your time and energy. You can do this on a piece of paper, a journal, or in a spreadsheet, but however you do it, you want to track what you’re doing in either increments of 30 or 60 minutes, and I also recommend adding a column to track how much energy you have at those times as well. This is a really important step that people often want to skip over, but if you can do this for 7 days, it’s going to give you so much valuable information.
It’s important to know exactly what tasks and activities you’re doing on a regular basis and how much time you spend doing them because we often think things take less time than they actually do, which is how we get in this cycle of working too much and never getting through our to do lists.
Tracking your energy is also important because this is something we usually don’t think about. Our energy has natural flows throughout the day, typical times when we have more energy and other times when our energy will be lower, so this exercise can help you identify what your own natural energy flow is. And it can also help you identify how certain activities might be affecting your energy.
I know this can be a difficult exercise to do, even just to remember to do it, but I really urge you to try tracking for a week. Maybe set some alarms for yourself throughout the day to remind yourself. If you forget, just try to track it to the best of your memory as soon as you remember.
After you’ve done this for a week, then you can look at that and start to separate all the activities you did that week and start to separate them out and create 2 different lists. You’ll want to create a list of activities that drained your energy and another list of activities that replenished your energy or that made you feel refreshed. Don’t feel bad if the first list is longer than the 2nd one, or if you don’t have anything to put on the 2nd list at all. That’s normal because the whole reason you’re doing this is because you already know that you’re spending too much time draining your energy, right? So that’s ok, because our goal in the next phase is to make sure we fix that.
So that brings us to the 3rd and last phase of the framework, which is the Design phase. This phase can be tricky, because it’s a little bit of a puzzle, and mindset patterns can get in the way here that can keep you stuck in your old way of doing things, so just be aware of that as you work through this phase.
Basically what we’re doing here though, is we’re going back and looking at your vision and your goals and we’re reverse engineering them to make decisions on what are your first next steps towards working towards those goals. What should your goals be for the next 90 days, the next month or even over the next week. Because now you’re going to redesign your day from the ground up.
But let’s take a step back for a moment and we’ll come back to your goals. The first thing I recommend you do here is look at your energy tracking. See what times of day you normally have higher energy and when you normally have lower energy. Try to schedule work or activities that require more energy of you during those times when you have more energy available. And try to schedule time in your day for self-care, or energy replenishing activities during the time of day when your energy normally dips. Does that make sense? The idea is that we want to schedule our day to follow our natural energy flow. When our energy is low, we’re better off if we take a break rather than pushing through to get more work done, because that will just burn you out and the quality of your work goes down anyway. So first you want to figure out that natural flow for you.
Then, once you have that general flow figured out, that’s when you can start deciding on what specific activities and tasks you’re going to plug into those buckets of time. And there’s usually an element of trial and error here. You might add something then take it away and add something else until you come up with a nice daily schedule that feels joyful and productive without being overly stuffed.
And once you start following this new schedule and daily routine, you’ll likely make adjustments along the way, and that’s all part of the process. Just remember to have fun with it and stay curious to what feels good and right for you, because that’s what matters. Remember that you’re creating YOUR path and YOUR ideal life, not what someone else thinks is ideal.
Well, I think that does it for our very first podcast episode! Thank you so much for listening, and I really hope this has been helpful for you. Feel free to hit me up on Instagram and let me know what you think. You can find me @HeatherGraceHanson.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Creating the Path as much as I did. You can find the show notes for this and every episode at heathergracehanson.com/podcast. But before you go, make sure to hit the subscribe button. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Until then, have a fabulous week.