Grow with Soul: Ep. 108 - Goals, Manifesting, and Making Things Happen Q&A
Hello, and welcome to episode 108 of Grow with Soul. Today I am answering a couple of your questions submitted on Instagram earlier this week. I’ve grouped together a couple of questions that all had a similar feel: knowing what you want and making it happen. So we are talking about manifesting, knowing if your goals are the right ones, picking yourself up after disappointment, choosing yourself and your dreams and dealing with challenges. There are some juicy questions in here, so let’s dive in.
What I talk about in this episode:
The role of privilege in manifestation
Giving away your agency vs standing in your power and trusting yourself
Bridging the gap between where we are now and where we want to be with medium sized SMART goals
Identifying when the inability to get into the nitty gritty actions of your goals is resistance
Being kind to yourself when a launch doesn't go the way you'd hoped
Playing whack-a-mole with the challenges of business
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Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 108 of Grow With Soul. Today I am answering a couple of your questions submitted on Instagram earlier this week. I’ve grouped together some questions that all had a similar feel - knowing what you want, and making it happen. So we’re talking about manifesting, knowing if your goals are the right ones, picking yourself back up after disappointment, choosing yourself and your dreams and dealing with challenges. There’s some juicy questions here, so let’s dive in.
What are your thoughts on vision boards and manifesting?
This is an interesting one - my thoughts on vision boards and manifesting are layered. First of all, it feels to me that there’s a lot of unacknowledged privilege in the discourse around this kind of thing that doesn’t take into account. Someone like me, a white, middle class able-bodied woman with no dependants, will come up against fewer struggles and hurdles to “manifesting my desires” than say, a carer, or a black woman, or someone living on benefits. A lot of what I’ve seen written about manifesting is mostly by women with my kind of privilege saying 'anyone'can do it and that just feels…not true. So that’s my first thought.
My second thought is that the biggest problem with vision boards and manifesting is that it can make you feel like you’re doing something when you’re not doing anything. It’s easier to cut up pictures from a magazine or do a new moon spread or a manifestation ritual than it is to just...do the work. I know there are manifestation people out there who do say you have to make it happen, but it is a very easy crutch to lean on to leave it up to the universe and have your board and tell yourself you’re trusting the universe when really you’re still too scared to take action.
Because ultimately, this can become another way we give away our agency. Rather than making aligned goals and standing in your own power and trusting yourself to make things happen, you follow someone else’s rules and scripts about how to, essentially, magic up your dream life - and if it doesn’t work, it must be that you didn’t do something properly and have failed. Anything that locates our ability to achieve outside of ourselves makes me wary.
That being said, I do believe there are greater forces at work. I think it’s arrogant to believe that the realm of human understanding is as high and sophisticated as it gets; running your business, or having a tumultuous 6 months in your personal life, reveals too many coincidences and serendipities for there not to be something greater going on. I would just say that my relationship with the universe is more organic than formally trying to direct or ask things from it.
I made a Pinterest vision board once, but didn’t really know what to do with it - the idea of making a physical one actually feels kinda stressful, like - how do I know which pictures to choose? What if I can’t find the right picture in these magazines? I think it’s likely I’m a bit too literal with it, and also that I am more of words and lists person than a picture person. But I also just felt…what’s the point? What is this going to do to actually get me there? There was also a period where I dabbled in consuming manifestation content a few years ago, but I found it really boiled down to “be very clear on what you want and make a clear plan to get it - and also ask the universe”. Which to me is just…doing stuff, not manifesting.
But I also really don’t want to shit all over it because most of all I believe in doing whatever works for you. If your vision board keeps you focused and empowers you to work towards your goals, that’s amazing. If your rituals of manifestation keep you going and make you feel like you’ve got this, that’s awesome. These things can be so good at focusing us and helping us put our attention and energy in the right places for us. But also, if it’s not working for you or it doesn’t appeal or you it makes you feel like you’re doing it all wrong - it’s fine to take your agency back and just accept it’s not for you.
I find it so hard to break my goals down into bite sized, time-driven pieces. Any tips?
This sounds to me like something I quite often see with my clients - a lot of long term clarity about the big goals and where you want to go, a lot of short term clarity about this week’s to do list, but a big gap in the medium term getting from where you are now to where you want to be. Perhaps rather than trying to go straight to the bite sized actions, start with bigger portions. For example, say one of your goals is to buy a house. Well, actually, to make that happen you will need to have x amount of money in savings - so then what needs to happen to get x amount of money? Perhaps you set an income goal, create a new offering, cut back on some expenses. These become your medium term goals, which you can then start to more easily break down into bite sized pieces. Sometimes our goals are too big, or not quite specific enough, to turn into actionable pieces - if you’re struggling with goals that are more vision-based, translate them into a SMART goal as they can be more action-focused.
The question mentioned time specifically, so if you’re struggling to know how to know how long things take that can feel daunting. There are two approaches here, which you can combine. One is to time track a little bit so that you know what is realistic for you - if it takes you roughly an hour to write 500 words, you can use that to work out how long your 5000 word course will take you. But also, you get to decide here. I quite often speak to people who don’t start things because they don’t know how long it will take - well, decide how long it will take. Use your time-tracking information to be realistic, but if you want it done in 6 weeks then make it happen in 6 weeks. You are not at the mercy of time, you have control and power here. You can get it done.
Lastly, just to throw a spanner in the works with this question, I would ask whether your goals are what you truly want? I see this in myself and with clients - inability to get down into the nitty gritty of those big goals can actually be resistance to something that’s not quite right. If that big goal is not inspiring you to start taking that action or making project plans, then it’s not inspiring you full stop. I know that I have set big goals, often following someone else’s process or after listening to a podcast or something, and then I have never wanted to work on them. That’s not what a true goal is supposed to do! It’s supposed to excite and inspire and make you desperate to get going. So maybe looking at those big goals and asking “does this feel truly like me?” is a place to start. Did this goal come from inside of you or outside of you? Does the life where you’ve achieved that goal feel like a life you want to be in? Or is there something else inside you?
How do you find the courage to try again after a failed launch (zero sales)?
Ok, this is all about reframing and being kind to yourself. I know that you’ve probably taken it a bit to heart and it’s hard to not take it personally, I know it makes you doubt and I know it feels like a failure. But you’ve honestly got to look at this like it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. In the grand scheme of your life - hell even in the grand scheme of your year - this isn’t going to be a defining moment of it all going wrong if you don’t let it.
Part of doing things, part of being in the arena, part of taking risks is that not everything will work the way you want it to. I’ve had things make zero sales, I’ve had things not sell as well as I would like, I’ve had content flop. You just have to not let it matter and move on to something else. That is one of the key unspoken skills of being a business owner - the ability to decide it doesn’t matter.
Because it is a choice. You can choose to make it mean that everyone hates you and your business is going to fail and give, or you can choose to say “well that didn’t work, what will?”. I doesn’t have to mean anything about your business unless you let it. Choose creativity and curiosity. There are so many reasons above and beyond “you’re rubbish” why it didn’t sell this time - the format wasn’t quite right, the pricing, the timing, the launch timeline, the messaging, the channels you used to market, the amount of marketing. These things will give you some answers to make your next iteration of whatever you do better. Listen to the language I’ve used as I’ve been talking about this - it’s not all failure and doom, but possibility and optimism. That’s the language you’ve got to use too.
One of the reasons why people worry so much about getting zero sales is what people will think - they worry that people will know and that therefore the trust will be broken with their business and it will all just be too embarrassing. In this way, no sales is better than one or two, because no one need ever know. It’s only you that needs to come to terms with it, as far as the rest of the world knows it’s all going swimmingly.
Lastly, the worst has happened now. The worst has happened, and you’re still standing. Yes it stings and there’s going to be a bruise for a little while, but you’re still very much alive and you still can very much do this. You’ve not lost anything, you just haven’t gained anything. In fact that’s a lie, you now know what doesn’t work. And that is very useful for putting you on a path to what does.
How can I cope with the disappointment of my husband not having the same vision of the future? (I am desperate to move out of London, he wants to wait until the kids finish school)
The way you’ve asked this question, the language you’ve used - “how can I cope with the disappointment”, “I am desperate” - suggests to me that you’re in quite a bit of distress about this. This doesn’t sound like you’re disappointed but you get it, it sounds as though this is eating away at you. And you can’t live like that. Ultimately, this needs open communication between you and your husband where you can clearly communicate that this isn’t just about a move, it’s about your well being as a human - and that it needs to be taken seriously. Some time journaling, writing or talking to yourself around this may help you to refine what specifically it is about London that’s making you feel so bad, and name the way you do feel, to help him understand and ensure it’s a productive conversation.
Because you deserve to thrive. Your family deserves a mother and wife who thrives. You getting increasingly miserable is not going to help anyone. It is not a solution for you to just put up with it and be unhappy for the next five, ten, fifteen years. The best solution for your family may not be leaving London right now this second, but the solution is certainly not whatever you’re currently doing.
It costs you both nothing to look and think about it. It costs nothing to spend an evening on Rightmove, to do some sums, to Google schools in a new area; hell, to look at the affordability of you all spending weekends and holidays out of the city for a while. It costs nothing to just see what it might look and feel like to entertain changing your lives slightly.
In this process, you can make a Good, Better, Best plan. We can be so all or nothing when it comes to decisions like this, but look at the shades of grey. Where are the compromises, what would significantly improve your life, where are the middle grounds that even if they’re not “the dream” they would still be great. This is your life; have your say and make it heard.
In the meantime, also spend some time exploring what it might look like for you to be able to thrive independent of external circumstances. Believe me, I know how it feels to be in an unbearable living situation that feels like it’s crushing you - but if you change that situation but you’re not at home within yourself, nothing really changes. You go with you. We can’t rely on where we live or who we’re with or our jobs to bring us happiness - we have to be able to source that internally. So what can it look like for you to thrive in spite of where you live? What do you have control over that you can change or do differently? How can you choose yourself more often?
What is your biggest challenge with your business?
The answer to this question will change depending on what week you ask me. In this and recent weeks it’s focus and motivation - in episode 106 I talked about how I’m making a pivot and I’m therefore finding it hard to get excited about my short term to do list when my head is already out the other side in plans for 2022. I am struggling to know how to do things anyway, in spite of low motivation, how to reconnect to the excitement of it all.
But you know, at the beginning of the year I’d probably have said my biggest challenge was knowing what to do with having too many ideas, or continuing to stay buoyant with work when under a lot of personal stress. In previous years my challenges have been prioritising health and well being, time management, clarity of direction, my sense of self.
Which is all to say, challenges are part of it. Running a business is psychological and emotional whack-a-mole - you think you’ve got it sussed, then something else pops up. There’s never a point at which it’s going to be easy, never a point you’re going to get to where nothing bothers or challenges you anymore. There’s always, always going to be something. Which isn’t a reason to get depressed, but a reason to relax. I think we can white knuckle so hard to try and “fix” some challenge in the hope that afterwards we’ll have no more worries. Instead, think of the long game. Your business is a road filled with bumps and pot holes and rickety old bridges, but the god the views are great. Navigating the road is the work, it’s not getting in the way of the work. So rather than drive along terrified and worried and trying to fill in every hole, just…enjoy it. It’s part of what makes it magic.