You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 55

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

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New Year, New Possibilities

Happy New Year, my strong friends! Two thousand twenty-one finally, right? Last year couldn't have ended fast enough. Hey, before we get started, I want to remind you of the fresh start workshop that I'm hosting this Thursday. This is a hands-on experience where you're gonna get closure on all of the previous chapters of your life and create the vision and strategy for your next chapter. We're going to take a holistic approach that includes life, relationships, and business, and most importantly, your mental health. 

This workshop happens over zoom this Thursday, January 7th at 1:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time. Anyone from around the world is more than welcome to join this free workshop. To register, go to myfreedomgrove.com/workshops. While you're there, take a look. I have workshops coming up every week during the month of January. This is to help you get a great start to two thousand twenty-one.

What Is A Blue Sky Vision?

So let's talk about blue sky visions. So you have a fresh chapter in front of you. I know beginning of the year, we all think about new year's resolutions and coming up with goals that we're going to start. And we get really excited about for, you know, a couple of days, maybe even a week. And then we start to fall away from them and we start to beat ourselves up and feel really horrible. 

That's not what a blue sky vision is about. This is not about new year's resolutions. This is about creating a vision for yourself of what you want your life to actually look like. A blue sky vision is creating something in your life that has never existed before. 

Allow Your Creativity to Flourish

I got inspired years back by this children's book called, What do you do with an idea? I love children's books because it helps you to grasp concepts very quickly and to get inspired.

So this book, What do you do with an idea, is so inspirational. It shows this little boy and he's walking and he has this little golden egg. It's his idea. It's his thing that he wants to create in his life. We never find out exactly what it is. The egg is just symbolic for what could be. Now, he carries this egg around with him. He tries to ignore it because he thinks, "No, no, that's not possible. What's everybody going to think about me if I do this? They're going to make fun of me. They're going to think that I'm crazy. They're going to think it's not possible." 

That little egg decides to start getting bigger and bigger because it really wants to exist. Eventually it becomes so pronounced in his life that he just can't ignore it anymore. It helps him to get over his fears, his insecurities, about what he's capable of and what the world will think of him so that he can go on and create this thing that he always wanted.

Now, that's what I want you to do with a blue sky vision. You get to create anything that you want. I don't want you to get hung up on what you're capable of today because your mind and your body are capable of infinite growth and evolution. When I used to do this in the corporate environment, people would get caught up so much on worrying about failure. They thought, "No, I can't commit to something. I can't put it out there because then someone's going to hold me accountable to achieving that by a specific date." 

A blue sky vision is something different. 

A blue sky vision is something so out there, so phenomenal that it doesn't really have time associated with it. This is something that you want to grow and evolve into. You already understand that you may not have the capabilities to do this today, but this is what you want for yourself.

I don't want to hear you say, "But Gretchen, it's just not possible. I can't do these things." How do you know it's not possible? You've just never done it before. You've never practiced it. You've never gone out and tried it. It's so exhilarating to do things you never thought you were capable of doing. I've had so many things in my life, big things and little things that I never thought I was capable of, but once I put my mind to it and I decided I wanted to figure out how to do it, how to grow my mind, grow my body, grow my capabilities at doing these things, all of it became possible. 

Growing From Challenges

You can evolve your whole life based on the challenges that you give yourself. Let's get really specific about challenges. Challenges can be things that you come up with for yourself or it might be things that life presents to you. It might be good challenges. It might be tough challenges. It might be heartbreaking challenges. The point is that you can always grow, and adapt, evolve and be able to do what it is that you want to do.

I'll start with a couple of examples of just physical things, right? We all have bodies. Our bodies all have different capabilities. I'm going to start with some examples of our bodies. Our bodies are capable of evolving and changing. 

One of my favorite things that I found for exercise throughout all of the years was Pilates. I don't know if you have ever experienced Pilates or if you know what it is. It was developed to rehabilitate people that had suffered some type of an injury or a setback. It involves a table like structure, almost like a bed with a series of pulleys and springs and the bed itself moves back and forth.

When I first started Pilates, I walked in and my body was pretty tight and pretty broken. When the instructor presented to me that I was going to not just lay on this bed platform. I was going to get up on my shoulders. So my whole body sticking straight up in the air. The only thing touching this bed thing would be my head, my neck and my shoulders. My whole body would be straight up in the air and I would be kicking my legs forward over my head and then backwards all the way down. 

I thought, "There's no freaking way." Like I was having such a hard time just walking upright. The idea of doing something like that, just seem totally insane. Yet, I started trying it one effort at a time and it didn't take long for my body to figure it out and to evolve and to adapt without pain. Now, that's really important. I am anti-pain on anything that you do. Your mental health and your physical health are very, very important. Work with your body and your mind, not against them. 

So in Pilates, I was able to start doing all of those crazy things I never thought was possible for me. This extended out to this hanging ab equipment at the gym. Now I have one at my house. This one you're just hanging your whole body. You're suspended by your arms, like holding yourself up and then you're bringing your knees up to your chest as much as you can. Now, when I first started trying to do this, just doing one seemed almost impossible. My back was hurting. My abs weren't strong enough, but my husband had reminded me: It just takes doing one and then the next day you're going to be able to do two.

And eventually, you'll start being able to do more because your body grows and adapts and so does your mind. Your mind starts to see what's possible and then gets excited and wants to keep trying. Eventually, I was able to do a hundred of these things. It was pretty amazing. 

You Are Capable of Amazing Things

I've met several people in my life that went on to do iron man challenges. I don't know if you have ever seen these on TV, but it is more than a full day activity of swimming and bicycling and running and the things that these people are capable of doing just blows my mind. And I remember looking at it thinking, "There's just no way I could do something like that."

 Now I have not decided to do an iron man challenge, just putting it out there, but what I'm saying is it's possible. I used to have these neighbors that were in some strongman competitions and they used to have these monster tire truck tires. They would do exercises where they were flipping this tire over on itself. And I, "Thought that is just,...Whoa." 

That thing had to have weighed hundreds of pounds and one of my neighbors was a female. She was my size only about y'know, five-two or so. And I thought, "How can this smallish woman be able to flip over this huge tire that's weighing hundreds of pounds that's almost as tall as she is?" But she was doing it and it was because she had decided she wanted to see what was possible with her body. It was pretty inspiring to watch. And if she could do that, I know that I could do it too. 

Now I know that my body wasn't in the condition that hers was, but that's just because she had been doing that for years and I had never even tried. I kept myself thinking, "It's just not possible." But once I decided to start doing blue sky visions in imagining what I wanted to do with my body, with my mind, with my life, I knew anything was possible. I just had to decide that I wanted it for myself.

Blue Sky Visions In All Aspects of Life

So let's start talking about other aspects of our life. Let's think about our businesses, our work, our relationships. How many times have you caught yourself thinking, "This is just the way that it's always been"? I can't tell you how many of my clients have said that. They think that that statement is a final thing, just because this is how we've always done things that does not equate to, "That's the only way it can be done." We get so caught in a rut on everything that we do because it's just routine. It's what we're used to, but that doesn't mean that's it for us.

There's so much more that's possible. 

Impossible Dreams Become Reality

We have infinite creative power over our life and everything in it and I still get blown away when I look at the types of technology that's out in the world now. Now I grew up before the internet, before cell phones, heck, before computers were even a thing. I remember taking my very first computer class when I was eight years old at a radio shack. 

And now our cell phones are basically a little computer that sits in our hand, almost 24/7. As a kid, I remember watching all the futuristic movies and all of the things that people were coming up with. Like this was some serious creative juices that were going on. 

And now here we are in 2021 and almost everything that I saw in the movies back when I was a kid and when I was growing up in high school and even college it's coming true now. I just saw last month about the first flying cars are in production. There are some that actually exist now. Now I'm not super excited about the idea of flying cars, but it just shows that if somebody can dream something, they can make it happen. 

It's going to take a lot of experiments, a lot of learning, a lot of stretching, a lot of growing, but it can happen. It can happen for you too. You can create anything. You can create things that don't exist yet. You can dream up these big things and then figure out how to actually create it. Even the way that we've worked has changed significantly. 

Innovation Unlocks Possibility

I remember a few years back when I was still working at Genentech and I was describing to my boss at the time about different ways that we could work and how we could help our customers. Now in my group, our customers were the people that we worked with because we were the business coaches for them.

Genentech was part of a larger corporation known as Roche with 17 plants around the world. As operational excellence coaches, we could support anyone across any of these sites if we chose to. It would involve coming up with new ways of working, new ways of connecting with each other. 

We had an innovation fair one day where this little robot thing was brought in for us to check out. This little robot, you could attach an iPad to as like a face. So I don't know if you ever saw demolition man and they had a scene where they had a meeting and it was just a whole bunch of iPads, basically all looking at each other. So that's what this little robot thing made me think of. 

What was cool about this is that this robot thing could be put in one location at one plant somewhere in the world and I would be able to operate it from my own laptop, wherever I was and be able to communicate with the other people. I could move the robot around their whole plant. So I could walk around, check out things, look at things, be in different meetings, be in different work spaces. 

This opened up a whole world of opportunity and the concepts of creating a podcast so that we could provide educational resources while people were traveling to and from these different locations and to create on demand courses and on-demand workshops for people. All of these were new ways of thinking and doing. When I presented all of these ideas to my boss, I remember him looking at me going, "Well, but that's not how we do things." I'm like, "Yeah, but that doesn't mean that we can't." 

So I eventually became a coach to a group of all of the innovation leads from the different segments of this large international corporation because I love to think outside of the box. I love to look at other industries for ideas and to piece together different things and come up with a whole new picture of what is possible. 

Creating the Enjoyment

Blue sky visions become that time when you can just dream wildly crazy big and decide what it is that you want for yourself. In two thousand twenty, the world changed dramatically. There were some folks that already had that innovative mindset. They had already been planning for the future. So two thousand twenty didn't come as a huge surprise. 

Those challenges were easily met because people had already been getting ready for a different way of working and doing and living their life. But for those that hadn't been getting ready, in the beginning, it seemed pretty overwhelming. It seemed insurmountable that we would be able to make such huge changes, but it was possible. 

Challenges come along. Sometimes we challenge ourselves because it's fun and we enjoy it. And sometimes challenges are given to us whether we want them or not. The point is our bodies and our minds can completely evolve and create new things in the world. We can adapt to new situations. It's so much more fun when it can be on your terms though. When you can envision a future for yourself and you get to design it ahead of time. 

Instead of being in reactive mode when things are just coming at you and you have to figure things out on the fly, if you can think about it from a long range goal, couple years out, even. What something so outrageous that you would absolutely love to do, it just hasn't been done before or you just haven't done it. Maybe other people in their lives have already done these things, but you haven't. Maybe now's the time that you want to start thinking about those things.

What if it was Possible?

I remember one of the very first blue sky workshops that I did with a group. And I was saying, "If you could design your work day to look any way that you would want it to be, what would it look like?" And so they had free creative license. So they had a whole bunch of post-it notes and each person was putting ideas, one idea at a time on post-it notes and coming up with this. And I remember them thinking, "Yeah, well this will never happen, but might as well." 

It's a lot of fun to dream. So they were coming up with these alternative hours that they'd like to work. And even the number of hours that they'd want to work each week. Once they were done, all of a sudden, they started to have all of those doubting thoughts pop up. But I was there asking, "Well, why not? Why can't you do these?" Like really challenge that. Just because we haven't done it that way before doesn't mean that we can't. 

With these alternative hours that people were coming up with, it would enable them to have more time in their day to do things with their kids or to run errands or to be able to do the physical activities that they always wanted to do. They just wanted to work in the evening time instead of during the daytime. 

Maybe that's possible for your life. Maybe the company that you're working at actually has a customer segment that would need you at these different times of the day. This might even make really good business sense. There can be a business case that can be made around why this would be good. There might be some cost savings that happen as a result of changing those hours. 

It might open up new customer values or new product lines or service lines because of a slight shift in hours, but it all starts with one employee saying, "Hey, these other hours might actually work better for me." It's like, "Okay, well, how can that work better for everybody?" It's possible. 

If you don't open up that dialogue and have those conversations, you're never going to know. You're never gonna explore the possibilities of what could be. If you have your own business and you're thinking, "Well, this isn't possible" or, you know, with all the homeschooling stuff that cut thrown at us in two thousand twenty. Maybe working alternative hours does work and now that we're on this international platform, a lot of people have gone into the virtual world. 

This opens up the possibilities of working with people around the world. I love that I'm working with people from Australia and Canada and Switzerland, the United Kingdom, I would have never imagined being a solopreneur that I would be an international solopreneur, but I am. It's what's possible because I chose to dream really big.

Blue Sky Visions and Relationships

When we're doing a blue sky vision, we want to incorporate everything. We want to have that holistic look. So think about your relationships too. What is possible for you and your relationships? Now I know a lot of people are probably out there groaning right now, two thousand twenty has definitely been a challenge for relationships. We're already triggered with everything happening in the world and then when you're spending concentrated time with the people in your house, your relationships might get a little bit more strained, but you get the possibility of designing what you want your relationships to look like. 

This doesn't have to be limited to just the people in your household. This can be extended out to your extended family, to your friendships, to your coworkers, to people in the community. 

What do you want for yourself? 

Listen, I know social anxiety is a real thing. We get caught up so much in other people's opinions and about how uncomfortable it is to do new things with relationships or even to be authentic or to speak honestly with people or to talk about our own needs, but anything is possible for you. All it takes is setting a vision together in these relationships and then doing a lot of experiments to get there. 

When I was in my mid twenties, I was working with a woman that just blew my mind when it came to relationships. I was still bright-eyed and doughy thinking that you'd get married one time and that would just be bliss and wonderful. All your dreams would come true. I mean, all the Disney movies showed it happening, right? They lived happily ever after. 

Yet, we know that's not exactly the whole story, is it? A lot of stuff comes up and sometimes we don't stay together. Sometimes we choose to live separately. So what this coworker shared with me, just like I said, blew my mind about what was possible. She was in a long-term marriage that ended in divorce. Her husband was already in a relationship with another woman before the marriage ended. I think you can see why the marriage ended. 

My friend decided that she didn't want her family to be broken up completely. She just wanted a different version of it. She wanted to go on and have a spouse that was just hers, that they would love each other. They would have a great relationship and she wanted to have a friendship with her ex-spouse. They had kids together. She wanted to be able to still have all of the family holidays together as one big family. 

Now, as you can imagine, this seems a little strange. Would you really want to spend Christmas morning with your ex-husband and the woman that he fell in love with while you were still married? And at the time, my brain just could not wrap itself around this picture, but this is what she wanted. She wanted to break outside of the norm.

She wanted to have love in her life. She didn't want to have anger and hatred. She wanted to just have a great life that everybody could enjoy. You're just a bunch of humans that all want to be in the same room, enjoying each other's company. It took a lot of work.

Experimenting With Blue Sky Visions

Just because we create these blue sky visions doesn't mean that it's going to be easy and just effortlessly happen. There's going to be stuff between where we are now and where we want to get to, but all of it is completely possible. If you have a vision for what you want for your life, you can make it happen. You're gonna experiment. You're gonna try a bunch of stuff. A bunch of that stuff isn't going to work. So you learn from it and then you try some other stuff and you go and you learn a few more things.

Experiment, and you just keep trying, because if that vision is something that you truly want, you're gonna figure out a way to make this happen. When you're creating this blue sky vision for yourself, go big, start off with a huge brainstorming exercise of every aspect of your life and all of the wonderfulness that you would love to create. 

Don't worry about the how. You're gonna figure that one out. And you know, I'm there to support you as you're figuring out all of that how, but when you go big in your dreams and your visions, you're going to be able to grow into it. You can create what's never existed before. And once you start making those strides towards creating it, those little incremental changes that are getting you closer and closer, your belief that it's possible is going to get stronger. 

In the beginning of course, you're going to have times where it's a little shaky, but that repetitive inching forward gives you that confidence that, "Yeah, this actually is possible." Along the way you're gonna learn something. You might achieve one of the parts of your vision and then decide, "Ah, that's not exactly what I want." Like I've tried it on. I didn't think it was even possible that I could get here, but now that I'm here, I'm like, "Nah, I don't know if this is really it. Maybe I want something else", and that's okay. 

Visions don't have to be permanent. They can evolve. As part of your learning and growing process, you're going to discover a lot of things about yourself. You're going to evolve who you are as a person. What once was something that would light you up, might not light you up as much anymore. 

Even the journey of trying to figure out how to make all of these things happen. That in itself might be what lights you up. It might not be the destination that you really wanted. You might actually just really enjoy the journey. And so once you get there, you might decide to evolve it to the next journey and then have all of the fun of exploring and figuring it all out and then create the next thing and just keep going. Because the journey itself is fun, that you really enjoy the growth process and the experimentation process. 

That's the thing. This is your life. There is not any one way that you have to live it. You get to find what is perfect for you. You only get this one life. Keep evolving it. Keep it interesting. Keep pushing the boundaries of what you think is possible. You have infinite creative license and a mind and body ready to support you in this. 

Remember to be kind to them, to that mind in that body. You want to take care of it. You want to invest it. You want to treat them right so that they'll be there with you for that whole journey. I hope I have your creative gears going now on what your blue sky vision can be. Let's keep that momentum going. 

Ready to Get Started?

The fresh start workshop this Thursday will help you go from that blue sky vision to actually writing it down and creating a strategy for how to make this actually happen. It's fun to dream at all, but just dreaming it doesn't make it happen. You need to actually put some action behind it for all of this to come true, but it's possible for you. 

I know. I've seen it. I've lived it and I'll be there with you through all of it to help you realize your dreams. So go register for this workshop. This is a great way for you to get your fresh start for two thousand twenty-one and get your momentum going. Go register for this class at myfreedomgrove.com/workshops. 

My friends, I am so excited to go into two thousand twenty-one with you. I have some of my own evolutions in my visions. I like to run my business with numbers so that I always know where I should go next as I'm learning and growing and evolving. To all of my female listeners, stay tuned. I have something really great coming at for you in two thousand twenty-one. All right, I will talk with you more next week. Have a good one. Bye bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out unshakable men and unshakable women. The unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, the coaching and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to myfreedomgrove.com/work with me. I can't wait to see you there.