You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 98.

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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Happy New Year my strong friends! Here we are. First week of January. I bet you're coming up with all of your New Year's resolutions, all of your goals. You're thinking about your dreams. The new year always feels great. It's this fresh start. You just can't wait to take on the world.

And then of course, doubt starts to creep into your mind of, oh my gosh. What if I say this goal? And I don't actually hit it? Oh, no. Right?

And so then you start to like, try to talk yourself out of making those goals or making those resolutions. But what if you had a way that you could guarantee that you would always hit your goals. Always hit your dreams, make all of your dreams come true.

I have that system. I've been using it for years. I love it. I use it for myself. I use it for my family. I use it for all of my clients and everybody's dreams always come true. Now the timeline may be different for every person because we work through all of the stuff.

My logo, if you haven't looked at it in a while, is this Redwood tree, right? Redwood trees are ever living. They live for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but within my logo, you're gonna notice there's this squiggly line it's called a unalome.

Now, a unalome is representing what your path is to enlightenment. I like to call it your solution. Once you finally figure out all of your stuff, you have your final solution so that your dreams are coming true.

The Clarity Steps

Everybody's unalome has a different amount of twists and turns all of the different experiments, all of the different learnings that they do, but eventually all of your dreams come true. And we do that by using the clarity steps.

This is a system that I developed many, many years back. And I had never really considered the process steps of it. I've been using this my whole life, but I never considered, oh, there's actually steps to it. There's actually a repeatable process. So once I had that all flushed out and I saw it and I was like, you're right.

I use the clarity steps on everything. And so there's a lot of stuff where people look at me and they're like, I don't understand how you do it. Even when I was back in the corporate environment and I had five kids and I had this successful career, I had a great house. I had all of the things. And people would look at me and they're like, oh my gosh, it looks like you have it all together. How do you do this?

And I'm like, okay, one, nobody has it all together. We all have our obstacles. We all have our challenges. But when we start to segment all of those different challenges out and work through each of them, eventually everything smooths out and you get your final solution and everything is working.

So that's where the clarity steps came in. I had always been doing this segmenting out all of the different goals that I had for myself, for my kids, for my business, for my career, when I was still in corporate. And anything to do with where I was living. And as you know, now I live in a house overlooking the ocean in a retirement area. There's a whole bunch of vacation rental homes out here.

Most people would wait until retirement to go live their dream life. But I decided in my forties, I didn't wanna wait until I was retired to go and enjoy that kind of life. I wanted to do it now while I was still young enough to enjoy it. And so here we are. So do all of that, using the clarity steps.

Today I'm gonna go over the clarity steps with you, tell you all seven steps, how you can use this for your business, for your life, for anything and everything so that you can always achieve your goals.

The great thing about this seven-step process is that you can not only use it on yourself to achieve all of your goals. You can use this with your own clients, and when you're documenting everything for your own goals, and you're going through all of the process of all of the experiments and stuff, you are going to be creating the documentation for any kind of program that you wanna create in the future.

This can create any content. If you ever wanted to launch a podcast or write a blog, or even do social media posts. Everything that you go through with using the clarity steps becomes that content. You could even use it to write a book someday.

Your goal is so much bigger than you. Everything that you go through in learning how to achieve your goal is going to help generations to come on how they can achieve their goals.

So let's get into the seven steps. I'm gonna give you a quick overview and then we're gonna go a little bit deeper into each of these. The seven steps are.

Step One: Your vision

Step Two: Your metrics
Step Three: The steps between you and actually achieving your vision.

Step Four: All of the obstacles that get in the way,

Step Five: The experiments that you do to resolve the obstacles.

Step Six: The lessons learned from each of those experiments

Step Seven: Your wins.

Step One: Vision

Let's get into vision, creating your vision. Now, this is the fun part. Everybody loves doing this part because you get to dream. What would it be like when you're already there? When you've already achieved your dream?

Now, this is based on the law of action. When you can believe that you can get there when you can see it when you can feel it, and you get really descriptive over everything about how your life looks once you're already there. Then you'll automatically start to make room for that to be in your life.

Now, many people will use vision boards, and they might cut pictures out of magazines and create a vision board and look at it all the time. And they'll talk about manifesting.

I also believe in manifesting, but we put a lot of effort behind it. That's where the rest of the steps come in. That's how you know that you're definitely going to achieve it, but you definitely have to cast that vision first.

Oftentimes I will use other ways of helping people to visualize what that future looks like. In business, we might start off with this vision of looking at their end-to-end process. What is the thing that they're trying to achieve in their business? What are all of those steps? What does that look like? How many of those steps? If it's a schedule, then we're going to create a vision of what that schedule would look like.

If we're looking at the dynamic with other people in their life, relationships, or coworkers or clients, whatever it may be, we paint a picture of exactly what that looks like. So we'll spend quite a bit of time here because once you can actually see it, it feels very tangible.

You have to get it out of your brain because in your brain it's really dark and you can forget a lot of those things. But when you put it out, you make it visible and you go back and you keep looking at, and you're reminding yourself, yes, this is the vision that I want. Then you can start to make a room for that in your life.

Step Two: Metrics

The second step is metrics. How do you know that you're getting there? You have to know what kind of progress you're making. We get so stuck in our black and white thinking that either we're there or we're not there that we forget how much progress we've made along the way.

When we go back and we look at the vision, oftentimes from that, we'll find what those important metrics are. And then we'll make a list of what those metrics are. We'll up with like a weekly check-in on, okay, how are we doing against those metrics? And then we'll get into some of the obstacles and stuff that get in the way of hitting those metrics so that we can resolve it and keep moving forward.

Then as you're going throughout the months, you can look back to go, oh yeah, I actually am making progress. Like, yeah, you really are. It's a pretty amazing thing.

I remember when I did some workshops last year, we did a whole section on vision and we briefly talked on metrics and went to steps and someone had raised his hand and he was saying, well, wait a minute.

But what are the metrics? What are the things that I should be measuring? Well, that's gonna be very specific to each individual, depending on where they are. Where are they in their business? Where are they in their life?

There was a time when I was in corporate that I found a downloadable PDF of all of the different types of project metrics and business metrics that you could use. That thing was like 60 pages long. And on each page, it had at least 40 different metrics. So that's a whole lot of metrics.

Now, you don't want to get into spending hours and hours just on measuring. You want to pick the things that are most important for you right now. Then once you achieve those metrics, then you can go on and pick other ones that are meaningful for you and your progress.

That's why I like to have one-on-one time, whether that is as an individual journey or within the Unshakable Program so that I can talk with a person, find out what they're working on. And then we can help to select what are the most appropriate metrics so that they can make progress going forward.

Step Three: Your Steps

Step three is, what are all of the steps? What are the things that you have to figure out between where you are now and your dream? Now, oftentimes people just want me to tell them what the steps are or they'll go out looking for a course somewhere. It's like, oh, just give me a checklist. Just tell me, do number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. You know, whatever it is. They just want someone to tell them the steps.

But really, it's that individual's journey. What they have to learn might be different than what the next person has to learn. There are some things that everybody has to learn, but the amount of time that it takes to learn might be different.

Let's talk about an example of social media.

Social media is a great place to share your knowledge to get more exposure. If you own your own business, it's a great way of marketing your business. Now for some people, that might be a really easy thing for them to do. Just throw out posts, start going. Everything is fine. But for other folks and me included, it takes a lot more than that.

We have a lot of things that we have to get over, like our fear of showing our face in public. It doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a fear. It could just be discomfort.

The discomfort of showing your face on a social platform that might be one of the steps. Where for somebody else, that's not a step because they're already comfortable with that. For someone else, it might be the scheduling of it all. Like how frequently do you need to do all of this? And how does that fit into their life?

For some people, it's just trying to figure out what is the content that they would do? What do they even put into a post? Or they might have to figure out the graphics; how do they create graphics that are engaging? All of those could be separate steps that they're figuring out on their way to living their full vision.

When you look at your vision, you're gonna write out what are all of the steps that you would have to figure out. You could do that on sticky notes. And then what sequence would you put that in? Because sometimes the sequence can help accelerate your progress. If you do something out of sequence, you might be spending all of your time on one thing and getting really good at it, but it doesn't actually move any of your metrics because you're doing it too soon.

So make sure that you're doing things when you're supposed to be doing them.

Funny little story. When I first started trying to figure out all of the online marketing aspects, I found another downloadable PDF, love those things. That was all on how to automate your processes. Okay. I hadn't even started anything. I didn't even have a process. So for me to be looking at how to automate everything was way too early in the process.

So I signed up for a course on how to automate things. It was way too soon to take that course. What I learned over the long haul was that when I lay out all of my steps of everything that I have to figure out, there are going to be courses or books or something for me to learn so that I can get really good at that. But when I look at those steps, can I attach those courses to those steps so that I know in what sequence would I even do all of that?

There's some stuff where it's like, yeah, that would be really great to know. But is it the most important thing for me right now? Going back, look at the steps. What sequence makes sense for you? So that you can focus on the thing that's gonna move your needles that are important to you right now. It's gonna move those forward.

Now, when I talk about needles, I'm talking about the metrics. If you think of a gas gauge and the little needle that's saying if you're empty or full. So we're just talking about metrics when I say move the needle.

Step Four: Obstacles

Step number four. This is the most important one, you guys. So often, we try to go after our goals, and we just jump out there, and we do it, and we might not make our goal. And then we give up. It's because there's an obstacle there.

And a lot of times, we get into that, just do it mindset. And we think, no, I should just be able to do this. Well, if you could, you would be doing it. If you're not able to do it. It's because there's some type of an obstacle there.

Step number four is writing down all of your obstacles. Acknowledge them, be kind to yourself. These things really exist. If you imagine yourself driving in a Jeep on a dirt road, and all of a sudden, there's a landslide. And there's all of these boulders in front of you.

Are you gonna pretend that those don't exist and just beat yourself up thinking, well, I should have made it to point B right now? No, you've got all of these huge obstacles in your way. Acknowledge it, write it down.

That's what step number four is all about writing down what are all of your obstacles? And when I say write it down, I mean it, write these suckers down. One line item at a time, and you don't have to sit there and analyze all of them as you write it down. Just allow it to be a data dump out of your head onto a piece of paper. Or if you're using any type of a spreadsheet, think write it down because these are your gold.

These are the things you're gonna work through; You're gonna resolve. These are those things that become the crucial details when you're trying to help other people, too. So remember I said, if you're doing all of this work and you're documenting it, eventually you're gonna be able to turn it around and use it to help other people through writing a book or content or a program. Any of that, it's your obstacles.

That's the gold right there.

Write those suckers down because if you have it, guess what somebody else has those obstacles too. They're gonna wanna know what obstacles you encountered. Nobody likes to hear overnight success. Like you don't get totally inspired by that because it's something that's not achievable for most people.

You don't just wake up, and all of a sudden, your dream came true. We all wish that we had a fairy godmother that had that wand that could just make it come true. But that's not reality. We wanna know what are all of the obstacles that somebody who achieved the dream that we wanna have? What are all of the obstacles that they had? What did they do to resolve those obstacles? Because we need to resolve those, too.

When you are trying to go after your goals, make sure you're writing down your obstacles.

Step Five: Experimenting

And then you're gonna go on to step five, which is experimenting so that you can resolve those obstacles.

Going back to that Jeep analogy, if you do an experiment on each of those boulders that came on the landslide and you resolve it, it's like one boulder is taken away. And then the next boulder, and then the next boulder. Eventually, you have a clear path to get to point B. And then your goal, your dream is inevitable. Then it's super easy for you to get there.

That's where the experiments come in. You're gonna look at your obstacle list. You're gonna prioritize it. Which are the ones that are having the biggest impact on you right now. So either it's something really huge that happens every once in a while, but when it does, it completely derails everything. Or it's one of those small nagging obstacles, but it happens all of the time.

So prioritize it, which one of those, if resolved, would help you move forward the fastest. So you'll pick that one obstacle, and then you're gonna do a structured experiment around it.

Some people just like to take spaghetti and throw it at the wall and see if it sticks, and call that an experiment. That can work., but you're going to miss out on doing exactly what you need to do.

In a structured experiment, we're getting very specific as to what is the desired outcome that you really want. There's a lot of times we have these ideas up in our head of, okay, I have this obstacle, okay, I'm gonna go do this and poof, it'll go away. But we haven't focused on what exactly is that desired outcome that we're looking for.

If we think about our processes and we break get down really specific, of course, we're gonna want at the end result, just everything works. But usually, it's something very specific in the process that's not working.

So when you're structuring your experiment, you can look at that one specific thing and say, I want this one part to work differently. And you describe exactly what differently looks like. If there's a metric associated with it, you're gonna say it's a five instead of a two, you know, whatever your metric is, of course, but you're getting really specific on it.

And then you're defining what are the requirements for a great solution? Requirements for you requirements for the other person. If there is another person. This is getting really specific.

Cost is a big thing. Oftentimes we'll come up with some type of a solution, throw that spaghetti at the wall, just go out and do it. And then, later on, find out that solution, it might have worked, but the cost to keep doing that solution is not sustainable.

It might be something that costs you ten hours of your time. It might be something that costs you $500. In the long run, is that something that's sustainable for you?

If you have gotten really specific on your requirements, you would be able to capture that before you even got into that solution. Because let me tell you, once you get a solution and it works, it's so hard to give it up! But when it's costing you something, and it's not sustainable, it's not the right solution. You're just going to be creating more problems for yourself and your business and in your life, if your solution is too costly.

So structured experiments, your desire to outcome your specific requirements. And then you decide what your experiment is. You go out, and you do it. And then you come back and do lessons learned, which is step number six.

The important thing to know about experiments, just because you do one experiment, doesn't mean that you're getting your final solution. It is helping you to learn what are all of the things that work don't work or that you would do differently. It's all about the learning process.

And then you'll go, and you'll do the next experiment based on what you learned. Step number six, you're lessons learned.

One of the great things about the clarity steps is it's helping you to develop a growth mindset. Growth mindset is that you can always learn. You're always uncovering new things and that you can grow as a person. You can grow in your abilities. All of those experiments it's giving you all of that good stuff so that you can grow. Because once you have all of this knowledge and this capability, you're gonna be completely unstoppable.

Step Six: Lessons Learned

Step number six, your lessons learned. It really is that simple. It's three things. What worked, what didn't work, what would you do differently next time? Look at everything that from your experiment, go back, compare it against your desired outcome. Did you actually get your desired outcome? Did you actually hit all of your requirements? And then what is it that worked? What didn't work? What would you do differently next time?

Now, if all of the stuff worked, then you have your final solution. You can call that a win, and you document that in a win log. That step number seven, we'll get there in just a second. But if there's anything on there that didn't work, then you get to choose. Do you wanna continue on to the next experiment?

You might have reduced your obstacle down enough that it's just like a small pebble and it's not that big of a deal anymore. And you, you can go forward, you can go work on the next obstacle.

But if it didn't quite get it where it needs to be, then do the next experiment. Now, this is one where you have to have some patience with yourself. You have to have that love for yourself. You have to have your own back. That this is so important to you. That achieving your goal of learning how to do all of this is so important to you that you're willing to go and do another experiment.

I encounter many people that they'll do one experiment. They get stuff that doesn't work. And then they just wanna give up and go do something completely different. They might even go back and rechange their vision, their steps, everything.

Now, it's just one experiment. You learned stuff. Now you're gonna go do it again and learn even more things.

I come from a science background. So if you think about all of the medicines that exist out in the world, did you know that it takes over eight years for a brand new medicine to go through all of the research and development process before they even determine if the medicine is effective?

All of the experiments that they have to do? What if somebody gave up the very first time when they were trying to come up with a cancer drug, but they didn't. They kept doing all of the experiments because they wanted to figure out how to create a medicine so that a person could survive cancer.

Now your dreams might not be about a medicine. It might be about something else, but if you have that drive and that determination that you're willing to go through all of the experiments so that you can learn what it takes to achieve that dream, you're gonna make that dream happen because you're gonna keep doing all of the experiments because you know that with enough experiments, you're gonna uncover all of the answers.

It makes sense. At the very beginning, you didn't have the answers because you've never done this before. That's why it's a new goal for you. So experiments, Lessons learned.

You do your lessons learned. If it turns out that you're not completely satisfied, you don't have your final solution. You're gonna go back to step number five, and you're gonna go and do another experiment.

You might even update a little bit of your requirements. You might have covered a new requirement you didn't know before. You'll update that and then come up with the next experiment.

Step Seven: Your Wins

And then the final step is your wins. You are going to be learning so much. Any piece of information that you learn is a win. You're gonna write that down. Any new capability that you do along the way, that's a win. You're gonna write that down, too.

It's so important to write down all of your wins along the way because it's so easy to get discouraged.

It can take a while to hit your most important goals. It takes a while to achieve the dreams that you have. You may have multiple dreams or a pretty complex dream. You're gonna need to have that dopamine hit in your brain. That reward that says, yes, you've got this. You're doing great; keep going. It feels good to keep having those dopamine hits.

Make sure that you're writing down in your win log. I have some clients who they don't really like to do this part because they want to just focus on some of the negative about themselves. We'll go, and we'll look at the win log, and it might just be one or two. And granted, I need to step it up a little bit and hold their feet down and say, no, we're actually gonna write down all of your wins. Let's do this.

And then I have other clients who have gotten really good at that. And so when we get to the win log, they're writing down tons and tons. Like we're 30, 40 lines deep in the win log. And you know what? That person's achieving incredible things that no one ever thought was possible for them.

The seven steps

1. Vision 
2. Metrics
3. Steps
4. Obstacles
5. Experiments
6. Lessons Learned
7. Wins
   
   

One thing that I wanna remind you about your obstacles, your obstacles comes down to just two things. It's either a process obstacle or a mindset obstacle. So process obstacles; usually you don't know what your process is.

We'll actually spend time actually documenting what that process is. Flushing out the details. You might not have some of the capabilities required within those process steps. So we work on that. There might be handoff issues with that. There might be tech stuff within that process. All of that can get resolved.

Mindset obstacles. Sometimes these can be pretty sneaky. We think that we have a process obstacle, but really we have a mindset obstacle. So when you have that, we go, and we do the coaching model. And we start looking at the individual circumstance. Your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, your results, so that we can find what are those thoughts that you're having that are not serving you well, and then how do we swap that out for something else so that you get the result that you want.

So two different types of obstacles in general, and we can do experiments on any of that. All obstacles are resolvable. Once you resolve them all, it's like all those boulders in front of the Jeep; they’re gonna be resolved out of your way. And then you driving from point a to point b, be super easy.

The clarity steps works on everything. This works on your business. This works on your relationships. Oh my gosh, I've used this so many times with my husband. We create a vision together about how we want our relationship to look like. And then we start looking at, okay, what are those metrics? And those steps? What are the obstacles?

Oh my gosh, that was a huge turning point in our relationship. When we did a combined obstacle list. What are the obstacles that he's facing for us achieving our goal? What are the obstacles that I am facing and just giving each other space to write it down. And to be honest about the obstacles, just even having that trust and that love with each other to write it down. That resolve some of the obstacles immediately.

So you can do this in your relationships. You can do this in a team environment.

It's so hard for people to say to other people, Hey, you didn't do your job. Have you ever encountered that? This might be in your own work situation, it might be in your business, or maybe you're a customer for someone elses business. How uncomfortable is it to say, Hey, you were supposed to do this thing by a certain date. And you didn't.

By doing the obstacles, by writing them down, it creates that neutral space of just here's the obstacle. Here's the object. Here's the defect. Here's the thing that it was, here's the requirement that it was supposed to hit, and it didn't.

Writing those down and then figuring out, okay, well, what experiment do we do? So that obstacle doesn't exist. You can have all of your dreams come true. You can have everything in your life running perfectly smooth by resolving all of your obstacles using the clarity steps. Anything is achievable for you.

I know having a visual of what this looks like is super helpful. I'm going to encourage you to go over to my website on the very front page. If you scroll down, you're gonna see where you can get your own copy of achieving any goal using the clarity steps.

I invite you to go download that so that you have that visual. You can start using this process. You can start achieving your goals. For anyone that would like to have some assistance in using the clarity steps so that you can achieve your goals, so that you can also have that extra support, uncovering your obstacles, resolving your obstacles. Reach out to me. I'm here to help you.

You can go again to my website, go to the Contact Me Page. There's an easy way for you to set up some time for you and I to talk about what your dream is and what would be the next steps to start taking so that you can start using the clarity steps.

All right, my friends, happy New Year, again! This is going to be a great year. I can't wait to see everything that you guys come up with for 2022. Let's make it happen.

All right, take care. I'll talk to you next week. 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 my freedom grove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.