March 18, 2024
Welcome to The Weekly Three newsletter. Each week I’ll share three insights, tools, stories, or resources to help inspire and motivate you to keep going after what you want.
This week’s topics:
1. Knowing your end game;
2. The Dan Sullivan Question;
3. Motivation AND inspiration.
– 1 – Knowing Your End Game
I thought the end game was to be so secure in myself that nothing could faze me. I was wrong.
The end game is to see what I’m capable of.
The end game is to test myself and ask more of myself.
The end game is to stretch and grow.
The end game is to keep evolving
The end game is to get to the end of my life and have satisfying answers to the following questions:
“Did you live the life you wanted?”
“Did you put yourself out there?”
“Did you become as strong as you wanted?”
“Did you let yourself be who you wanted?”
“Did you do what you wanted?”
“Did you play full out?”
“Did you live a life of meaning?”
“Did those important to you know you care?”
“Who is better off because you were here?”
Those are end game questions.
The actual life lived will depend on the person answering.
But you can see why my initial end game was mistaken.
To be so secure in myself that nothing will faze me — that’s a skill.
To be fazed and know how to recalibrate and move forward — that’s also a skill.
Acquiring skills is not an end game, at least not for me or my clients.
Cultivating skills and using them to create a meaningful life — that’s an end game.
Do you know what your end game is?
How would you answer the above end game questions?
If you’re struggling to imagine, here are a few prompts to kick-start the process:
“What would it look like to live the life you wanted?”
“What would it look like to put yourself out there?”
“What would it look like to become as strong as you wanted?”
“What would it look like to let yourself be who you wanted?”
“What would it look like to do what you wanted?”
“What would it look like to play full out?”
“What would a life of meaning look like to you?“
“What would it look like if people important to you knew you cared?”
“How did you leave people better off because you were here?“
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There’s a great quote in the book, Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath:
“The longtime newspaper writer, Ed Cray, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, has spent almost thirty years teaching journalism. He says, ‘The longer you work on a story, the more you can find yourself losing direction. No detail is too small. You just don’t know what your story is anymore.'”
The more I do this growth work, the more I realize how easy it is to lose sight of the end game.
But now I know doing so is a thing. My hope is by sharing this, now so do you.
What will you do with this knowledge?
And how will you keep this knowledge in your awareness?
– 2 – The Dan Sullivan Question
First, who is Dan Sullivan?
Dan Sullivan is a world-renowned speaker, entrepreneur coach, founder of The Strategic Coach with his wife and business partner, Babs Smith, and author of numerous best-selling mindset and entrepreneurship books including The Gap and the Gain, Who Not How, and 10x is Easier Than 2x (written in collaboration with organizational psychologist, Benjamin Hardy, Ph.D.).
Dan has spent the past 40 years empowering others to think, dream, and live bigger.
If you know you’ve been playing small, personally or professionally (or both), one of the most powerful ways to think and dream bigger is to ask yourself the Dan Sullivan Question:
“If we were having this discussion three years from today, and you were
looking back over those three years, what has to have happened in your life,
both personally & professionally, for you to feel happy with your progress?”
This question is helpful because it allows you to elongate your time horizon. It’s hard to believe that your life can dramatically change in 6 months or a year (even though it’s absolutely possible), but your brain can imagine that you could undergo a dramatic transformation in three years.
Three years is also far enough out that your nervous system doesn’t freak out when you invite yourself to speak truthfully about what would need to be different for you to feel happy and satisfied with the progress you made.
The Dan Sullivan Question helps you create a future so compelling you want to do the work required to achieve it.
I recently asked myself the Dan Sullivan Question and my response filled ten journal pages. When my pen stopped, I just sat there for a minute. It was suddenly clear why I’ve been holding back in certain projects in my coaching practice.
Simply put, those projects weren’t aligned with my compelling future.
I believe our subconscious knows when we’re going down paths that compromise our innermost desires.
The power of the Dan Sullivan Question is that it requires us to speak out loud what we, in fact, want.
For me, the real epiphany came when I got clear on my end game first (see number 1 above).
When you have an idea of how you’d like to look back at your life, you will know what will be required to make it happen.
You will see gaps in skills and capabilities.
That’s what the Dan Sullivan and end game questions do: they bring the gaps to the forefront so we can get to work solving for them.
If you’re struggling with day-to-day actions, it’s possible you haven’t painted a compelling enough future yet.
No worries.
It’s never too late to do these exercises.
Think of end game questions as the GPS coordinates.
The responses to the Dan Sullivan Question are the step-by-step directions.
How can you make time this week to paint a future so compelling that you can’t wait to do the work to create it?
– 3 – Inspiration AND Motivation
Finally, we’ll end with this quote by high performance coach, Rich Litvin:
“Big goals are great for inspiration. Tiny steps are great for motivation.”
Inspiring goals require you to become someone different.
It’s not inauthentic; it’s a natural byproduct of doing something different.
Who you are right now is a conglomeration of your circumstances, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, behaviors, actions, and results — these create your lived experience to date.
Change any one of those, and you become someone different.
Change nothing, and you remain the same.
The gold is learning to use what you can control and influence to make the change you want easier and more inevitable.
This process takes time.
It requires fortitude.
Why fortitude? Because, in the words of USC professor, Ed Cray: the longer you work on something, the more you can find yourself losing direction. (See full quote at the end of paragraph 1).
In a journey of an unknown timeline, you’ll have days when you’ll wonder if it’s worth it.
You’ll wonder why you’re doing what you’re doing.
You’ll start believing your negative, fear-based thoughts, and this will send you spiraling.
But when you understand how motivation and inspiration work, you can use them to get back on track.
First, zoom out: have you lost sight of the bigger picture? If so, take a few minutes to repaint your future in such a compelling way that your mind and body are back in sync and you’re itching to get back to work. This is you re-entering your GPS coordinates. Per Rich, doing this will help with inspiration.
Then, zoom in: are you clear on the steps you need to take to create your compelling future? Are the steps unwieldy, unclear, overwhelming, too big? Take a few minutes to check in on the steps. If you don’t know where to start, get some paper and journal on the end game questions and the Dan Sullivan Question. Remember, the steps are the step-by-step directions that will take you to the ‘coordinates’ you entered. Per Rich, doing this will help with motivation to do the steps required, and to keep doing them.
If you’re struggling, consider what’s missing: motivation, inspiration, or both.
Once we have awareness, we can get to work.
Have a fantastic week.
Kari
P.S. Did you like this newsletter? Click here to read previous episodes of The Weekly Three.
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Kari Watterson Coaching
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