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The #1 Ability You Need To Elevate Your Life In 2023

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn what self-aware, high-performers understand and do to raise their performance and satisfaction in life and why it’s the #1 ability you need to develop this year.

Sometimes when we want to get to elevate an area of our lives, we believe we need to move faster and work harder. As a result of the stress, we lose our focus and any hope of executing our best ideas, work, and creativity.

We’re continuing our 3-part series that will teach you just what you need to do your most satisfying work and set yourself up for the life you really want. In Part 1, Get Your Great Goal Down, we talked about overcoming the #1 mistake high achievers make when setting goals and how to overcome it.

Today, I want to show you the #1 ability you most need to hone your focus so that you make decisions from your highest level state of being instead of from the rampant stressed-out level and pace that too many are seeing as ‘normal.’

Let’s start with a story about a man named John

John, a respected leader in his field of work, came to work with me with the goal of managing the increasing stress levels and pace of his life. He’d been feeling overextended at work and absolutely exhausted from the stress and pace of his life. He noticed he was more irritable and anxious than he used to be.

He didn’t feel there was ever any time for what he really wanted: freedom to focus his time and energy on his priorities.

John and I have worked together for a few months and recently had a conversation that was notably different than prior ones. This one was about his recent experience when his teenage daughter came home sick after drinking at a party.

At the time, John’s wife was out of town and it was just him and the kids. He was unsure of how to respond to his daughter and noticed that he was both worried and angry. He noticed his stress dropping and rising as he watched his daughter. He also noticed his immediate pull to react impulsively.

Where he typically would react by reprimanding his daughter, by raising his voice to command attention, he instead paused and observed.

At that moment, he stood next to his daughter at the toilet and searched Google for an answer. In his search, he clicked a link that said, “Stay calm. Your child is in a vulnerable state.” These words were just enough to allow him to recall the work we’d done together..

He’d recently gotten feedback from his team that he was impatient, intimidating, and not listening well. This was holding him back, it was holding his team back from fully trusting him, and holding everyone back from achieving as much as they could together. He knew this same reactivity had impacted his personal life too. The relationship between himself and his daughter had deteriorated too.

Stress steals our focus. When this happens, we are no longer in control of our lives.

We start living in survival mode (flying in late to meetings, being annoyed at colleagues who aren’t doing things the way we do them, being hard on ourselves, yelling at our kids, and more) as our normal way of being. So, we race harder. We move faster until we’re further stressed out. Simultaneously, the goals and commitments we’d love to prioritize have no way of being executed.

The 1 thing that’s robbing us of the amazing capacity we have to get our lives back is our ability to move fluidly between the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS).

Think of your SNS as your “Survival Mode” and your PNS as your “Peaceful State” and both generate their own types of emotions.

Survival Mode emotions include:

stress
imbalance
breakdowns
contraction
fears
struggle
frustration

Peaceful State emotions include:

expansion
health
order
trust
repair
love

Each of us is familiar with Survival Mode. It’s an ability we’ve been gifted with to protect us in the presence of danger. It alerts us to a threat and powers us to escape. This was especially useful during caveman days when we needed this stress response to escape animals seeking to hunt us. But in modern days, we get these same triggers when we’re stuck in traffic or we’re late for a meeting. Unlike animals and our caveman ancestors, we don’t come out of these stressful states as easily.

We don’t realize when we are leading our lives from triggered, stressed-out states. As a result, it prevents us from going after our most desired goals and priorities.

In order to begin allowing yourself to fluidly transition between your SNS and PNS, I want to challenge you for the next week to be aware when you are operating in your SNS and then recognize any thought, behavior, or emotion you’re holding that is unloving to yourself. This is going to be the beginning of a detox that will liberate you, your body, and your emotional addiction to whatever it is that you worry about.

What this exercise will do is begin to impede the signals of survival emotions from conditioning you any further. This will help you begin to tune those out which will free up energy that you can then use for something more beneficial.

When you do this repeatedly, you will begin leading from your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) instead of your sympathetic nervous system (SNS). Think survival mode.

Remember, you are not hardwired to be a certain way for the rest of your life. You are not hardwired to be riddled with stress on a daily basis. And nothing profound was ever created in survival mode.

Your ability to fluidly shift from your SNS to your PNS will be the #1 ability to elevate your life this year to create your highest levels of performance and satisfaction. When you do it you will gain a significant advantage in business and life.

In this episode I share:

The #1 ability you need to develop to elevate your performance
The most important thing you will do to hone your focus this year
A personal story exhibiting this ability in action and how it can play out and create new, ideal relationships and performance

Resources and related episodes:

Tune into the previous episode, Get Your Great Goal Down

Episode 112. Reviewing the Year Before Moving On

If you’d like to be notified of when new podcast episodes are released, you can do so here: Playing Full Out
Learn more about the Inside Out Method

Connect with Rita on LinkedIn

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

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About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

the #1 ability you need to elevate your life in 2023 rita hyland playing full out podcast

Get Your Great Goal Down

**Listen to the full podcast episode to learn what to focus on as the year takes off so that you can do your most satisfying work and set yourself up for the life you really want.**

It’s 2023, can you believe it? The new year is here and it’s going to be a fabulous one!

I know this for certain because you have never been more experienced, wiser, and ready for what’s to come. This year is filled with an abundance of potential, and it’s the perfect opportunity for you to take advantage of the fresh slate that the new year brings.

This is your year to get your best and most satisfying work of your career out into the world and enjoy a vibrant life with the freedom to do whatever else it is you want.

However, what I see happen all too as the year progresses, among fast-paced, high-contributors like yourself, those who are serious about growing themselves and making a real difference in their businesses and at home is that they get caught back up in the fast-paced work environment and personal lives that they lead.

Unfortunately, this can lead to distraction and frustration, and it’s at this point that many people make one killer mistake: they begin to think that their vision isn’t that important.

But let me tell you, it is! Like an airplane needs a runway to take off, you need your vision to take off too. As I experienced on an airplane recently, without an assigned runway, we simply remain stuck on the tarmac.

Without a clear vision, you’ll find yourself floating through life day-to-day, keeping yourself busy and eventually realizing you have nothing to show for all the time that’s passed you by. Maybe this feels a bit familiar to you. Maybe you’ve started your vision and you had the best intentions for it, but you’ve become distracted from it. You begin to say, “I’ll do it later.” Maybe you’re no longer lit up by the vision you’ve set out for yourself.

Friend, I want you to know that you are not alone and you are not behind. You are right on time. Each one of us has felt this in some way, so today I am going to get you back on the direct flight pattern to guarantee that you can get your vision down so you can get started immediately.

I want you to have the freedom to focus on planning your dream vacation to Italy you want and to work on your business without wondering what you’re missing or second-guessing if you are doing enough.

Let’s start by covering the biggest reason that we miss creating a vision and great goals each year and how to resolve it.

The big mistake we make when it comes to goals is that we make our goals mean something they do not.

The first way we do this is by attaching our own personal value, worth, or adequacy to the goal. We believe that if we hit the goal it means we’re good enough. If we don’t, it validates our inadequacy.

The second interpretation we put on goals is that we believe that the bigger the goal, the bigger its meaning. If we shoot a basket in our backyard and miss, no big deal. But when we take the same shot at the United Center, we make it mean something entirely different. Or if we say we want to build 100 widgets instead of 10 widgets, that extra zero means so much more.

The meanings we give our goals riddle us with stress which then contracts our ability to deploy our talents and ingenuity. A lot of times the meanings keep us from even setting our goals.

What we can do to resolve this is to first understand that goals are neutral. They are directions to guide us to our next action. Nothing more.

The meanings you give or don’t give to your goals change everything. When you view your goals as neutral, you will feel a sense of relief that will lead you to taking focused and deliberate action.

Remember that our goals are not designed to assess us or our worth. Our goals are designed to guide us, to give us direction. Be aware of when you are leaning towards creating a goal that you think is going to validate you in some way.

Once you change your mindset around goals, you are ready to clarify and declare them. I’m here to help you get that done.

Begin by answering what on December 31st of this year would make you shout, “This has been an incredible year?” Jot down 5-7 things that would light you up and excite you to experience, build, or achieve.
Once you do this, your next step is to narrow your focus. Circle 3 of those that are the most significant. Once you get your top three, highlight the ONE that you know is calling you and cannot wait. This is it. Your #1 goal. It’s the goal that excites and inspires you to show up as a greater version of who you are today.
Know who becomes better off when you achieve your goal. Why does achieving your great goal matter? What is the cost and who is hurt when you don’t achieve your goal? Why is it so important? When you understand the impact of your one great goal, it’s going to help you move towards your goal when difficult moments arise. Knowing your ‘why’ becomes your fuel in the inevitable tough times.

That’s it. Once you do this you will have done more than 98% of the world will do this year when it comes to setting goals.

BONUS: To get yourself going, write down the next 5 to 7 action steps you will take to achieve it.

By following these three simple steps, you’ll be able to sharpen your vision, focus on what’s important, and take action that will lead you closer to your fabulous year.

Stay tuned for the next episode of this series where you will dismantle the hardest part of starting and following through on the best and most satisfying year of your life… learning how to identify and overcome the mental blocks.

These are the things that keep well-meaning high-contributors stuck working too many hours and not enjoying the freedom in their lifestyle that they want. You’re here to achieve great things and live a full and vibrant life. Let’s make sure that happens this year!