I can close my eyes and be right back there in the moment: Mark Victor Hansen onstage at the Bakersfield Convention Center telling an audience filled with women including me, then a county bureaucrat, the importance of creating a life goals list. A 101 life goals list. He suggested we buddy up with a co-worker to share our lists and then work/play/or allow our subconscious minds to craft methods to bring these goals into fruition.
I went home that night and wrote my 101 goals. I didn’t do it all at once, I made my initial goals quickly without much thought and then I walked away and continued to come back and pop more items onto the list throughout the evening, but I was so excited to share my list with my secretary I was bursting at my ever-passionate, oh-so-not-typical-bureaucrat self.
My secretary apparently hadn’t given it another thought. She said her 101 Goals were to get up every day and go to work and go home. For 101 days.
I wonder how quickly my face fell, how quickly the pallor of resignation fell across my forehead, my shoulders.
Ironic in retrospect: several months later I went on a stress leave after two of my clients threatened my life in two months. In the interim I discovered life coaching and the rest became history including reaching many of those 101 Goals.
My secretary left the county a decade after I did also due to a workman’s comp claim. She met all of her 101 Goals – and went on to create a life of… well. I am not going to judge her life. I am sure it was predictable and filled with love. She was and is a fabulous person.
(Applause says 5 minutes are up!)
Lists are gold for entrepreneurs and creatives and humans in general for many reasons, especially when made stream of consciousness style as we do via #5for5BrainDump and we allow the beauty of what is buried in our subconscious mind to come out of hiding. It is as scientist and best-selling author of Brain Briefs Art Markham said in relationship to listmaking: “It helps you clean out the weeds you couldn’t see.”
When you write LONG lists, the subconscious and the ridiculous partner up because of the sheer volume of the list. It makes it magical and it makes it a practice in making what might seem like drudgery fun.
Here’s the deal: start with a 5 Minute Brain Dump and start your numbered list. Then go about your life and add to your list as ideas pop – which they will because you have ignited your subconscious mind, called it into duty. It WANTS to give you more of what you’ve asked for everytime.
After a couple hours set your timer for another 5 minute writing session. Repeat as necessary. Delight in the results.
Tell us in the comments one to three of your goals from either your first five minutes session or beyond. Would love to hear what this generates AND support your process.
Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people’s creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
