The Year to Get Clear

Kristin Allaben
January 8, 2020
2020 Vision, awareness, Focus, happiness, self-awareness

If you don’t enter a destination, your GPS is of little service. If you don’t create a goal, you don’t know where or how to focus your energy and activity. If you don’t have a purpose, you get pushed to-and-fro at the whim of the world around you.

With 2020 now here and its reminder of good vision, this is your year to get clear.

Where do you start to get clear? By deciding what you want to have happen this year – what outcome, success or achievement – would make this a good year?

No one else can define this for you, but it is a necessary first step to help you get clear about you. From there, you can more confidently work on getting clear about what you want, what fits you and what makes life good for you. When you figure that out, you can determine where you are and what you need to do or make happen so you can move to where you want to be.

To help you get started, consider an approach that I routinely share with my coaching clients. It goes like this: Imagine it is December 31, 2020. The entire year has gone by. You take a moment and realize what a great year this has been.

Now ask yourself: what happened to make it a great year? What were you clear about that helped you to make wise and sound decisions? What were you clear about to help you make progress on meaningful personal and professional goals? How did you grow, improve and make progress to be the best you or to be the person you want to be?

Think Personally

Complete a mental 360-degree walk around your life using the prompts below. Reflect on your response to each of the prompts. Consider recording your thoughts to help you see a more complete picture.

What do you want to happen this year in your life…

With your health?
With your family?
With your friends and / or colleagues?
With your finances?
With your school, college or other educational focus?
With your leisure time?
With your career direction?
With your sense of life purpose?

Think Professionally

Complete a mental 360-degree walk around your professional life using the prompts below. Reflect on your response to each of the prompts. Consider recording your thoughts to help you see a more complete picture.

What do you want to happen this year in your work…

With your career path?
With your salary or compensation?
With your relationship with the organization and management?
With your impact?
With your skill development?
With your interactions with colleagues?
With your retirement?

Take Action
It is your choice. Don’t let others take control of this for you. Make the time to get clear to boldly and confidently define your directions. With this, you dramatically improve the ability to achieve what you want so when you get to December 31, 2020, you can reflect on the year and confidently state that you had a most amazing year.

Need help getting started? Learn more about 2020 Vision and contact us to schedule your first discovery coaching call.

By Jay Forte

Consider reading 2020 Vision – The Year to Get Clear About The Things that Matter

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Life

2020 Vision – The Year to Get Clear About The Things that Matter

Kristin Allaben
December 30, 2019
2020 Vision, awareness, Clarity, Focus, happiness

Let me guess: Your days can be chaotic and make you feel like you are running in place. At the end of the day, you are exhausted but don’t really feel like you have made much progress. This could be because you lack a clear vision of what you want to accomplish.

Well, this stops now.

2020 Vision is a commitment to be more mindful and intentional in how you show up to your days – both in work and life. As Stephen Covey shares in habit #2 of his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “begin with the end in mind.” Get clear about what you want, where you want to go and what success looks like. From there, you can assess your current performance and develop a plan to achieve that vision of success.

As you start a new year, consider getting clear about the following areas:

You: What are your talents, strengths and interests? Identify your abilities to be able to wisely and intentionally lead with what is best in you. With clarity about who you are, you create the ability bring your best, greatest and most productive self to everything you do. How will you get clear about you this year?
Relationships: Who are the important people in your life? What amplifies your connection with them? Identify the relationships you have at work. What does a successful relationship look like? Identify the relationships you have outside of work. For each, define what a successful relationship looks like. Getting clear about what you want in each relationship can help you regularly assess where the relationship is to know how to improve it and move it forward. How will you get clear about your relationships this year?
Directions: What do you want to accomplish or achieve in 2020? Identify what career path you want to be on. Do you want to change jobs, get promoted, go back to school, become a manager, start your own business? Identify what life path you want to be on. Do you want to change jobs, go to college, get married, get divorced, have a family, move to a new area? The choices are endless and they are yours to make. But remember: even though there are always a lot of options, only some of them fit you. Knowing yourself and what you want of your relationships will influence your direction. How will you get clear about your personal and professional direction this year?
Blocks: What will get in your way to get clear this year? What habits, assumptions, interpretations and limiting beliefs are stopping you from allowing yourself to clearly define what you want for you, your relationships and your directions? Shining light on your blocks (which could be anything from finances to health to education to job availability or even the lack of self-belief and confidence) helps create the ability to address them to stop them from blocking your happiness and success. How will you get clear about the things that are blocking you this year?

Your life is up to you. You are not a passenger, you are the driver. To arrive where you want to go requires clarity. Your GPS is not much help if you aren’t clear about your destination.

Think 2020 Vision. Get clear about you, your relationships, your direction and the things that currently block you. When you’re clear about all of this, you can set your destination and enjoy the ride.

Get clear to get great results.

Take Action
Consider the benefits of working with a coach to help you get clear about you, your life and / or your work. Sometimes, it’s hearing things said out loud to a neutral third party that can offer clarity to you in a completely different way.

Imagine. Create your vision. Build your plan.

Let’s get started.

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Life

Five Rules for A Really Great Life in 2020

Kristin Allaben
December 30, 2019
2020 Vision, awareness, happiness, Motivation

We all need guidance. There is so much to figure out so we can live in a way that matters. And though this is individual work to do, I have created five universal rules that will help anyone have a really great life, a list I’ve assembled based on my more than 20 years of managing and coaching others (and doing this work myself).

Here they are.

Life has its ups and its downs. Expect them. Use the ups to help you deal with the downs. Never stay down long.
Never compare yourself to someone else. They are different on purpose and are better than you at some things and you are better than them at other things. Focus more on being your best self.
Make the time to know what makes you happy and stay focused on it. Get clear about your goals and stay focused on them, regardless of the distractions and interruptions you encounter.
Take nothing personally. As the expression goes, “What you think of me is none of my business.” Everyone can and will have their perspectives. Never let what others think and say distract you from being your best and truest self, and from focusing on what makes you happy.
Make everything you touch better. My dad used to say, “It is not up to you to improve the world, just the part of it you touch.” Each day, make where you are – your relationships, your work, how you show up to your world – just a little bit better. Overtime, you will make things significantly better.

Consider using these to guide your thoughts, feelings and actions to set your direction in 2020. These guidelines can help you move through life happy, focused and living your definition of a great life.

By Jay Forte

Consider reading 3 Ways to Help Your Team Start Strong and Focused in the New Year

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The Year to Get Clear: If you had no limits, what would you do every day?

Kristin Allaben
November 29, 2019
2020 Vision, awareness, Get Clear, reflection, Weekly Question

This week, our Get Clear question is: if you had no limits, what is one thing you would do every day?

The purpose of this question is to get you to think outside the limits you’ve set for yourself. Whether intentional or unintentional, each of us go through our days with a list of what we can and can’t do. Sometimes it comes through the voices of others; sometimes it comes through our own voice. This is where we find excuses, casually explaining or justifying why we didn’t or can’t do things we love to do or want to do.

To talk about a life with no limits, we first have to pay attention to what we assume to be our limits. Many people say time and money. Some say it is opportunity or family commitments. Some say it is talents and skills. Others say it’s just luck or bad luck. What do you consider your limits to be and where do you get them from?

For me, one of the biggest limits I’ve realized I set on myself is time. Every day, I set my intentions and goals for what I want to achieve during the day and increasingly, I find myself falling short. As a mother of three young boys, having any sort of schedule is laughable to the more experienced parents; nothing ever goes as planned. It has made me realize that I need to better define intentions vs. goals and get myself into a proper mindset for the day. So, as a result, I have the intention to do many things, but a more focused goal to achieve specific items during the day. In this mindset shift, I’ve identified my limits (time and family commitments) and acknowledged how I can change how I think about these “limits” so I can do more of what I want, need and love to do each day.

Another way to think about this “get clear” question is to see it as being given the freedom dream, wonder and invent. Without limits, you create a larger view of what is possible. You can always scale it back if you need to, but if you can only see 100 feet in front of you instead of 1,000 feet, then you miss the opportunities in the additional 900 feet.

Take Action
Ask yourself your Get Clear question of the week again: what would you do every day if you had nothing holding you back?

Start small if you want, but start. Picture a world of possibilities and name yours. More time at the gym. A healthier lifestyle. A promotion or advancement at work. A move to another part of the country or world. More financial security. A remarkable personal relationship. Enjoy what it feels like to focus on a big dream or goal. Get excited about what it could be like when it happens. All of this is there to help you learn to see how capable you are but for you to activate this personal capacity, you need to clearly envision what you want.

Whatever it is, go do it. What’s holding you back?

Are you part of our 2020 Vision Facebook Group? Sign up now to have your chance to connect with our team of coaches and engage with other community members to help you gain even greater clarity about yourself and your goals for 2020.

By The Forte Factor Team

Consider reading Creating Goals: Start with “Be Better”

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The Year to Get Clear: What do People Applaud Me For?

Kristin Allaben
November 22, 2019
2020 Vision, awareness, Get Clear, reflection, Weekly Question

This week, our Get Clear question is: for the you here today, what do people applaud you for?

This is an important question to ask yourself for two reasons. First, to gain greater awareness of your strengths so you can use them more intentionally in your days. And second, to gain awareness of the strengths others see in you that you may not be aware of.

In our work with thousands of people and hundreds of companies, we can tell you that a seemingly universal truth is that everyone can identify what they think is wrong with them vs. what is right. Nearly everyone can easily list their faults and weaknesses, mostly because the world is quick to point them out. You’re too talkative, too direct, too confrontational… the list is endless.

This is why this question is so important. The goal is to help you start to discover, see and understand what others see as great in you, what they applaud you for.

Once you hear from those who know you well, stand in front of the mirror and tell yourself what about you is remarkable. Don’t hold back. Don’t play small. Notice everything others positively comment on and applaud. Start a list. Keep adding to the list as you identify more things to help you balance what you know of yourself so you can see what greatness others see in you.

Take Action
Ask yourself your Get Clear question of the week again: What do people applaud you for?

As you identify any new strength or ability this activity helps you discover, add it to your expanding understanding of yourself. Spend a minute understanding what others applaud you for so you can get acquainted with it and start to build on it. Mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn stated, “There is more right with you than wrong with you no matter what you think is wrong with you.”

Get clear. Be the real you. This is the key to a great life.

By The Forte Factor Team

Consider reading How to Help Your People Improve

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The Year to Get Clear: When you were young, what did you love to do?

Kristin Allaben
November 15, 2019
2020 Vision, awareness, Get Clear, reflection, Weekly Question

Our goal over the next eight weeks is to help people learn how to get clear about what they want in 2020. After all, 20/20 vision is considered perfect vision.

To kick-off our weekly Get Clear efforts, we asked: when you were young, what did you love to do?

Some of the answers we heard, at face value, talked about hobbies people enjoyed or spending time with family or friends. At face value, those are great answers that tell you a bit about what someone’s childhood was like. But the answers to this question actually have a lot more meaning.

The reason for this question is that when we were younger, we were more connected to our true selves, something we lose touch with over time because we aim to please. Whether done intentionally or subconsciously, we modify who we are to please and accommodate the people and world around us, and the unintended consequence is that we can lose our true selves.

To help get clear about yourself – so you can make wise and meaningful decisions about your life and your work – you need to connect to your true self to have accurate and complete information to work with.

So, when you were younger, what did you love to do? I bet some of this is still there for you.

When Jay was younger, he was always writing. He had three brothers who were always outside and active, but he was always inside dreaming, inventing and writing stories. As time went on, he was guided to pursue a career that seemed more achievable than writing. He never really thought about being a writer until someone suggested he write a book about the ideas he had to create a remarkable workplace. That rekindled the flame for writing and reminded him how much he loved it. A year later, he wrote his first book and a second book the following year.

Writing, dreaming, storytelling, writing poetry, thinking about big ideas has always been a passion for him. He explained, “When I step back into it, life is better, fuller and more connected to who I really am. I now write everyday – blogs, articles, programs to teach others and anything that helps me get my ideas out to share them with my world. And it was only in reconnecting to what I was truly passionate about as a kid that I realized that the something I loved to do as a kid holds the same weight today. This passion helped me define and develop my career, a career that uses what I am passionate about every day. Sometimes by allowing yourself to think back to when you were younger, you see things that you gave up on – for whatever reason – that belong back in your days.

Take Action
Ask yourself your Get Clear question of the week again: when you were young, what did you love to do? How is this still important to you? Does it (or can it) fit into your life? How does this help you get clear about what belongs in your work and life that fits the real you?

Now take a moment to reflect on that answer. Get clear. Be the real you. This is the key to a great life.

Are you part of our 2020 Vision Facebook Group? Sign up now to have your chance to connect with our team of coaches and engage with other community members to help you gain even greater clarity about yourself and your goals for 2020.

By The Forte Factor Team

Consider reading Pay Attention

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