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Welcome everyone. Thanks for tuning in. I'm your host, Michael Joseph Ferguson. Happy 2025. I hope your year is off to a good start. In today's episode we are going to be going through the Life Visioning exercises in the Drummer in the Great Mountain. So we're going to go through the Life Visioning chapter and we're going to discuss all of the different steps of life Visioning that I've mapped out. And we're going to go through the first couple steps in today's episode and in our following episode, which will come out in the next week or two. Now, if you have the book the Drummer in the Great Mountain, I would encourage you to get it out. If you do not have it, that's okay. We're going to give you a free PDF copy of the Life Visioning chapter so you can get that by going to drummerinthegreatmountain.com episode 113. You can also just check the link in the description and get it from there. Okay, so here's the deal. There's going to be some of you listening who are feeling like, yeah, I'm going to crush 2025. It's going to be the best year yet. And there's some of you that are feeling low and uninspired and maybe like me, we're sick over the holidays. So you're still kind of getting yourself back on track again. So wherever you are on that spectrum, I think it's really important, just from my personal experience, looking back at my life, that the process of doing life visioning has made a huge difference. I was thinking today, I was thinking about all the things I have in my life and I'm like, okay, those didn't just happen. Like I really did set clear intentions. There was a lot of grace and blessings that came, but it started with me staying, okay, I want this and I don't want this. And as life goes on and as we get through, you know, we go through regrets and challenges and things that overwhelm us. It's sometimes harder to touch that. So goal setting feels very overwhelming, and we often want to push it away, but we always know what we're wanting. That's the key is, like, what are you wanting to have happen in 2025? Regardless, like, put aside how it's going to happen. Don't worry about that yet. Just ask yourself, what am I wanting? And if you keep coming back to that as you do this work and as you go through the year, that's going to help. You're. You're making choices instead of just going with the flow or, you know, what tends to happen with us is we get. We have something go wrong and then we feel bad. And when we judge ourselves and we think, oh, we're broken, and that cycle continues and we stay in reaction for most of the year. So I want to encourage you to start the year off on a good foot, and it is arbitrary. Like what we say is the beginning of the year. Some people would say it's solstice. Other people would say it starts in spring. Different cultures mark the year. Different. In Western culture, we draw the line in the sand at January 1st. But having that ritual is important. It's important to draw a line in the sand and say, okay, this is the beginning of the year. I'm going to do some life visioning and goal setting for the year with some detachment where we can say, I may not get all of this, but if I don't do any kind of visioning, I will probably get what I got last year. So I want to begin with some inspiration. I was thinking back to the people I've coached this past year and people that have taken workshops. And this is not anywhere near a full list, but these are the things that just popped out as I was thinking about people having wins based on setting clear intentions, getting clear about what they want and what they don't want, and seeing the results of that, especially when they've gotten some extra support to move them in that direction. So this is from the community. So some wins in no particular order. So multiple people in our community became ADHD coaches. You know who you are. I want to congratulate all of you. I know that was a lot of work. We've had people quit drinking and their life dramatically improved as a result of that. That's always a big win. I've seen people who've had businesses that went down for a while at the earlier part of life last year, and then they Rallied, pulled in some support, changed some things and ended the year off really strong. We've had people recover from the loss of a spouse, which is just the most insanely painful thing that I can imagine. And to see their life start to come back and new energy comes through and their inspiration comes back is always an inspiration to see that just because of how gut wrenching and how destabiliz that is. Had another client make huge strides in recognizing their depression and anxiety came from not setting boundaries and having unrealistic, unrealistic expectations of themselves and their nervous system and make changes in their life as a result of that insight, making the changes and having the mood and the energy come back as a result of that. Multiple people have, have reported that they exercised every day for one week and found a huge improvement in their well being and their ability to focus. Something I talk about all the time, but it's always great when someone goes, I can't believe it actually worked. I'd had another client do a screening of a film they made a few years back to their friends and it went great and they were so happy to see. They were just blown away on how the film was and they, they got some new energy into their creative life again. Uh, love seeing that. That was a great win. Uh, another one was a parent, after seeing their children really struggling, decided to move their kids into another school that had a lot more support and it just went great. The kids are now thriving, they're feeling better and it's reduced the stress in the family because that kind of when children are really struggling, it's just the whole family feels it and it just creates this great sense of sadness and frustration. And so to see that one little tweak of getting them to another school. It was some work, but it really paid off. Multiple clients got their finances in order, create a spreadsheet, brought in a bookkeeper to work with couple solopreneurs entrepreneurs that decided they needed some kind of structure and so supporting supported them in getting in a person that they can meet with at the beginning of the week and the end of the week to talk through how they needed the week to go and what were their goals and help with some correspondence at the end of the week, check in to see how did it go and make the plans for the upcoming week. That's something that I work with a lot of people on and seeing that reduce the stress, expand their capacity and, and just have another person that they really enjoy working with. Big win on that front. Creative projects completed, screenplays, written roles, in films, on and on. There was a lot of wins from last year. So that's what's happening in the community. And that comes as a result of doing starting here, starting with the life Visioning work. Okay, so let's get into it. So if you have the book the Drummer and the Great Mountain, you might want to grab that. If you need to get the PDF, then you can go to drummer in the Great Mountain dot com, forward slash, episode 113, all lowercase, or check the link in the description, grab that, hit pause, and then come back and we'll go through it. So the life visioning chapter is chapter six in Drummer and the Great Mountain. So you can open that up. I'm going to go through all five steps, and we're going to go through specifically step one. Today we'll go through that exercise. Each one of the steps has an exercise connected to it. And in the next episode, we will go through exercise number two together. But I want to walk through the five steps and just a little bit of background. So this is about 15 years old now, this process, and it came from me going through a lot of workshops from other people, reading books and trying to distill down a process that I found first worked for me, that I also found worked for us neurodivergent folk. I felt like it gave us a really nice structure without being too complicated that we can work from. And that was the whole gist of putting this together. And over time, it hasn't changed that much. And if you've taken our life visioning workshop, a lot of this is familiar to you. And it's important to do this on a yearly basis so that we come back to, here's what I'm wanting, here's how I want the year to go, putting some good energy behind that. And then this is a good structure I found to work with. So the first step is getting clear about your talents and skill sets. And that primarily has to do with you tuning into, what am I good at? And many of you are like, oh, I've already done this and I already know what that is. But often we forget and we find ourselves in a life where we're not using those talents very well because we're not making those a priority, or we've allowed life to turn into something where we're doing a bunch of tasky stuff and there's no room, like, left for the things that we're actually good at. And that's often going to lead to overwhelm and sadness and frustration. So it's important to revisit this once a year. Step two is mining your daydreaming for clues. And this is really about getting into your subconscious and to see like, okay, what's bubbling up? Because your subconscious is going to be telling you through daydreaming and through things like, God, I wish if I could just do that, those kinds of things are going to connect you into what needs are not getting met and also a potential direction to move in. I find our subconscious is extremely powerful and we, we give it so little time so, you know, we connect it, connect to it through journaling, through doing the exercises, like we'll talk about in our next session, that when we do that, when we connect in with our subconscious, we're, we're more in alignment and it's easy to get out of alignment with ourselves when we're not doing this deeper work. At least you don't have to do it all the time, but taking time out to go, okay, what's really going on? And dropping in a little bit to, here's what I've been daydreaming about, here's what my subconscious, this is what's bubbling up. And to put that into the pot to stir as you're making your plans for the year. Step three is creating long term goals in specific areas of your life. And there's some specific life categories that I really like. And originally I got this from Sonia Choquette's book, you, Heart's Desire. Fantastic book. Can't recommend it enough. But this is one of the gems that I got from that book is having these specific categories to work with. And these are categories that I've then taken and changed and adjusted a little bit. So those categories are health, work, relationships, creative expression, finances, service. That's volunteering, things like that. Spirituality and mindfulness, Home, travel and adventure, Possessions. That's just stuff. Buying stuff, selling stuff, getting rid of stuff. Those are the general categories that I really like to work with. If you've taken our workshops, you know, we work with those a lot because they give us some kind of structure to the messiness of life. Most things fall into those categories. So that's step three. Step four is going from long term goals to short term goals where we're like, okay, here's how I want the year to go. And maybe I want to think five years out, which is what I mentioned in the book. But then we bring it down and go, okay, what's the shorter goal? What's the thing that feels a little bit more in reach and then step five is going from short term goals to doable actions. And inside of that is something that I talk about more and more, which is creating milestones for yourself. What is the point in which when you hit that milestone, you know you hit it. And it's so important to have those as you're not only just going through and addressing longer term goals, but also just throughout the day and throughout the week. Milestones are so helpful for us because they give us a line in the sand to say, I did that. And I've gotten to this phase of whatever I'm doing and, and I find the word milestone versus goal feels a little more. It's a little more comfortable to work with. So I've leaned more and more towards talking about milestones. So those are the five steps we're going to go through the specifically exercise number one today. Next session we will go through exercise number two. And if you're wanting some extra support, our upcoming life visioning workshop, we really focus on steps three, four and five, which is creating long term goals in those specific areas of your life. We want to take those long term goals and then convert them into smaller goals and prioritizing what's most important and then finally taking those short term goals and converting those into milestones and doable actions. That's the work we do every year as a community. And I hope you can join us if you haven't joined us before and if you can't, that's okay. You've got the book, you've got the chapter, and you can do this work yourself. Okay? So let's do exercise number one together, which is getting clear about your talents and skill sets. So either grab a sheet of paper, open up your computer, possibly do this on your phone. Although it's a little less structured, I want to encourage you to maybe put a little more focus to it. So if you can grab a notebook, grab something you can write on, that would be ideal. Secondarily, open up a word document or a text document on your computer and you can do it that way. So at the end of this exercise, what you want to have is a list of things you're good at. Just bullets here. I'm good at this. I'm good at this. I'm good at this. And it could be anything from I'm good at chess to I'm a really skilled graphic artist. I'm a really good listener, I have really great ideas. It can either be very specific or very general. But I want to give you a couple questions to Kind of spur on this list so you can think about it possibly from a different perspective. So the first question to ask yourself is, what is it that when I do it and I'm in the act of doing it, time flies because I'm so engrossed in the activity. Another question, what have others told me I'm gifted at? This often relates to something that has benefited them in some way. And having that acknowledgement from the community, from other people, is very valuable information. So take a moment and think about that question as you're making your list. And finally ask yourself, what activities provide me with a sense of self confidence? Either as I'm doing it or when I've completed and I've looked back at it, I get that sense of, mm, I did well, I'm good at this. I've got a gift for this. So you may want to hit pause, finish your list, and then come back and we'll do some reflection. So this exercise for most people is somewhat revelatory, even if you've done it, you know, in the last couple years, because we forget what we're good at and we often forget to schedule those things into our lives and that we're good at or lean our life in the direction of making sure those are getting utilized. So the question I have for you is, as you went through this exercise and as you read back through what you wrote, what did you realize? What insights came from going through this exercise? Now the next question is, what of those things can you place more energy towards in 2025 because you know it will make your life better, you'll have a more enjoyable year and you'll feel a greater sense of self confidence. Now, if you're reading through in the book, there's a second part of this exercise and I'm going to move that to our next podcast episode because I feel like it goes really nicely with tapping into your subconscious. So I'm going to move that exercise into the next episode, which will be coming out next week. Okay. So I hope that was helpful for you. I hope you're feeling a bit more inspired about 2025 and doing some life visioning work. If you would like to join us and join the community in doing this life visioning work together, specifically, really getting into your longer term goals, your shorter term goals and fleshing those out so that you have some clear action items. You have a map going into 2025. We will be doing our life visioning workshop on January 25 and 20. If you're interested, you can go to drummerinthegreatmountain.comworkshop and we'd love to have you. It's always fun. We got people from all over the world that join us and specifically this is the one where I hear a lot during the year. I get a lot of feedback from people telling me, here's what we did, the workshop and here's what happened. And I really enjoy hearing the progress that comes from just all of us getting together and getting that synergy going. So I hope you can join us and until next time, be well.
