Have you ever been listening to this podcast and thought “Yeah, OK, Great Work sounds, well, Great, but HOW? How do I actually get over my drama? How can I find the time to make progress on my Great Work? In this episode, we are going deep in the weeds and talking about exact tactics (#exactics).

Join me as we discuss:

• How to do Great Work in the weeks, days and moments of our lives.
• How to avoid feeling like every idea you have is either too small to make a difference, or so large it’s paralyzing.
• How to rebuild trust with yourself, so that will believe yourself when you set goals.

This week’s episode includes an excerpt from my book! If you loved what you heard, and want to hear it again—but this time with your eyes!—pre-order your copy today!

Link to pre-order Great Work

Link to diagram

Link to Great Work Journal Page

About The Host:

Dr. Amanda Crowell is a cognitive psychologist, speaker, author and coach changing our perspective on the world of work. It IS possible to do Great Work-- launch a successful business, make a scientific discovery, raise a tight-knit family, or manage a global remote team-- without sacrificing your health, happiness and relationships.

Amanda is the Author of the forthcoming book, Great Work: Do What Matter Most Without Sacrificing Everything Else, and the creator of the Great Work Journals. Amanda's TEDx talk has received more than a million views and has been featured on TED's Ideas blog and Ted Shorts.

Her ideas have also been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, The Wall Street Journal, Quartz, and Thrive Global.

Sponsored By The Aligned Time Journal

The Unleashing Your Great Work podcast is sponsored by the Aligned Time Journal! The Aligned Time Journal is here to answer the question "But HOW?" How can we figure out what our Great Work is? How can we get started, stay with it, and finish our Great Work so it can go out in the world and have an impact?

Click here to learn more, and try it out for yourself!

For more information about the Unleashing YOUR Great Work podcast or to learn more about Dr. Amanda Crowell, check out my website: amandacrowell.com

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Hey, it's Amanda, the host of unleashing

your great work. I am excited to announce today that the great

work journals are now available on Amazon. This is the next

exciting iteration of the aligned time journal. And I'm

really excited to bring them into the great work family. If

you've ever wondered how to do great work, and whether the

journals can help you stay tuned, I'm sharing all of that

insight on today's episode. Welcome to unleashing your great

work, a podcast about doing the work that matters the most to

you. I'm your host, Dr. Amanda curl, a cognitive psychologist,

speaker, coach, and the creator of the aligned time journals.

Every week on this podcast, we are asking the big questions.

What is great work? And why does it matter so much to us? What

does it take to do more of your great work without sacrificing

everything else? And how does the world change when more

people are doing more of the work that matters the most to

them? Whether your great work is building your own small

business, or managing a remote team at a multinational company,

you'll find insight and answers here. Anna is a woman on a

mission. At least that's how she feels when she's talking about

her dream of starting a nonprofit organization that

provides art therapy for veterans. She began working at

the VA as a therapy provider in her late 20s. And she discovered

how powerful expressive art therapy was. When it was used by

veterans healing from the shock and trauma of war. It connects

them back to a part of themselves that got suppressed

during active duty. It's like watching a whole new version of

themselves emerge from our work together. When our therapy

works, it works. She said while Anna continued to work at the VA

full time, she wanted to lay groundwork for her nonprofit.

And his vision for her great work is rock solid. She has no

problem getting excited about the opportunities that she could

create for veterans. And for herself. What I really want is

to make art therapy free for veterans, any veteran no matter

where or when they did their service should be able to

explore that experience through art. And I went to have an art

gallery full of artwork from veterans. Because I think if

people see the art, they'll more deeply understand the sacrifices

our soldiers are making. And I would love to shape the national

conversation about war, honor service, and what it means to

support our veterans when they come home. Yet, despite her

outright enthusiasm and deep content knowledge, Anna was not

making progress on her dream. It's reached the point where I'm

almost embarrassed to talk about it with my family and friends.

They'll ask me how it's going and I just shrink. I don't know

what my problem is. She continued. I know I'm a hard

worker, I work all the time. And I get so excited by the idea of

creating my nonprofit. Why have I done so little? Every now and

then I searched the internet looking for names of veterans

groups to connect with. But that's it. That's everything

I've done in a year. This is very common. We hit on our great

idea, create a powerful vision, get super excited, and then

nothing really happens. Everything that comes to mind

either feels too small to make a difference or so large, it's

paralyzing. It's no wonder that we give up and decide to think

about it tomorrow. Confusing vision with goals is one of the

most common sources of frustration when people are

trying to make progress on their great work. That confusion is

frustrating by its nature. Let's just say that Anna has an hour

to work on her nonprofit after a long day providing therapy at

the VA. How could she use one hour to shape the national

conversation? She can't. At the core of a lot of this

frustration is a lack of clarity about ideas. A vision is an

idea. And so as a goal, but so as a task and a to do. And if

you're anything like Anna or me or 98% of my clients, you are

full of ideas. Ideas come in the shower, while you're out walking

the dog doing morning pages are simply out of nowhere. And this

is before we even get to the goals and tasks and to dues that

come rolling out of meetings and conversations, emails. Some of

these ideas will be small on the level of maybe Matt could help

me with my budget, and some will be a lot larger like I want to

write a best selling book. These are clearly not the same kind of

ideas. Right.

I like to categorize ideas into five different levels. Now I

like to visualize them as an upside down Triangle, at the

very top of the upside down triangle, the really broad part

is your vision. This is what we hope to achieve someday.

Underneath that is an understanding of what we're able

to do in the next year or two, which I call an accessible

aspiration. That's still not what you're working on, on the

regular. Instead, level three, one level down from that are the

90 day goals, I like to set 90 Day goals to which we are

actively striving, of course, they're aligned to your

accessible aspiration, which is in turn aligned to your vision.

But we're not working on the aspiration, we're not working on

the vision, we're working on the goal. And we know that if we

work on it for weeks, not years, but weeks, we can accomplish it.

Part of that is the weekly task. What can I do this week to get a

little bit more to get a little closer to my goal. And then what

I'm doing today, the to do is the tiny tip of the upside down

triangle. This is what this is the small thing that I'm going

to do today, that gets me closer to my task this week gets me

closer to my 90 Day goal, which in turn gets me closer to my

aspiration which gets me closer to my vision, it's helpful to

understand how your ideas fit into the structure, because the

best way to align your time to an idea depends on the level. If

your idea is something you can do today, like ask Matt for

help, then the best thing you can do is put it on a to do list

or in the daily pages of your great work journal, and then do

it. If your idea is on the level of a catalyzing vision like and

is world changing nonprofit, then you can do two things.

First, you want to activate it, which is so that you get super

excited and invigorated and imagine how it feels and think

about it, how it looks and you know really excited about it.

And then once you've done that and created that space, then you

need to translate that vision down into the lower levels of

the upside down triangle so that you can take concrete action. So

the accessible aspiration. So for Anna to move out of

paralysis and into action, the first thing she needed to do was

to translate that enormous vision, that enormous powerful

vision into an accessible aspiration. So accessible

aspirations are aptly named, they have to feel both

accessible, and doable, but also kind of far away. They will take

multiple 90 Day goals, cycles, and a lot of figuring out unlike

a vision, which has a nebulous someday feeling accessible

aspirations feel tied to your real calendar, usually, I think

of these ideas as on tap for the next year or two. And I realize

that if she was going to build a successful nonprofit, then she

needed to conquer fundraising. So she decided to start by

trying to fund a pilot program and a year or so this aspiration

begins to put Anna into the flow of concrete work, it helps her

to realize that she's going to need to make connections, hone

her pitch, find opportunities to collaborate. But even an

accessible aspiration can be overwhelming when you try to

decide what to do and what not to do in the next three months.

For this, we have to head down to 90 day goals. So why would we

set 90 Day goals. And you know, you may have noticed that 90 Day

goals are sort of all the rage. And if you're a somewhat of a

rebel like me, you probably want to know why you would set a 90

day goal before you blindly follow along. So I mean, first

let's acknowledge that 90 Day goals are somewhat arbitrary.

You could set a 10 week goal, and that would be fine. Or a

four month goal, which is what I actually recommend for people

who are still in school, if you're tied to a semester, then

you should go with the semester. But nonetheless, I do like 90

Day goals because they give us four chances a year to make

things happen. And with four cycles, we really can do a lot.

I also like it, because if you follow the fiscal quarters of

the year, starting your goals in January, April, July and

October, then it can help you make you feel like you're part

of something bigger, you can start saying things like oh,

these are my q2 goals and bemoan the end of the quarter along

with like all the other business people. And this is a very

powerful piece of identity building, if part of your great

work is building a business. So you can leverage that with 90

Day goals. Also, with 90 Day goals, you can roughly follow

the seasons. And if you live in a seasonal place, then your life

probably feels significantly different in January than it

does in July. And I'm not making the claim that January or July

is more productive, because that depends on you and the weather

in your part of the world. But instead I'm noting that some

goals will feel more appropriate and accessible based on the time

of the year that you set them in 90 day goals allow for that.

Also, we can kind of generally predict what we'll be doing in

the next 90 days in a way that we can't when we look much

further into the future For example, could you have dinner

with a friend on the second Tuesday and three months? Okay,

answer that same question. Could you have dinner with a friend on

the second Tuesday of the month in five months? Really go to

your calendar and try to answer that question. Do you notice the

difference? In 90 days, you could generally say, probably or

Probably not, because I know what my life is going to be

like, in five months, it starts to feel like yeah, maybe there's

no way to know just see if that's true for you. Finally,

the 90 day time frame is long enough that you will definitely

want to quit, but you won't, at least not until your 90 days are

up. And part of this is that we are reestablishing trust with

ourselves that we're going to stay with our goals long enough

to accomplish something significant. And you can't re

establish that trust with a goal so short that you never want to

quit. Okay, so how to pick your goals. Now, I think it's

important to follow the three s goal structure in part because

taking on more than three goals related to great work at any one

time can make most people feel overwhelmed and stretched in

every direction. And of those three goals, only one of them is

a stretch goal. The other two goals are a support goal, and a

sanity goal, which together provide a solid foundation from

which to achieve your stretch goal. Your stretch goal is the

beating heart of your great work. It usually requires

research help seeking the learning of new skills and a

whole lot of failure. Your stretch goal will also force you

to overcome hurry, worry, guilt overwhelmed hustle and

perfectionism. This is the piece you've chosen to get your hands

dirty with, you know, you'll make mistakes. And you're

confident that on the other side of those mistakes is victorious,

glorious progress. In short, stretch goals require the most

willpower. Willpower is our ability to focus on things when

we don't want to and to do complex tasks when we want to do

easy things instead. Willpower is a limited resource in humans

because it's housed in the newest part of our brain, the

prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is responsible

for helping us make hard decisions, focus on difficult

tasks and suppress our urge to quit.

The interesting thing about your prefrontal cortex is that it

gets tired. Other parts of your brain do not get tired. Your

limbic system, for example, doesn't ever get tired of

helping you breathe. But the pre for the prefrontal cortex on the

other hand does run out of juice. Just think about it. By

the end of the day, you are much more likely to eat a whole box

of cookies yell at one of the lucky people you live with and

cry right here also much more likely to put off making hard

decisions avoid new and novel problems like the plague. This

is what it looks like when your prefrontal cortex has lost its

mojo. And this is why I recommend only having one

stretch goal. These taxing goals drain our limited willpower and

make us tired. Great work is worth the drain, obviously, but

doing too many difficult projects at once leads to

burnout, unhappiness and sacrifice. That's against the

rules. One stretch goals enough. Anna decided that in the next 90

days she would have at least 12 conversations with fundraisers,

executive directors and program leaders at veteran focus

nonprofits. That's roughly one conversation a week she called

it her listening tour because she didn't want the pressure of

pretending to be an expert. The next goal and the three s goal

structure is the support goal. The support goal is designed to

make your stretch goal easier, more accomplishable and in some

cases possible. A support goal might provide the stability in a

related area or address an issue that tends to arise in

convenient times. Examples might include tracking your finances

better posting on social media more regularly if building a

social platform for your business important or automating

your calendar, scheduling and reminders. Support goals are

often though not always goals that focus on process instead of

projects. While stretch goals often have a clear

accomplishment associated with them. Support goals often

focused on getting better at something. Process goals are

critical. Because these habits form the foundation of our lives

but they can feel nebulous. You can always get better sleep

because you are always going to need sleep and your sleep is

never perfect. This can make process goals feel as satisfying

because they are never done. So it helps to give your process

goal a clear finish line for the sake of your 90 day goal.

Instead of get better sleep for example, choose go to bed by

10pm at least four nights a week. Instead of keep better

records choose file all claims within two weeks for example.

Anna's 90 Day support goal was to network more regularly. She

was regularly invited to conferences and events both at

the VA and in the larger DC region but she was so tired from

work that she skipped most of them. Her support goal then was

to change her ways and attend to More of these opportunities to

network, her support goal intersected with her stretch

goal directly. If I go to one of these networking events at least

every two weeks, I should meet enough people to find the 12

conversations for my listening tour. The final goal in the

three SQL structure is the sanity goal. This goal focuses

on something that makes you feel grounded, resourced, and

resilient. Resilience is the ability to bounce back, recover

from disappointment and continue despite failure. It's related to

willpower in the sense that we're more resilient earlier in

the day. And it's related to vision because vision creates

the motivation that keeps us invested when things get hard.

The nature of great work requires you to learn new

things, put yourself out into the world, to things that

activate all the drama, and drain your willpower. The sanity

goal is critical to the success of your stretch and support

goals, because it keeps you resilient enough to stay at it

when things get hard. As you consider your sanity goal,

please make sure that you're choosing something that would

make you feel good even before you accomplish it. For example,

if you choose going to yoga three times a week, make sure

that going to yoga even just once feels great. The point of

this goal is to give you the gift of groundedness support and

strength right away. And all along the way. You might have

already guessed Anna sanity goal, based on her support goal,

she was staying up late and getting up early trying to keep

everything going her sanity goal then was to be better rested. So

she could have the energy to make good connections while she

was networking. Now, once you've officially set your 90 day

goals, it's time to align your actual time to those goals. This

is where the rubber hits the road. It's one thing to have a

lot of understanding about our great work clear language to

describe our goals, and our heart full of good intentions.

But if we don't do something differently, and the hours and

the minutes of our weeks and days, we will not make any

progress. We must align the way we spend our time to our goals,

tasks and to dues. So how do we do that? Well, in your great

work journal, at the beginning of each week, you'll review your

90 day goal and ask how can I get a little closer to my goals

this week. This exercise will result in three weekly tasks.

Each of these tasks are concrete and substantive steps forward

and are likely to take some effort over a few days. In the

first week, one of the weekly tasks and a set for herself was

to reach out to a contact she had made at a conference. He was

quote someone high up at the Wounded Warrior Project. And she

planned to write him an email. When she set up her weekly task

in the great work journal,

she was prompted to consider what's likely to get in your

way. She realized that she wasn't sure what his name was,

nor was she sure where to find his email. And honestly, she

wasn't as up to date on the Wounded Warrior Project as she

probably should be. Now under normal circumstances, people do

not ask themselves these questions. Instead, they state

the task in its simplest form and hope for the best. For

example, annamite, right, I'll email my contact at Wounded

Warrior. And then she'll either does nothing, or she buys a

month long ticket for the struggle bus. Here's how that

could look without acknowledging it directly. And it feels weird

that she can't remember her contacts name. She questions

whether it's even okay to connect with someone she hasn't

kept up with. Of course, that weirdness falls apart when you

look at it directly. She could just find his name, and then

research his organization. And he wouldn't expect her to be an

expert on him anyway. In fact, wouldn't it be kind of weird if

she knew every detail of his work life when he'd only met her

once at a conference? Solutions are often very simple as my

point. And yet these unexamined difficulties cause a lot of

shame and a lot of delay when we set a goal and then pursue it

with a dogmatic commitment to positive thinking. We're shocked

and dismayed when the inevitable setbacks, mistakes and

roadblocks pop up. If instead, we set a goal and plan for the

setbacks, then we get the best of both worlds. Mental

contrasting is built into every level of the great work

journals. We do it when setting goals when setting weekly tasks.

And when setting daily to dues and Anna's case because she

didn't expect to email her contact in 15 minutes, she was

ready to do some digging. Even weekly tasks can be composed of

mostly good intentions, the real magic happens today. Right now.

The daily pages of the journal will prompt you. Given what

you've decided to do this week. What can you do today to get a

little closer? I'm sure that question sounds familiar. As

it's almost the same question that you asked in the weekly

task that's on purpose, I find that the idea of getting a

little closer is very accessible. Most people realize

that while they can't do it all today, they can get a little

closer. The same structure I described for setting weekly

tasks governs daily to dues in the great work journal as well.

And each of the daily pages of the great work journal you will

be asked, What can I do to get a little closer today? What's

likely to get in my way? And how will I get around it? Now

remember, Anna knows she's going to need to ramp up to writing

that email. So her phone is related to do wasn't write an

email to the Wounded Warrior guy. Instead, it was do a

forensic investigation of my email and notes from the

conference to figure out that guy's name and email. What's

likely to get in her way? I have a tendency to get impatient. She

says, How will she get around that? Well, I decided to keep at

it for two whole hours. And if I still couldn't find it, I would

start emailing other people from the conference to ask them.

When she reported back, she said, it only took an hour to

find it. It turned out that he was copied on an email from

someone else, I can do some research on Wounded Warrior

tomorrow, write the email the next day, it's happening. She

was so excited. Consider how differently it would have felt

if every setback was a surprise. I imagined that her report back

would be more like I tried to write the email, but I couldn't

find his email address anywhere. Finally, an hour later, I found

it copied on an unrelated email chain. And I was like, Finally,

now I can write the email. And then I realized I don't know

enough about their work. So I got delayed again, maybe later

this week, I'll finally get this email out. The email is going to

be done on the same day in both scenarios, but the experience of

it, and by association, the likelihood that the project

makes progress is entirely different. It turns out when you

manage your expectations, when you're expected to have

roadblocks, and you know, it's going to take a while to get

around them. You make much more progress on your great work. And

the thing about great work is that great work generates more

great work. Now Anna's email to her connection at Wounded

Warrior earned her virtual coffee. During their

conversation. Her contact suggested she reached out to

someone he knew at Operation second chance, her new friend

and operation Second Chance introduced her to someone she

didn't know and another division at the VA. And around six months

later, her new colleague at the VA offered Anna a promotion to

move into an integrative health clinic that includes art therapy

among its offerings. And I was intrigued surprised and not at

all sure what to do. If she took the new role, her dream of

starting her own nonprofit would be delayed at best and derailed

at worst. But the new role involves learning fundraising,

and her new co workers were passionate and interesting

practitioners who saw the benefits of alternative

treatment just like she did, what to do. Listen, these are

good problems to have. And they are without a doubt the kinds of

problems you encounter when you get into the flow of your great

work. It's messy, exciting, and nonlinear, involving unexpected

opportunities and chances to change direction. In fact, part

of the fun is the unpredictable and emerging nature of it. That

didn't make any decision any easier. But it was gratifying to

know that whichever choice she made, she would still be doing

her great work. Anna opted to take the role in the Integrative

Health Clinic at the VA. And she's glad she did. She says

I've learned a lot about fundraising. And I've had my

eyes open to a lot of other therapies like acupuncture and

hypnosis that are also really powerful for veterans. When I do

start my nonprofit, which I'm still planning to do, I think it

will be even better. This is how it feels to do great work. You

have a vision, you realize you can get a little closer in the

next year, you realize you can get a little closer in the next

90 days, you realize you can get a little closer this week. And

now you know what to do today. One day after another. As you

get a little closer and a little closer, you will be shocked to

discover that you are now knee deep in your great work. The

great work journal can help you the great work journals can help

you on the one hand, they give you a place to document your

great work. So if you ever start to feel like I'm working and

working and working and nothing is happening, you can look back

through the pages of your great work journal. And you'll see

that that's not true. On the other hand, it reminds you of

how great work unfolds in the real world. It will ask you to

plan your way around mistakes. It will prompt you to remember

your great memories and what you're grateful for. And over

time you'll discover as you chip away at your great work every

day that you have unleashed it out into the world where it

belongs. Today's episode is an excerpt from my book, great

work, do what matters most without sacrificing everything

else which is releasing on June 7. If you've enjoyed what you

heard, and you want to hear it again, but this time with your

eyes. preorder a copy today. The link is in the show notes