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The Build a Vibrant Culture Podcast brings together amazing leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts to share the successes, challenges, and secrets to living and leading as a VIBRANT Leader.
Tune-in each week as Nicole Greer interviews a new Vibrant Leader.
Email her at nicole@vibrantculture.com
Nicole TedX
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So, I am here to talk about the idea that we should stop searching for answers and just simply live into a really powerful question. And here's the question. What is it that you really, really want? Now, when I ask you that question, something probably bubbles up inside of you, maybe some shame or some guilt, because if you're like me, when I was growing up, I was told, don't get too big for your britches, and you shouldn't want so many things.
But I'm not talking about the greedy, selfish, little girl kind of want. I'm talking about the kind of want that is a deep, deep desire inside of me for my own little light to shine. That's what I really want. And I want that for all of you, too. So here's the thing. When I ask people what do they really want, they tell me this terrible answer.
They say, I don't know. And I think it's because of that shame and guilt from growing up telling us, you know, you shouldn't want things, that we stop understanding that there are seeds inside of us, a little light inside of us, that needs to be turned on. That we should know what we really want. So here's the thing that pops up, this resistance that stops us dead in our tracks.
That won't allow us to pursue the thing that we really want. But here's the deal. Edna St. Vincent Millay once said, It is not true that life is one damn thing after another. It is the same thing over and over again. And people think, that must be life, cause life is tough. But no, if you look in the mirror, you will see that the damn thing is you.
Here's what I do every morning. Every morning I get up, I flip my little feet over the side of the bed, and I head towards the potty. Isn't that what you do? So I go into the bathroom, and for some reason, I don't know why, I flip on the light. And I look.
And I say, Damn. But see, I've got to get out of that mental model that, you know, what's on the outside is what really matters. I've got to get my head wrapped around the idea that on the inside is what matters. Now, many of you have been to seminars, you've been to trainings and things, and you've had seminars on time, money, how to get your energy up.
And all of those things are very, very important. But before you can get your time in the right place, and your money invested the right way, and your energy wrapped around the right subject, you're gonna have to figure out, What do I really want? Now here's the thing. You can invest the time, the money, and the energy, but if you attempt to carry out your plan without proper resources, meaning that you know what you want, you're gonna end in failure.
Because you'll invest time, money, and energy, and you figure out, this is not what I really want. Or something worse happens, and this thing is that people abandon their plans altogether. I work as a life and business coach, and I talk to people all the time that know they are getting in their own And they say, how do I get moving forward?
And if I can't help them, and I don't start asking them powerful questions, the reality is, is they're going to abandon their plans, and they're just going to go through the motions. Just trying to get to retirement, or just trying to get to the end. Thinking that there's going to be something just waiting for them.
But the thing that is waiting for them is on the inside of them. Now, in order to get your flame up, it's and full and bright and shining out, you're going to have to have one character trait that you've probably never ever heard of or even thought that it was a character trait. But before you can be a person of humanity or wisdom or character, you're going to have to be somebody that has this character trait.
The character trait that fans and sustains the spark that is inside of you. And that character trait is this thing called willingness. Now let me give you a definition of willingness. Willingness is being able to see what you really want and acknowledge it and own it and love it and know that you have to trust this is the right thing.
It requires love and trust and, and willingness is without reservation, refusal or judgment. I'm going to do whatever I need to do along my lifeline to get that done. Now here's the thing. I truly believe every human in this room right now and the ones that will watch this video have had a little dream about what their future holds and you are either paying attention or you are ignoring it.
Now, here's the thing about a dream. You might have had a dream just last night. And that dream is probably already disappeared. But if you take the dream, and you write it down, and you revisit it, and you go to it, and you're willing to spend time with it, eventually the dream will go from your head as a thought, and drop down into your heart.
And it will be like, I think I want to do this, and it will turn into I really want that. But again, it is this beautiful, deep want that you have to trust, and fan into a flame. And then eventually, after you start to desire it, and spend time with it, and actually take some, what I like to call next right steps, it will eventually get down in your belly space, down in the furnace.
And you will say, I was born to do this. In fact, if you look at the lifeline up here, on the left is the X is the day that you popped on the planet. Now here, let me tell you some truth about the day that you popped on the planet. Every single person in here, the same thing is true on the day that you popped on the planet.
Your mother was relieved.. And you were wrapped in the most pristine piece of fabric that anybody could find. Your mother held you, and she saw the spark. She said, look at the baby.
Practically perfect. So what happened to you guys?
Life came at you fast, as Ferris Bueller would say. And you're heading hard and fast for the X on the other side of the line. Because that is the day that you are going to pop off this planet. I do this exercise with everybody that I work with because it's so imperative that we understand you have one shot.
One shot to figure out the spark. One shot to trust it and love it and fan it into flame with some willingness to get to the other end so that when they put you in a box or a jar, the comment is she did everything that she needed to do. She was so willing to make it happen. You don't want the opposite where they look at you in the box and they go, Hmm, get her hair right.
So we have to work on our dreams, our desire, and our destiny so that we get to the X on this side and people understand what our purpose was. So inside of you have a flame and this is a diagram of your spark, your flame, and you will see that inside of it there is a comfort zone and that is just kind of your pilot light.
It's just sitting there and there are three things going on that is just kind of feeding that pilot light, keeping it on. There are human traits, which is personality and character traits. There is a belief system. And there are things that you're thinking. Now, if you don't challenge your personality, and you don't challenge your belief system, you don't challenge your thinking, you're never going to go out into the learning zone, which is when your flame starts to come up.
And if you want to shine, S H I N E, S H I N E. You're going to have to do some serious work along that lifeline to light things up so that you can see the path that is your destiny. So what do we need to do? The first thing we need to do is self assessment. Now I love this quote. It says, make a careful exploration of who you are. You've got a past that informs who you are. You can take a personality test to tell you what kind of personality you have.
There's character assessments, core value things, all sorts of information you can do to find out who you are. And then it says you're supposed to make a careful exploration of that and sink yourself into it. You are the only one that is going to be able to get your flame. to shed light. And I'm going to tell you, it's a dark world out, out there.
We have need of you. And so you can't be impressed with yourself. You don't compare yourself with others. You simply take responsibility for doing your creative best and you have to take response ability. So the second thing is habits. When you think about who you are, you're going to find out that there are a few things about you that needs a little tweaking.
That you're going to have to fuel certain parts of you. And if your fire happens to be out of control, you might have to put some rocks around it and control yourself a little bit more. And those habits require three questions. The first one is, what do I really want? Where am I right now? And what is my next right step?
And doing habit work is absolutely essential to getting you where you need to go. I ask people all the time, tell me about a bad habit that you have and this quickly they can tell me about it. But if I ask the opposite question, the question that kind of goes along with what do I really want, I say, what good habit do you have in place?
People are almost stumped. We've got our focus on the wrong thing. We need to really think about how can we get our habits in place to edify our dream. So for example, perhaps you want us to be a speaker on the stage. You're going to have to get a habit of getting in front of people.
You might need to join Toastmasters or the National Speaking Association or something like that. You're going to have to put habits around the dream, so it becomes desire and ends up becoming destiny. The third thing you're going to need to do is to get into integrity. Now integrity is kind of a funny thing because people think they have integrity.
I mean if I asked all of you, are you men and women of integrity, I'm pretty sure every single one of you would say, that's me. But I would tell you, it's not you. Because here's the deal, if I know I have a little flame in here, and my job in life is to light up the world around me, with my dream, my desire, my destiny, I'm going to have to make choices in line with what I say I really want.
That is true integrity. I become more whole with every right thought, every right step, every right action. So I need to meet my future self, and how do you do that? You have to take next right steps, and there are three perspectives that I invite you to look at. So here was the lifeline where you popped on the planet, the X was over here.
Now the invitation is for you to go out to the future, 5 to 10 years, and just take a really good look around. I mean, you gotta decide, how many good years do I have left? When you get out here, you're going to take stock. What do I want the future to look like? Who do I want to be? What do I really want?
And then you start talking about it. You make it fantastic. You write it down. And then you do something really neat. You turn back to the present. And you say, what is it going to take to get from there to here. And that is the retrospective. Now notice I did not go to the past because when I ask people all the time, what did you do?
They tell me what they, what do you want? They tell me what they did. But I want you to tell me what you want to do. So once I get here, I've got my introspective. Then I'm going to have my retrospective. I'm going to get to this point where I'm back in the present. And as Edwin Wade Teal said, he said, No path is ever truly tried until it's tried both ways.
If I go out to the future and come back to the present, and out to the future and back to the present, I am going to get very clear about what this is going to take. And I will unleash this amazing amount of creativity. And, instead of having hindsight, I will have this beautiful thing called foresight.
And I will have this beautiful thing called foresight. Now, it's going to take a lot of energy to traverse this lifeline, to become who I say I want to be, to get what I say I really want. And I want you to just take note that there are really five energies that we have available to us. Oftentimes people think, I'm just tired.
Well, my suggestion is, take a nap. Then, wake up. Wake up and realize you have five energies you could be working on. Maybe you don't know what you need to know to get where you want to go. Maybe you don't feel like it and you need to talk your feelings through and get your emotional energy in check.
Maybe you need some faith and you need to work on your spiritual energy. Maybe you feel bad in your body and you need to get that under control. Or perhaps you don't know the people you need to know to get you where you want to go. So, work on your five energies. Now, how do I know that this works?
Because I'm living it, first of all. But I'll show you three examples of why I know this works. This is Linda. Linda came to me and she said, I'm stuck. The children are grown, even the grandchildren don't have time for me anymore. What am I gonna do? I said, well, Linda, what did they say about you when you were younger?
Tell me about yourself. Do some self assessment. She said, this is going to sound selfish, but people used to tell me I am beautiful. And I said, Linda, you are beautiful. She said, you know, I always dreamed that I could be a model. And I said, Have you heard about this whole demographic shift where the whole United States is aging?
AARP needs a good looking girl. She says, No. Why don't you just get your picture made? This is a picture of Linda in her Blue Cross Blue Shield commercial with her fake grandchildren, where she finally began to love and trust herself. And this is Don and Amy. Both of them had divorces that you don't want to know about.
Both of them told me, I really want to meet a nice girl. I want to meet a nice guy. I want to learn to trust and love somebody else one more time. So Amy here, we put together a whole wedding before we even knew Don. He didn't know what hit him. . And finally, this is a picture of Don Murfin.
Now Don Murfin is one of my favorite people on the whole planet. He has a soup kitchen. In fact, he has three soup kitchens. When I met Don Murfin, he told me, I'm retired, I was a CEO, I made all sorts of big deals, I was a mover, I was a shaker, I made stuff happen, I am bored. I said, well tell me about yourself.
He says, well, I love to do business, I'm an entrepreneur by heart, and I love to cook. And just off the cuff I said, you ought to start a soup kitchen. This is a picture of Don at the community cafe. Don says, that's exactly what I'm going to do. And now he has fed thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
So, here's the deal. You get to choose. You got two feet. You're on a lifeline. You can take a next right step. So what do you guys really want? My name is Nicole Greer. Thank you for listening.