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#498 - The Ones Who've Been Listening

Hi there!

Have you ever finished a podcast episode feeling inspired and ready to change, only to realise a few weeks later that your life looks much the same?

In this episode, I'm speaking especially to those of you who have been listening for a long time.

I explore why understanding something can feel so much like progress, why the promises we make to ourselves are the first to go in a hard week, and why support isn't a sign you've failed. It's the structure that helps change last.

I also share a decision about the future of my Monday Motivation episodes, and why I'm moving that work into a space where inspiration can turn into action.

What have you known for years, but never had anyone beside you to act on?

As always, I’d LOVE to hear what resonated most with you - so please share and let’s keep the conversation going in the Dream Life Podcast Facebook Group here.

Have a wonderful week ...and remember, it all starts with a dream.

Enjoy!

PS: If you would like support planning and following through alongside a group of inspiring women, explore Dream Life Coaching: https://www.yourdreamlifestartshere.com/course

SHOW NOTES:

RESOURCES:

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi there, and welcome back to another episode of the Your Dream Life podcast. I'm Kristina Karlsson, and I'm really excited to have you back here.

It's been so wonderful to receive so many messages when I took a couple of weeks' break recently, and I just want to say thank you so much.

Today's episode is for the people who have been here a long time. If you're new, you are very welcome, and I'm so glad you are here, and this will be relevant for you as well. But today I want to talk to the women who've been listening for a couple of years. And if you are new here, you might have been doing the same with another podcast, so it's still relevant for you.

So this is specifically for the women who have been listening to the same podcast for maybe one year, maybe three, maybe five. The ones who've got a favourite episode. The ones who message me about something I said ages ago that I have half forgotten. You are the reason I keep making these.

My dream of having a podcast was first about tackling a challenge. It was really hard for me to imagine that I could have a podcast in my second language. It's not my forte, and it's still not my skill, but it's something I really, really enjoy. And once I got over the fear, after 50 episodes or so, I now absolutely love thinking about what I can create here that is beneficial for you.

That is in my own episodes, but also through the guests that I have. And oh my, I have so many incredible guests coming up in the next 12 months, so I am excited to share all of that in the coming months.

But I want to say something to you that I've been thinking about for a while, and I hope it makes sense the way I mean it. I'm going to try to explain it. If you have been listening for years and your life looks roughly the same as it did when you started, I'd like to talk to you about that.

And just to let you know, this is not about making you feel bad or having a go at you. I am in this boat as well, as a listener to other podcasts. It's actually quite the opposite, because I think I know exactly what has been happening, and I don't think it is what you think it is.

Let me explain. Here is what listening does. You put an episode on while you're driving or walking or unpacking the dishwasher. You get inspired, and you might feel that shift that we're all looking for. Maybe your shoulders come down a bit, something clarifies, and you think, "Yes, that's it. That is what I needed to hear."

I know this feeling very well myself, and I also hear about it all the time. And that feeling is real. I'm not going to pretend it isn't, because it is, and it absolutely matters. But your brain files it as progress. And that's the one thing I want you to be aware of. The feeling of understanding something and the act of changing something produce almost the same sensation in the moment.

They feel nearly identical from the inside, which means you can spend three years genuinely moved, genuinely learning, genuinely nodding along in the car, and arrive at the other end with a calendar that looks exactly like it did. You have been doing something, just not the thing.

And I want to be clear that I'm not standing outside this. I have shelves of books that changed my life for about four days, and that is one of the reasons I started my book club, GROW. I did not want to just read. I wanted to implement what I learned.

You know the four thousand weeks. I've been speaking about that for quite a while. You know clarity comes from starting. You know momentum beats motivation. You know about writing things down, and you know about the small step, and going first for yourself once in a while. You know it, genuinely.

So the question I want us to think about today is why knowing it hasn't been enough. Because that is the actual mystery, isn't it? You are not lacking information.

In today's world, there's more information than ever, and too much information is actually one of the problems. I heard that the other day in the free workshop I ran on Tuesday night: where do you even start?

And if you are a listener to this podcast, you've got more information than most coaches. You are definitely not lacking desire either, because you are here, and you would have stopped listening years ago if that was the case.

So what is it? I'll tell you what I've come to believe after years of doing this work for myself, and also coaching lots of women. It took me a long time to see it, because it's so obvious that it actually hides.

People do not struggle because of a lack of knowledge. If you've got a phone, and most of us listening to this would have a phone, then you are not struggling because of a lack of knowledge, because you can get almost everything from your phone. People struggle because they are trying to change their life alone.

That is it. That's the whole thing. And I know that sounds too simple, but I want you to stay with me, because I want to show you the evidence, and the evidence is in your own life.

Think about the things that have actually stuck for you, and think really hard about this one. Not the things that you're meant to do. The things that are actually still going.

I can almost put money on nearly all of them having other people in them. Maybe it's a class you paid for where the teacher noticed if you were not there. Maybe it's a friend who walks at 6:00 in the morning and would be standing on the corner whether you felt like it or not. Maybe it's a book club, a team, a course with a group in it, something where someone else could see whether you showed up.

And now I want you to think about the ones that stopped. Maybe the app, the program you bought and did for four days, the journal with 11 pages filled in, the thing you were going to start in January, maybe the pile of books that you meant to start. Mostly things you were doing on your own, where the only person who knew you'd stopped was you.

That's the pattern, and once you see it, it really is hard to unsee. And I know this too well myself. That is why I am part of a coaching program myself. That is why I have a speaking coach, and that is why I go to yoga classes rather than doing them at home by myself.

And this is really important to remember. It is not about willpower. You have plenty of willpower. I can prove it, because you use it every single day for other people. You get the kids where they need to be. You deliver at work. You turn up for friends who are having a hard time. You are enormously reliable, just not to yourself.

Most women are magnificent at keeping promises to other people and terrible at keeping them to themselves. And it's not because you are weak. It's because a promise to yourself is the only one with nobody on the other end of it.

Nobody's waiting, nobody notices, and nobody asks. So it's always the first thing to go in a hard week. And then of course, once we've gone through that week, there's another week after that, and it just keeps going until you have that realisation that time has passed by.

And I want to talk about why we think we should be able to do this on our own, because I think there's something quite specific going on there. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that needing support means you haven't got it quite together. That the really impressive women sort it out themselves.

That asking for help is something you do when you have failed at doing it alone. Which to me is completely upside down. Every high performer you can think of has a coach. Every athlete, most chief executives. Musicians have teachers for their entire careers, and nobody thinks Serena Williams needed a coach because she wasn't good enough.

The support is what the performance is built on. It isn't a rescue, it's the structure. But somehow, when it comes to our own lives, the one thing we are supposedly in charge of, we decide we should manage it with willpower and a notebook, on our own, in the gaps between everyone else's needs.

And then we feel bad when it doesn't work.

And this is so true for my own story as well.

I started my first business, kikki.K, at 22. I had come to Australia from Sweden. English was my second language. No retail experience, no business degree, no idea about business, and not much money. But I was not building kikki.K alone. There were people around me the entire way. Some of them believed in it before I did, Paul being one of them. Some of them told me things I didn't want to hear. Some of them just kept turning up and asking how I was going, which sounds like nothing, and it is actually everything.

I remember that I used to say to Paul multiple times a day, "Do you think this is going to work?" And him believing it was going to work before I did meant that I could keep going. So when I built my second business, Dream Life, and Dream Life Coaching, I started building it as a course.

But what I realised pretty quickly is that it's really easy to buy a course. I have done that plenty of times myself. But doing it on your own is hard, so I built a room instead.

And let me tell you what it actually is, because I'd rather you knew than guessed. Every Monday at 7:00 in the evening, Australian Eastern Time, I go live on Zoom with a group of women. We do an hour. It's recorded, so even for those who have a busy Monday, a Monday is never a lost week.

Each month has a theme, and we work through it together. This month, October, it's about your top 10 dreams for your lifetime and your 10-year plan.

In September, we took the month to plan for what I call a mini year, the quarter coming up.

And the people in my coaching program are not cut from a special cloth, and neither am I. There are times when they haven't done a single thing they said they would do. But the beauty of that is that the room holds it without anyone making it awkward, and getting a little bit of support, a little bit of belief, a little bit of inspiration, whatever that person needs that week, gets that person going again.

And that is the part you cannot get from a podcast: the starting again. Because on your own, falling off means it's over for quite a while. In a room, falling off is Tuesday.

So this month we're taking 10 new people, and that's on purpose, because it's a number where I can still know what's going on in your life. The whole thing runs for 12 months. That is also on purpose, because the things worth doing take longer than six weeks, and a year is long enough for a hard month to be just a month.

Now, I want to be fair to you here. Coaching isn't right for everybody. It might not be right for you. If you are in a season where you genuinely cannot give an hour on a Monday to creating your dream life, then it's not your time, and that is absolutely fine. There is no version of this where I want you signing up for something you cannot show up to. But if the reason you haven't joined is that you think you should have been able to do it yourself.

Or that you are not far enough along to deserve support, or that you'll get organised first and then join. If it's those three, I want you to really think about it, because those three are how three more years go by, especially the last one. Getting organised first is the same trap as getting ready first, and I've spent a whole episode on that already.

So, the practical part. The October group is now open, and the doors close this Sunday, or as soon as we have 10 women. You are covered by a 14-day guarantee, which means you come to the first Monday, you do the first piece of work, and if it's wrong for you, you tell us and we refund you. No awkwardness.

You'll also get a full year of GROW, our personal growth book club, as a welcome gift. We always read books that align with the theme in the coaching program, which gives us another way of looking at the theme. It's amazing. The link is in the show notes, or just head over to yourdreamlifestartshere.com/course.

And if you've got a question or you're not sure, you can book 15 minutes with me. I would much rather have a conversation with you to see if it's right for you than have you talk yourself out of it in your own car or on your walk.

Now, I want to tell you something I have decided, and I've gone back and forth on this for a while. I am going to stop making Monday Morning Motivation episodes. Every Monday, I've been sharing a quote and a thought, 10 minutes on a Monday morning while you're getting ready or driving or walking, and I have loved making every single one of them.

And they are the purest example of everything I have just described, because what happens is this. You listen on your way to work, and you get inspired. You feel that lift, and it's real, and it genuinely sets your day up better than it would have been. And then Tuesday happens. Not one thing in your week was different because of it. The quote was beautiful. The feeling was real.

The inspiration was real, and nothing moved. And that is not your fault. It's the format. 10 minutes once a week in your headphones can give somebody a feeling. It cannot give them a changed life. And after nearly 500 episodes, I've had to really think about this myself, about the difference between those two things. So I'm going to move it. From here, Monday Morning Motivation happens inside the Dream Life Coaching program.

It's the same spirit, just in a different format. But the good thing is that we then do something with it. We take the idea, and we put it against your actual week. Where does this apply? What would it change by Friday? What's the one thing you're doing because of it? And the Monday after that, somebody asks how it went.

That is the difference. That's the whole difference.

And I've been thinking about this for a while. I'd rather make 50 of those a year for the women who act on them than for thousands of people who feel lovely for an hour and then change nothing. That's a decision about what I want my work to be worth, and it took me a while to be willing to make that decision.

So if those Monday mornings have meant something to you over the years, I want you to know where they're going. They're going somewhere you can come if you decide to. Let me finish where I started. If you've been listening for years, thank you so much, truly. You have been giving me something quite rare, which is a reason to keep making this every single week for nearly 500 weeks, and I would love to give you something back.

Not another episode. You've got hundreds of those, and they have done what they can do. A room, once a week, where somebody knows what you said you were going to do, notices when you go missing, and is delighted when you turn up again. That's the piece you have been missing, I am fairly sure of it, because this applies as much to me as to anyone else.

Doors close on Sunday, or before. Once we fill the 10 spots, they're gone. I would love for you to be one of those 10 if it feels right for you, and if not, that is completely fine. I'm going to continue the Friday episodes, and I've got some incredible guests coming up, and I cannot wait to share them with you.

Thank you so much for listening. Have the most beautiful weekend, and I know that I will be seeing some of you on Monday, and I can't wait.

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