Episode 001: Step One to Making Your Dreams a Reality: Equalizing Desire and Effort

Welcome to Limitless with Lisa Z. A podcast about how to move from inspiration to action and bring our dreams to life. I'm Lisa Zahiya, and each week I'll release two podcasts, one where I walk you through action steps about how to make your dreams a reality with another podcast in which I interview amazing change-makers from all over the world. This podcast isn't just for listening. Take notes and take action. Let's ignite and change the world together. 

Welcome to Limitless with Lisa Z., A podcast with your host, me, Lisa Zahiya. That is all about moving from inspiration to action and combines an actionable podcast with interviews with amazing humans who are changing the world. Welcome to episode one, season one of the action part of the podcast. This is four episodes with me all about how to move from the thing you've been thinking about, wanting to been inspired to do, into actually doing it. Let's get started. 

Okay, folks, welcome. This is your host, Lisa Zaia, life coach, business coach, overall thinker about why humans do what they do. And my mission in the world is to get more people into action, doing what they most wanna be doing in the world. And that's what this podcast is all about. So will you fully be able to do everything you've always wanted after listening to four episodes of this? No. That's why there's gonna be multiple seasons, but you sure can change. So I hope that you will get out a notebook or if you're taking a walk or if you're in the car, take some time to note some of the things I said. We're gonna put it in the show notes of what actions do you wanna take to move forward with this. You know, the thing I've noticed, especially in today's society, is that we're all about the information. We can see 20,000 inspirational tos or Instagram posts. We can talk a lot about why we are or not doing something, but there's very little action. 

So the more you can say what you're gonna do, write it down, and take baby steps to put it into action, the better it's gonna go. So I wanna really focus on that idea of baby steps. Meaning that you're not gonna transform your life by tomorrow. In fact, that never if ever, works, but you certainly can choose to take tiny steps that will move you in the right direction. And folks, here's the other thing about baby steps is that when I take baby steps, teeny tiny little things that move me towards what I want, we have the greater ability to pivot. So when I take little, it is easier to change direction when I find out that things aren't working. So today's topic is equalizing desire and effort. So what I've seen in the world is, and with my clients is that people come to me, I really wanna make more money. I really wanna create this business. I really, really, really wanna. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, and they really want something, but there is an unequal amount in effort they are putting into doing it. 

So if somebody's effort to do the thing that they want is a 10, but their effort in doing that is a two, then we have a giant gap, and giant gaps aren't good. So the very first thing we wanna do is to figure out what we want. So the exercise for that, uh, there's two different ways you could do that. The first is to write down in a notebook what I want and then allow yourself to just write for 20 minutes. So you're gonna set a timer for 20 minutes, and you're gonna say, I want, I want, I want, I want. And allow yourself to not self, self-edit. Allow yourself to dream and really think about what you most want in the world. There are two things that can get in the way here. One is practicality. And while I believe that at times being practical is useful, it's not something we wanna do all the time. 

And then secondly is fear can get in the way. So I want you to let go and allow yourself to dream. What do you actually want? So I remember when I wanted to open a dance studio, I kept, I kept feeling like people would say, oh, that's not practical to do that. You couldn't have this many people who are interested in doing something like that. And also, fear got in the way. People would always tell me that as a dancer, I would be poor. And I'd be like, well, okay, I guess I'll just be poor. But I decided that that was not acceptable. So what I really wanna encourage you to do is to think what are the things that I want. And allow yourself to step out of that fear and out of practicality and realize that I use the word, God. My God would not give me a desire that comes from a healthy place in myself if there was something wrong with it. 

So anything that when you are clear in your heart, and you desire something, it is coming from your heart, it is coming from you, it is coming from God, it is coming from the universe, and allow that to be. So you write for 20 minutes stream of consciousness. You just keep going. Don't pick up the pen off the paper and then you're gonna let it sit for a second. Get up, make yourself a cup of tea, whatever you'd like, and then review it again and circle anything that comes up more than once. What really resonates with me here? Uh, you can also use your body what feels the best when you think about it. So if I've talked about wanting to make more money and it comes up a couple of times, anything that occurs more than once, we wanna circle that is high desire. 

Also like, if I notice that it feels good for me to want that, we wanna lean into that. So once I have that, I wanna make a list of my dreams. What are a list of my goals? You can do the next five years. You can do 10 years. Uh, I really advocate doing tenure plans for a decade, and you could do your lifetime. I even have lists of things I'd like to create or start in the world that will be legacy. Meaning what a goal looks like that is so big that it will take longer than my lifetime to achieve, but I can get the ball rolling. 

This podcast is brought to you by coaching with Lisa Zahi, a business development company which provides strategy coaching and staffing support to mission-driven businesses. We help create bold and impactful businesses and to help the founders become the people who can do it. Curious about how to grow your business? Schedule a free consultation at www.chatwithlisaz.com. 

The other thing you can do to really get your lists of I once if you're not clear on that, is to make a desire map. Meaning you can put yourself in the center, you're gonna draw a circle, put your name in it, and then draw little branches coming off, and they can be family, career, money, spirituality, all the aspects of your life. And then, you allow yourself to name what are the things you'd like to see happen again in a specified period of time. And then, I like to start with five things, the five things that you want the most in your specified period of time. And then we are going to first put between one and 10, how much do we want this thing, which this is our desire score. 

So typically, if it is in your top five, the desired score should be a nine or a 10. How bad do I want this? I wanna make $20,000 a month. I want to create a school for girls. I want to create this change in my life. It is not selfish to desire a positive change for you or your family. It doesn't always have to be about changing the world. So, for example, I recently had a client who said, I wanna make $10,000 a month, and their desire for that was a 10. So we write down our desired score. These scores are not bad or good. They do not equal a grade, it is just a numerical measurement of energy. So there's a lot of energy there. And then we have a really honest non, shameful conversation with ourselves about the amount of effort we are putting in. 

Am I doing a tens worth of effort to get this thing I want? She was not putting in a ten effort towards making $20,000 a month. She had invested in coaching, which is a great effort, but she wasn't always executing against what we were talking about. She was getting in her own way a lot. So we wanna measure like how big is the gap between the desire score and the effort score And the bigger that gap is, the more action we need to take. So she put her effort at a four, and her desire to attend and this is alarming and not a place we wanna be. Anytime there's a big gap, it is time to start taking baby steps and even some medium-sized steps toward change. So the reason we wanna stay out of that desired gap is that this is a place where there is blame and shame. 

And as we all know, there's been a lot of work in the world about this, but blame and shame make us feel bad about ourselves. And as soon as we start feeling really bad about ourselves, we tend to freeze, or we tend to backpedal, which is gonna get us, it's gonna make that gap bigger. So instead, we wanna say, Hey you, I love you. You're talking to yourself here. I wanna change this. So let's get rid of the blame and shame, super. So we do that, and then there are two choices here. So if I say my effort is at a four and my desire is outta 10, there are two different ways we can make these things closer together. One is we can lower desire, or we can increase effort. Now I think everybody tends to be like, Hey, you know, I'm really gonna increase the effort. 

But that is not always realistic based on a couple of things. The first is we gotta be real clear about lifestyle. Now, of course, changes to lifestyle can happen. They probably need to happen to get you toward your goal. However, um, there are times like if you just had a baby, a newborn baby for either parent, that is not a time where necessarily you're going to increase effort. If you have a big trip planned, if you're taking care of somebody, if you're in a role as a caretaker, if you're sick, we need to be very clear about this. And the other place is you need to be very clear about do I need to heal before I can put in this effort. If you have a trauma, if you have a physical trauma, an emotional trauma, a spiritual trauma, you might have to do the work. 

So the way to reduce the desired score is to just postpone it, put it at a date in the future. So maybe when the baby's a toddler or maybe when I've gone through a healing process, maybe I need to go through a grief process. I can start ma moving up my effort. So what do I need to do to take care of myself? And a great thing here is what I call the thousand dollars test. Meaning do you need to heal, or do you need more effort? If you need to do something and somebody said, Hey if you don't do this, you have to pay me a thousand dollars. This helps indicate do we need more effort or do we need to take a step back. If somebody says, Hey, if my desire was to run a marathon and the effort score was low, and the way to change that was to run five miles a day. 

Now if I wasn't doing that, cuz I didn't feel like it, if somebody said, Hey, you have to either run or pay me a thousand dollars, I would go run, which means that there's my test, I need to increase effort. But if I had hurt my ankle and I couldn't do it, I would have to give them the thousand dollars. Also, I've heard it has also been done. Like if you were gonna be in physical danger, I don't like that so much. So we're gonna do it based on money. If a thousand dollars is too much, you can call it a hundred dollars test. If you're like, that's easy, make it a $10,000 test. So that's gonna help measure it. So then the second question is, do I need more effort? So if you feel like you were in a space to give the effort, we need to think about what are all the ways I can dial up your effort. 

And then there are two things I wanna talk about here, which are gonna be in next week's episode. And the first one is a distraction. Do you have too many distractions in your life? And how do we deal with them? And the second one is creating an identity where we prioritize the effort. So those will both be in week two. I'd love to hear all your questions and your comments about the, um, desire versus effort and how can I help you with that. As well as using baby steps, send me an email, please like, and subscribe to the podcast. This is, uh, super excited to bear this fruit for the business. And finally, please check out this week's interview with the amazing Ray McDaniel. 

That's it, folks. Another amazing episode of Limitless with Lisa Z. I am inspired and wanna give you the homework. Take some notes, take action. Do one thing today that can move you towards your dreams—got feedback. Let us know. You can write to us at lisa@lisazahiya.com or visit us at www.lisazahiya.com.