The Focus Bee Show Podcast: Katie Stoddart Interviews Imogen Roy
How often do you remember that nature isn’t just a pleasant place to visit on the weekends, it exists inside of you?
We’ve been so well trained to mimic the machines we’ve created that we completely disregard our own emotional experience by overriding internal, biological messages that are coming from our body. We’ve been so well conditioned to look outside of ourselves to leaders or teachers for the answers, that we’re disconnected from our own desires, our compass and our inner knowing.
In The Focus Bee podcast with Katie Stoddart, we discuss how we can rewire these habits, begin living from the inside-out instead of from the outside-in, and fall in love with the process rather than the result. When we’re able to do this, we can stay open to the people and opportunities that may be necessary for us to flourish at our highest potential.
“The greatest gift we can give to ourselves is to identify the recipe to make ourselves happy.
What is the recipe for us to harness our own unique expression of energy in the way that we’re designed for? ”
Links Mentioned in This Episode:
Imogen’s YouTube series on Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies
Imogen’s interview with Seth Godin
Learn how to define success for yourself, and live into your vision with purpose and direction - Vision of Success online course
Read the Transcript:
Katie: Welcome to a brand new episode of The Focus Bee Show. Today I'm here with Imogen Roy. Imogen is a Strategy Coach and she supports entrepreneurs to be more prolific, productive and present in their business – without burning out. I discovered Imogen thanks to her YouTube series on The Four Tendencies that I thought was absolutely fantastic. And I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining the show today, Imogen.
Imogen: Hello, it's great to be here.
Katie: It's really, really great to have you. In your interview with Seth Godin, you discuss the importance of focusing on the process, in comparison with focusing on the goals. Why do you feel this is such an essential part of high performance or success in business?
Imogen: Great question to start us off. Yes. So this is a big foundation of my whole philosophy actually, questioning and then chucking out this idea we have about “no pain, no gain”, which really is only relevant and very few specific situations. I'm all about falling in love with the process rather than the results. And there's a few reasons for this. One is that in this more mechanistic way of goal setting, there’s this idea that you fixate on an external object or a specific result, something that's outside of you – once you get there, then you're going to feel a certain way, or become a different person, or somehow transform your life. But between now and there, there's a very unpleasant journey that has to take place. And then when you get to the goal, then you're finally arrived, and you can finally enjoy yourself and finally, live, right? And there's a few things that feel wrong about that to me. One being that all we have really is our day to day. All we have is our health, our creativity, our general wellbeing. And if we're not enjoying the journey, then what’s to say that we're actually going to enjoy that destination? And the second is that when we really fixate on an external object or a certain point of arrival, whether that's getting a job or earning a certain amount of money, or some other kind of arbitrary signal of success, it's very much focused on perfection. And you risk creating this prison for yourself where you get stuck pursuing the wrong thing for you. So really, when we talk about falling in love with the process, rather than the result, it opens us up to improving the process towards a goal as opposed to the point of arrival. In the course of enjoying the process, we can stay open to the people, and the opportunities, and the changing of minds that may be necessary for us to actually flourish at our highest potential.
Katie: Absolutely, I really love everything you said about how the process differs from of the way we think about our day to day life, but also in some ways makes us more open or more fluid because there's a certain rigidity that comes with being too focused on the goals. Was there a time in your life where you were too focused on the outcome? And you felt how this impacted you?
Imogen: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that all coaches and teachers and therapists, we teach the lessons that we have found the hardest to learn ourselves. I'm definitely someone who is very ambitious, very results-focused. When I was younger, I was trained as an athlete so I've always had this mindset of pushing myself reaching the next level, always working, working, working. It really got to a point where I was really sacrificing my body and my mental health. And I ended up not just having two stress-related spine surgeries, but also having a major professional burnout, and having to rebuild my whole life and work from scratch. That was when I realized that maybe I was going about this the wrong way, and that if I was burning out, sacrificing my body, having health crises, then this wasn't a sign of success! That it didn't matter if I was, you know, having $10k months, as you're constantly told that something that you should aim for, or that you have a certain number of clients, or you're reaching certain professional goals, like speaking at conferences and so on, if I felt terrible in my body and if I felt like I had lost control of my own being. So it really called me to question the way I was going about things. And so yes, I have absolutely lived the extreme downsides to being completely results-focused and losing touch with that the process and the living part and the journey part. And in my journey of greater self awareness, and recognizing that there are actually a million ways that you can go about something, I discovered that the greatest gift we can give to ourselves is to identify the recipe to make ourselves happy. What is the recipe for us to harness our own unique expression of energy in the way that we're designed for? And seeing other people's ideas, or blueprints or systems or strategies as sources of inspiration, or sources of teaching, but not necessarily the ones that we should adapt for ourselves. So this is what I help people with now, helping them work out for themselves, whether they believe they are someone who actually does require a lot of structure and routine, breaking down goals and little pieces to follow, or whether what they're actually someone who is not wired that way. They're wired more to be in the flow, to be open to others, to not necessarily fixate so much on specific things that they want, but investing in their relationships instead and allowing things to come to them. Because we're all wired so differently, and I want everyone to be able to follow their own path and not get too caught up in what they believe they should be doing for success.
“The greatest gift we can give to ourselves is to identify the recipe to make ourselves happy.
What is the recipe for us to harness our own unique expression of energy in the way that we’re designed for? ”
Katie: Yes, I think it's a really important part that you just mentioned – how we all differently wired, and it's great to have inspiration from all the different people, but to take what suits us. And it's interesting also, to see that you had to reach rock bottom in some ways to wake up and realize this is actually not success, even if I'm reaching some goals that I'm aiming for. Because I'm not enjoying it every day, or because I'm feeling stressed or burnt out, or it's impacting my body – therefore, this isn't really success. What sort of mindset shift do you feel people can have without reaching rock bottom to realize why the process is so much more important than the end result?
Imogen: Hmm, well, yeah, I want to make a point first, which is, you do not need to reach rock bottom to make a change in your life. And I always say to people, please do not take as long as I did to figure out what I actually wanted and needed, because it's not worth it! You don't have to reach rock bottom to make a transformational change. And you don't have to reach rock bottom to finally get on the right path. Not at all.
“I believe that the body is actually in the driving seat, and the mind is simply an assistant to the body.
The mind exists to hear, interpret, and provide feedback on the signals coming from the body, as opposed to the mind controlling the body and getting it to where it wants to go. ”
In terms of a mindset shift, I would say the first place to start, as always, is with awareness. And actually asking yourself, am I sacrificing or compromising something about my being to achieve these results? So in my case, it was very much about my body. I had completely lost connection with my body, and was pushing my body in ways that were completely unsustainable in order to achieve the results that I was getting. And my problem was that I didn't have awareness. And I would say that mindset was not actually my issue. It was, my mind was taking over completely. It was actually body awareness that I had lost touch with. And I really believe that those two things are key. I think in this industry, we do talk a lot about mindset. And that's great, and it's very important, but it's not the only thing. I believe that the body is actually in the driving seat, and the mind is simply an assistant to the body. The mind exists to hear, interpret, and provide feedback on the signals coming from the body, as opposed to the mind controlling the body and getting it to where it wants to go. And so for me, I think the mindset shift needed was tuning out the mind more and actually practicing listening to my body more and developing that mind-body connection.
Once you've recognized, okay, are there places where I am sacrificing or compromising or working against myself in order to achieve these results? Is there something else I could do? Is there another way I could try this? Is this really what I want? And I think once you've got that foundation of awareness, it's really questioning, asking. Resistance – okay, where is it coming from? Why? These emotions I'm experiencing – okay, what's the message behind them? My body is telling me this. Okay, so what's it trying to say? And it's actually listening and interpreting, and starting to tap into a bit more of imagination of, “Okay, so what am I gonna do about it? What can I try?” And then this is where the inspiration piece can come in. Because rather than looking at side of yourself to go, “okay, what's the guaranteed blueprint? What's the productivity planner? Just give me the tools so I can just use it and forget about the process” you can think, “Wow, look at all these people using all these really unique tools and strategies to to get what they want. Let me try a few things on for size. Let me experiment a little with other people's tools and see if it actually works for me or not.”
Whenever I teach a class or start coaching someone, I always say to them, “Do not take anything I say as truth. Everything I say is to be questioned, every single tool or idea or strategy I share is to be tested in your own life, and then you can decide whether it's good or not. And if it doesn't, then toss it. If you come back to me and say, ‘Imogen, that thing did not work at all for me, it's rubbish.’ I'll say, ‘Great! I'm so glad you tried it. And you found that out for yourself. And now you can put it to the side and go, ‘Nope, that's not for me, I need to try something else.’” And this is the mindset I want to cultivate more in people – everything is up for questioning, everything is up for experimentation. Take what's out there and try it on for size until you find something that works. And also recognize that you are going to be changing as a person so much. Your needs are going to be different from one year to the next. I think a lot of people have experienced that this year. Maybe what was really working for them in 2019 in terms of getting their goals, meeting their desires, plans, etc., has completely fallen apart in 2020. Not because there's anything wrong with them, but because they have different needs, a different game is afoot, and therefore we need different tools. And so I hope that this year, people have tried a few more things, actually. And maybe this has open people up to a different way of doing things.
Katie: Yes, I think that there's two really key points that you mentioned here. One of them is the mind-body connection. And sometimes like you said, if we're to focus on our goals, or external results that we're trying to achieve, we forget about the body part. And the more we tune into our body, the more we exercise, meditate, take care of ourselves, eat healthily, the greater impact you also have on your mind, and just your general well being. So that was great. And I also loved what you said about experimenting, and not taking what anyone says as the given source of information you have to follow. I had this a lot when I started my coaching business. All the marketing people telling me to have the Facebook group, the Instagram page. I don't have Facebook or Instagram; I use LinkedIn. But there's this sort of obligation. “This is how you do it. This is how you achieve success as a coach.” Well, what if it doesn't suit me? So I feel it's like you said, you don't only question what your coach can recommend, you question all of it until you find what suits you.
To come back to the process part, do you have a specific framework perhaps that the listeners could tap into that could help them with this?
“I really want to help my students and clients remember that there is nature inside them and to align with that as much as possible. ”
Imogen: Hmm, well, let's begin with this. So really, my ultimate philosophy is returning us as close to nature as possible. What's happened with humans over the last 200 years or so is, we’ve gotten so smart, we've created all these amazing machines to do things for us. But we're also not smart enough to recognize that our greatest skill is mimicry. So what we've done is kind of adorable, we've created all these machines, and then started mimicking them and trying to keep up with them! And so what we end up doing is, instead of allowing these machines to carry off our workload and free us up to be human – to create, to have pleasure, to connect, to spend more time with each other – we end up basing our measures of success against the pace of those machines. So I really want to help my students and clients remember that there is nature inside them and to align with that as much as possible.
I want to paint a picture for your listeners. Now, when we think about the natural world, a really strong, beautiful tree is a great image. It has a strong trunk, and this really wide beautiful canopy, and once a year, twice a year, a wonderful harvest of fruit. Now, do you think that the tree focuses a lot of energy on producing the fruit? No! There's this enormous ecosystem where, in order to have this canopy, you've also got this enormous root system growing under the under the earth that we can't see, that is often at least as big as the canopy, if not larger. It has its enormous foundation of support. And then there's also the soil, the microbiome. And that is really the fuel and the recipe of success for the tree that we can't see. And there's a lot going on in there. And as soon as that soil, that microbiome, becomes compromised, the whole health of the tree is at stake.
I like to encourage people to think more like this when it comes to their own success and their own goals. We tend to focus a lot on the fruit – the outcome. Applying mindset and applying strategy to try and force this fruit into being. Visualising it and making the fruit happen! When actually, we're missing the the essence, which is the microbiome – our overall health and well being, our relationships, connection to our body The root system, the really wide base of support: building resiliency, building strong relationships and partnerships with people who will hold us when things get hard. Fruit is simply the outcome of taking care of all of those things. It happens on its own, it's kind of effortless, it just arrives when the time is right. And so that's really where I want to start with is getting people to switch their focus from trying to create this fruit from scratch to actually focusing on nourishing their ecosystem? This is the fertile soil from which all the success and creativity and results is going to come from. And then considering, how am I building my wide base of support? What's my community like? How are my relationships, am I investing in them enough? Will people help me when people come together when I have a tough time in my business or in my life?
And then in terms of creating a process for yourself. Well, I think a good place to start is, starting from the inside out. Let’s face it: when you're starting a business, it's almost like as soon as you register your company, the whole of Facebook knows, and you get targeted with so many adverts about all these things you need to spend money on, all these things you need to do and it's totally overwhelming. And exactly as you pointed out Katie, maybe completely irrelevant for you. Maybe you can see wild success without Facebook or Instagram. Maybe you can see wild success without having a funnel or doing any public speaking. All of these things are possible. So I would say that before looking outside of yourself for the answers is to start with inside out thinking. And if you like I can share a simple but really effective goal setting process that I that I teach my clients.
Katie: Yeah, that would be fantastic. Yes, I'd love to hear. I'm curious and I'm sure the listeners can benefit from it.
Imogen: Great. So I actually invented this for Seth Godin's audience actually because I was speaking at an online conference last year. We each had to create a 20 minute workshop. And I thought, “What can I teach you about goal setting and creating a process in 20 minutes?” And so I came up with this framework, which I now call Productive with Purpose. You draw a table with four columns with the headings: feelings, purpose, habits, and success.
So we start with feelings. The first question you ask yourself when you're wanting to decide where to focus your attention is, “how do I want to feel?” How do I want to feel. And so the first part of this exercise is writing down as many feeling words as come to mind – how you want to feel in your body, in your career, in your work, in your day to day, in your relationships. And just write down as many feelings – I want to feel calm, I want to feel joyous, I want to feel wealthy, I want to feel inspired, I want to feel connected, I want to feel strong – and just writing down as many words as you'd like.
And then the second column is called purpose. What we're doing here is we're going to choose three of those feelings words to focus on. You either choose three words that really stand out to you from your first column, or perhaps you've noticed that in your first column, there are some families emerging, like families of words, and you want to pick a word that summarizes each of those families. Then those are going to be your three areas of focus for this period of time ahead. Then you've got your three purpose words.
The next column is what habits will I need to do on a regular basis to generate those feelings in my life? So let's say you chose inspired as one of your purpose words. What habits do I need to put in place to generate these feelings of inspiration? Maybe I need to be having more conversations every week. So maybe a habit is I'm going to schedule in a call with a friend or someone in my network once a week. Or I'm going to listen to a podcast from a new podcast or twice a week. What action am I going to take to get inspiration? How am I going to go and create that feeling for myself rather than waiting for it to happen to you?
And then finally, in your fourth column – success – and I don't use the word “goals” because again, this is a process. How will I know that I have that I have achieved success in this area? What are the benchmarks? Are there any milestones or how will I basically be able to measure success in this area? And for some of your some of you it may be, maybe you want to feel prolific. So your habit is creating content, or writing chapters of a book, or putting a book proposal together, or creating a podcast or something. Well, for you, it might be slightly easier to measure your success because you can go, “Okay, I know I will feel prolific when I'm writing a newsletter every week, or I have written 6000 words of my book,” or whatever. But for some of you may feel a bit less tangible than that. It may be deciding that when I've done three months of this, then I'm calling that success, or I'm doing an experiment for this amount of time. And committing to this experiment is how I'll know I will have to achieve success.
And so really, in four steps, what you end up with is three habits, for each of your purpose words, how you will measure success, and a clear sense of how you want to feel. In a short period of time, you've created a little map for yourself where you have desires, actions, and how to measure success. And what I love about this exercise is that it's so stretchy. You can do this exercise for the new year, you can do this exercise for the next five years, you can also do this exercise, as I sometimes do, on a Monday to set the week ahead. Especially weeks where I have a lot going on and I'm like, “Oh I can easily get into overwhelm here. So much to do.” Right. How do I want to feel? And then once I have those three words, it really helps me to prioritize and choose because I'm only going to lean into the things that were going to help me generate those feelings. If I want to feel in charge, and I want to feel like I've completed something, well, then I'm naturally going to go and finish the things I've already started in order to generate those feelings as opposed to starting a whole lot of new stuff.
And actually, if you want more support on this, I have just recorded an online course taking you through this process, called Vision of Success.
I found this to be a very reliable way of setting goals. And what I love is getting feedback from people. You know, even just a few months ago, I was contacted by someone who was in that first Seth Godin workshop with me and used the process and it just completely transformed their year, even though it was 2020, even though lots of things kind of went crazy, they stuck to their three words. And they were like, “it's just been one of the most productive years of my life.” So feedback like that just makes me so happy. So go ahead, try the exercise.
Ever wondered am I living a life that’s true to myself?
Give yourself the gift of clarity.
Vision of Success Online Course – now available
Katie: I absolutely love this. I think it's fantastic. It gave me goosebumps. I think part of the magic here is how a lot of the time we focus on goals, and then we sort of link an emotion to them to make them stronger. So it's sort of, “I want to write a book. Okay, what emotion will I get? Well I’ll feel happy and successful, and I've achieved something I've always wanted to do.” And so we tend to, we learn a lot – especially as coaches, to focus on the goal and add an emotion. Tony Robbins talks a lot about this, having the emotion makes it stronger, and then you're more likely to do it or want to do it. But what I love about your approach is we focus solely on the feeling and emotion and it totally changes the way you view each activity. And the activity is actually linked to the emotion. So sort of the other way around. It's counterintuitive in some way, yet, of course, it's going to make us happier, because our aim is to be happy or to have the feelings that we want in our life instead of aiming for the goals to give us those feelings. So sort of the other way around. I think that's fantastic. And I will put the link to the course is also in the show notes for the people listening. Yes. So thank you so much for sharing that framework with us. I think it's hugely valuable. I haven't heard of a similar approach, to be honest. A lot about emotions, a lot about feelings, but not about that being sort of the main focus.
“We can’t underestimate how powerful the prohibition against emotion is in our culture. How we’ve been so well trained from a very, very young age to completely disregard our own emotional experience. To override these internal biological messages that are coming from our body, to look outside of ourselves to leaders to teachers, to people telling us how we should behave, what we should feel and what we should want. ”
Imogen: Right. What I'll say is, every time I've taught this exercise in a workshop, or in a class, a lot of people struggle with the first column. They’re like, “Oh, I don't know how I want to feel. I've had a mind blank. I can't think of any words. I'm stuck. What is wrong with me?” And some people can get very emotional. I've had people almost in tears: “I don't even know how I want to feel. I've completely lost touch with that side of me. I know how to perform, but ask me how I want to feel this year, and I don't even know what to say.” We can't underestimate how powerful the prohibition against emotion is in our culture. How we've been so well trained from a very, very young age, to completely disregard our own emotional experience to override these internal biological messages that are coming from our body, to look outside of ourselves to leaders to teachers, to people telling us how we should behave, what we should feel and what we should want. And I love how you reference that Tony Robbins method, and of course, it's very, very common: decide on a goal from the outside and then make it into an emotional story for yourself afterwards. I’ve kind of been so out of that worldview for such a long time that it kind of makes me laugh now. But it's such a long winded way of going about something, when in fact, if you are able to tap into that desire that's coming from you from the beginning – that’s where the power is.
The thing about desire and the emotions that arise, is that we can't help what we want. It just is. Any child will show you this. All young children go, “I want that. I want that. I want a castle. I want a pony. I want to play. I want that toy. I don't want to wear that outfit. I want to do this now.” They are so well self expressed, and they always know what they want at any moment. And doesn't matter if it goes against what they know other people want. And they don't feel like it says anything about themselves. They don't have any prohibition against their own desire. They're simply like, “I want this, I'm going to ask for it.” And they're just going to keep doing that. And when we look at a child, I think it's a beautiful reminder that that is actually who we are at our core. We do have this ability to tap into our own desire. It's just been trained out of us very well. And so what we end up doing now as adults is going, “ You know what, I should write a book because I'm at this stage in my business, and all my competitors have written a book. So I think I should write a book. So how am I going to trick myself into wanting this, like, what's the emotional story I'm going to create to force myself to write this book? But what about if, for you, you just have no desire to write a book, and you're never going to have a desire to write a book, and that's okay! And actually tricking yourself into making yourself want to write a book means that the process of writing that book is going to be horrible. And then the point of arrival of that book is not going to be enjoyable, because the work of having a book only really begins at the promotional stage. This is how people end up tying themselves up in knots. Having external success, but not enjoying it, because it's not the right expression. And then in the meantime, there are all these uncovered, unfulfilled, true desires inside of them that are not being heard and are not being expressed. So yeah, it can feel strange or unconventional, even a bit silly, to start a goal setting framework with feelings. But that's exactly why I encourage people to try it. Because it's breaking a pattern. It's breaking a pattern. And whatever the outcome of taking the exercise is, interesting things always come up. Even if it's simply an awareness that you don't even know enough words for feeling.
Katie: That's also a very good point and what you said about the emotions and how we're taught from a very young age to either repress them, or we don't understand them. And right now, what you were saying was also similar to what you said at the beginning, in terms of questioning what we're told from the outside. So in the example of writing a book, for instance, if this is an outside expected result of someone then it’s to be questioned – like I mentioned with the Facebook group, or with Instagram. I think sometimes people imagine that they have goals that they want, but they don't really, but it's just because they think this is what they need to do. And then they need to add the emotions and the feelings in the Tony Robbins sort of way to make it happen. But by doing that, it makes you feel this aligned with what you truly want to be doing, which is essentially what you're talking about. So I love how we've wrapped up from the process thought and linked it to the emotions and feelings, because I feel this is directly tied together. Because if you're more in your feelings, you're more in the present moment. And therefore you're more likely to enjoy the process. So maybe if you could say, a short statement around this link, before we conclude the episode, that would be great.
Imogen: Sure. Well, I think ultimately, it's about moving from an outside-in method of living, where we're always looking outside of ourselves for the next thing, for the next pointer, for the next direction, and instead reminding ourselves at every moment that actually there's more inside of us than we take credit for. If you reverse that order, where you go from the inside-out, and that you can actually create your world, and your career, and your business, and your life from your own experience: take what's inside and realize it on the outside, manifest it on the outside. You know, it's just a more holistic, engaged, connected way of going about things. And all sorts of doors open up to you when you start to allow yourself to be your own inner compass. I hope that listeners today have got some interesting nuggets to take away with them. And I would love to hear from anyone if something in this episode resonated with you. Please do get in touch or if you try the goal setting exercise. Let me know how it goes for you. I always love to hear feedback.
Katie: Thank you so much. Imogen. I am I've learned so much so I have no doubt that all the listeners have taken away at least one gold nugget if not more than one. So thank you so, so much for being on the show today.
Imogen: Absolute pleasure.
I’m Imogen, and as a Strategy Coach, I help entrepreneurial people to be more prolific, productive and present in their life and business.
If you’re ready to start living a life that’s true to yourself, learn more about my online course, Vision of Success, or book a free call with me to talk about coaching.
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