What’s Your BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL?
“If I were to write a book, this would be the book that I’d write.”
That’s the first line I wrote in my journal when I decided to turn a workbook I had developed for my coaching clients into a book. For years, I’d wanted to write a book. It was a story I wanted to tell…
“I did it. I wrote a book”
…because I knew I had the skills and capabilities to write one.
Knowing is different than doing, though.
As an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, I fell in love with writing. I remember hunkering down at my desk, semester after semester, to churn out papers for the courses required for my degree. Each semester I looked forward to the writing assignments. For me, writing papers was like solving puzzles — I had to figure out how all of my thoughts and ideas connected with the course content to form sentences, paragraphs, and pages to create a cohesive argument.
As my mom can tell you, though, this was a far cry from the kid-version of me trying to write school papers. Through elementary, middle school, and high school, I was the kid who would ask my mom for help the day before a paper was due and sit at the kitchen table with her, upset at the paper, the assignment, the teacher, the course, and the school (I was never upset with myself for procrastinating) and exclaim with tears, “Writing is so stupid and pointless…I hate it.”
My undergraduate years introduced me to psychology — a topic that deeply fascinated me. And, because of this fascination, I discovered that writing had a purpose: draw out ideas to help myself and others with the learning process. Not only did it have a purpose, I wanted to get better at it. So, amidst the coursework through my undergraduate and graduate school years, I transformed into someone who consumed books on writing to improve as a writer. I read Stephen King’s On Writing, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I’d repeatedly pick up The Elements of Style by Strunk and White and William Zinisser’s On Writing Well as I was working on papers.
I loved writing.
And, somewhere along the way, a seed was planted: “I want to write a book.”
But, every time I came back to this idea, I froze. Writing a book seemed like a really hard thing to do.
And, because the work and the unknowns of writing a book overwhelmed and scared me, I avoided it.
I hid from it.
I repeatedly excused my way out of it.
I did this for a long time.
Fear can be a powerful deterrent from telling the story we’ve always wanted to tell. And, more importantly, fear can lead us to believe that we’re stuck telling the same story we’ve always told.
Luckily, though, I found myself at a crossroad.
You see, I believe we should do hard things
Like, really hard things.
Things that, dare I say, scare the $#*% out of us.
In fact, this idea is core to my coaching philosophy.
To achieve our peak performance, I believe we need to do BIG, SCARY, and HAIRY things that require us to fully prepare because without the preparation and attention to details, there is a deep fear within us reminding us there is no way we stand a chance of accomplishing that GOAL.
Writing a book scared the $#*% out of me.
And for that reason, I was avoiding it.
And that was the crossroad I found myself at: I was living in complete contradiction to my philosophy and to what I was asking my clients to do.
For me, writing a book was a BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL:
BIG: “That just seems like a huge undertaking and I don’t even have a topic to write about. How would I possibly fill enough pages with content to make a book? That must take years
to do.”
SCARY: “People like Stephen King write books. People like Robert Greene write books. People like Donald Miller write books. People like Fredrik Backman write books. Smart people write books. People of value write books. People who have interesting stories to tell write books. I’m not like them; I can’t write a book.”
HAIRY: “I don’t know how I would even get it published. I don’t know how to format graphics to fit with the text that I write, let alone create artwork that would even go in the book. I don’t know how to create a cover. I don’t know how to get it printed. I don’t know who would buy it. I don’t know…I don’t know…I don’t know.”
But then I started challenging myself: “If I’m asking clients to identify, transform, and chase after their own BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL, why am I letting a BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL of my own hold me back and, in the process, prevent me from telling the story I know that I can tell?”
And so, I just started doing.
Rather than sit in wonder of what I thought I was capable of, I started taking action. And the first step was simply writing in my journal: “If I were to write a book, this would be the book that I’d write.” And bit by bit, the book became about me putting my belief into action: Identifying a BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL of my own, transforming it into a BIG, SCARY GOALby focusing on the little things that finally led me to achieve my BIG GOALand tell the story I’ve always wanted to tell.
In other words, I simply started doing the little things on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis that were really hard and messy and that scared the $#*% out of me.
Download the Book
You can download the book here.
My hope is that in creating the story I’ve always wanted to tell — writing a book — I help you start the story you’ve always wanted to tell by helping you identify your own BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL, transform it into a BIG, SCARY GOAL, chase after it by taking action and, in the process, achieve your BIG GOAL and finally tell the story you’ve always known you’ve been capable of telling.
You can download the book—What’s Your BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL?: Start the Story You’ve Always Wanted to Tell—for $4.99.
Using a 3-Phase Process, the book includes 12 in-depth activities that help you:
Develop self-awareness
Uncover your life’s vision
Establish goals that bring that vision to life
Learn to pull strategic behavioral levers to chip away at your goals and vision
The book is designed to be self-directed; however, we offer 1-on-1 Goal-Setting and Lifestyle Coaching Packages to provide you with a more in-depth exploration, guidance, and direction of the book’s activities while also providing weekly accountability as you work on your goals, and the process around those goals, to tell the story you’ve always wanted to tell.
Identify your BIG, SCARY, HAIRY GOAL and then learn how to transform it so that you can achieve your BIG GOAL and finally tell the story you’ve always wanted to tell.