65. Asking Better Questions to Focus Your Year

​​In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger explores how asking big, purposeful questions can guide your goal-setting for the year. Discover how reflecting on questions like "What is my purpose?" and "What do I have to share with the world?" can help you create meaningful, aligned goals that support lasting weight loss and personal growth. Learn how clarity and mindful planning are essential to achieving your goals and why your purpose can evolve with the seasons of life. Tune in for actionable tips to set clear, purposeful goals that will set you up for success. 

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com

Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 65. I am Dr. Stacy Heimburger, and today I want to talk about something—goal setting with purpose. So, last week I asked you to think about a focus word for the year, and when I was working through this with some of my clients, I realized that I left out a piece of information that might be really helpful, and it’s about asking really good questions. So, sometimes we need to ask really big questions and let our brains think about them for a little bit so that we can start really understanding what our focus for the year needs to be. Questions like, “What’s my purpose?” or “What do I have to share with the world?” These aren’t random. OK, these are ways to guide us, especially if we want to create really meaningful goals. If my goal is a little bit superficial, I might not really need to know what my purpose is or what I need to share with the world, but if I want to get something really big done and I need to make sure that I’m in alignment with that goal, then I need to kind of see where my baseline GPS is, right? This is all about getting clarity. So, when we have a really clear “why” to why we want to do something—really clear reasons, really clear meaning and purpose—we are much, much more likely to achieve what we’re trying to do.

So, I want to talk about this background question concept. So, I think sometimes—first, let me start by saying when we ask our brain a question, it is going to search for the answers, right? So, I think we did a podcast about this before. When we ask awful questions like, “What’s wrong with me?” our brain is going to search through all the crevices and find the answer for that. It’s gonna find all the things—all of our insecurities—that we think are wrong with us. If we ask better questions, we can get better answers. Our brain really wants to come up with the answer for us when we ask a question. Sometimes, when we ask really big questions, we don’t have an answer right away, because it’s pretty big, right? If I’m asking, like, “What’s my purpose?” or “What do I want to contribute to the world?” I probably am not gonna come up with the answer to that off the top, like, in two seconds. So, I might need to let that just marinate in the background of my mind, because the brain is still gonna be working on that question, even if you’re not giving it direct focus. So, if you have this working in the background, your brain’s still gonna work on it. OK, so I love this. My husband doesn’t always understand it, but I drive to work a lot in silence, and that, to me, is this reflection time—this background marination time—that really helps me answer some of these bigger questions. So, I don’t want you to feel pressured to rush to answer something with questions. I want you to just let them linger and then just trust that your brain is working on them.

The other thing I want to say about the answers to these big questions—this is, “What is my purpose?” “What do I want to contribute to the world?” And I do like those two questions in particular, because I think it really does give us some drive and some focus—but I want you to understand that those things can change. So, I think part of the other reason we find it hard to come up with answers to these questions is because they feel so big and so permanent and so forever that we’re afraid to answer it. And I want you to understand that I think just like seasons change, our purpose and our goals change. So, I’ll give you my personal story about this. So, when I was in med school, right? For those of you not doctors, when you’re in medical school, you have to decide what kind of doctor you want to be. And there’s lots of choices, right? There’s lots of specialties. There’s lots of things to do. And so, when we’re going through our rotations, you have to kind of choose, “What kind of doctor do I want to be?” So, that was the first time unintentionally I was asking this question about, “What’s my purpose? What do I want to contribute to the world?” and I had a few years to marinate on it. So, there was time in the background for it to marinate, and what I found for myself was that I really wanted to take care of very sick patients, but that they were usually going to get better and then I was gonna send them back into the world. And I really felt such meaning and purpose with that. And so, for me, that meant I was going into hospital medicine. I was gonna be an internist, only work in the hospital. Whenever you’d ask me, I’d say, “You really don’t want me to be your doctor, because it means you’re sick enough that you need to be in the hospital overnight.” So, I loved the idea that people would come in, I would be able to be a detective, figure out what was wrong, have the answer to make them feel better, and send them back into the world. So, I was very clear with this. This was my mission and purpose, right? So, I knew I wanted to do hospital medicine. Fast forward, I loved hospital medicine, and I loved the idea that I wanted to have the hospital goals and my doctor goals be one and the same, right? So, patient satisfaction, quality improvement—things. Someone introduced this concept to me of there are hospitalists, which is what I was doing, and then there are house doctors who just want to do their job and go home. So, I knew that I wanted to be a hospitalist, and I loved this idea of being a hospitalist, and I wanted to teach other people to love being a hospitalist. And so, I decided my new mission and purpose, after a few years of doing that, was that I wanted to do more administrative work. And so, I wanted to be like a director of a hospitalist program, so that I could teach other hospitalists or other medicine doctors how to have a love for hospital medicine. Then, a few years after that, I found coaching. I made a lot of personal changes in my weight and how I was feeling about myself, and I found a new purpose and a new mission, and now my purpose is to make women feel beautiful, no matter what size they are, in any way that I can. And what I want to share with the world is coaching. I want to share these new medications with people. I want to help people manage their hormones, because I want women to feel amazing and beautiful, because that’s the season and that’s the mission, and that’s the purpose right now. So, it is OK if these things change. It doesn’t mean any of them were wrong. It doesn’t mean I made the wrong decision in the beginning. It just, as we grow and evolve, we pivot. We make changes. We change, and what we want to share with the world can change. So, I want you to give yourself permission to let your answers evolve and change, and know that that is living intentionally and in the moment, and don’t be afraid to just put your dollar down on what you think your mission and purpose is for this year.

So, these are going to shape our goals for us, right? So, how do they do that? Well, if I’m saying I want to help people feel beautiful, then I need to look at my medical practice and what I’m doing in my coaching practice and make sure that my goals for my business and my goals for myself align with all of that, right? So, my focus word for this year is going to be strengthen, because I want to get stronger personally, physically. I also want to strengthen the core of my business. I’m going to get a couple of new certifications, right? Because I want to expand my world into more women’s health. So, there’s certifications I can do for that. So, see how that shaped my goal, right? That shaped one of my personal growth goals for the new year is that I want to focus on helping women feel great, so I’m going to go get this menopause certification so that I can help women and really understand what they need during this time. OK, so that’s why the focus word, asking these big questions, these goals become so much more meaningful. They become so much harder to ignore, right? When the going gets tough, right, we still want to do these things because we have aligned these goals with our core mission and values and our purpose, and whatever our focus is for the year. And so, that really is gonna help us be successful.

So, how do we do this? OK, so I want you to write down these big questions. There is something about putting pen to paper that changes the way your brain works a little bit. So, we are going to write down, “What is my purpose?” “What do I want to share with the world?” and then we are not going to rush the answer. We’re going to let them just marinate, and we’re gonna give ourselves time to reflect on that. We are going to go back to our focus word and make sure that is in alignment with that. OK, how did those things come together? Journaling about this would be very helpful so that we’re really—like I’ve used the term set the GPS—but this is how we do it. When we’re super clear in our goal setting, we are so much more likely to succeed. I actually just saw something. It said that they did a study—I think it was Harvard graduates—and they asked them all their goals, and of course, they all did, but only 20% of them had written them down. And then they went back 25 years later and checked on this graduating class, and those 20% that had written them down were hands-down more successful. I think they said something like their worth was more than all the rest of the class combined or more than double—I don’t know, some dramatic result. OK, so that’s why we want to do this, and that’s why we want to write these things down, and these are going to help us create really clear goals. So, asking questions about our purpose and what we have to share with the world is a really powerful way just to get super clear. This clarity is gonna be super helpful. And remember, this is something we really need to revisit every year, because things change. Great things change. We change, and as we grow and evolve, it is OK for our mission and purpose to grow and evolve. I also think it’s really important if you have people in your life that you share your life with, that maybe you do this together. Make sure that our goals are still lining up together and that we’re not going down different paths. OK, so start today. Reflect on those questions, “What’s my purpose?” “What do I have to share with the world?” Write them down. Let them marinate. Maybe get your significant other, whoever shares your life with you, to do the same thing. OK, and then I want you to just start thinking again in the background what type of goals we might want to look out for next year. Next week, I’m gonna go through and next week I’m gonna go through a process with you where we take everything we’ve been talking about the last few weeks and I’m gonna show you how it all lines up to make really meaningful, actionable goals that will be inevitable. Meaning, we’re going to set them, and then we are going to set them up in a way that our success is absolutely inevitable. And it is amazing when you can set goals and know that you can achieve them. I’m very proud to say we’re gonna be doing an episode in a few weeks. I have lost 100 pounds, and this will be the first year that weight loss will not be on my goal list, and as someone who just turned 50, that’s a pretty big deal. So, this all changed. All of this became possible when I started getting really clear on my goals. These steps will help you succeed. OK, I share all the time when before I went to coaching, before I learned about coaching, I set goals, and then I looked back, and they were like, “Lose weight,” but I had nothing near like next to that. I had—I didn’t know where, like when I look back on this journal, like I don’t know where my weight was, where did I start? Where did I end up? What was my plan? How was I gonna measure? Nothing. I had no idea. I had to really set goals. So, everyone’s gonna start, you know, been talking about their New Year’s resolution circle goals, but if we just think something in our head and we don’t make it actionable, the chances of succeeding are not very high. But by doing it this way, by assessing our year, what happened, we’re gonna ask these big questions, get our north star, our compass, our GPS set, this is what I want to do, this is my purpose, this is a goal that feels really meaningful to me. It’s gonna be so much easier to succeed. OK, that’s it for this week. I can’t wait to hear what y’all’s goals are. I would love it if you would just tag me on social media at sugarfreemd or email me support@sugarfreemd.com and let me know what your goals are. If this is helpful, please share with a friend. Otherwise, I will see you next week. Bye.