Noelle's Notebook EP 4: Get Excited

Hello everyone, what's up? It's me. I know I haven't been on in so long, so I wanted to come and say hi. Good day to all of you. Feel free to drop in the chat and say hello. I'm kind of monitoring it over here. So great to see you. I am excited. Excited today because I reached one year. Actually, a year ago today, I started off at Red Hat, which is a subsidiary of IBM. And then about 7 months later, IBM picked me up and was like, ooh, we like what you're doing. And I joined IBM as an executive. So one year in, super excited about it. But I wanted to share with you today, and I only have a few minutes, as you do. So thank you so much for joining me. Super grateful that you are here. I want to share with you a couple of ways that, A, number one, I get excited, but also how I stay excited and how I stay motivated. But really excited about like, thank you for all of you who have wished me a happy work anniversary on LinkedIn. I really appreciate you all so much. And this episode, you'll notice I changed my logo. Oh wait, AI Leadership Institute. We have launched a new Leadership Institute site that includes all of our courses that we're teaching. It is incredible. We are doing low-code, no-code AI. We are doing Apply to AI. We are teaching, and really it was founded because we wanted to help teachers and faculty, staff, but really maybe everyone, um, have a chance to to learn more about artificial intelligence. So I'll tell you more about that maybe at the very end. But first, all of you, thank you so much for joining. If you are here live, you are welcome to say #live in the comments. If you are here on a replay, you know I love all my people who watch the replay. So please let me know you're here by doing #replay. It is so great to see all of you, and I'm always so grateful that you're spending some time with me. Hopefully soon we'll do it in person. Next week I am going to be in Nebraska at the I Can Leadership Conference for Women. It is going to be amazing. What's up? Thank you for joining. I'm going to be speaking. I have a keynote presentation. It was awesome because someone from high school on Facebook was like, oh my gosh, you're speaking at the I Can Leadership Conference. And I was like, I am. So it's really cool when you finally get to a point where people are recognizing you in different circles. So amazing. So that is happening next week. I hope you all will tune in. And if you are anywhere near Nebraska, certainly come and visit. I am also in June, I am in a different city speaking on a different stage. I am headlining in Vegas at the beginning of June. I will be helping out Dataiku in their AI, Everyday AI conference at the end of June. It's going to be a fantastic couple of months. So I hope you'll hang on for the journey. I will of course be always sharing the play-by-play. So let's get down. Hey Liz, what's up? Oh my gosh, we have to connect. Great to see you all. Admisa, thank you so much for joining. You all are amazing. Thank you for chiming in and commenting. Okay, so the first thing, and I only have, you know, a few minutes, but how do I stay excited? So a lot of people always ask me, oh my gosh, Noelle, you know, it's like in the afternoon here on the East Coast, 5:45 in the afternoon. How do you stay so excited? How do you stay so energetic? And of course, some of you know I have 4 kids. My dad lives with me. Today was like doctor appointment day. So we're running around doing doctor's appointments. How do you do it? I, I will tell you, the number one way that I stay energized is I know my purpose, my why, and I stay focused on doing things as closely aligned with that why as I can. And it really does. Like, the only time I get tired, the only time I ever am like, Oh my gosh, this is such a hard day, is when I'm doing things that are deviating from why I think I'm here, what I'm here to do. And it's amazing. You should try it. Do like a little 7-day challenge with yourself, right? Of course, in order to do that, you need to find out what your why is. Wes Gruber, if you are watching, I learned this from him in our early days, long before AWS and Amazon. We worked at a company and he was in charge of root cause analysis. And I use this now all the time. Where we do— we did a 5-why analysis when bad things would happen. And rather than when bad things happen, just look at your life, figure out what you want. Like, what's the thing you want more? I want money, I want freedom, I want whatever it is, right? And then ask yourself why. But don't just ask yourself why once. Like, ask yourself why and write it down, and ask yourself why again, right? So let me give you an example. If I say, oh, I want to be, you know, I want to make $5 million this year, Why? Because I really want to, you know, create a space for my family and I want us to not have to worry about money. Why? Because I want to make sure that we can do things that we care about, that my kids can become artists if they want to, or become detectives or whatever they want to do without worrying about, you know, income. Why? Right. And eventually it boils down to the essence of what you want. And you'll realize when you do that, that the thing that you wanted doesn't necessarily have to be the only way to get to that essence, right? That, that foundational purpose. There's millions, infinite ways to get what you want. And it's— but it's only when we get— when we boil it down, if we say we want $5 million, here's what happens to most $5 millionaires. They make $5 million and they're like, huh, this didn't— isn't the way I thought it would work out, right? So It's really, it's much more important to ask yourself why, why, why, why do I want what I want? And get to that core purpose. And then every day, make sure you're doing something in alignment with that. So that's the next thing. So the first thing is, is find out what your why is. There's lots of different ways to do that. Please ping me if you need help. I have lots of tools and technologies and stuff that I've used to figure this out for myself. I'm happy to share those with you. But the second thing I do is I have uncovered that I have a superpower. There's lots of other ways of saying this, like there's Enneagrams and all these things, but find out like what— not only what you are good at, right, but the intersection between what you're good at and what you love to do. And that is what I call my superpower. So for me, I love technology, I love emerging technology, and I love to teach and share. That's the intersection. So when I can do both those things, I am on fire. I can't stop. I, I want to just keep on working and do it all. It doesn't even feel like work, right? And I can help a lot of people doing that. So, but sometimes we get into roles where we're not getting paid to do that intersection, right? That's a part of it maybe, but that's not what we're getting paid to do. So what I try to do, and I did this today, I was so excited, I try to find opportunities, kind of volunteer opportunities, to find that intersection so I can hold on to that joy of like, oh my gosh, I just did this thing. It was exactly what I'm here to do. And then that joy pulls me through some of the other stuff that I have to do that maybe I'm not super excited about, like expense reports. But those— that's how I do it, right? I figure out what is my why? How does that why translate to my superpower in this world, something that I am uniquely good at and uniquely like not just good at, but that I love? And then how do I find pockets of opportunity to show up and do work in that space? Much of it for me is volunteer. Much of it. But I'm moving more and more, you know, organizations and companies are discovering like, oh my gosh, Noelle, you're great at this and this is actually valuable for our company. You should do this. And it's part of my job more and more now than it's ever been before. But there's always other things that you have to do as part of your role. And the way to keep excited about that too is to tie on to this superpower of yours and demonstrate it in any way that you can. Yay! Thank you guys so much. Thank you all for showing up and being here with me live. And again, thanks for all my replayers out there. Okay. So knowing your why, connecting with your superpower. The next one, it actually is a two-parter, is one of the things that energizes me and motivates me every day. Is writing down my goals. And I've talked to you guys maybe about— or you all maybe about this before, right? I've talked about writing, how important it is to write down your goals. But I want to take a slightly deeper look at it because I don't just mean like your to-do list, and I don't even mean like your goals, like I want to speak on stage or I want to make this much money in a sales, you know, transaction or whatever. I really, when I say goals, I'm thinking of two different types. One is like my vision, What is my vision for my life? And here is the trick, and I love it. It's super fun. And really, VR has made this even better for me. But my vision is a present tense, present tense, right now statement of who I want to be 5 years from now. And here is the beauty of this, is that when I'm doing something hard or when I'm about to do something hard, I think to myself, Who am I doing this for? And it's not someone else. It's me 5 years from now. It's me 5 months from now, right? Who am I doing it for? I'm doing it for me, but it's me 5 months from now who's like, gosh, I'm so glad you did that hard thing because I couldn't be where I want to be without you having done all those hard things in a row. So it's incredible, incredibly powerful if you try it. So think— oh, it's a little bit, um, I, I see, uh, what's the word, laggy. Um, so I'm sorry if that's the case for you as well. Hopefully not for long. I always have funny lag moments in all of these. Um, but one thing— so one thing I do is I do create 5 statements. I have 5, you could have 3. These statements are in 3 categories. One is my personal goals, things I want personally. One is financial, and one is professional. I happen to have a few in each. But when I write down these, this vision of who I want to be, I write it down in the present tense. And every day, in the morning and in the evening, I read through them or even think about them in my head. And I say, I am in the best shape of my life. I am a bestselling author. I am a top-rated keynote speaker in the world. I am these things. And it's funny, I've been saying some of these things for decades, right? But when you say it every day, here's what happens. Your mind locks in on, okay, that's who we're— that's who we're going to be. And now as opportunities come to engage with people, with opportunities, with work, you're looking through the lens of who you are going to be 5 years from now or 10 years from now, or whatever your goal set happens to be. And so you end up having more discipline to be able to turn down conversations that don't serve you. That turn down work opportunities that don't get you in direction with that goal. Rather than most of us, right, before I used to look at my goals once every few months maybe, right? Before that, when I was really young, once a year at New Year's time. And by, by June I would have no idea, like I would be on a completely different trajectory. I would not be thinking, oh man, I said this thing on January 1st, what am I doing today to get there? But when you write it down in the present tense and review it daily, twice a day, it instantly focuses and provides a level of discipline that really I haven't experienced in any other format. And it's easy and cheap. You don't have to buy it, right? Like, this is all the superpower you have within your own mind. Hi, everyone. So awesome to see you, Catherine. Thank you for joining us. Okay, so write down the vision of who you're going to be. Just try it. Like I said, 7 days, see what happens, see what different opportunities are presented, or that you choose to say no to because you're holding this vision of who you want to be in your mind so often. And honestly, I say, like, one of my friends, Sue, Sue Heady, Sue is— she actually puts her vision board, she took a picture of it and put it on her watch. So every time she looked at the time, she'd see her vision board. She doesn't need to like look at it and be like, oh, what's in the upper right corner, right? She knows it. But just seeing it every day, right? It just reinforces who she is and who she wants to become. So the other thing though, so that is like the vision part. And I'm, that is, I'm the biggest fan of that. The other thing that motivates me though, is kind of almost the other side of that big vision, which is how do I create confidence? A lot of people ask me in my last few minutes here, a lot of people ask me about like imposter syndrome or confidence building, right? How do I get more confidence? And I used to always be like, get on more stages, talk more on, you know, and I found a hack that I think some of you, at least the introverts like myself, will love. Um, some of you will appreciate this, I hope. Um, but the hack is that in order to build confidence, you really need to start with building confidence in yourself. And there's an easy way to do this, and you won't be perfect at first, but there's an easy way to do it. You can, you know, get your handy-dandy notebook, or maybe it's on an iPad with an Apple Pencil or whatever it is, right? And you make a goal for the week. You're going to drink water every— a gallon of water every day. You're going to work out every day. You're going to spend 1 minute in mindfulness every day. Alexa, you're going to eat dinner with your kids 5 days this week. I say every day, but I'll give you a break. 5 days this week. Week, right? Write down that goal. And then on this page, like a bullet journal— if you're any of you bullet journalers out there— put 7 little boxes for the week. Every single day, check that box. Pick something easy at first, something that you know you're good at, that you can do. Pick something easy. But here's what happens when you get to the end of the week. Something magical happens in your brain where you're like, I did this. I did this. I can trust myself. I said I would do it and I did it. And then you repeat it multiple times. Now I have like 3 or 4 boxes. Actually used to have them in dry erase marker on my mirror. So every morning I'd wake up and I would have it like, you know, take care of whatever I want. I think mindfulness, journal, exercise were 3 of the 5 that I had on there. And every day I'd check them off. And even if I missed a day, right? I wouldn't be super disappointed because I'm like, man, I did 6 or even 5. I mean, I'm a mom of 4, for goodness sakes. Like, I'm glad I get some of these done. But it's really impactful because you're proving to yourself that you can say a thing, do a thing, and complete a thing. It doesn't actually matter what it is. I do, of course, encourage you, as you get good with the easy stuff, raise the bar, make it harder, right? If you're working out every day, for half an hour. Maybe you decide to do alternating Tabata days. Maybe you decide to increase the weights. Whatever it is, but you write it down. Here's the key: you write it down and you check it off and you prove to yourself, I did this for 7 days straight. And then right underneath it, you add another 7 boxes. And now you're going to see yourself do 20, 21 days, right? After 3 weeks. I don't know how many of you know this, uh, but there's a program called 75 Hard. It's by Andy Frisella. I love it. He's got a, uh, a podcast called Real AF, which is Andy Frisella, I think is how you say his name. Anyway, it's an acronym, you know, it's his initials. Um, but he has this program called 75 Hard, and it's 75 consistent days of doing the same things, these little checkboxes, right? Drinking a gallon of water, working out twice a day for 45 minutes, one is outside, taking a picture of yourself every single day, writing or reading 10 minutes of a nonfiction book for your own self-development every single day. And what he says is that this 75 Hard challenge will change your life because it reprograms your mind to trust yourself in ways that you've never trusted yourself before. It gives you confidence that you can, that you can probably hardly imagine because now your brain is like, you got this. You could, whatever you want to do. I want to go skydiving. I want to speak on a stage. I want to, Start my own podcast after doing something consistently and proving to yourself that you can do something consistently. You'd be amazed at what you can choose to take on. So I leave you with that. Thank you so much. I have 3 minutes till my next call, but I wanted to hop on and say happy anniversary to me. Thank you, IBM, for having me. Thank you, Red Hat, for taking me back because I left them back in 2011 to go on to bigger and better things. But they welcomed me back with open arms. I love all my work family and all of my home family. And I'm so, oh, so, so grateful that you all decided to spend a few minutes with me. I hope it was helpful. I hope you grabbed one or two tips. Thank you so much. And always connect. I'm on Instagram @noelle.ai, TikTok @noelle.ai, as well as Mindful Leadership on LinkedIn. Take care, everybody. Make it a great rest of your week. Thanks. Bye.