#349: Publish with a Purpose: Exploring, Embracing and Reaching Your God-Given Goals with Marnie Swedberg

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Hey Kingdom Writers, welcome back to this episode and I'm just so excited to have a guest with me today. And this is another Publish with a Purpose episode. My name is Shelly Hitz and today I'm going to be joined by Marnie Swedberg. Welcome, Marnie.

Hey, great to be here, Shelley.

So excited to have you. Marnie is an international leadership mentor, the author of 13 books, which is amazing. The host of her own radio show, a media expert, and a keynote speaker for organizations around the world. Fun and fast paced, yet peaceful and approachable. Approachable. Her history includes so many things. I never knew all of this about you, Marnie, but includes fires, floods, a tornado, car wrecks, business setbacks, burglary, lightning strike, ambulance rides, and more. But she models just a comeback. Behavior, possibility, thinking, and profound faith. So we're going to talk today about goal setting, like how to keep the main thing. The main thing. And as we get started, like just, you know, introduce yourself to our audience and you know, just share your heart regarding this topic.

Well, thank you and it's so fun to be here. I love talking about goals and especially about God given goals. And so as I work with leaders around the world and with the speakers over@womenspeakers.com and the event planners and women's ministry leaders, one of the things that, that I love to focus on is that God created you. Specifically. I say when he strung together your 3 billion base pair of DNA, he did it in a particular way. And according to scripture, he has set up work for you to do. Even before you were born. He knew what he brought you on the planet to do. And so there's very specific work that God has created you specifically to do. And when we align ourselves, our God given selves with the God dreams that he put inside of us, that he equipped us to do when we came into the world, then we're going to find that pursuing our God given goals will just be the greatest joy in our lives.

Yeah, and I love that because I do, I, I believe God has gifted each one of us uniquely and you know, just invited us to join him in different things along the way. And you know, we really encourage writers to set publishing goals, you know, to set goals as they're working on their books. You have 13 books. So you are aware of this process too. But you know, as Christian writers or kingdom writers, you know, is it biblical to set goals? You know, I mean, you know, this whole thought of like being almost like driven can almost bring out this worldliness of I want to strive and accomplish these things and I want to be seen and known and, and yet, you know, there, there's this give and take. So talk, talk to us a little bit about that.

Well, it's definitely biblical to set God given goals. It's not biblical to set any goal that you just think of. And one of the songs I love at Christmas time, there's a song that I've loved for decades called Born to Die. So when Jesus came to earth, he was born to die. Yeah, that was like the goal. Well, most of us wouldn't put that on our goal list, Rachel. Right, okay. I don't think that was the one God called me to, hopefully. But you know, he does have specific goals for us. And as we explore how he created us and what our passions are, what our vision is, what who we're interested in, how we're interested in communicating to them, we can identify our God given goals as we go along and yield those up to him. And one of the, one of the exercises I like to do with my coaching clients, maybe we can do together here right now. Unless of course, you're driving, then don't do this. But otherwise grab a notebook or something, like a large newspaper or something big like that, and hold it up in front of you like you're reading it. So open the, open the notebook full out or the newspaper full out, hold it up in front of you and that's like a goal. Now you've got this goal and you've got this big idea and it's all in front of you and it's like, whoa. And what happens is that, that's we get into trouble, Shelly, is when the goal becomes the mini God and it's all we can see. So what I say now is, I say fold that thing down and put it between your two hands, kind of like praying hands on the outside of that notebook, on both sides of it. So that that notebook is now a slim centerpiece. And everything you're looking at all around it you can see. But that goal stays there in the middle and you can tell that you're getting what you were talking about, like self centered or you're getting off balance or the goal is becoming to God. You can tell that when all of a sudden it's open again, and you can't see anything but the goal. And when we do that with goals, what happens is that we break our families, we break our health, we break our productivity, we break our ideation or our creativity. I mean, it's like, you can tell all these things are. Are crashing, and it's because the goal has once again taken over your life, and so have goals. Get very clear about them. But remember that God's the God of your goals, so keep yielding them to him all the time.

Yeah, I love that because it is such a great visual. You know, I. I'm a very visual person, and it is easy to let things overtake your life. And I always say I'm a redeemed workaholic. So I've definitely been there before. And now, like, God just, you know, redirects me so quick. When I start, you know, going back to that, like you said, you know, just holding that up, and then it's like, nope, bring it back down. It's all good. And we can get so distracted or consumed on the path towards goal attainment. So how do we really stay focused on God while we're still going for the goal? So, you know, we're still trying to reach and achieve that goal, but make God the center.

Right. So however it is that you keep track of things, like, I'm a list person. Shelly, are you a list person?

I am.

You are?

Yeah.

You get so much done. And I always say when it's in my head, it's a million things to do. When I write it down, it's 122. But, you know, it's like you can organize 122 things or 12 things, but it's hard to organize a million things.

Right.

The million things swirling around in your head cause you to become incredibly ineffective because you're just swimming. Years ago, we bought a retail store, and neither Dave or I had ever owned a retail store. Both of us had teeny, tiny experience working in retail stores, like a year each, maybe over our whole histories.

Yeah.

So we got thrown into the deep end. We weren't with a chain, and so we had to come up with everything. We had to come up with the. The checkout system, and we had to come up with the pricing, and we had to come up with the end caps and had to come up with all the displays and the sales and everything. Shelly. It was so long before I could get my head around it. It took me. It took. I say it took two years before I saw Every process, one time, that's how big it was.

Wow.

It was so overwhelming. And for the first several months, I would go into the store as the owner, I would go into the store and I would just spin my wheels. I would work so hard, but at the end of six or ten hours, I'd look back and I'd think, what did I really do?

Yeah, I can't.

I don't know what I did, and I don't know if I'm helping, because I just didn't know what to do. And that's one of the reasons why I really like Kingdom writers, that's why I coach speakers, is because when you don't know what you don't know, you just spend so much time just trying to figure out the wheel. But the wheel's already been invented. So one of the ways to help you not get so distracted is to get some kind of a system in place where you can prioritize those million things to do that are really only 122, but you can can prioritize them into a process that's going to allow you to succeed instead of just allow you to just work and work and work so hard and get nowhere. So that is the key there, and I just have to tell you, the end of that story is once I understood what my problem was, is that I didn't have a plan and I didn't know how to make a plan, once I understood that that was my problem, the problem was quickly solved, and I was able to not only for myself, make plans and see that they got done, and we began to make great progress, but also for my entire team, I was able to very clearly define. These are the three projects I want you to work on today. And we were able to, as a team, make tremendous strides forward. Once I understood that, you have just simply got to have a plan that's feasible, that's doable, and then work your plan.

Yeah, it's. It really does make a huge difference. I even experienced this yesterday. I was working on a new product. It's going to be a toolkit. And I was just feeling overwhelmed. And I was like, oh, my goodness, this is what writers feel. So many times when you're just starting, especially if you don't have a lot of experience yet. And what I ended up doing is I just broke it down. I broke it down into aspects, and then I began to put those checklists under each thing. And then I just began, little by little, starting to get the things done. And by the end of the day, I mean, I had made a ton of progress and it felt so good. And I'm constantly prioritizing my list as well because it's really easy to have a lot of things on your list and then to, you know, just spend time doing the, you know, less important things. Whereas when you prioritize those most important tasks, that's when you're really going to start to move forward as well. And so, yeah, I love that. What would you say are a few of the biggest mistakes that go getters make and how can we avoid them?

I love to start all of my coaching client with mission vision work and if they haven't done it for themselves yet, or if you guys haven't done one for yourself, do it for yourself first. If you go to marnie.com you can just grab the mission vision training or it's part of the group mentoring program over there. But start with a mission and vision and get very clear about what God is calling you to do in your life. Like who are you? What are you hearing? And then I do a mission vision for every major project I take on, whether it's a new book, I'm going to plan a new summit, I'm going to start a new website, whatever it is, if it's a major project that's going to take more than, I'd say more than a month, I definitely do a mission vision because once you get clear about who you're doing it for, why you're doing it, how you're going to do it, what's the purpose of it and like that, then you're able to actually make the plan that makes sense. So start with the big picture. And then exactly what you said, Shelly. Work backwards, you work back, you go out to the end and you say, what is the end result here that I'm looking for? And then you work backward and what are the stages I'm going to have to do in between? And another question that we sometimes forget get and who am I going to need to be when I get there? Because sometimes there's some self, there's some work we need to do with Jesus to help us be ready for the next step. A lot of writers and you know, I know you guys, that's your focus is writing and but a lot of writers actually have to go in and do media or stand up in front of groups and speak. You may need to think about that in advance and have Jesus be helping you prepare for that as well as you're working toward a publishing date. So there's A lot of things to consider. And I think that a couple of the biggest mistakes are starting just at the beginning.

If you.

If you didn't know where you were going and you got in your car and you just started driving, you would eventually get somewhere, but who knows where it would be? You know, you would never do that. But sometimes with our projects, we feel like that's what we should be doing. And that is the biggest mistake, is not having a very clear destination in mind. Now, having said that, I know you've experienced this, too, Shelly. A lot of times I will go running for that destination that God's put in my heart. And I can see that carrot out there, and I am just going for it. And I get very close to achieving the goal, reaching the destination. And God says, hard, right? And I hate that. But at the same time, what I have come to understand is that he knows how to motivate me. And the thing that's at the hard right when I take the hard right, when he asks me to, right before I reach the goal that I thought I was going for, what I find is there's something hard right. There's something right there around the corner that I would have never even known existed or to ask for or was too big for me to imagine, or was too wonderful for me to imagine. But if I will be faithful to go for the goal that God puts in my heart, he will either let me achieve the goal that I went for, or he will give me something better. And this is the open hand principle here. So put your hand out with your palm up to the ceiling. Put your hand right out. And now what we do is we take that goal that we've created with God. We've worked through the mission and the vision. We know what we're going for. We put that goal right in our open hand, and that's where we leave it the whole time. What the biggest mistake is, is fisting your hand around that goal, right? And holding it so tight that literally, if you were to make a fist and hold it tight, within two minutes, you would be in pain, physical pain, because we actually weren't created to do that. We were only created to make a fist and hold it tight for very short periods of time. So what we were created to do is hold our hand and our hearts were open and let God be, orchestrating this whole thing. And what you'll find is if when you do that, other doors are going to open that are going to just work so synergistically together with the goal that along the way, it's going to be like, it's shoring up. And I see like a pine tree, you know, that's big at the bottom and teeny at the top. When we have a goal, a lot of times we just see a teeny straight up, like, Tamarack, you know, it's really a skinny tree. But as we all hold these goals in open hands, God, like, does this filling out work as it's growing toward the goal until, yeah, at the top, you get the goal. You get whatever prize it is that God has put out there and you've been working for with him, but you also have all of this additional support and influence, and you're sharing Jesus with more people than you imagined because you've held it with an open hand.

Yeah. I love so much of what you have said. And, you know, I think it's really easy to just fist up. And then, you know, it's like, okay, open up again. And it's just like, you know, there's reminders of, like, all right, I'm just gonna release this to you. And I call it, you know, you said the hard right. I call it the twists and turns of life. But as writers, we can think. Plot twist, right?

Yes.

And sometimes those things have turned out to be even, like you said, so much better than what I could have even thought or imagined. Like, when we first went out and I quit my pt, we were in rv, thought we were going to be traveling around the country speaking. And then all our speaking engagements stopped. It was during a downturn in the economy, and a lot of Christian schools weren't hiring speakers anymore. And we were sitting in our rv, looking at each other like, all right, what do we do now? And to be honest, it was very, very hard. But that's the year we wrote and published 23 books. And it really turned the whole trajectory of our business to what we do today. And. And so it's just so amazing what God will do when you keep that open hand, when you're. You're willing to take the steps of faith and see what God's going to do. But I love what you said about the mission and vision. And as we kind of start to close this time, maybe you could kind of walk a writer through the process. Maybe they're in the process of writing and publishing their book. Like, if they're working on a book project, what would you recommend? Or maybe you have an example with one of your own books or one of your clients of how they would come up with this mission and Vision.

So I wrote a book called Ebooks Idea to Amazon in 14 days. I literally had 16 days from the time that I got the speaking engagement where I was to speak seven times in three days in seven different cities talking about how to write an ebook. And I took the pinch hit engagement. That's what I was doing at the time was only pinch hitting. And I had written several ebooks so I knew how to do it. Except that what had happened is when I wasn't looking, the Amazon had released Kindle. And all of a sudden I realized, oh no, I need to teach this in 16 days.

Oh my goodness, all these groups and.

I have never myself published a Kindle ebook. So I knew that I needed to publish a Kindle ebook. So that was part of that mission vision there. Who's this for? How are you going to do it? How long do you have to prepare it? You know, how does it feel to you? That's one of the things we start with, is how it feels to you. Like, does it feel like fire, like wind, like water? And in what way? And so what happened with that mission vision? Once I was clear about that and I began to work on it, I realized that by the time I was ready to present the class, I would actually have the entire system in place to do it. And so I hired a bunch of outsourcers to help me with research and editing and, and copywriting and also the COVID work and all that. And literally 14 days later I wrote the book that later became an Amazon bestseller on how to write an ebook and get it published in 14 days. And so it's not what everybody should do, obviously is get their book published in 14 days. But it's what I had to do. And I was able to go through all of this and present everything from, from the very starting of the idea, all the way to how to make sure that it's legal, that you're not plagiarizing, how to get all of the research done, how to write it in such a way that people will want to help you promote it. It's all in there. And so that was one of the places a mission and vision was so important for me with that one. Otherwise I would have just been all over the world trying to figure out what to say these groups. But that one helped me to be able to identify exactly how to go forward. And it was actually to write a resource that all of them got for free, that attended and that later, like I said, went on to become an Amazon bestseller.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you so Much for sharing that. It's amazing that, you know, when. When God is in it, sometimes it can, you know, acceleration can happen. You know, typically, like you said, that's not the normal. But yeah, I love that once you got clear on what that mission and vision was, that then you could move from that overwhelm and move forward. So what would you have in closing? Just encouragement. For Kingdom writers who are wanting to set goals and really just keep God at the center, what kind of encouragement do you want to share with them today?

I think one of my favorite verses in the Bible, I have so many. But Hebrews 11:6 is such a great, great verse that says, in order to please God, we must believe he exists and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. And I love to keep that verse in the forefront because when I truly believe that God not only is there, but that he is helping me, that he is leading me, that he wants to reward me, that he wants to use me, that he wants to flow through me, when I actually believe that with all of my heart, soul, mind and spirit and all my might, what happens is I become just unstoppable. Right. Shelly, you've seen this and experienced this. When we are a little nervous about it, like, I'm not sure. I don't know really why I'm here. I don't know what I'm supposed to do when we're feeling that way, like I felt at the beginning when we owned the store, so overwhelmed and confused. It's very difficult to reach our goals from that place. And okay, it's okay to start there. Think of yourself as a new baby in the goal setting area and just start to start to learn to listen, start to learn to talk, start to learn to toddle and to walk and don't worry if you fall down. But the goal in the end, God's heart for us is that we are listening, following him, and actually accomplishing in this world everything that God put us here to do. And it starts with being. And so just to remember that you're his, that he created you just the way you are. You're not crazy for liking what you like. You're not weird for saying it the way you say it. It's like all God's plan. And there are readers, there are listeners who want and need what God has placed inside of you. So be courageous, friend, and accomplish the work God has called you to do by walking faithfully with him, moment by moment.

Yeah. So good. So much richness in there. Thank you so much for sharing this today and if people want to get connected with you further, what's the best way for them to do that?

That yeah, for my coaching and mentoring program or to check out what I'm doing, you can go to my website, marnie.com which is Amazon. Mary A R N is in Nancy ie just marnie.com and if you are looking to speak to help promote your book or your message, I also host WomenSpeakers.com and Shelly, you've been a featured speaker over there for a long, long time. Love promoting you and all the women speakers who are Christians with a message to share that God has put in your heart. So you can check out womenspeakers.com as well.

Yes. And I highly recommend if you are a speaker, check out the site. I have gotten bookings through that and so it's such a great, great resource that you've put together. Marnie and connect with Marnie. She has so much to offer. Oh my goodness. So prolific. And thank you again for being here. Thank you all for listening and we love you and we will see you in the next next episode. All right, bye bye.

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