Grow With Soul: Ep. 91 Diving Deep On The Inward Attainment Map
When you have a problem in your business, whether that's with getting going or making a big decision, we want the magic answer and a system to follow, not to have to turn inwards. The Inward Attainment Map is the best of both worlds, providing a structure to help you work out the answers you need. In today’s episode, I wanted to talk through the Inward Attainment Map methodology and how you can start using some of the key milestones within it to start making progress in your projects and shift your life onto a more fulfilling track.
Here's what I talk about in this episode:
All about the Inward Attainment Map – how to use key milestones to create a shift in your life
We are often drawn to the ‘must-dos’ when we feel disconnected and uncertain in our business
Over time your values and priorities shift – your idea of fulfillment and attainment will change as well
Links I mention:
Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 91 of Grow With Soul. In today’s episode, I wanted to talk through the Inward Attainment Map methodology, and how you can start using some of the key milestones within it to start making progress in your projects, and shift your life onto a more fulfilling track.
We are often drawn to “top tricks” and “must do’s” as silver bullets when we feel a bit disconnected and uncertain in our business. I find that it is in times of discomfort that we are most susceptible. We just want it to end, so we home in on the symptom that hurts the most, and think that if we fix it, everything will be ok.
Maybe that’s growing your Instagram following, starting a podcast, closing down a product range. I think we can all relate to the fleeting thought of “if I just had 10,000 Instagram followers everything would be fine”. But the trouble is, discomfort isn’t caused by that one thing, it is the cause.
We like the silver bullets because the alternative is hard and long, and without clear instructions. You’ve likely listened to people like me talk about needing to go inwards and connect to your why and act in alignment with your values, and you’ve thought “well sure, that makes sense” – but without a way ‘in’, a structure to follow, it’s near on impossible to actually do that. The silver bullets are attractive because there’s a definite set of rules and a tangible outcome at the end. Turning inward to figure out what you really want, less so.
This is what the Inward Attainment Map does. I spoke about the origins of this methodology back in episode 84, but the short version is that it is the refinement of how I help people find what they want to do into a single methodology. It’s not a map to perpetual growth, but to attaining your individual fulfilment and success from the inside out.
Crucially what the IAM does is take all that amorphous theory about values and alignment and turn it into something you can work through. So you can feel like you’re making progress, like you’re doing it, and what you’re doing is the stuff that makes a real difference.
Important to note is that the IAM is a cycle, not a straight line. Over time your values and priorities change and shift, and therefore your idea of fulfilment and attainment does too. This doesn’t mean that you’re fickle or never satisfied – it means you’ve reached the end of an IAM cycle and it’s time to reconnect inwardly.
So where are you currently on the Inward Attainment Map cycle, and, more importantly, what can you do to feel you’re moving forward? Below I’ve laid out the detail of each stage so you can recognise where you’re at, and I’ve included a key action step for you to go and start applying it today.
ALIGN
At the beginning stage, you’re feeling lost and stuck, looking around for inspiration and not knowing what you want. You might be right at the beginning of your business journey, or several years in, but what has happened is that your values have shifted, and what you are striving for hasn’t moved with them – thus, you’re out of alignment. You will likely be feeling directionless and easily swayed, and common situations are where you find yourself somewhere you don’t want to be, and not knowing how you got there, and when everything looks good on paper but you’re not excited.
At the Align stage, we are trying to change our thought patterns from “what does fulfilment look like?” to “what does fulfilment feel like?” Because at this stage, we’re feeling easily swayed and disconnected, striving toward what fulfilment looks like is risky – you can start to follow someone else’s idea, or what you think you should want, rather than what you really do.
So the key action step of Align is to create a vision of what fulfilment feels like to you – imagine how the most joyful, purposeful, successful version of you feels and how they live day to day and isolate those feelings so they can become a goal. This process is walked through in The Planning Kit, so I’ll link that in the show notes for you. Reconnecting with (or connecting for the first time with) your purpose and clarifying your values are also key here, so you can see it all it back and white and give yourself a benchmark to go from.
ACCEPT
Once you have an awareness around your values, and you know that changes need to happen, you meet resistance. You are full of excuses and reasons about why you can’t do what you need to in order to make that change, or why something won’t work for you, and you feel overwhelmed by fears and blocks that make you want to reach for the sticking plaster or, worse, stay where you are. You’ll often be in the Accept stage when you look around and realise this little shift or pivot has more work than you expected, or when you’re wondering whether you’re cut out for this after all.
Rather than try to push down or overcome these feelings we need to accept them as a part of the process and change “how do I overcome my blocks?” to “how do I work alongside my blocks?”.
A Key Action Step: understand the roots of blocks to work with them. Rather than shy away, look them right in the eye with compassion for yourself and trace back their origins to understand why they exist, and take away some of the power they hold over you. Practice sitting in the discomfort of them, and find ways you can do what you’re afraid of with your fear sat next to you.
A big part of this is also learning to coach yourself around this discomfort by asking bigger questions. We often ask the small questions, like “how do I get 10k Instagram followers as soon as possible”, rather than more curious questions that can get us to more expansive solutions. For example, a question I often posit to students and Trail members when they ask a question like that is “what result do you want, and how can you get that result?”. This helps you to think outside of the narrow realms of your small question and come up with a more creative answer.
APPLY
The third stage is the fun bit. You are feeling positive and inspired and can’t wait to crack on with making changes and trying new things. However, you have a hundred different ideas you want to follow through on and no clear direction – you know where you want to be, but not how you’re going to get there. You’re feeling excited and enthusiastic, but a little scattered and impatient too. You’re often at the Apply stage if you’re working on lots of projects at once or when you have that new year or new season energy. You can get sucked into doing all the things at this point, rather than building clear stepping stones, so we want to move from “what things can I do?” to “what things take me to my vision?”.
A Key Action Step: create a values-led roadmap that works backwards from your vision, including only activities and steps that feel good and aligned with your values. Again, this is covered in The Planning Kit. To go deeper here, getting really clear on your strengths and motivations enables you to plot a roadmap that is most likely to be sustainable (because you can make progress and feel motivated to get going) and work quickly (because you’re not having to learn how to do things before you can see any results).
ASCEND
In this final stage, you are living it. You are immersed in your vision and roadmap, feeling calm and clear about what you’re aiming for while seeking momentum and signs of change. Here we do not want to exist in a purgatory of waiting to reach the vision, but practice being “towards and within”: working towards your vision and living within it. You will be feeling on top of things and grounded, perhaps with a little impatience or a wandering eye for new projects.
Common situations of Ascend are doing focused work on a project you feel confident about or doing more of what you love in a day than what you don’t. This means changing “how long until I get where I want to?” to “how can I experience my vision today?”.
The key with Ascend is that the milestones are much more mindset-based. It’s easy to get complacent here, to think that you’ve cracked it and have got this business thing down, and then you stop your mindset practices and find yourself drifting off course. A key action is to practice Conscious Choosing. To avoid drifting from your vision and piling up extra tasks, get into the habit of consciously choosing what you do. When an email asking you to do something drops into your inbox, consciously choose whether or not you do it, rather than let fear or people pleasing control you. Being conscious of your time energy, having systems that keep you in check and always working to experience fulfilment in your every day, not just some day, are other key components of Ascend.
So I hope this short tour of the Inward Attainment Map has been enlightening, and I hope you see or feel where you might be on the Map and have some new ways of thinking about any discomfort you’re feeling.
