In this episode…

Are you someone where the clock strikes midnight on January 1st and you blurt out the first thing which comes to mind as your goal for the year?

Or is Big Vision your middle name?

In this episode, we’re talking about how to use this time of year productively, separate yourself from the pack and create empowered goals to start off 2021 ahead of the game!

So let’s dive in!

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Amanda: Welcome to episode 31 of the Heart Driven Hustle podcast, we’re your hosts, Amanda and Kingsley.

Are you someone where the clock strikes midnight on January 1st and you blurt out the first thing which comes to mind as your goal for the year  or is Big Vision your middle name?

In this episode, we’re talking about how to use this time of year productively and create empowered goals to start off 2021 ahead of the game.

[00:01:00]Can you believe this is the last episode of the year?

Kingsley: Yeah, I can because it’s a rot bump up against the end of the year. It’s December it’s between Christmas and new years. And yeah, let’s jump straight in and do this one.

Amanda: Well, it’s that funny time of year, isn’t it. And I actually listened to another podcast very recently, the Ed Mylett show and he sums this time of year up perfectly.

He calls it separation seasons.

Kingsley: Funny, funny name, separations seasons. Tell me more about this. I listened to it myself. It’s actually really intriguing.

Amanda: Yeah. So he articulates that this particular time of year is when people will step up and separate from others. It could be from others. It could be for themselves, but this is a time of year when people will step up and become so much more.

And it’s not just at Christmas that this occurs, this can occur throughout the year. But this  is the time when it [00:02:00] happens for most people. And it could be separation around many different facets of life. So it could be in career.

It could be in health, it could be around money and things like that. But it’s a chance that you get to start overlapping other people. He says that Christmas day is just a day, but quite often it turns into a week.

Kingsley: Maybe even a month, you know you come into the 15th of December and you go, Oh geez, it’s time to kind of Slack off.

For us in Australia, summer’s definitely well into the swing of things. So everyone probably knocks off around, you know, the 15th of December, if not earlier, and people don’t start coming back to work or even being present at work until, you know, early January, mid January. So. You know, people are taking three, four weeks off and then, then they’re waiting all this time to get back into it.

Amanda: Yeah.  it really is the employee mindset I used to see in some of my past jobs, is that pretty much first to December, it was all about Christmas lunches, Christmas [00:03:00] gatherings, doing as little as you can to get by. And then, like you said, Kingsley, it’s about returning in mid to late January.

It’s pretty much two months that you’ve had often not done a whole lot, but that’s very much the employee mindset, isn’t it?

Kingsley: Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. So I think this  separation season talks about doubling down during that time when everyone else is kind of taking a break. Or you even traditionally would take a break. For me it’s almost like your you’re overlapping yourself. You’re saying, no, I’m not gonna do the same that I did last year. And you know, I didn’t get the results. Maybe you didn’t get the results you got last year. So this year you’re going to knuckle down in December and January because. You you’re going to find another month almost, you know, it’s the 13th month of the year that you’re going to find and you’re going to be able to work at which I think for me, that’s kind of rings, rings home as far as beating yourself and doing better for yourself because you know, you, I don’t always [00:04:00] put myself up against other people, but rather than myself or what we’re doing,

Amanda: so true. It’s not about comparing yourself to others, but what would the old me do? How can the new me be that little bit better and it doesn’t need to be an absolute mile. It can just be, what’s one thing that I can do today that the old me wouldn’t do.

Kingsley: Exactly. Yeah.  We’re not talking about doing 16 hour days in December and January  but being present or  making headway towards the goals that you want to achieve for next year.

Why not start them in December? Why not start them tomorrow rather than waiting till January? Because you know, if you wait till January, You’re not going to do anything until February

You’ve

Amanda: missed that short window of opportunity that you have. And I know for us, in particular, being in the health and wellness industry, what does everyone do come new year’s Eve?

Well, that new year’s resolution is to get fit, get healthy. And you’ve got that short window to act upon it. So if we’re sitting down, not doing much, then [00:05:00] we’ve missed out. So for us, it is so important to leap into as I’m sure you should too. So anyway, that brings us to the, the topic of today’s podcast, which is all about empowered goal setting.

And what a year this has been, it’s been both extremes. It’s been the worst year for some, and it’s been the best year for others. And I know for me, personally, my view on it is life is largely what you make of your circumstances. It can be so easy to get caught up in what’s going on around you and to hand over the control to someone else.

And when you do that, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed and helpless, but if you’re able to look out what is within your control instead, and focus only on that and go within, then you’re able to feel a lot more fluent and in alignment of your own goals and your vision and what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

Kingsley: Yeah. There’s a lot that’s happened this year and there’s a lot that’s out of our control, but if you focus on what you can control and you make headways, then it’s a very different year to what other people have had. And [00:06:00] you know, we, we feel that we’ve had a great year apart from having bub, you know, we’ve made headways in our careers.

And it’s, it’s all been because we focus on what we can control and we keep on making headways rather than going, Oh God, it’s all too hard. And

Amanda: kind of sit around,

Kingsley: sit around and watch Netflix for the next six months.

Amanda: Totally. Well, let’s make 2021 the best year. Not only for ourselves, but for you guys too.

So let’s jump in.

Goal setting. So for some people it’s less of a thought out approach to goal setting, and it’s more of a spontaneous thing that’s thought up on new year’s Eve. Like my goal is to lose weight or my goal is to read more or maybe my goal is just to be healthy. These sound really great on the surface, but these kind of goals just don’t last.

And the stats show that by the second weekend, the majority of these types of goals or new year’s resolutions, if you want to call it that have been given up upon,  and we don’t want that for you. We want you to set empowered goals, ones [00:07:00] that are gonna drive you and inspire you to create something great.

So this is the process that we use.

Goal setting is often thought of as a results oriented task, but this is one place that you can come unstuck. It shouldn’t focus merely on the outcome.  It’s about the journey that it takes to get you there.

So think of it like reading a really amazing novel.

If you read it with the intention of just getting to the end, you’re going to get there, but you’re going to be left with this feeling of, well, what now, once you’ve finished the book and goals are exactly the same. Too often they are outcome based and they focus purely on the end result. You tick the goal off the list and  that initial elation for the sense of accomplishment wears off. You’re left feeling really lost and wondering, well, wait, next it’s like that tick done next. Instead, do you want to take the time to savour the journey? So celebrate those small wins. And this is something that I was completely guilty of.

I would simply go yep. Done onto the next thing, [00:08:00] but I’ve made a real conscious point of trying to celebrate those small milestones along the way, because when you start to do that, you can lift the foot off the pedal and, and really just bask in what you’ve done and go. Okay. Okay. That was really cool. I did that.

And it encourages you to keep doing it again. So when you do to achieve these small milestones, think about what have you learned along the way?

what skills or attributes have you gained or have you had to summon something within you to overcome that adversity?

Step back and take stock of the growth that you’ve had because knowing that we were able to achieve something really amazing allows you to then build upon it for the next. So this year, try the following goal setting process that you can feel much more empowered.

And the first step is around visualizing and manifesting.

So create your vision for the next year. Think specifically what it is that you’d like to achieve. So what do you want in 2021? How will you have [00:09:00] developed as a person once you get there? Where will you be? And what level of success will you have achieved? Visualize it in great detail.

Visualize what it would look like to achieve this vision and what it would mean for you in life. So what does it look like? Who is around you? How do you spend your day-to-day life? How would it feel? And think in terms of your five senses and really experience it. So smell, touch, sight, sound and even taste it! Why not?! Taste the success?

It’s really important to be very clear and specific here. So write it down, draw a picture, speak it aloud. However it is that you tend to express yourself, do that. And the intention here is take your vision from the abstract form in your mind, and to get a lot of substance, because when you take something from the metaphysical and bring it into the physical form, you start to bring that idea to life.

Next thing to do is to set aligned [00:10:00] goals. So now that you’ve created your vision and you know what you want, it’s time to set goals, which are going to drive you forward in this direction. And these goals shouldn’t purely be around business or career, but think of in terms of the other categories and areas of your life too.

And so, I mean, yes, this is all about pleasure too, because, well, what would life be without pleasure. So maybe you see travel on the horizon either locally or abroad. I know I do personally. I mean, overseas travel is probably something that is off the list in 2021, who knows again, not worrying about things outside my control.

So what am I going to do? Well, I’m going to concentrate on traveling locally because I know I can do that, that I can fill that void by staying local within Australia and recreating the exotic experiences here by seeking out new adventures.

So the trick here is to think about your highest values and start integrate these into your goals. And you’ve probably guessed by now, but one of mine is travel and experience. That’s [00:11:00] something that really appeals to me and that’s what I will always integrate into my goals to help me feel much more aligned and wanting to achieve those.

So think in terms of these four categories:

Professional think in terms of career, leadership, business.

Personal family, fun adventure.

Now your Physical health, your strength, maybe your fitness.

And profitable. So finance savings and purchases.

ANd I’m sure you’ve probably heard about smart goals. You know, the things we talk about in school, they need to be specific. They need to be measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. And when setting your goals do keep these factors in mind, but also consider the following additional points.

Make sure that these are your goals and not someone else’s. It can be very tempting to see what someone else has achieved and think, yeah, I want that.

But if the goal doesn’t align with your values or your vision, you’re more inclined to abandon it, which is quite often what happens with new year’s Eve [00:12:00] resolutions, everyone in the circle start saying, I want this, I want that. And you think, yeah, that’s that sounds great.

I want that too. But if it’s not yours, you’re going to be one of those people that abandons it pretty quickly.

So, what you want to do is own the goal. You’re not going to feel passionate about it or driven enough to pursue it,

create your goals and then take space too. So step away from them for a week or so before returning back, just to ensure that they really do resonate with you, because I know when you get your head stuck in something, you think, yep. That seems it that’s right. And then you revisit it. A week a month, a year later.

And you think, what was I thinking? It’s not me at all.

The other thing to consider is if you can speak in positives rather than negatives, and I’ll explain what I mean here. So identify what you will achieve rather than what you will avoid.  This puts our minds into a really positive space that allows us to think bigger.

However, there is a caveat here. For some people, they are [00:13:00] driven by moving away from dissatisfaction rather than moving towards pleasure. And if you are one of those people and that is your driver, then do that. So an example of this would be, I don’t want to have to work in my nine to five anymore.

That’s someone that is driven by getting away from dissatisfaction. Someone who is driven towards pleasure. They would say, I want to create my own business. See how there’s a difference between the two it’s only very slight, but if you’re someone that is motivated by getting away from dissatisfaction, then use that kind of language because that is yours own it.

And use that in your goals.

The other thing to do is think big enough that it scares you don’t choose a goal that you can easily achieve traveling along the same trajectory that you’re going at the moment. You want something that is going to cause you to increase your effort, something that is going to cause you to extend yourself to a point where it becomes uncomfortable, because discomfort is where the growth happens.

You’ve [00:14:00] probably heard Grant Cardone or Mr. 10X and he’s really famous for saying this. He says set a goal and then times it by 10. Can you imagine that? I mean, even if you don’t achieve what that big, hairy, audacious goal is, just imagine how far you will have propelled yourself forward by aiming for that massive goal.

You’re very likely to crush your smaller sensible goal along the way, even if you don’t quite reach that 10 X goal. So think about it in terms of that you haven’t failed instead, you absolutely smashed your earlier goal.

When you start aiming for something really big, it gets you to also question, well, how can I achieve this?

And it sets you up to think much bigger and outside your normal realm of possibilities. Yes, it’s daunting. But it’s also going to drive you and lead to questioning whether your current systems and processes will actually enable you to achieve your goals, or do they require redefining and streamlining?

Asking ‘ how can I?’ is such a powerful question.

Something else to note here is [00:15:00] that goals are often bigger than the year ahead. So even though we’re doing goal setting here for 2021, don’t let that limit you. There is nothing wrong with having five, 10, 50 year, a hundred year goals. In fact, you can even have them beyond your own lifetime too. So what are some legacy goals?

And I don’t want to scare you away because. That can seem really daunting in itself, but really smart way of creating goals, which drive you towards your bigger vision are having goals, which extended beyond the year.

Now, what this means for the purpose of creating a 2021 goals is that the deadline for this goal doesn’t need to end in December, 2021.  In fact, there’s nothing wrong with hitting the end of the year with a list of incomplete tasks. Instead, what you’re going to do is spread the workload for this goal across the entire period, whether it be five years, 10 years, whatever it may be with smaller milestones being accomplished by the end of this year.

And what you’ll be left with is a sense of accomplishment and a feeling that you are on your way to creating that [00:16:00] much bigger vision beyond 2021.

The third thing to do is to create a system of milestones. So I know I just touched on that, but this is where we really start to break it down. So whilst it’s great to have a vision and goals, having a system is what will enable you to get there.

When you have a really big goal, it can sometimes seem quite unattainable, but by chunking it down into a system with mini milestones, you’ll be kept accountable and a goal feels so much easier to actually achieve.

Your system will essentially be a series of repeatable steps which progress you towards that goal.

And the best way to derive this is to begin with the end goal in mind, and then work backwards. So let’s just say, for example, your goal is to create a part-time coaching business, which pays you an annual income, $50,000 by the end of 2021. You’re probably thinking, well, it’s a bit overwhelming. How do I do that?

But let’s break it down. So $50,000 spread across a year equates to just over $4,000 per [00:17:00] month. And let’s say that you can charge $150 an hour per session. So per month, that equates to around 28 hours of coaching. See, that doesn’t seem all that hard. And if you consider that how many days are in a month?

Well, on average, about 30. How many are you actually working now on average around 20? All of a sudden it’s just over one hour per day, it’s really is quite achievable.

Now that, you know, these numbers, you can start figuring out what that actually looks like.

You know that some clients will want to work with you once a month and some will want to work with you multiple times. So you start getting an idea of how many new clients you’re going to need to bring on each month. So, what does this look like in terms of bringing on new clients? How many conversations do you need to be having each day to achieve these numbers?

This is where it becomes really important to understand your numbers here. It’s for this reason.

So you can start with your end goal in mind and then reverse engineer it to figure out the steps that you need to put in between.

From [00:18:00] here, you’ll then set up your schedule accordingly to provide sufficient time to achieve your daily milestones, which connect to that greater purpose.

Each month, set aside time to review your numbers and keep yourself on track too.

And that’s really important. It’s about holding yourself accountable.

Now this example that I’ve given you here, this is a linear example. It’s all about trading time for money. And as we’ve touched on previously, if you can set yourself up to create residual income, this is where the smart money is.

Residual income is something which pays you while you’re sleeping. So all of a sudden you’re going to start seeing a much greater return on your time. In fact, you don’t even need to be working, to start earning an income, which is pretty cool.  There’s a book that I read earlier this year called Beach Money by Jordan Adler.

And he goes into this in quite a lot of depth and  I highly recommend checking it out because you’ll come out of that with a complete understanding of what residual income is and go, why didn’t I start this earlier?

This then brings us to the fourth and [00:19:00] final step, which is review and reflect.

Now as this process is just as much about the journey as the end outcome. It is important to take time, to stop and reflect upon your progress.

When creating your system schedule in time to reflect where you’ve come from and where you’re going. Acknowledging the progress that you have made and seeing how far you come is motivation in itself.

It’s a way of reminding yourself that you can do this.

Consider what has worked. What hasn’t worked. And what can you refine along the way? What did you find easy or did you find difficult? What do you need to do more of? Or what do you need to do less of or even stop altogether? And as through considering how far you’ve come, that it’s really possible to imagine how much further you can go.

Do this process on a monthly basis, and then take the time at the end of the year to repeat it whilst considering whether or not you lived up to your full potential and whether there’s any lessons that you can take forward into the next year.

Now what happens when the going gets tough and you fall off the wagon [00:20:00] because I know in business it happens.

Life happens. Well, you need to understand your reason why. And we talked about this in depth in episode two. So right back when we first launched this podcast, when you know your reason why. You are so much more likely to stick it through thick and thin because your reason is bigger than your excuses.

Why is it important for you to achieve this goal?

What does it mean in terms of your overall vision?

your reason why needs to be so big that the thought of not a shave yet becomes inconceivable. And when you make it about something bigger than the doubt you’re experiencing in that tiny little moment, you’re going to be propelled forward and then back into momentum again.

So there are my four steps around how to create really empowered goals rather than just goals as you may have done in other years. So let’s do a quick recap because there was a lot of information in there and I went through it quite quickly.

So first of all, visualize [00:21:00] and manifest, what do you want this to be? Second create align goals. So, you know, your values, you know, what your greater vision is well ensure that your goals that you’re setting align directly back to that. Step three is create a system and milestones.  Start with the end goal in mind and then reverse engineer, what the steps are to get you into place that is going to be your system.

And then number four is review and reflect. So what’s working well. What can you do more of? What should you stop doing altogether? Take time to see what’s working and what’s not.

And then what tweaks you might need to make to help you get there in your goals.

So how has your 2020 did you achieve what you wanted to achieve? For me, mine turned out quite differently to how I expected the end result though, was pretty much spot on. I mean, the journey itself, pivoted turned, it looped the loop.

It was very different, but [00:22:00] I think that’s the point of this. It’s about being able to adapt to the circumstances and what’s going on in order to keep that end goal in mind and to help get you there.

What does 2021 look like? Well, I know what mine looks like.

So how does yours look, guys? I can’t wait to hear all about it.

Happy goal setting, and we’ll see you all in the new year!