In today’s episode, I’m sharing with you my personal guide to powerful goal setting.
It’s always a good time to set goals. I love setting goals at all times throughout the year, however, if you’re reading this as it drops, then you’ll know that right now goals are a pretty hot topic.
I wanted to share with you what my key principles and guiding strategies are when it comes to powerful goal setting.
If you still aren’t 100% sure of your goals, your goals aren’t exciting you, or you’re worried that you haven’t set goals in a way that’s going to help you, this is going to be a really helpful episode.
Let’s dive in!
Before I give you all of my tips and tricks for powerful goal setting, I want us to be clear on what the number one job of having a goal is.
We know that goal setting is good, and we know that knowing what our goals are can really help us to achieve them. But what is its principal job? And have you even really thought about what a goal’s job is?
Before I started a business, I thought that setting goals was good at giving me direction. If I had a clear goal, then that was the direction that I was aiming for.
But since having a business and having set goals hundreds of times throughout the last 10 years, I have grown to realise more and more that the most powerful goals for me are the ones that create expansion. Which is actually quite different to direction.
Expansive goals are powerful goals.
They’re goals that expand your capacity to achieve, to receive, to move closer to your dreams, and to affect people to make change… simply just by SETTING them!
When I think about the goals that have been the best for me, their job was not direction… my strategy is the thing that tells me what I’m going to do, not my goals.
The goals that really do an amazing job of helping me change my life and other people’s lives, and get me closer to the big dreams that I have, are actually the ones that create a sense of expansion.
I love to take that approach and get super clear on:
- What am I setting this goal for?
- Why am I setting this goal?
- What is its job?
Having the realisation that the job of my goal is to create expansion – therefore, I want to set a goal that feels expensive – makes the type of goals I set far different. It also really helps me to narrow in on the goals that are going to be the most powerful.
I just wanted to plant that little seed before we go into my guide to goal setting.
Sometimes we just set goals because we have to set goals and because we know it’s a good thing to do. But the more that we’re clear on its job, the more effectively it can do it.
Do you want goals that direct you? Or do you want goals that expand you?
I know which one feels way better for me…
Here are my top seven sexy little tips for powerful goal setting:
1. Pay attention to your resistance and thoughts
Your resistance to setting goals, setting certain types of goals or setting big goals is exactly the mindset fodder you need to uncover in order to be able to achieve those goals.
People often come to me and say that they can’t set big income goals because then they don’t hit them and they get upset.
But that’s the mindset piece! When you don’t reach your goals, you get upset by them…
Do you want that to be your reality? Or do you want to let that go?
Do you want to spend your life avoiding goals because they might upset you? Or do you want to live in a world where setting goals expands you? Where setting goals helps you achieve amazing things?
I know which world I’d rather be in.
Instead of having a fixed mindset and accepting your fate as never being able to set certain types of goals, or only ever setting super achievable goals that don’t really excite you, wouldn’t you rather shift it?
Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where you set ginormous, scary goals, and it takes you closer and closer to the life and business of your dreams?
Wouldn’t you rather have this excitement, expectation and anticipation when you set these giant goals, and even if you don’t get there, you can still see that the journey has been completely worthwhile, therefore, it doesn’t derail you or send you off on a downward spiral if you don’t hit your goals?
I know which one I’d rather live in!
Pay attention to the resistance. Pay attention to those pop-up thoughts.
Every single one of those pieces is your opportunity to choose what you want to believe.
Ask yourself: Is that what I want to believe? Or is that something I want to change? Is that a thought I want to hold on to? Or am I ready to let go of it?
The choice is yours…
That’s my first juicy tip for powerful goal setting – pay attention!!
2. Aim bigger
My guide to powerful goal setting is to aim bigger.
I know for some people, that feels really tricky because they’ve had experiences where they’ve set big goals and they’ve got really excited about them but they didn’t achieve them and it created that negative downward spiral.
But as I said with tip number one, I think that our job as online business owners and entrepreneurs is to become more and more comfortable with setting and not hitting our goals.
Up until the end of 2022, I have never hit one of my 100-day income goals. Never.
I’ve run 100 Days of Progress Art since 2015, and for six years, I never hit my goal. But over those six years, I’ve significantly increased my income. I’ve significantly scaled down the time that I invest in my business. I have helped thousands and thousands of people.
Do I regret setting goals that I didn’t hit? No, because those goals did their job. They expanded me. They were expansive.
As far as I’m concerned, there’s no harm in setting goals that feel a bit obnoxious.
In fact, if you do challenge yourself to aim a little bigger, perhaps you’ll uncover more of that juicy mindset fodder and be able to clear some of the limiting beliefs and blocks that you have and expand your capacity to receive. You can expand your capacity to earn, achieve, and grow.
I want to just plant that seed. Aim bigger!
The times when I’ve been in masterminds and biz friendship groups where we’ve nudged each other to set bigger goals, have been the times where those goals have been smashed and this amazing expensiveness has happened.
When I first aimed for a million-dollar year in my business, the benefit wasn’t just in achieving the million-dollar year. I didn’t hit it the first time I set it. I’ve not yet had a million-dollar revenue year in my business. But the first time I set the goal to have a million-dollar year, I started asking different questions.
I started asking questions such as:
- Is the structure of my business able to support a million dollars in revenue?
- Do I have the customer service capacity for a million dollars worth of sales?
- Do I have the team support I need?
- Is this my million-dollar team?
The changes that I made as a result of that very big, very audacious goal, were extremely beneficial beyond whether I hit the goal or not.
Whether I hit the goal or not, I made changes to my team, the structure of my business, and the systems and processes that I used. All of those things were for the better and set me up for what I hope to be my first actual million-dollar revenue year in 2023.
As you can see, simply aiming bigger can create that sense of expansion. Part of the expansion is that the questions that you ask yourself and the decisions that you make are through the lens of being someone who is able and capable of achieving that big goal. THAT is powerful goal setting.
3. The earlier the biz journey, the looser the goals
When it comes to creating business growth and setting goals for your business, if you are in the early stages of business where you’re still learning who you want to serve, what your price points are going to be, what your model of business is, what works, and what your conversion rates are, sometimes it’s enough to just set a loose revenue goal and be open to the possibility of how you might get there.
Sometimes I see people in their first stages of business, setting goals about having 15 VIP clients pay them $2,000. The goal is so specific and so narrow that it doesn’t allow enough flexibility to go with what you learn along the way.
The narrowness of the goal can sometimes be limiting.
Remember, the goal is expansion rather than direction.
The earlier you are in your business, the more I would recommend that you focus on an expansive loosey goosey goal. I don’t recommend being prescriptive about where that goal is going to be achieved, or the specifics of that goal.
One of my goals at the moment is having Conference tickets sell out because I know that I’m capable of selling out Conference tickets. We’ve never sold out Conference tickets before but that’s a really expansive goal for me.
I can be specific about that because I have Conferences set up, it’s a proven entity, and we’ve already sold almost 100 tickets.
That really helps to give me that confidence and clarity around a more specific goal.
The earlier in your business, the looser those goals need to be. You don’t need to be quite so prescriptive with your powerful goal setting.
4. Big goals, small list
This is actually a mantra that we adopt in the Heart-Centred Business Planning Posse.
Woman with Planner doing powerful goal setting
When it comes to creating a plan on how you’re going to achieve your goals, sometimes we can default to believing that the bigger the goal, the busier we will need to be. The bigger the goal, the more things we need to do to achieve those goals.
Our mantra inside the Planning Posse is: Big goals, small list.
By list, I mean to-do list.
This then starts to pop up and show you where you may have some beliefs around what’s possible, or whether that’s actually doable.
I get a lot of #ButTash’s in the early stages of the Planning Posse each year when I talk about this.
So many people think that they need a big list because they’re early in their business journey and they’ve got a lot to get done.
To that I say: What if you could achieve your goal of $10k months without having a lot to get done? What if we could just do it a little bit easier, and do it with a much more focused to-do list?
You can see it hit them when they realise that they’ve been telling themselves that they have to work harder because they:
- Are in startup
- Have children
- Are a type A personality
- CAN do more so feel they SHOULD do more
- Love working hard
I’ve had people say to me that they love their business so much that they’re willing to give it 60 hours a week and have a giant to-do list.
If that’s you, I want you to think about how you’re training your business. What are you training your business to expect from you if you’re setting out with the intention that this is a 60-hour-a-week business?
That’s just something to have a think about.
Notice your resistance to it. Notice what your #ButTash is right now.
Maybe you think you need a big to-do list because you’re neurodiverse. But research has actually shown that the smaller the list you have, the more likely you are to achieve it. Especially if you are neurodiverse. Just saying!
I want to know what your reason is. Why can’t you have big goals and a small to-do list? Why is that not possible for you?
That’s your mindset fodder.
This is why goal setting is so sexy. Just the action of setting the goal itself uncovers so much that we have in our limiting beliefs and in our mindset that tells us what is and isn’t possible for us.
You get to decide: Do I want to keep these things? Or do I want to let them go?
5. Make the goal scary but not disconnecting
Sometimes I’ve set goals and I’ve just blown them out of the water. I’ve set a goal and then decided to randomly double it. Most of the time it was when I was working with a mentor.
I would tell my mentor that I had a goal of a $50K month, and they’d tell me to make it a $100K month.
Within three days of setting the goal, I’d realise that it was so far away that I’d lost all connection to it.
It’s not just scary and exciting. It’s actually either completely terrifying or so far away that I’ve already decided it’s not possible for me and that the level of work, change and shift in my identity that’s required for me to actually achieve that in a month’s time is so big that I checkout.
When it comes to aiming bigger, aim for that scary, exciting, slightly uncertain zone.
Just pay attention to those thoughts. If it’s so big that you’re completely terrified and you’re shut down or disconnected, then it’s not doing its job of expansion. That’s the key to powerful goal setting.
6. It’s not always about hitting your goals
You’ve probably picked this up all the way through this podcast episode.
The power of setting goals is not just in achieving goals.
That’s where a lot of people get into goal-setting resistance. They don’t understand that setting and working towards goals has so many other benefits. They’re just fixated on hitting that goal.
Particularly when it comes to money goals. It can be very easy to get fixated on whether you’ll hit the goal or not. It’s either win or fail.
Unfortunately, if you put yourself into that position, then all of a sudden, whether you hit the goal or not is going to be responsible for how you feel. It’s going to dictate what you think about yourself and whether you feel good or not… whether you feel worthy or not.
See how it all gets tied up and messy?!
Sometimes, the fact that you set such an expensive goal and moved towards it is enough. You don’t need to hit the goal for the goal to have done its job.
Just like when I first set a goal to have a million-dollar revenue year. I made changes. I uncovered a bunch of beliefs about how I needed to change who I am as a person in order to be worthy of a million dollars.
It was setting the goal that helped me to uncover and clear all that stuff.
It’s not always about hitting the goal. Hitting the goal is one benefit of setting the goal. There are dozens and dozens of other benefits.
If the only benefit you’re looking for from setting a goal is hitting the goal, then you’re setting yourself up for either a big sense of disappointment or just putting your sense of worthiness and success into the hands of something that you have influence over but no control over.
You don’t have control over how much money you make in your business. You can influence it, but whether someone hands you their money or not, is actually not in your hands.
There are things we can do to increase the likelihood that that will happen, but ultimately you don’t have control over it. This means you’re externalising the driver of how you feel on the inside.
I think that that’s a dangerous thing to do.
When you know that the job of a goal is expansion, and you also know that the benefits of setting and achieving goals are multi-layered and multifaceted, then I feel like that allows us to experience all of those other benefits.
It opens us up to see that this is a snowball. This is actually contributing to a greater picture – a bigger picture and longer-term growth.
If you don’t hit your goal, it’s not the end of the world. It’s not going to completely derail you. It’s not going to mean that you think that you’re unworthy and not good enough. It won’t create that downward spiral.
That’s my sixth tip for powerful goal setting – it’s not all about hitting the goal.
7. There are different types of goals
One type of goal is goal outcomes. An example of this is how much money you bring into your business. That’s the result – the outcome.
You don’t have control over outcome goals. You can influence them, but you can’t control them.
Same as the number of people on your mailing list. You can set a goal for the number of people on your mailing list, but you don’t have direct control over whether that goal is achieved or not. You can only influence it through your actions.
It’s important to be clear on what different types of goals there are. You don’t want to set all of your goals as outputs. Output goals are what you create and what you have control of (ie. write a book, create and run a new webinar, etc). You have complete control over those goals, but there’s no connection to an outcome.
What is the point of running that webinar? Is it to get clients?
The outcome is the result, the output is what you do.
There are also input goals.
You might have a goal of how many hours a week you work. Or you might have a goal on how much you’re willing to invest in ad spend. That’s an input – how much am I willing to put into this?
You may also have lifestyle goals. You might have goals of wanting to go for a walk every single day. That’s an output – something you’re going to do – that’s related to your lifestyle.
Not all goals are created equal.
If you’re creating a giant list of things to do, that’s actually not setting goals. That’s a to-do list.
Remember: we want big outcome goals, and a small list of outputs (things we’re going to create).
Big goals, small list.
When it comes to powerful goal setting, focus your big-picture expansive goals on what you’re going to achieve (what the outcome is) rather than the output (what you’re going to do).
Because who knows! You might have a gorgeous VIP client walk in the door and say that they know you normally only sell your online course for $1,000, but they want to work with you one-to-one for a week for $100,000. You can take them on as a joyful, amazing client who you love working with, and just like that, you’ve hit your income goal for the year in a completely unexpected way!
Just because the money came in in an unexpected way, does that mean that $100,000 doesn’t count? Does that mean that it’s somehow less than worthy or that there’s something wrong with you? It’s 100 grand!
I like to keep my goals very outcome-orientated. And then in my strategy and what I’m going to do to achieve those goals, that’s where the outputs go.
I have 10 key outputs each quarter. They’re the 10 things I’m going to do that are most likely to get me to my three outcomes – the goals that I want to achieve.
The three outcomes that I usually set are:
- Income level
- List size
- Health and well-being
My health and well-being goal may be the hours of work I want to do, closing the rings on my Apple Watch, or something related to how I feel each day.
Make sure that you’re not just setting a giant to-do list when you’re setting goals.
I often see people putting a bunch of goals into a planner, but 99% of the goals are actually just tasks and things they’re going to do.
Is that expansion or is that direction? I think if we focus on goal setting as an expansive activity, it makes a big difference to how we feel about it, but also how effective and powerful it is.
And we want to be doing POWERFUL goal setting!
There you have it. Tha’s my guide to powerful goal setting all in a nutshell:
1. Pay attention to your resistance and thoughts
2. Aim bigger
3. The earlier the biz journey, the looser the goals
4. Big goals, small list
5. Make the goal scary but not disconnecting
6. It’s not always about hitting your goals
7. There are different types of goals
If you have any questions about this episode, please feel free to slide into my DMs on Facebook or Instagram. I’m always happy to have a conversation about it.
I also have a sexy little task for you for this podcast episode…
I want you to come over to the #PinnedPod post in the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs community. If you come over to the announcements of the Heart-Centred group, there will be a #PinnedPod for episode number 333.
I want you to tell me what your big powerful, expensive goal is.
A goal shared is a goal magnified.
If you tell me your goal, I will take it at face value that you can achieve that goal. I believe in you achieving that goal. I’m also helping to send those ripples (if you believe in manifestation and the law of attraction).
When you share a goal, you actually create ripples for the achievement of that goal because we’re bending time and space in your favour, and I have far more belief in you than you do in most cases.
You’re borrowing other people’s belief and you’re using that to create momentum.
Remember: A goal shared is a goal magnified.
Come on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs community and share your big, juicy, expansive goal in the comments of the #PinnedPod. We’ll all snowball each other’s goals together because a rising tide lifts all ships, and we’re all going to achieve amazing things together in 2023.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
