Next Level 275: How to hit Q4 running to finish 2025 STRONG!

There are only 92 days left in 2025. I have a question for you. Are you happy with what you've achieved so far this year? What do you want your life to look like next year in 2026? But more importantly, what do you want your life to look like three years from now? Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larson. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. Today I'm gonna walk you through my step by step process for how I set a three year vision, how I set my goals for every year, how I chunk those goals down into quarterly goals and ultimately action items that myself and our coaching clients use on a daily basis to help you achieve your goals. And in the show notes, I'm gonna provide you lots of links and a step by step process that you can follow along. And after this podcast and if you need help building out your goals for the quarter for the year, your three year vision and you want weekly support, I'm going to show you how you can not only schedule a free strategy session with me, but how you can also join our coaching program to help you walk through the process as well as to have weekly accountability when achieving your goals. So as you may have guessed, the first step in your goals is what I go through with all my coaching clients and that's building your three year vision. So check out the show notes, click on that link and that'll show you my three step process to not only make next year your best year ever, but to help you walk through creating your three year vision. And this three year vision should have things like what does your health look like? What is your ideal schedule? What do you want to be achieving in three years in your career, your business, your financial life? Are you financially independent? What are the steps that you're going to take between now and then to achieve financial independence? That's what we're going to help work through. What do you spend your time on? Who do you spend your time with? Do you spend more time with your family? Do you spend more time on your health? What type of travel do you take? And then make it fun. What car do you drive? Do you have a new house that you've built. And I think all these things, when you get clear in your mind on what you want to achieve over the three years, it helps you have better energy and better focus on a regular basis to achieve these. And when you finish your three year vision, it should be a story, it should be a short story that you read that you share with your partner and it should excite you when you read it. When I read mine and I read my coaching clients three year visions, it makes the hair stand on my arms because it makes me so exciting. It should be easy to visualize and it should help you envision your perfect future life. Now, I've been coaching clients since I was in college. I used to coach cyclists and then I've been working with the coach. My wife had been working with the coaches for about 15 years. We have a couples coach we work with. I have a business coach I work with. And one of the things my business coach loves to say is you have too many goals. I'll never forget going through this process with him and he said, chris, you have too many goals. You need to narrow these goals down. Don't have three or four goals in all kinds of different categories. Pick one goal, pick that one thing that you can focus on to narrow down on, to focus on, and then do fewer things to accomplish more. So what are your goals for Q4 of 2025 that are going to help supercharge you as you go into 2026? What I like to do is I break my goals down into four categories. These four categories are health, because health is the most important. Obviously we talk a lot about how to build your wealth on our podcast. So our second category is wealth. Then it's family or social. So if you don't have a family, it can be your social life. Who do you spend your time with? Who do you hang out with on a regular basis? But for those of us that have families, what does your family life look like? Do you want to spend more time? We just did a special session with our coaching group where we talked about doing what's called a family board meeting. And what we do is every quarter I spend about a half day with each of my two boys and they get to pick. We turn the phones off, we turn the screens off, and we do something fun that they want to do. Things like racing, go karts or going for a bike ride, taking a hike. We have a meal afterwards and we just get to spend quality one on one time together. And I think this is important for you and your partner, your Spouse, your children. And also it works in business too. A lot of us in business are used to having our quarterly meetings, setting our quarterly goals, having our weekly check ins with our employees or our boss that we have. But why not apply that to your personal life as well? This is something that you can employ too. And then the last category is what I like to call personal enrichment. And this can be things like how many books do you read? What books do you read? Are you trying to finish your degree at school? Are you focused on learning a new skill like meditation, for instance? Also travel, where are you going to travel next year? Where are you going to travel for the rest of this year? Are there things that you're going to do that, that are exciting and fun for you? Is there a new car that you want to buy? Your 3 year vision should incorporate these and you should visualize these. And then each quarter, pick one goal in each of these categories. This is going to help you distill your actions and your choices down to that one focal point. And then you want specific action items that you have for each quarter. So for each of those goals that you have, I would suggest having two or three action items. And these should be simple, they should be these smart goals, right? They should be simple, they should be measurable, they should be timely. So that if you hand that list to somebody of action items, if they stepped into your shoes, they would achieve the same or a very similar outcome to what you were. So make them specific. Like you were telling yourself what you need to do and what you need to walk through. And I love Brian Tracy's quote. He says if what you're doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it's moving you away from your goals. So think about that. What is it that you're, that you're doing that is actually hindering you from achieving your goals? And this brings me to the next topic, which is do you have a not to do list? It's very important if you eliminate these things. And I have a article here that I've wrote in the show, notes that talk about how to create 20 to 40 more hours a week. So I've got three things that you can do to help you create 20 to 4 hour, 20 to 40 more hours a week. Number one, what about waking up earlier? If you could wake up 30 minutes or 60 minutes earlier and focus on that one thing, that is really going to move the needle and how would that impact your life? Something else, Stop watching and reading the news. One thing that we did back in 2012 is we got rid of our, our TV package. We got rid of cable news. And I'd lay on the couch some evenings and watch like an hour, some, some news show, drink a beer, and I would just waste that time. It just create negative energy. So you want to eliminate those things in your life that are negative. Social media is another big one. Eliminate your social media delete on your phone, your social media app, so it's harder for you to spend time and waste time doing those things. Break that cycle of just endlessly scrolling on social media. Also, don't argue on social media. One of my rules is I don't argue or create conflict with my friends and family. And this especially applies on social media. Because if they're there on social media arguing with somebody, you're just pouring your energy and your time down a black hole. Gossip like, don't talk about other people and waste time doing that. That's negative energy for you. It's negative energy for them. And I think if you want to have an abundant life, you need an abundant mindset, but you also need abundant positive actions. And then this last idea will be one that some people might not like to hear. But you can treat the weekends or one week, one one day of the week as a work day. So you could get up on a Saturday and work for a few hours. You don't even have to work the whole day. But think about how much more you could achieve. If you could save an hour a day or an hour and a half a day during the week and be more productive and then spend a few hours, one or two days on the weekend, you can easily create 10 to 20 more hours a week. Grant Cardone had a saying. He said his buddy said, hey, you know, Sunday is God's day and you know, I'm just going to lay on the couch and watch football. And he said, God wants you to be productive. He wants you to achieve your goals in life and get the most out of life. So turn off the football and go to work. I love, I love the way Grant Cardone phrases some things. He's got an interesting energy about him. And then from a financial perspective, what do you not spend money on? So I think it's a lot easier. I talk about this in my book about having your savings tax. So if you save on the front end, if you, if you pay yourself first and invest that money first, then you're not trying to scrimp together and scrounge together money at the end of every month, every quarter, every year to hit your investment goals, Hit your investment goals, have fun and have that expendable or disposable income that you can spend money on, those fun things at the end of your paycheck or your income from your business that you have. So I'm walked you through pretty quickly my my strategy here, which starts with your three year vision, your annual and quarterly goals, and then your action items that are going to give you specific measurable tasks that you focus on every week. And every week on Sunday morning I typically sit down, I read my three year vision, I look at my week, I plan out my goals for the week and I move those things up in the week to Monday to Tuesday, typically first thing in the morning. And those are my items that are really going to move the needle the most to help me achieve those goals and then finally have someone you're accountable to. If you're looking for a coach that can help you achieve those, we help provide that in our coaching community. But Book a strategy session. Click on the link below. Feel free to reach out. Book a free strategy session with me. I'll help you clarify what you want to achieve this quarter in 2025, the end of 2025, so we can set you up for success in 2026 and really focus on how you want to change your life and create that amazing future for yourself not only over the next quarter, in the next year, but over the next three years. Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.