Goal-Setting Techniques for Video Business Owners in 2025. EP #358

Happy New Year 2025.

It only seemed not that long ago that it was the year 2000, but maybe that's me showing my age. Anyway, I wanted to just welcome you to this new opportunity this year and give you a few things to think about as you are no doubt thinking about the next 12 months, how you can do it differently, how your business can shift, how you can change, how you do things. So today I want to give you some very simple exercises that you can do that on a day of reflection like this, you can start setting your course for the next 12 months.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host, Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

So I think whenever we start a new year, you've no doubt had a little bit of downtime, you've had some great time with family, hopefully you've not fallen out with anyone. But I know that that period between Christmas and New Year always yields some contemplation, some reflection, maybe a little bit of, like, regret for spending too much on Christmas presents. But here's where today's an exciting time to reboot. I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions because I think they're hard to maintain, but what you can do is, is use the time today or tomorrow to reflect on the last year. And what I want to do is give you some really helpful tools to position yourself and set yourselves up for success in the next 12 months. So first of all, I want you to get an A4 pad, like a legal pad, and draw a line from top to bottom on the page. And on one side of the page, Write wins from 2024, and on the other side of the page, write lessons from 2024. So first of all, you're going to write down all the things, month by month that you regard as a win, as an achievement, as something you feel proud of, something that you feel that you tackled and you came out of the other side with a success.

And if you get stuck, just spend some time thinking about this. It's an opportunity to write down and anchor in paper where you won, where you had success. And on the other side of the page, I want you to write your lessons learned. Now, typically speaking, the lessons, the things we failed at or we learned from are easier to come up with than the wins. I think it's something to do with Being a self deprecating creative, that we're always very hard on ourselves. And so what I want you to do is write the wins on one side and the lessons on the other. Now this is going to help you to get clarity on just how much you achieved last year. We often forget just how much we win at life and in business because we don't spend enough time reflecting on it. Inside the VBA we always have a weekly goals and a weekly wins thread. And it's not there is some kind of bullshit, like kind of, you know, technique Nick, to get people to be engaged. It's actually to help you to set yourself up for success every week and also spend some time in gratitude acknowledging the things that you achieved because otherwise one week just falls into the next and into the next and into the next. So by doing this process, once you've filled the page and spend 10 or 15 minutes doing this, like allow yourself the space to reflect. One of the techniques I use is I just go back like December and then November and then.

October, September and so on and so forth. And you'll find things every month that you can reflect on. And then what I want you to do is circle the three most significant in terms of wins and lessons and think about them and think about how you can do that more this year and how you can take your lessons and avoid making the same mistakes. And then I want you to think about what is the one thing that you'd love to achieve in your business this year? What's the biggest lever that if you could pull it and just solve that annoying nagging problem, would enable you to have the year you dreamed of, not the year that perhaps just went. Because you are completely in control of how you choose to navigate the year ahead. And the reason we do what we do at the VBA is we want to help people who are ready to get support to do that faster in a realistic way that doesn't make crap promises of, you know, multiple leads the next day if you just build this system and plug it in. Because that stuff is bullshit. Building a business takes time. It takes effort, it takes a lot of thought. And there are no quick fixes. Any quick fixes are just short term band aids. They don't solve the bigger problems. And the bigger problems need some time and attention. And we saw back in December, a bunch of cool people decided to jump on our 30 day sprint. And I was just so impressed with how everyone just got stuck in and with the pressure of the sprint, just delivered and got huge progress and people got results very, very quickly by doing that process. And so one of the things we're going to be doing this year of the VBA is adding even more levels of accountability. And I'm excited to talk about those things, but it's going to involve some really cool new additions to our programs and to our communities to make them the best place for you to succeed. So I'm super excited to reveal more about that when we get it all ironed out. And yeah, just wanted to say Happy New Year. I'm going to keep this nice and short today because I want you to just do that simple exercise. And one of the challenges with business is most of the answers are actually quite simple. But simple seems to be very hard for us to do. As creatives, we always want to kind of get the crayons out and make it more challenging. So I want you to just lean into the simplicity of celebrating your wins and observing your lessons and thinking about how you can do those things differently next year. And then what is the one thing you want to achieve this year? And I look forward to supporting you on that journey. Happy New Year, folks.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast with your host, Dan Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the Accelerator program can help you today. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes, and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review.