In this solo episode of the Overgivers Anonymous podcast, host Angela Mondor (the Geeky Girl) guides neurodivergent entrepreneurs and small‑business owners on turning big visions into concrete results. She begins by highlighting the importance of the “circle of control” – recognizing that we can only influence our own actions, not external outcomes like sales or market demand. Using Stephen Covey’s framework, she advises listeners to start with a yearly vision, then break it down into quarters, months, and weekly tasks, making large goals feel manageable. Mondor critiques traditional SMART goals, swapping “Achievable” for “Actionable” to emphasize controllable steps, and stresses specificity, measurability, and time‑bounds. She explains how weekly planning rolls up into monthly and quarterly plans, providing a clear feedback loop. Flexibility is key: unexpected life events (illness, family duties, car trouble) require adaptation, but a solid action plan helps mitigate setbacks. Mondor also stresses that success is personal – it changes with life stages, from covering household costs while raising young children to planning for retirement. She concludes with a call to join her “Rockstar Success Circle” for community support and accountability, and invites listeners to the Overgivers Anonymous Facebook group and show notes site.
Chapters
Hi and welcome to this episode of the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor and I'm also known as the Geeky Girl. Let's talk for a minute about our goals and our dreams, our wishes, the success that we're trying to create inside our business. Now, you probably created vision boards. Maybe you have even written out dreams and wishes inside maybe a notebook that you've tucked away inside your drawer. There's all kinds of different ways that we can create these visions or these ideas on where we want to go. The trouble is sometimes us neurodivergents have a hard time following through. So here's some ideas I want to talk to you about. How do we get these goals to actually come to fruition? Now, one of the most important things you need to understand about the difference between the goals and reality is the fact that you have no control over what anybody else does but yourself. Circle of control, right? So You guys know I love Stephen Covey, but there's a circle of control and the circle of influence and the circle of concern. Those 3 circles inside each other. And really, you only have control over certain things. So you can't control how many people buy your things. You can't control what people were willing to pay for your things. Those things you don't have any control over, but you do have control over the way you market your business. You have control over what you offer inside your business. You have control about what you include in those offers. Get the picture? Okay, so what we're going to do is talk about that goal, and then how do you take that goal and break it down into an action plan? Here's where the money shot is. You need to be able to create a plan that is going to allow you to accomplish those goals. So you need to start with, where do I want to go this year? Now, not everybody is good at being able to do long-range focusing, long-range planning. Sometimes if somebody might ask you, hey, what are you going to do in 5 years? Maybe that's overwhelming for you. But when we look at just a 1 calendar year, it can be a little bit more digestible. Sometimes even that big calendar year is still not really comfortable for you, but you got an idea. But when you break it down into quarters, maybe then you feel a little more comfortable. It's like, oh, I can see that whole quarter. Maybe that makes you uncomfortable. That's okay. We break it down into a month. What are we going to do this month? But when you start with that end in mind, which is another Stephen Covey thing, that yearly goal, and you break it down into the quarters and you break it down into the months, and then you put your weeks together based on what you're gonna do in that month. Now it becomes a whole lot more manageable. Instead of trying to think about that whole year's worth of time, now you're only thinking about what am I doing this week in order to accomplish things for this month? And it rolls uphill. So this is different than the way a corporate world would do it. This is a different way of seeing things than a lot of people teach. So I'm backwards. Okay, I want you to think about this and being able to say, what is it that I'm going to do? That's your goal. Now, your goals can be financial, your goals could be based on how many people you want in your audience, they could be I'm going to sell X amount of things, I'm going to grow my email list, blah blah blah. Like, there's lots of different kinds of goals that you can create, and your success is yours alone. Don't let anybody tell you that you have to be a 6-figure business to be successful. That's bullshit, because you might not want the stress and pain that comes with a 6-figure business in whatever industry you're in. That might not be the path you want to be on. You might choose to have a success that looks completely different. When I first started my business in 2009, my kids were little. Success to me meant being able to earn enough income so that I could offset the costs inside our house and I could stay home with my kids and I'd be present for each and every one of my children's things that they needed me for, whether I needed to be at the classroom one day or I needed to be a hockey mom all day and into the dressing rooms, driving kids around to practices, those kinds of things. That was success to me in 2009. My success visions have changed throughout the years. And now, of course, my husband is moving into that retirement phase. We're talking about what are we gonna do next in retirement? So of course my success vision is different than when it was when we had littles at home. So your successes will change too. So don't worry about what anybody else says. You paint your own way to your success. But the, the way there is to create the action plan. So it is really, really important you take the dream, Create the goals out of that dream, and then you break it down into how you're going to accomplish those things. What is it that you're going to create? Now, some people don't like SMART goals. I hear a whole lot of crap being thrown at SMART goals. But really, a SMART goal is simply just something that is specific. We create a goal that's specific. I'm going to do this, and I expect this as a result, which is measurable, right? So I'm gonna Grow my email list by 500 members. That's specific and it's measurable. Now, I choose out to change the A. They call it achievable. I don't call it achievable. I call it actionable because we can only control our actions. We can't control the results. So the A is actionable. So then what can I do to get those 500 people? I'm going to take these actions to do it. What are those actions for you? Maybe creating a freebie. Maybe you do some Facebook ads. Maybe, I don't know, what is it that you're going to do that's actionable so that you can get to that measured 500 of the specific goal of growing your email list. And T stands for time-bound. How long is it going to take you to make that happen? Is this a yearly goal, a quarterly goal, your monthly goal, right? So I know people shit all over that whole SMART goal thing, but it really is important to think about the goal itself and how do I break it down. Okay, so when I talk to you about that yearly Quarterly, monthly. It's important to check in often. And when I do this, I weekly plan. So during my weekly plan, I know what I need to accomplish during that week, and I know that the things that I'm going to work on that week are actually going to roll up to my monthly plan, and that monthly plan rolls up to that quarterly, and the quarterly rolls up to the yearly. So I know I'm always— even though I'm working on this small little bit here, I know I'm always working towards that greater goal above, right? So you need to stay flexible because things happen. There's, there's things we don't predict. I mean, all of us, you know, there's things that happen in our lives, whether it's somebody gets sick. Maybe you have aged parents to look after. Maybe you got littles at home. Maybe something happens that you can't get to a specific— maybe drive to your appointments or something, and maybe your car breaks down. I don't know. You have to be able to adapt and change. And when you do create the overall plan, and you are able to get to a point where you are planning weekly and rolling that up and planning monthly and quarterly, when you're doing those things and something unexpected happens, it's easy for you to say, oh, that happened and it's going to impact me in these ways. How can I mitigate those things? How can I take these moments and change them so that I'm not going to be terribly negatively affected? If you're just rolling by the seat of your pants and something negative happens, it might drag you so far down you don't even know which way you need to come up in order to get back to where you were, right? So that's why planning is important, but we need to put those actions on the plan. Okay? That is how you're going to see success because you can only control your actions. So you choose, okay, for this quarter, we're going to take these actions. Well, at the end of the quarter, you can say, did those actions work? Well, first of all, you say, did I take the actions? If you took the actions, good on you. If you didn't, well, we need to try to take those actions next time. Or did I take them and did they work? Did they work? Yes. Awesome. How can I expand and change and grow that way to be able to continue doing that? Or no, they didn't. Okay, what other actions can I take? When you break it down like this, then you have control over what those actions are. Now you can choose to make changes inside your business and in your life to grow a life and business that you actually love. Now, if you're somebody who struggles with creating things like this, or this seems crazy, outrageously, unexpectedly terrible, because I've met people who feel awful about this. I love these things and we have an absolute blast. We have a Rockstar Success Circle where we help you plan, organize, create those action plans, and help you to stay accountable to that and help you also, you know, be flexible as you're moving through this thing. And if you are looking for some of that, you can join us in the Rockstar Success Circle. We'll drop the link below and they'll be in the show notes. So you'll be able to have an outlet to be able to get this, get the help you need so you can see the success inside your business surrounded by a community of really supportive individuals that are all wanting you to succeed as much as you want them to succeed. I hope you have a fantastic day. I hope you realize that you have so much power in planning your actions, that you have so much control over what that outcome looks like in terms of the work that you're going to take towards it. And when you do plan and take action steps, it gives you some solid information on how you need to grow your business— what's working, what's not working, how can you change things— and you can create the success that you want inside your business. I hope you have a fantastic week, and I'll talk to you next week. Thank you so much for listening to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. Your support means the world to me. You can find show notes for this episode and other goodies at overgiversanonymous.ca. And if you enjoyed this episode, or you enjoy the podcast in general, why not join us in the Overgivers Anonymous Facebook group where you can connect with overgivers from all over the world? Head on over to geekygirl.ca/group.
