Overview of business priorities when planning 2024 ✅ ...and what support structure will you use?

To understand how to prioritize your time and your energy. In using my group program, we start, we need to start with goals because I see the group program basically as a community and a, A community of focused support for your business goal in 2024. Okay. It's a, it's a community and it's also a structure of focused support. So if you don't know what you're, if you don't, that's the first question is you might maybe, and maybe that you need some support around that too. What, what is the goal that is. Is drawing you forward into, into more activity for 2024. Couple examples. Are you needing to clarify your offerings so that it's more in alignment with your audience and the market? Why is that important? Well, clarifying your offerings, or I call it optimizing or aligning your offerings with the market is so, so key because if you don't, the simplest secret to doing well in business and not having too hard of a time is to sell what sells. People often forget this, especially those of us who are idealistic and heart based and we are visionary. We, we have something that we're so pass. Passionate because we have our peak experiences or we have our life experiences that we want to communicate to the world, or we have some modality we study that we're so we forget. Okay, fine, we, our modality may be wonderful. Our peak experiences may be transformational for others too, our ex. Our skills or whatever. But it's like we still need to package it into what sells. We sell what sells. And of course, the way that I sell is not through persuasion psychology and trying to manipulate people into buying through various scarcity tactics and whatnot. But I say sell what sells based on your compassion for your audience. It's like if you can lean into your compassion, which you already have. I mean, you're the same visionary nature that you have, the same idealism you have. The flip side of it is that you care a lot about people. And when you have someone in front of you who is telling you about their struggle or their yearning, you naturally have an abundance of caring towards them. And those kinds of conversations are what I call, I call them market research conversations. Sometimes market research conversations sound like it's very analytical and technical. The way I like to do them, the way I encourage you to do them is essentially you're, you're there in that half hour or that hour or 15 minutes even whatever time they're willing to give you to draw out of them what they most care about. At this Time as related. As related to the. The. The body of work that you have as related to the. The areas that you can. You can deliver value in to draw their. What they care about so that you can align with that care, so that you can naturally, as a human being or as a caring soul, naturally align with your compassion for their yearning or for their frustration, as it may be, for their pain, as it may be, or for their dream, as it may be. So that's an example of that goal of clarifying aligning your offerings with what sells. What sells is really what people care about. That's all it is. It's like what people care. And you align with that. And then they're like, thank you for meeting me where I'm at. See, I always. It's like, I always try. I mean, this is. This is really what I see. Authentic business being about is like, every action in our business can be an action for the soul, essentially, can be an action that's worthwhile for the soul. Otherwise, it's not worth me doing anything. I don't care about doing anything in my business unless it's, you know, deeply worthwhile for my. For my. For my eternal soul's growth. That's what I care about. And so even market research is. Is really about that. So that's an example of. Of. That's one goal you might select to say, I'm going to align my offerings. Another goal you might select is, okay, I've got my offerings. I think they're. They're. They're. They're pretty well aligned. And now I want to reach a lot more people with these offerings and with my content. That actually might be another goal too. It's like, George, I know that creating content can be a tremendous way to build an audience. A true fan audience. A true audience. That. And here's. Here's another important nuance to all this. The bigger your reach and the warmer your reach. Okay. The bigger or warmer your reach. What's that light that suddenly showed up? That's strange. Okay. Okay. I. I have a. I have a. A spirit following me here in my light somewhere. Yeah, I don't see anything behind me, but the bigger or warmer your reach, the more you can whisper offerings from your heart and it'll sell. Well, it's the truth of the matter. I have been very privileged to have had the years of developing a true fan audience such that I am grateful to say that that's much more my experience today than it was in the past is I can come up with experimental Offerings that I feel passionate about. And even if I don't do a whole lot of market research, I can simply whisper them without using persuasion psychology to sell them or anything like that. I really mean, look at my, look at how I sell. I mean, look at my, you know, I usually sell on Wednesdays on my Facebook business page. If you want to look at that, look at all the Wednesdays Wednesday posts. Not every Wednesday I sell, but many Wednesdays I do. The posts are very not typical marketer, you know, things that make you salivate because the copywriting is so damn good and the design is so mesmerizing or whatever. No, I don't. I whisper, I whisper offerings from my heart. And because I've developed a true fan audience, people go, sure, sign me up for that. I'm always surprised by the way I'm always, I'm like, oh, maybe, maybe 10 people will sign up for this minimum. If I had 20, I think I'll, I'll continue with it. 80 people signed up for this one. I'm frequently surprised these days. I'm so grateful. But it's because of the years of creating content consistently, authentic content to grow my reach and to grow the trust to grow trust. Now, trust starts with self. Trust. I was going to say trust of my audience and me, of course, through consistent content, authentic content over years, more and more trust. But developing other people's trust in you, I think starts with developing your own trust of yourself. You have to develop a trust that, okay, the way I show up with my so called marketing or content is really authentic. It really aligns with my values. You have to say that. You have to, you have to believe that of yourself. You have to do it right. It's really. And then the other type of trust you develop is I trust myself to show up consistently. If my audience is going to trust me to show up consistently, I have to trust myself to show up consistently. Now in the beginning, you might do it for the sake of your audience, for the sake of your business, for the sake of your, you know, the audience growth or whatever. That might be an external intrinsic motivation that gets you going on it. But ultimately you have to develop this intrinsic motivation of saying, I trust myself to show up consistently creating content because I really believe in it. I can, I can understand the passion behind it. Now I get so, you know, almost evangelistic, as you know me, evangelistic about the importance of creativity, consistent creativity. I call it creativity fitness. Just like someone says, I am so passionate about getting fit and staying healthy that way because of, you know, longevity or because I, you know, some people start with an extrinsic motivation is I want to have a beach body, right? Like I, I want to look good when I'm naked, right? Whatever that might be the, for them to get fit. But then eventually as they get going on it, they develop this intrinsic motivation is like, because I'm worth it, because I care about my body, because, because, and, or because I care about my discipline even even deeper than, than the body is. I care about the practice of discipline and that's why I do it no matter what, right? So, so consistent content creation is like that. It's, it's, to me, it's creativity fitness. If I don't consistently show up to create except during my weeks off, just like with exercise, you take some time off, right? I always take, as I'm recording this in 2023, I've been taking one week off of creation every four to five weeks. In 2024, it's going to be even more. I have 13 weeks already slated to take time off of creating 13 weeks out of the year. That's like at least once every four weeks. Something like that, right? Once everybody. Something like that. And so just creativity fitness. If I do not show up consistently when I've said I'm going to create, I'm going to get unfit, I'm going to get sick. I mean, technically the analogy is I'm going to get unwell, ill, weak in my, I'm going to get weak in the channel from my soul expression into the world. Because I think about authentic creativity as really us practicing, figuring out, experimentation, experimenting. How are we expressing our souls voice in this life? What does that mean for us? What's authentic to us? Everyone's going to look different, everyone's going to sound different, everyone's going to say different things and say it in a different way. But what is true for the soul? What is true for. Yeah, that's really me. That, that feels right. Or that feels really passionate. Oh, that feels really deep. Or that feels, really makes. It makes me feel alive or it makes me feel like I'm on, I'm in service, I'm in, I'm on purpose, right? That expression, if you do not show up again and again and go deeper and go bigger and go more powerful with that expression, it goes the other direction. You go into your shell, you lose the confidence, the authentic confidence, not the fake it till you make it. Well, maybe in the beginning you do a little bit of that to try to try to show up but eventually, the authentic confidence to express the soul's voice. And the more you do that consistently, guess what? The more of a true fan audience you develop, and then you can whisper your heart's offerings, and then they buy. All right, so anyway, that's another possible goal. I'm just kind of going through the possible priorities you may have in 2024 for your business. You know, alignment of your offerings, authentic, consistent content creation. Another popular goal is content distribution. Someone might say, george, I'm grateful. I'm already. I've already feel like I have a system for authentically creating content. But I want this to get out to a lot more people. I know it's not just my hundred Instagram fans who, who can benefit from this. They're probably, and I want to tell you this, the truth. Think about this. The Internet. The Internet has 5 billion users. Let's start there. Not million. Right? Billion users. Five billion. What if you gathered, okay, I'll, I'll say this. What if you gathered 10,000 random Internet users in a, in a, In a giant room of 10,000 Internet. Random user Internet, Random Internet users. How many of those 10,000 might be your ideal? You know, might be a potential, even potential person who could benefit from your content? I'll be really conservative. Let's say one. Say one out of 10,000 random Internet users could potentially benefit or know someone close to them. That would definitely benefit. Ideal person. Right? So that's one out of 10,000. Okay, let's run the numbers. So that's basically five zeros, five zeros. So 5 billion down to 500 million. It's 1 0, down to 50 million. It's two zeros down to 5 million. That's three zeros down to 500,000. That's four zeros. And then the fifth zero is down to five. 50,000. Right. 500,000 to 50. 50,000. And I think that's actually really pretty accurate, actually. Each of us probably has 50,000 potential fans. And if you want to go even more, let's add one more zero to it. Each of us probably has 5,000 true fans out there on the Internet just waiting for us. Whatever it is, their life experience, the combination of the trauma they've been through, the. The peaks they've they've experienced, their cultural background, their education, all the conversations they've had, all the books and movies they've consumed, all the combination of all these people somehow are like just a really good fit with you, your soul mate audience. Essentially 5,000 of them are out there literally, you know, and potentially 50,000 for some of us. So the question is, how do you distribute your authentic content out to those 5,000 or out to those 50,000? Well, in my program, you can learn that and practice that as well. You know, the ways we do it include collaborations with other people, including people in the program, or another way is through social media ads. I use both ways. Another way is through search engine optimization, SEO. That's another way that we talk about in the program as well. So there's different ways and there's even additional ways that I didn't mention here. But okay, so that's another possible priority. It's like, I've got content and now I want to distribute that content. Another. Another priority someone might say is George, I. I have these different things going on in my business and in my life, and I am frequently overwhelmed. I would love to have more of a streamlined system to work my business and to work my life. And I call that Joyful Productivity, which is one of the five foundational courses you get when you join the group program. My group program, it just comes with it. You don't have to use any additional credits or money to buy it, just comes with it. And we study it all year long. Joyful Productivity and JO product is basically, it's a suite of practices and habits that I've honed over many years. A lot of you don't know this. When I started my business in 2000 and 2008 was when I started to like, think about, you know, getting into my own, becoming my own consultant, freelancer. A lot of you don't realize this, but my very first business, my very first title for myself was Sustainable Productivity Consultant. That was literally the name of my. When, when I got a P.O. box, post office box, they said, what's the, what's your company name? Oh, Sustainable Productivity Consulting. So I had that name for about a year. That was my first love because I've always been interested in time management, energy management since I was very young. And over the years I've developed different ways of thinking about it, different ways of doing it. And then, you know, I decided to become a consultant with it. So that's kind of how I began. And then I kind of didn't know how to market myself, so I had to learn a lot about marketing. And then people started asking me about that and then I started anyway, so marketing became like my main thing for, for quite a while. And I still talked about productivity. Eventually named it Joyful Productivity. I've been talking about joyful productivity since 2011. 2011, nobody cared. Nobody cared about that. People wanted to talk me to talk about marketing. Nobody wanted to really hear me talk about product, Joyful Productivity. But I kept talking about it. 2011-2012-2013-2014, I tried launching a Joyful Productivity program. I think something like three to five people signed up. I think I had to cancel it or maybe I ran it very short amount of time. Nobody cared. Three years later, nobody cared. 2015, kept talking about it. 2016, 2017, 2018, I published my book on Joyful productivity. You see how many years is going now. And then, not only did I. And in 2019, I believe I launched Joyful Productivity again. I think it was, maybe it was 2020 even, but now I called it something different, TLC. It was still Joyful Productivity program. And this time lots of people signed up. So it took many years and many tries of really not knowing how to market myself and figuring that part out and, but still continuing to talk about it because I couldn't, I couldn't not talk about it. Right? I couldn't not talk about it. It was just so something that I felt like, oh gosh, if I had one message for the world, I have to talk about Joyful, you know, so Joyful Productivity is this whole suite of practices I've now developed and teach in my program that helps you with things like how do you start your work day, how do you end your workday, what do you do during the workday, in terms of prioritizing, in terms of starting each work segment, in terms of even the idea of segmenting your work. I mean, there's lots of that. And plus in terms of how do you organize your information? Overwhelm. These days we have overwhelm of information and, you know, to try to organize and keep all that stuff. And it's all included in the Joyful Productivity program, which is part of the FRUIT program, one of the five foundational courses. So that could be a great goal. I always say Joyful Productivity, again, I'm biased because I started there is to me the foundational suite of skills is to me the foundational thing that all entrepreneurs should work on. I'm still working on it because without Joyful Productivity, we'll just. What's the alternative? It's, well, non joyful. Some people, it's. It's non joyful productivity, which is hustle. Hashtag hustle. Grind. Hashtag grind. Right, right. It's just, it's basically like you work damn hard, you work until your eyes bleed because then one day you have a Good life. Then you'll be able to retire early. Fire. Right? Financial independence. Retirement. Retire early. I'm always like, if you had joyful productivity, why would you want to retire? I mean, now I'm, I'm grateful that financially I could retire early. Now I literally have enough money where I'm in Mexico now. My expenses have dramatically dropped. I could technically. Fire. Retire early. Not, not work another day in my life. That's not. Probably not true. I think I would for a little bit, a little bit of luxuries. I think I still want to work a little bit, but for, for the basics, to live very basically and live okay, I could retire early. But why would I. I love showing up to work every day because of joyful productivity. Like I want to work until the day that I have dementia or until a day I literally cannot. How do I turn on the computer again? You know, by that point, AI will do everything for us. But no. So why would I ever retire? Like the people who are like, seeking financial freedom, I'm like, I used to do that too. I used to do that too. And then I realized it's not really financial freedom I'm seeking. I'm seeking joyful productivity. If I could show up every day and love the moment no matter what it is, if I can be in service to others and even if I am doing something boring, so called. Because obviously not every, not my entire day is doing this kind of thing where I get to deliver, you know, my, my, my service in this kind of way. No, I, I. Earlier today, I was spending two hours like figuring out the particular email sequence to the new group program members to be. And here are the payment links. I had to make sure the, the links are correct. A lot of detailed work myself. I don't have an assistant. I do it all myself. I am, I'm literally, I try to model the solopreneur life. I do it all myself. I do all my technical stuff. I do all my admin. I do all my own bookkeeping, I do all my own marketing. And I'm the keynote speaker in my business. I clean my own toilet. Actually here in Mexico, we, we can afford a, a cleaner every two, every week. We want to, we have her come every two weeks. She cleans the toilet when she's here, but I clean the toilet when she's not here. You know, I do it all. Of course, I have several helpers that I pay in my programs and courses, but it's really, I pay my helpers not because I really need them to, because I want to give back the money and I. They get to enjoy doing some stuff. And it kind of is a bonus. It kind of adds additional value to. Anyway, so I, I do everything essential in my business myself, and I do it. Joyful productivity. That is the secret. That is the secret. It's not that. It's not that when you create an authentic business and it's perfect business, every single moment of your day is doing stuff. Stuff that's fun. That's. That's a fantasy. No, no matter how great your business is structured, there's at least 20% of your business that's still drudgery or tedium, or from the outside, it looked like it might be tedium or drudgery. And yet have you learned to not only do what you love, but to love what you do? That's a secret of joyful productivity. So anyway, that's, that's my, that's my spiel. I'll stop here. But that's really. Back to the original question. The original homework for you, perhaps, or reflection for you is what is your priority for the coming year, for the coming 12 months, 13 months, whatever you're planning, what is your priority? Answer that one first and then you say, well, I've got these 10 priorities. I've got these seven priorities. No, no, no. What is your main priority first? What is the thing that will be. That will make everything else easier or better or more possible for you, stronger, more capable for you? What is that priority first? And then, sure, we can then layer on additional priorities, but you know, you got to get the main thing systematized first. By say systematized, I mean, like, you have a process where like, yep, I show up for whatever your priority is every day or every week or at these times of the week or whatever like that is in there. No questions first. And then we have. So, long story short, my group program is designed to support you in number one, clarifying what, what that priority and those priorities are. We do that early on in the program and then secondly, to support you in a structured way to actually do it implemented, which comes from all the different features of the program, such as the calls with me or the group calls with me, the. Or the one on one calls with me too. You can, you can sign up for those additional costs if you. But the group calls with me. I do 10 group calls a month. That's already including my weeks off, by the way. But I still do 10 group calls just for members per month at different times. So that, you know, if you could just come to one group call a month. You'll probably get a lot of a jolt of energy and, and some clarity because you can ask question questions and stuff. Anyway, so, so whether it's group calls with me or it's a one on one call with your with your helper, I pay helpers. I pay a helper to meet with you once a month for half hour to help you clarify yet again to review again again your priority for the upcoming month and or it's our class implementation sessions where it's like again paid helpers are, are hosting. Okay if you care about your offer productivity, we're gonna talk about that for, for an hour twice a month. We're going to work on that. You know, each of us are going to work on our own or whatever. So class limitation sessions or the group forum, obviously the private forum where you can ask questions, get support or accountability. Buddy, anyone? Lots of different features in the program to help you create and follow your priorities. So with that I think I'll end this video. This video went a little longer than expected, but I hope this was helpful. I hope this was inspiring. Gets you thinking about what your priority or your priorities might be. Thanks.