The # 1 secret to reach your goals

Hello and good evening. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, coming to you live from a few different places. I'm over here on my cell phone, on Instagram, I'm over here on my laptop, on the Facebooks, on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter. We're not doing TikTok today because TikTok, you have to hang out for a really long time. And I have dinner reservations and I'm so excited. It's my favorite restaurant. If you haven't, if you've ever been to Cape Cod, or if you're planning on going, go to Buca's Tuscan Roadhouse. It is the best Italian. That should not exist on Cape Cod, but it does, and I'm so grateful for it. Anyway, we're not talking about Italian food. We're not talking about going out to dinner. We are talking about the magic, the pure, unadulterated magic that is half assing shit. I want to be honest, okay? So I'm doing this live right now. This is day 13 of my 30 day goal, okay? So I want to do 30 days of lives and doing it only Monday through Friday because I'm trying to have good weekend boundaries, right? And I didn't know what to talk about. And I was literally thinking, like, how can I have assets? Because I'm, you know, not feeling 100% today because I had my Covid shot yesterday. And I'm excited about dinner. And we have company coming. There's a lot going on. Hi, Javi. Welcome. Of course, course it's Halloween next week. That's my favorite holiday. There's just. There's a lot going on. So I was a little distracted, and I'm thinking, like, how can I half ass this, right? And I am a firm believer that half assing things is the key to your success. Like, anything you want to accomplish half assing, it will get you there, right? I am the queen of coming up with plants. All right, so, like, here, here, let me show you, like, plans, plans. Okay. Do I stick to the plans? No. Never have I ever stuck, like, strictly to any of the plans I've ever set for myself. Okay. I love making them, though. So it makes joy to make the plan to see how my life could work perfectly. Right? But the thing. Hi, David. Welcome. The thing that released me and allowed for me to reach new levels of success in my life, in my business, in other. I mean, what other realms are the life and work anyway is that I released myself from sticking perfectly to the plan. Okay? And Let me just use an analog metaphor here. Working out, right? So say you have a weight loss goal and you come up with a daily workout routine, and you plot it into your calendar, and you come up with a really strict eating schedule, and you give yourself all of the different foods that you're allowed to eat. What happens when you get super restrictive like that? Your mind starts rebelling. You get into the scarcity mindset of all the stuff that you can't have. You also exhaust yourself. Your body's not meant to work out that much. Right? Right. It needs to rest. Right. You're not a pro athlete. You're a human who's working, like a 9 to 5 job or running your business. So what happens? We make this whole elaborate plan. We tell ourselves, I'm going to do this every single day. Right? And then day three rolls around and we slip up and we have a donut. Or day four rolls around and we go to the gym. We just can't bring our. We're just tired. I can't do this. Like, I'm just gonna walk on the treadmill. And then you look at the plan and you'd already fucked up the plan, and you're like, oh, like the plan is off the rails. This isn't gonna work. And then what happens? You throw the whole thing out. Okay? That is not sustainable. If you're doing that equivalent in your business, which a lot of us do. I see you. I see you. Because I see me. It happens. We do this to ourselves all the time, right? We do. We say, okay, well, I'm going to post every single day to LinkedIn. I'm going to go live every single day. And then we get to that day and we can't think of the perfect thing to post. And then we don't. And then we screwed up the plan, then we don't do it. And then. Because whatever it is is now associated with failure and shame, we don't want to go back to it. Right. Why would we? Why would we? Like, it's like going back to someone who's going to treat you like garbage. But mind you, the person who's treating like garbage is you. Right? It's just, you start treating yourself like garbage when you go back to the thing that you screwed up on. So here's. Here's your key to success. Half asset, right? Half asset. If you have a workout goal that you want to work out, like, every day for 100 days in a row, great. Like, do the peloton for five minutes. Don't even Put the stupid shoes on. Like, wear flip flops while you're on the peloton. I did this, by the way, when I. When the pandemic hit, a friend, friend who also has a peloton, like, got a group of women together who she knew were all on the app, and she asked us if we wanted to do like a 10 day sprint. Everyone did 10 days together. Well, her sister and I decided, okay, let's do another 10 days. And then we did that. And then we were like, okay, well, you know, let's not do another 10 days. Let's go to 50, right? And we got to 50, and then it was like, cool. Well, we got to 50. Let's go to 100. Let's do 100 days in a row of peloton writing. And yeah, most days I did a 30 minute workout. Cody Rigsby is my man. I love him. I could hang out with him all day if I had the stamina. But you know what? Some days I phoned it in. Some days, especially in the early days of the pandemic, when shit was rough and we were all terrified that everything was going to crash and burn. Some days I would pour myself a glass of wine and I would climb up on the peloton and I would just let myself, oh, hello, Andy. Welcome. I haven't seen you in gazillion years anyway. And I would let myself just do five minutes of a very easy ride and not stress about it because I knew that it counted. Half assing it one day absolutely helps you towards your goals. And, Justin, stop overthinking and just send it. Yes, yes, exactly. Leandro, hello from Brazil. Hello in Brazil. Hello from Cape Cod. Anyway, we cannot hold ourselves to these high standards that we create for ourselves, but never for anyone else, okay? That is not the key to success. Okay? I love. I love Ron Swanson. He's like one of my favorite characters of all time in TV movies, all of them. But his saying is, I never half ass anything. I always use my full ass. It's a bad example. It's a bad example. You know, there are a lot of things that go into it. You know, you're gonna have days where, like, emergencies come up, right? Especially if, like, you have kids or animals or, you know, other humans that you care about remotely in your life. Like, Stu is going to happen, and you're not going to be able to stick to the plan perfectly, right? You're a human in a meat suit. Like, for instance, I went and got the COVID shot yesterday, okay? I don't feel amazing today. It's just. It's not. It's not my day. I knew it wouldn't be my day. So I'm giving myself permission here to, you know, just talk about half assing stuff. That's. That's my topic. Half assing. Well, I'm half assing. It's very meta, right? So anyway, yeah, full permission here to half ass stuff. Because here's the alternative. If you hold yourself to the standard that you have to do everything perfectly and you create these elaborate plans and you break it all down, you make it all perfect and you make it super complicated for yourself, and then you don't stick to it because you're never going to stick to it. Let's just be real, let's not even kid ourselves here. You are never going to stick to those plans. Plans, they will always go off the rails, okay? And it won't. Like, some of it will be your fault and some of it will be the universe's fault, but it's never going to happen. So what happens when it doesn't happen and you get, like, discouraged from continuing because you didn't do it perfectly? You give up completely, right? That's not going to help you get anywhere. It's not going to help you build your business. It's not going to help you reach any goal that matters to you. But if you give yourself permission to half ass it on the days where you need to, that is what's going to make the difference, okay? That is what is going to turn your life into something completely different. All right? And it like half assing, quarter assing, eighth assing, like, like, it doesn't even have to be like a halfway kind of thing. You just have to put a little bit of effort into it. Just a little bit. You know, this is one of the reasons why when my clients are struggling to post to LinkedIn every single day, to build that habit, to build that, you know, muscle that they can think of stuff every single day, I have them do what I call the no ferret challenge, where instead of, you know, racking your brains and trying to figure out exactly what you should post and, like, giving up because it's too complicated. If you're having a day where you can't think of anything, you just post a picture of a ferret. And the goal here is to just post something, right? Because as small business owners, we don't have a marketing problem, we have a memorability problem, right? We simply just need a few people out there in the world to Remember that we exist at exactly the right moment. All right? We need our name and our picture to just pop up in their awareness from time to time. That is good enough. Let me see. I love that Gary V. Has always said fast and good is almost always better than slow and perfect. Yes. Yes, it is. And I would even posit that fast and kind of shitty is way better than slow and perfect. Because here's the thing about slow and perfect. It actually is. Is like no movement and perfect. Right? Because nothing can ever be perfect. Like, you're like, if you're holding out for perfection, it is absolutely never going to happen. Right, Javi? Oh, you love. You love what Justin said. Yes, I love it too. Yeah, yeah. Half ass things like, I want you go to the gym. Go to the gym. And like, like, give yourself a goal of going to the gym every single day. And walk on the treadmill while you play on your phone. Like that counts. You're still moving your body. You're still moving your body. Post to social media, post a selfie and just say, hey, I am feeling a little burned out today and I just, like, wanted to show you all my face. Like that counts. People will remember that you exist. All right, stop overthinking things. And I say this to you because I need to hear this too, okay? I'm not being holier than thou right now. Being like, I'm so perfect at being imperfect. No, I still struggle with this. This is still something that gets in the way of me being out there in the world. So if you go through this, know that you're not alone. Right? Also know that no one out there knows what your idea of perfect is. No one. Like your ideal clients. They don't know your friends and family. They don't know the other people at the gym. They don't know the people on LinkedIn and social media. They don't know. They don't know where you're falling short to yourself, right? They're seeing you post or show up for your workout and they're thinking, cool. Like, they're having just kind of a personal day on social media or, you know, they probably worked out really hard yesterday and they're just walking on the treadmill. Cool. Good for them. They're here. You know, everyone is running their own race here, right? It's. I don't drink anymore. I gave it up because I realized that it was giving me a lot of anxiety. This is something that's really common for people with adhd. Like, alcohol spikes your cortisol, it spikes all the stress hormones and like, like, we just. We already have, like, imbalances with our dopamine anyway, so it gets really squirrely and we end up getting a lot of anxiety. So I don't drink anymore. But when I used to drink, you know that feeling when you're out at the bar and you're with friends and you've had like a couple drinks and you're sitting there and you start getting really in your head and you're like, what do I do with my arms? Like, am I being weird with my arms right now? Like, oh, God. Like, let me do. Let me do this with my arms. Wait, hold on. That's weird. Hold on. Do I do this? Like, oh, oh, okay. I'm just. What do I do with my arms? And you think everyone is watching you and everyone is, like, criticizing how you're being with your arms, right? When really the truth is no one's paying attention. Everyone else is also in that, like, wondering, like, what am I doing with my face? Like, how am I sitting? Weird. You know, how am I holding my cup? Funny. You know, the beautiful thing about this is no one's paying attention. No one's actually paying attention to what you're doing, right? And if they are. If they are paying attention because you already did something to get their attention, and they are either looking for an opportunity to work with you, they're looking to be further in conversation with you, right? And doing those low lift things, like literally half assing stuff and being more approachable actually makes it easier for them to start a conversation with you. They're not actually. But really, most people are not actually paying attention to you, right? So it really doesn't matter. What matters is that you show up every damn day for whatever it is that you are working towards. That's it. The only thing that matters with that, I just. I just did. Day 13 of my live goal. Yay me. Like I said, I'm not feeling 100% and I do have dinner reservations. So this is a short live, everyone, but I want to thank David and Andy who joined me over on Instagram, and Javi and Justin and Leandro over on the LinkedIn land. Thank you all for joining. I hope this is helpful. I hope this is that kick in the butt that you needed to go and half ass some stuff just gloriously this weekend. And if you need any support, if you need, like help in properly half assing stuff, that's exactly what I do for my clients. Anyway. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach and host of the Weeniecast podcast, which will be dropping on Sunday with a new episode. Thank you all for joining and I will see you next week. All right, bye.