What's a goal without a plan?

Hello, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Happy Sunday, everyone. I wanted to go live today because I was thinking about the three essential things that everyone needs if they want to grow a business, Reach a seemingly impossible goal, or do anything that is worthwhile. And I came up with these few things, and I think they're pretty brilliant. So I hope you stay tuned and listen to all of them. And first and foremost, I love to do some housekeeping. So I am going live through streamyard. Sometimes the technology fails us. However, I'm going live to the Facebooks, to LinkedIn, and to YouTube. Sometimes I don't get all the comments from everywhere. So if you comment and I don't call you out and I don't respond to your question, it is not you. It's just the technology. I do love this to be interactive. So if you have any questions or something to add to the conversation, please, please do. But tonight, I want to be talking about goals and how we achieve those goals, because that is essentially what any business is. A business is just a vessel for us to reach certain goals, right? It may be monetary, it may be freedom, it may be creative, it may be impact. It could be any one of those or any other. Any other thing in the world, right? So let's talk about what a goal is. Okay? So what a goal is is basically something that you are working towards and you want to achieve, right? But let me tell you something about goals, okay? So goal without a plan is just a dream. As they say in Cinderella, a dream is a wish your heart makes. Yeah, okay, we don't really care about dreams here because a goal. Goals are what we want. Goals are attainable. Goals are things that we have identified in the world, and we've said, hey, I think that I want that to be mine. Think I want that to be mine. But let me tell you something about goals. A goal without a strategy and an action plan is just a sad little dream that your friends and loved ones will get tired of you talking about if you keep droning on and on and on without taking action. Okay, I'm gonna say that again. A goal without a strategy and action plan is just a sad little dream that no one will want to hear about after a while if you don't take action on it. Okay? The other thing about goals is you have to believe that they are attainable for you, okay? If you're working towards a goal and in your body and your soul and your mind, you don't believe you can actually hit It, I'm sorry to break it to you, you're never going to reach it, okay? Your, your, your belief system is a powerful, powerful technology. Your faith is a powerful technology. If it's not programmed to believe that you can attain that fitness goal, can attain that professional goal, can attain that money goal, it's never going to happen. Okay? And I'm going to go into why. Because the three things that you need when you're doing anything worthwhile, and let's talk business, because that's what I'm here for, you know me. So the first thing that you need is a goal. Okay? You need a goal. You need something to reach for. You need something that is just beyond your comfort zone or a little further that you're going to start working towards. You also need a strategy and a plan. That's where people like me come in. Okay, we can also come in for the goal part, but we love coming in when you already have the big juicy goal and say, okay, cool, we're just going to reverse engineer that and here are the steps and here's the action plan. Here's what you need to go go do, and go do it now. And now, and now and what did you do? And all the things. So you need a goal, you need an action plan, and finally the third thing, you just need to fucking believe in yourself, okay? You just need to believe in yourself. And you don't have to believe in yourself all the time. You can let yourself off the hook, you can have moments of doubt, but in the moments that matter, you need to believe that you can actually go for this thing. Okay? So I'm going to go into each one of these three things that you need to do and I'm going to break them down a little further. Okay? Okay, So a goal, okay? So your goal does not need to be your 30 year goal. Doesn't have to be anything. I know. So I, I'm a planner. If you were to look in any of my notebooks from high school, I guarantee you you'd see like every fifth page there'd be a ten year plan. Ten year plan of like what I thought was gonna be my life. Like I was gonna go to school for this and this was gonna be my job and I was gonna get married and I was gonna have babies. And obviously some of that hasn't happened yet. And actually some of that I don't want to happen. Okay? Because goals change. And so I think what happens, especially for those of us who are prone to planning things, who like to know what's next, and we like to be able to prepare for it, is we break trust with ourselves. Because we have set goals for ourselves in the past and we've kind of worked towards it, but not really, because they weren't really our goals. They were just, like, the logical next step that we've been handed in the. In the greater scheme of things. You know, we've all been handed, like, some kind of narrative of how someone's life should go well if it's a success, right? And so oftentimes those of us who are really driven, really ambitious when we're younger, we don't really know how to think for ourselves and really figure out what our personal goals are. So we take whatever society gives us and we try to, like, plan out our lives to that. And then we veer off because we're not meant to do that, right? We veer off, and it's just not meant to happen. And we go and do something different and we feel like we failed because we didn't stick to the plan. And that's perfectly okay because that plan was not meant for you, okay? That plan was meant for someone else. Someone super cookie cutter who, you know is gonna be that person who has the 2.5 kids and the dog and the cat and the white picket fence, all good for that. You're meant for something a little better. Not that I'm judging, like, that's a perfectly good life. But I know that you can have a greater impact on the world. So a goal. If you don't have a goal for where you want to be, don't stress about it being something that's like 10, 20, 30, 40 years out. Because honestly, none of us know what the world's going to look like then. We really just don't. I mean, I know when my parents entered the workforce, and when their parents entered the workforce, you generally just, like, had a job for your whole life, and you might have changed or bopped around a little bit, but I've had, like, seven different careers, and I'm only 33 years old, so the world doesn't work that way again anymore. It's just. And also, we don't have to operate within those constraints anymore, which is an amazing gift, right? So set a goal for three years from now. And if you can't think that far ahead, set a goal for two years from now, okay? Think of where you want to be, what you want your home to look like, what kind of people you want to surround yourself with, what kind of work you want to Be immersed in how much money you want to be making. Get really, really specific about the details, because the universe loves details. I want you to imagine you go into a restaurant, and it's a really good restaurant. It has really high ratings. Everyone has been, you know, raving about it, and you're like, you finally made it in. You're so excited. You sit down at the table, and they have a really, like, eclectic menu. I mean, you can pretty much get anything you wanted here. And there are also options of stuff that you don't like. And so you sit down at the table and you talk to the server and, like, what would you like, honey? And you're like, oh, well, whatever's good. I just want good things. Well, the waiter may have a different definition of what is good as you. So, for instance, I don't like tripe. Tripe is, you know, sheep intestine. I'm good. I've tried it. Don't get me wrong, it tastes very spongy. It's just a weird sensation. Now, I don't like that. But if I just said to the server, hey, give me whatever's good, and that's their favorite thing, and they've heard from, like, the last 10 people who had it that it was really, really good. Guess what I might be getting? I might be getting tripe. Because the server's thinking that they're doing their job really well. I'm giving them vague instructions, right? And so they're just giving me what they think is. Is what I want. And this is what the universe does with us all, all the time, because we are super vague about what it is that we want in our lives. And so the universe gives us things that are the equivalent of tripe. The universe gives us relationships that don't serve us, that just barely meet our basic needs. Like, tripe will get you full if you eat it, and you'll have to suffer through it a little bit, but it's food, and it's edible, and it is nourishing. It'll give us friendships that don't serve us. It'll give us jobs that don't serve us. It'll give us clients. It'll just give us all the stuff that we don't actually want. So it's really, really critically important when you do sit down at the table, metaphorically and literally, to name what it is that you want, down to the detail. You want to host a friends and family dinner on Sunday afternoons, and you want to be able to host a Christmas party where someone plays the Piano and has, and everyone gets to sing along to carols and to show tunes. This is personally like, what I want in my life. You want to be able to buy a villa in. In Italy somewhere where you get to go on vacation with your family. You want to do all these different things. You have to be specific about it, by the way. I'm just telling you guys all what I want because I'm very clear about what I want, because I know that if I'm clear, I'm going to get it, okay? That is how my work, my life has worked up till now. If I'm clear, I get it. And I want you to see how amazingly that works, okay? So you need to have a goal. That's number one. If you're working without a goal, I hate to say it, but you're spinning your wheels and you shouldn't be wasting your energy like that, okay? So get really clear. Even if it seems like it's out of your reach, that is allowed. Okay? Maybe you want to own a home in New York City. Okay, cool. Well, maybe for the next five years you can't own a home in New York City, but maybe you can find one that you can get, like, a recurring reservation in so you can go and, like, visit that. That area of the world and experience life in New York City. That's perfectly valid as well. Okay? So you need a goal, number one. Okay, Goal. If you don't have a goal, get a goal. If it's not specific enough, make it super fucking specific. Pinterest is a great tool for this if you, you know, don't know. If you have a hard time with, like, thinking of details. Next. Number two, you need a strategy and you need a plan. Okay? Like I said, a goal without a strategy or an action plan is just a dream that your friends are going to get really sick of hearing about after a while. The strategy and the action plan are going to ensure that you make headway on this goal, okay? Because here's the thing. You can set yourself a huge goal and you can think, wow, like, I'm just going to sit here and manifest this. I'm just going to, like, you know, law of Attraction, write about it in my journal. I'm going to talk about it. I'm going to, like, hold the vibrations that's coming to me. But if you're not doing any of the work to make it real, babes, I'm sorry, it's not going to come to you. Law of Attraction works when you believe it's coming to you, that's the third thing. And when you do the work to make it happen. Okay, now, I see a lot of people say they are working in their business, working on their business, working towards their goals, when really they are doing the equivalent of shuffling papers around. Lauren Howard. Hi, Good evening. This is everything I needed to hear tonight. I'm so glad. Truth. I had a glass of wine before I did this, so I'm glad it's coherent. So, but here's the thing. You can work and work and work, work and work and is the equivalent of just shuffling paperwork around. It doesn't actually move the needle on anything. It makes you feel busy. Like, this is the badge of honor that we all have in our world right now. You arrive somewhere and someone says, oh, how are you tonight? And you know, like, oh, my God, Becky, I am so busy. And it's like the new badge of honor. It's the new, like, I'm doing so great. I'm so in demand. I'm so busy. Okay, but let's be real. You can be busy doing bullshit work that doesn't actually get you new clients, that doesn't actually move the needle for your business, that doesn't actually get you closer to your goals. Okay? If you don't have a strategy and an action plan that breaks it down into little minute actions that you can take from day to day to get you closer to that big goal, you're not doing anything. I know that's really hard to hear. If you are not breaking down that bigger goal into small action steps that you can do on the day to day that you can do to work in your business every single day, you're not doing anything. Like, it's just, you have a goal over here and you have action and you're spinning your wheels over here. They're not connected. The strategy connects everything. The strategy makes sure that the wheels are in gear over here and they're churning and doesn't necessarily have to be fast. It can be like a slow churn. Okay? They can go really slow, but they are going to move towards that goal. It's really easy to spin your wheels over here. Okay? You need a strategy, you need an action plan. If you don't have those things, go get them. I'm one of the people you can get them from. Hello. I'm. I'm a business strategist and leadership coach. That's what I do. That's what I spend my days doing. Okay. I'm not the only person who does that, though. So if you don't like me for whatever reason. Go find someone else and just get this together already, okay? There are plenty of me out there, okay? So that's number two. You need a strategy. You need an action plan. Finally, number three, you need to just go ahead and believe in yourself. You need to believe in yourself, okay? Because you're going to have this big goal, you know, three years from now. You're hoping to make $500,000 from this program or, or this business or whatever. You want to be able to buy a vacation home for your family. You want to be able to pay for your kids to go to college, whatever, okay? If you don't believe in yourself. Oh, I'm just. Sorry I'm distracted. Justin, your tireless dynamo and your audience is lucky to have you. Just wanted to say hi. Thank you, Justin. I appreciate you. And hi back. But if you don't believe in yourself, let me tell you what's going to happen, okay? So you're going to be working towards this goal. Say you have. And this is assuming you have a strategy in place. If you don't have a strategy in place, you're going to be spinning your wheels and it's just not going to be connecting at all. This is assuming you at least have two of these three things together, okay? So you have a strategy of a plan. If you're working the strategy and you're working the plan, failure is guaranteed in that, okay? There are going to be things that don't work, and they're going to be things that do work, but they just fail in moments. Okay? So, for instance, enrolling new clients, okay? This is one of the worst, most painful truths I have to teach my new clients is that on your enrollment calls, three out of four people should say no, okay? If not three out of four people, then one out of two. It's either 50% or 75% no rate, okay? Meaning you get on a call with someone and you ask them to be your client and they say no, I don't think this is right for me. It's too expensive. It's this. That. That is super healthy, okay? If you're not getting that, if you're getting 100% yeses from your stuff that tells you that you're charging too little, okay? And you can't. You can't scale a business on that. You should be getting half, if not three quarters of people saying no to you. But here's what happens when you don't believe in yourself. You have this big goal and you have this action plan and you're working so hard and you're grinding and you're, you know, really tapping into your creativity and you're putting yourself out there. You're just outside your comfort zone all the time and you hear three no's and it just plummets you into the gutter. It just, it completely tanks. You imagine like there's a helicopter up here and then a torpedo comes and, and it just blows you out of the sky and you crash and burn and it takes you weeks to recover from it because three people said no to you. Boohoo. Woe is me. I just can't recover from that. Because. Because you don't believe in yourself. Them saying no just reaffirms what you actually believe, is that this is never going to happen for you. I'm going to say that again. When you don't believe in yourself, any little setback is going to reaffirm the actual belief system you have, which is this is never going to happen for me. I can't do this. People won't hire me for this. And let me tell you something. What you believe affects your energy and your energy impacts everything you put out there. So if you believe that this is never going to work for you, if you believe that this is like no one's ever going to sign up with you, that you know this isn't going to work out, that this is a pipe dream, but you're going to work towards it anyway. Everything you send out, any text message, any social post, any newsletter, all your sales calls, everyone's going to be picking up on some level of that and you're going to start getting more and more no's. Now this is, we're talking faith here, right? We're talking faith. This is what religions are based on, okay? We're talking faith in yourself, which, I mean, if you talk to the earlier generations, okay, my parents, my grandparents, they found security in marriage, in a secure job, in owning a house, okay? They don't, we don't really have the model for having faith in yourself. Often if you do, you're incredibly lucky and I want you to treasure that and go and thank whoever gave that to you. But when you have faith in yourself, you are able to get through those bumps. You're able to get past the, oh, wow, the last three people have said no. That's actually really healthy for me. That tells me that my pricing is, is along the same, like the correct lines that I should have. And if I get more no's, it means I'm just Gonna have to make a change. Just. It's just data. It's just data. It means nothing about me. It means nothing about the viability of my goals and my dreams. It just means that something needs to change in either how I'm communicating or in this other thing, okay? It doesn't mean anything about me, okay? When you have belief in yourself and you believe that your goals are attainable for you, you can make it through any drought. You can make it through any slump, okay? Because here's the thing. It's the cyclical nature of absolutely everything. I was walking home from the restaurant tonight, and I looked up and the moon was just absolutely gorgeous. And I don't know if it's a full moon tonight or if it's like just a couple days pass because it was just so bright against the city that I, like, it just had this, like, blurry halo. I couldn't tell if it was a true circle or not. But here's the thing. The moon is never the same every single night. Like the night you see a full moon, you know, it's just going to, like, start waning. It's going to become smaller and smaller and smaller until it disappears. And when it disappears and you can't find it in the sky, you know, it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until it's a full circle, okay? The seasons. The beautiful thing about everything in our life is that nothing lasts, okay? Good times, bad times, none of it lasts, okay? We're always going to move through one season and end up in another and then end up another and then end up another. Okay? This is true in nature. This is true in our lives. It's true in our businesses. And if you don't believe in yourself, you're never gonna make it from winter to spring to summer. You're just gonna be in winter and be like, fuck, this sucks. This is obviously not gonna work for me. I'm just gonna give up here. And I don't want that for you. I don't want that for you. And you shouldn't want that for you either. So whatever it takes for you to believe. And maybe the big goal that you have, maybe it's too big. Maybe you break it up into, like. Like, three parts, you know? Maybe you break it down so it's like a fraction of what it is. That's what it takes for you to believe in yourself. I want you to do that. Because what I know about humans is that we are amazing. We can make absolutely anything happen. When we have a goal when we have a plan and when we believe in ourselves. And if you don't have one of those things and you're getting frustrated at the time, same thing isn't happening already. I want you to go back to the drawing board and make sure you have one of. One of each of these things, okay? And if you don't have the strategy and the plan, I want you to call me, okay? I want you to call me. Even if I'm not the right fit for you, I want you to call me. Because I know a crap ton of other business strategists and coaches who I can refer to you. If you don't believe in yourself, you have this big goal. That is also something I want you to call me about, because that's what I work on with my clients as well, okay? It's really hard to have a big goal and believe that it's going to happen for you. And that is one of my favorite parts of my job, is like, you actually don't have to believe in yourself all the time, because I'm over here holding this basket of all the things I believe that are possible for you. That's the best thing that I do in my. In my work. And my clients just got to come to me when they're in those months when it's a new moon, when it's winter, when it's barren, when it's a drought, and say, tell me you believe in me again. And I get to do that. And that's what gets them through to the spring and through the summer and through to getting clients and through to actually reaching their goal. So any of this stuff is happening for you, I want you to shoot me a dm. We're going to book a call, okay? You're not shooting me a dm, and we're not booking a call. Like, that's not happening. Okay? So you shoot me a dm, we are going to book a call and we're going to talk. And there's no pressure in this call. You are either going to get, like, resources. I'm going to send you to other people or refer books or resources to you, or we're going to talk about what it looks like to work together, okay? Because here's what I know for you here, and I'm saying this to a life. I don't know who's watching this, but here's what I know about the human condition. This is what I know about people, is that we are unstoppable when we have all Three of these things lined up. When we have a goal, when we have a strategy and an action plan, and when we believe in ourselves, I know that we're unstoppable. And the path may not open up and happen the way we expect it to, and that's okay. But I know you can reach your goals regardless of whatever limitations you've set on yourself. Anyway, it's Sunday night. I have. I still have cleaning to do. This is kind of why I went live, because I wanted to avoid the cleaning. But the live is over now, so back to cleaning I go. I hope this was a nice boost for you this Sunday. I am going to be going live for the rest of the year. The rest? The rest of the year? That sounds so dramatic. It's two weeks. Okay? Calm down the rest of 2020. And here's what I want you to know. If you're in business for yourself, I don't want you slowing down right now, okay? Because everyone else is slowing down. It doesn't mean they're not paying attention, doesn't mean their eyes aren't open, doesn't mean their ears aren't listening. Okay? You need to just be present, be open, talk about what you're doing. Because people are paying attention and they're still in the buying mode. They're still interested in getting help for whatever it is that they're doing. And if you solve that problem, you need to be not in their face, but you need to be out there. You need to be some, you know, somewhere where they can see you and hear you and think, oh, yeah, I've been meaning to reach out to that person for a while. I should do that right now while I have downtime. Okay. Anyway, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Happy Sunday. Thank you, Lauren and Justin, for tuning in and commenting. If anyone else did comment and I wasn't able to call you out because I didn't see you, I'm sorry for that. I can't wait to touch base with you in other commenting places on the Interwebs. Anyway, have a great Sunday and I will talk to you all this week. Bye.