Ep101: If You’re Waiting Until January to Set Goals, You’ve Already Lost 2026

Matt Dart breaks down why waiting until January to plan 2026 is a mistake. He walks through the SMART framework and shares his actual vision board: monthly date nights, building a team with AI, going pro on organic content, and specific income targets. The key is tracking analytics and keeping goals visible on your phone.
Chapters
Alrighty, team Matt here from the PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle show. Hope you guys are having an amazing day so far. So today we're going to talk about how to set proper goals in 2026. I'm going to run you through the framework that I use. Super, super simple by the way. And I'm going to show you, I'm going to share a couple of my goals that I'm working on for 2026, but the majority or the majority of people will do this last minute. So the reason why I'm doing it now is to get ahead of the game and start working on 2026 right now where everyone else is just chilling, drinking beers, sink and piss and you know, having a great time, which is great. But I'm also having a good time but preparing for 2026. So firstly, let's go through my, let's go through my personal update. I've been like, there's no secret, I'm going all in on organic right now and investing a lot of money with like videographers, editors, all that type of stuff to improve my organic content. Because I'm going pro. And actually on my one, one of the things on my wallpaper actually says go, go pro on, on social media or organic content. So just a little update on my little bet here. I'm up to, I think I'm 180,000 views in the last, it's like five weeks. I need to get to 500,000 by the 9th of January or I've got to run a half marathon. So I've got one, two, three at the time, this recording, I've got three and a half weeks to do that. So right now if I kept doing the same thing, I would fail, I'd get to around 400,000 views. So I need to increase my game. So which means I need to, I need to make better content. So right now my, my little update here for you is make sure and little, little story I suppose or little insight is to make sure when you're actually doing tasks, make sure you're actually tracking the data and the analytics to make sure it's actually going to be of benefit to you long term. Because just because you do something doesn't mean it's going to propel the business forward. You need to be doing the right things. So like just because I make content and let's, let's say for example, you know, I make two pieces of content every single day for the next month, but I get less views, there's no point me doing that amount of work to get less views or less engagement. I can make less content and put in more work into producing the better content, if that makes sense, and then get the same amount or the better amount of views by doing less work but putting in more quality instead of quantity. That's the shift in social media these days is social media wants more quality, not quantity. So that's what I've been working on right now. So let's get into today's training. So I got a couple of things I wanted to go through. I'm just going to share some of my stuff and some of my experiences with setting goals. So the first thing I want to talk about is you need to have your goals like. You need to, you need to have like proximity to your, your goals. My goals right now are on my phone screensaver. So I'm on my phone, you know, for multiple hours of the day. So I see my goals every single day without fail. That's how I keep focus towards my goals. If you think about like laser focus, if you've got clear focus towards goals, or if you got no goggles on and you're just kind of being very reactive, what do you think is going to happen with your goals? Okay, so have them, like, have them on your wall, have them on your screensaver on your laptop or your phone and you'll, you'll subconsciously become way more focused. Um, the second thing, let's go through the framework. So everyone's heard this before. Smart goals. So specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. Let's go through these in a little bit more detail. So specific as in, you don't want to say I want to grow my income. How much? You want to grow your income by measurable. How much do you want to grow your income by? And how do you know if you can actually achieve that? So don't just, again, same example, don't just say how I want to grow my income. Is it measurable? Can you actually see, can you actually track how much income you're, you're making measurable? Could be like, if it's not measurable, could be like, oh, I wanna, I wanna improve my, I don't know. Let's just say, for example, how your stomach feels. You can't measure that. Is it attainable? Can you actually achieve this goal? If I want to go from 1 million to 100 million in a year, probably unlikely. Is it relevant? Is it relevant to what you're doing right now? I might say I want to run a, I want to Go for a run around the world. It's not relevant for me. And is it time down? Do you have a specific time frame in mind? This is super easy when you're setting goals for 2026 because the time is in 2026. The time down is 2026. So that's like everyone already knows this was an acronym, but most people don't actually use it. So how can you make goals specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and tie bound? These are the things that I usually have in my goals for 2026. I have money, relationships, investments, business and fun. Okay, so if I look at like my vision board right now and I'll see if I can share my screen. So if you're watching on YouTube, you should be able to see my screen very soon. You're on Spotify. You may or may not be able to see it. But let me share my screen. I'll show you my 2026 goals. And by the way, my values haven't really changed too much from 2025 to 2026. So it actually looks very similar. So you should be able to see, see that now. So I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, I've got 6 kind of pitches and some writing on each picture that basically demonstrates what that means to me. So I'm going to, I'm going to go through one by one to give you some ideas or some context. And this is the stuff that I'm focusing on this year. So top left is family be present. So I've got a picture of me and my two kids, which is to be present with my family. That doesn't really change. That's a constant reminder for me to be present with them going down relationship Date Nights Monthly and then invest into my relationship. So I'm looking to actually find like a relationship coach in 2026 to help with my relationship with, with my wife and also with other people, like friends and stuff like that as well. So date Nights Monthly, which we're relatively decent at, but we can can always do better. The next one down is leverage. Use AI and team. So I'm focusing 2026 on building a team so I can get time back. So we have actually already hired another coach to be part of our coaching team at PC Mastery. And by the way, if you're interested in actually growing your income as a pt, we actually help face to face and online trainers add an extra $30,000 to their revenue guaranteed. So if you want to get a plan on how to actually do that, just comment the OR DM me the word hybrid and I'll. We'll make a plan together and see if we can achieve that goal together. So I'm building a team. So I've got. I've got Jason, who does AI slash operations for me in systems. I've got Scott, who's actually a client of mine. He's coming on board as a coach. He's gone from 2k per month to 17k per month as a PT in 11 months. So he's becoming a coach for us. And then I've got two VAs from the Philippines, one on one's social media and the other one's lead generation. So I've got four team members right now. I don't think I'll need too many more team members in that. But what, what it's really focused on or what I'm really focused on for 2026 is getting rid of the stuff that I don't want to do and having someone else do that for me so I can focus on the things that I'm really good at, which is sales and marketing. Well, that's what you should be focusing on for business, right? You should be focusing on sales and marketing because that's going to propel you forward the most. And then you basically outsource everything else either to AI or to a team. Okay, the next one is the bottom right, which just says GoPro and there's pictures of microphones, laptops, you know, podcast stuff. It's going pro on organic content. I am making a decision to go pro in 2026 for content creation. Eventually I will start a YouTube channel. Well, I've got a YouTube channel, but I'm going to be more serious about YouTube but also more serious about just content creation in general, not just putting up stuff just for the hell of it, just to tick a box. But be more purposeful with this. We got holidays. I've already got Japan already booked for February with the family. We are thinking of going traveling for six to 12 months starting at the end of 2026. Still kind of tossing up with a few things there. So I've just put Japan on there for now. So I've got a picture of Japan and I've just written holidays Japan. Obviously I can put some other stuff on there as well, but we're just not 100 sure if we're going to be traveling in 2026 or if it's going to be 2027 for that world trip every six to 12 months. And then the last one for me is the investments and business. So I want a 60k share portfolio for 2026 where which we didn't. We did pretty well with our share portfolio this year in 2025 but I want to increase that in 2026 and then we want to get to 90k per month. So that's a rolling million or seven figure income. We need 90 clients to do that. So that's some of the things that I do for me you can think of this as well is for some of these goals. Like some of these things are more reminders for me but a lot of them are also quite tangible like date nights every single month, 90k in monthly income, 60k short share portfolio. But they're more outcome driven so family is be present. Leverage leverage Team using AI plus obviously outsourcing, going pro on organic social media if I really wanted to and this is actually good feedback for me right now, I actually should make specific goals on my social media organic content. Like how many, how many people do I want to impact each month on my social media in terms of views and engagement, how many followers do I want to have? How many clients I want to get from organic every single month? Like I know I need to actually get 11 clients per month to be able to hit 90k per month or to get 90 clients which right now we average usually around 5 or 6 per month. So I obviously need to double what we're doing and we've got obviously some plans with that that we're going to implement in 2026. And the whole point of me hiring a team is so I can spend more time on the sales and marketing which are going to propel the business forward to that 90k per month goal. Okay, so moral of the story here is what can you do as a PT to either outsource or delegate or completely remove with AI, for example, so you can focus on the stuff that's going to propel the business forward. Perhaps you're stuck doing PT sessions, trading time for money. Perhaps you're not willing to invest in ads to get more clients. Perhaps you're not willing to go all in on organic content to go pro on content. So what do you need to do to get the best results in 2026? So that's what I'm going to leave you with today. So in summary, to set goals in 2026 you got to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bound. However, it doesn't mean you can't have specific outcomes that you want to achieve as well like I do, which is be more present you know, GoPro and organic social media, they are still fine. And the last thing I would suggest is make, like, a vision board that you can have on your wall in front of you. Like, if you. If I had my vision board type of thing in front of me right here, that would be epic because I usually sit here and, you know, and. And work, but, you know, if I just. If I had it, like, under my bed, I'm never going to see it, so I'm never actually going to stay focused. This is why I have it as my screensaver on my phone. So. So I literally wake up every single day and I see my goals, so I know what I'm focusing on. Okay? So I hope that really makes sense into how I do things. This is just worse for me. It might not work for you, but this is what works for me. But the whole point is go, go out somewhere, sit at a cafe or something, or go get some fresh air, go out of the house, sit down and reflect on 2025, and then go into 2026 with purpose. Be proactive rather than reactive. Make a vision board. It's just what I do. Make a vision board. Put it on your phone as your screensaver, put it on your laptop as a screensaver and look at it every single day so you know what you're working on. We've had a tremendous year. We've. We've tripled our business in 2025, which is crazy to think. We've tripled our business in 2025. So, yeah, I'd like to think some of the things that I'm doing is working. I probably should have started with that, how I should look my income in 2025. But, yeah, that's how I do my planning. Hope it helps for you. And I'll see you in the next episode. Have an epic day.
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