061. Goals Part 1 - The Mindset Behind Setting Goals that Lift You Higher

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. Well, hello. Hello my friends. How are you? Happy New Year. Here we are, 2023. So exciting. And we're back. I have taken a couple weeks off, not totally, but I mean, as far as recording new podcast episodes and just have been spending the time enjoying the holidays and having the kiddos home from school. And now it's like we are back back in business, right? It's kind of like coming out of that holiday fog, right? Of events and all of the holiday gatherings and entertaining kids and buying presents and all the things. And so now it's like we're getting back to normal life. Kids are going back to school tomorrow and the regular routine resumes, as does the podcast, which I'm really excited about because I have some really great things planned for this year and the plans keep coming together. So here we are. And I wanted to start off the year by talking about goal setting. And I have a, a view and a way of setting goals that I feel like is not typical in our culture or typical in, in business coaching. So I want to just offer you a different alternative to goal setting. If you are like me and have a, in the past found goals to be very traumatic. You know, setting goals and not achieving them and feeling like a failure and just using them to beat myself over the head. I decided a few years ago that I just don't want to do that anymore. And I learned and now teach a different way of thinking about goals and setting goals and really making goals. Something that are a part of my growth and contribute, contributing to my growth. And so wanted to just have that discussion with you today. And also I want to invite you as we get started here today, if you enjoy this podcast, I would love to hear from you and, and what you love about it. And if you wouldn't mind leaving a review and telling me what you like about it, even what you would like to hear more of, I want to hear from you. I'm going to be launching some different ways that we can communicate about the content on this podcast that are going to be really fun for all of us. So stay tuned for those. As I get those put together, I will let you know. But in the meantime, I would love for you to leave a review if you would like. And that is so welcome and helpful. And also feel free to share this podcast with your friends, with those in your entrepreneurial circle, and other women that you know that could benefit from it. And I know that many of you already do that because I hear about that. So thank you so much. I appreciate you so, so much, and looking forward to some really great growth in this podcast this year. So that's one of my goals anyway. So, speaking of goals, I first want to define what a goal is, because it is not some really awful measurement of ourselves that we use to beat ourselves over the head, which it can often be for some of us, for me included in the past. But really, what a goal is, is the object of a person's. This is from the dictionary. It's the object of a person's ambition or effort. It's an aim or desired result. And I really like to think about it as that aim or that desired result, right? So we think about a goal as just giving us a something to aim at, to aim for. I used to have a boss back in the days when I was working in New York in the Internet industry, in Internet software, and he used to say, if you don't know where you're going, no road will get you there. And if you don't care, any road will do. And I. I used to be so mystified by that. But then, you know, in thinking about it, it was like, what is more difficult? Is it not knowing where I'm going and measuring myself on that because that feels awful, or is it not caring where I'm going and measuring myself on that? Right? Because those of us, as entrepreneurs, we're always, like, thinking about, like, how am I doing? Like, where am I headed? What, how's this gonna go? I want to feel successful. I want to be successful. But if we don't decide what those success markers are, and for each one of us, they can be different. They don't have to be all about money, right? But they can be lots of different things. But if we don't decide ahead of time what they are, I feel like we're going to be measuring ourselves on some maybe unspoken success factor that we have inside of us that's unspoken and unplanned for, right? Like unintentional. So I know for many, many years, I avoided setting goals and making goals for this reason. Like, I didn't want to feel awful if I didn't achieve the goal. But I think what feels even more awful is not setting a goal and still having one. That's, like, unspoken does that make sense? I don't know if any of you experience that, but that's kind of how I used to work. And, and so I just felt awful all the time, right? It's like I felt awful because I didn't set a goal. I didn't, I, I felt awful because I didn't achieve the unset goal, but if I set a goal, I felt awful because I would never achieve it or whatever. So I really had to change the way I thought about goals. And the way I have come to think about goals is that it's my aim. I just want to know what I'm aiming at, right? And my brain wants to have something to aim at. It wants a job. It wants a job and it wants to know at all times how things are going, right? And I think that's okay. Obviously that can go wrong and we can, can get off into some sabotage and criticism of ourselves and things like that. But overall, I think we need to have an aim. And so that can be monetary. I do set personally, I set a revenue goal because I'm in business to make money, number one. But number two, what it represents to me is that every dollar that I earn that I create in my business means that I am serving another business person, another businesswoman, and helping her to make money in her business. And so that's why for me, I'm totally fine with, with measuring revenue. I know some people would rather measure their success and other factors. And that's not the only measurement for me. Like, I have a revenue goal, but I want to do it in a way that also respects my other responsibilities, my role as a, a mother and a spouse and the family obligations that I have and the relationships that I have. I want to create my business goal, but not at the expense of my personal goals as well, right? For caring for myself and my body and my health. And I believe that that is totally possible. So, yes, I have a new revenue goal, but I also have a goal of how I want to feel about, you know, in that journey along the way. So we have this aim. But what I like to really think about as far as goals is not actually getting to the goal itself within the time span that I've set, but it's thinking about what is the growth that I want to have on the way there, right? So because yes, I'm gonna get to the goal eventually, whether it's in the 12 month span that I wanted to get there or maybe more, but there's a lot of journey in between where I am now. And getting to that point, right? And so what is all the gain and what is all the growth that I want to experience? That, that setting that goal where it is is going to call me to that, to take me through that growth or to that growth, right? So for example, I want my ultimate goal. I don't know if it's my ultimate, ultimate, but my next big, big goal is to create a million dollars. I want to make a million dollars in my business in one year. And I'm nowhere near that yet. I've crossed the six figure mark, but I'm not 2 million yet. And I'm not going to set that as my 12 month goal, right? Because not that it's not possible, I totally think it is possible. But the mile marker that I want to get to at this point for this 2023 year is 300k is my revenue goal for this year because it's part of my growth along my journey to get to a million. But I feel like that is a goal, that's the 300k is a goal that's going to really stretch me and call me higher and call me to my creativity. Whereas if I were to set the goal for a million, it seems a little too far out there and just kind of shuts me down right now, right? Like I know I'm going to get there, but I'm ready to problem solve and be creative and create that 300k. And that was also my goal for 2022 and I didn't achieve it. But what I did do is I was problem solving at the level or thinking about like all the different ways that I would change myself and my business to get to that 300k. And so I've already begun problem solving at that 300k level. And so I'm just going to keep that goal for this year until I get to it. Right? And because of the growth that I want to experience in myself and my business to get to that level. So when we're focused on that growth and on that gain, then whether we achieve the goal or not, within that 12 month time span or whatever the time span is that we give it, then it's fine, right? Because I know I will have, whether I achieve it or not, I will have gotten all of the growth that I wanted to get. So that's how I think about goals. That really helps me to acknowledge my growth. Whether or not I achieve the goal like I am, I have a plan together. I know exactly within the offers that I currently have, how I want that all to come together in order to create 300k. So it's just the problem solving along the way to get there, right? And that is the creativity and the challenge that I want to have this year. And to do it in a way, like I said, that respects all the other parts of my life that I want to maintain and grow and take care of. So that's how I like to think about my goal. And so I'm wondering, have you set a goal for the year? I hope so. And if not, now's a great time. You can just pause this podcast and set your goal because next we're going to talk about the simple plan to get there. So if you set a goal, for example, a hundred thousand dollars for your revenue, gross revenue for this year, then think about what is the simple way that could come together with the offers that you already have, right? So like how many clients do you need to have to get to that 100k? Or how many, you know, however your offers, however, you can figure out the math that gets you there with the capacity that you have. Or maybe your plan is to increase capacity or increase prices or, you know, kind of how, how does that come together? Simply, for example, for me, it's like if I was going to make 100K and I had, for example, like a 5K offer, I would need 20 clients, right? So, okay, well, how does 20 clients come together? Well, you know, in my business, I have, well, it's one of my offers. I have six month packages, coaching packages, right? So that would be, you know, 10 clients for each six months. So you always have 10 clients going. And so then my question would be, well, do I have that capacity for myself and my business? Yes, I do. But what, for example, wouldn't be reasonable is say if I set my goal at a million dollars with a 5k offer, I would need 200 clients, right? And with the offers I have right now, I don't have capacity for 200 clients. So I would have to solve for that. And whether that would be increasing prices or increasing capacity or changing my offer, like that's the sort of simple plan that you need to come up with how you have the, how you get to your gross revenue number, that goal, and then once you have that, you can go forward and begin laying out the more detailed plan. And so I'm going to talk more about this on the next podcast. This is going to be a two part mini series on goal setting. But in this first part I wanted to just lay out really the mindset behind goal setting. Because I think it is very different than a lot of the ways that at least I, and many of my clients and women that I talk to have been taught how to set goals and why we set goals and what goals are for. And so I really wanted to lay that out and just encourage you to set a goal and set up the simple plan, right? And then next time what I want to talk about is, okay, now we have our goal, we have our simple plan, then we're going to set four, probably four, three or four main goals that will support that big goal, right? And then I want to teach you how to break those up into manageable milestones and benchmarks and chunks, basically, so that each day, each week, each month, each quarter, you're doing the actions that are going to lead to that goal being realized. And I think this is something that I'm doing different this year with my goals and my planning that I haven't done to this level of detail in the past, which I think is why I did not reach my 300k goal last year. So this is one of the pieces that I am changing in my own planning process to, you know, solve for that 300k level that I want to hit. Right. So I wanted to share it with you because I think it is just pure gold that if you decide to use this process in your own planning and your own goal setting, I am positive it's going to help you get closer to achieving that goal. So that's my little teaser for next time. And also just as another teaser, I am still enrolling students or participant clients in my 90 day marketing accelerator for Q1. So if you want to really take your marketing, your messaging, your communications, your offers, your social media, all that to the next level in your business and really set yourself up with some amazing marketing momentum and habits and practices and efficiency, I just want to invite you to join me in the 90 day marketing accelerator where we are have 12 weeks together. We are having group sessions where I'm teaching a workshop as well as providing group coaching. And then you also will get the opportunity to have six one on one sessions coaching sessions with me for implementation, for accountability, for problem solving on your particular business, your marketing. And I can really help you to gain so much traction to start out this year. It's going to be amazingly valuable to all the clients we already have in there and we do have spots left. So I would love to welcome you in there. If you're interested, you can visit my website@melissamkellogg.com and if you happen to be listening to this podcast at a time when we're not actively enrolling in the Marketing accelerator, there is a wait list so you can be notified next time we open up the doors. So I look forward to having you back next time as we dive even deeper into goal setting and planning. And I hope you have a great rest of your week. Talk to you later. Bye. If you like this podcast, then you have got to sign up for my free on demand video training Grow youw Sales Doing what yout Love where I teach you in depth my simple process process that you can implement right away to harness your mindset and your skills to grow your sales to whatever level you want. So go grab that now. The link is in the show notes and I'll see you next time.