What to do over Christmas...

Hey, what's up? It's Ollie here. So today's Christmas Eve, and as you can see, I've got a little cute little Christmas tree behind me with tons of presents inside. And I'm super excited for tomorrow. I hope you guys are as well. And I thought I'd make a quick video to catch up with you. Really? Because I haven't made one for a little while. And also just outline my process for what I actually do over this holiday period between Christmas Day and New Year's Eve, where everything kind of slows down and, you know, it's time for a break. Because obviously we're not going to be hustling over this next week, right? We're not going to be putting in tons and tons and tons of hours into our business. Instead, we're going to be more introspective. We're going to be slowing down, going to be hanging out with family, celebrating, and not really focusing on work. But even though you're not hustling, you're not putting in tons and tons of effort into your business. You can do a few very, very short, easy and fun exercises to make sure you kind of wrap up this year and smash into 2019 in the most productive way possible. So when January the First hits, right after you've got over the hangover from celebrating New Year's Eve, right? And maybe wait till January 2nd instead of just having a few, like, New Year's resolutions, which you're not really too committed to actually keeping until the end of the year, you have a real strategy to move through and get some incredible results in 2019. And this works for me. This keeps me on track at the end of the year and the beginning of the new year has done for the past few years, and I wanted to share it with you. So let me just walk through a few points of how this works and hopefully you'll come out of this video feeling really clear about what to do over the next few days. So the first thing I like to look at when it comes to reviewing things in the holidays is my wins. And now this is really important. A lot of the time we get caught up in focusing on all the stuff that's just going wrong. I just take the past two weeks in my business, right? I can list to you instantly a ton of stuff that's go wrong, right? I've had refunds go through. I've had stuff not planned go exactly to plan. I've had tasks that have been on my to do list for weeks that I haven't done yet. And it's nagging me knowing that I have to do them. And there's just loads of stuff that I know that haven't been done quite as well as I wanted to. And as a business owner or as someone who's looking to start a business, a lot of the time this stuff can plague you. Actually start to get you a little bit down, especially when it comes to strategizing and planning your goals for the next year, right? It can make you feel as if you're underperforming or maybe there's no point in setting goals for the new year if you can't keep on top of all these things you should have done that you haven't done. So if you're in that space and focusing on all this negative stuff, it's very difficult to be ambitious. So you have to switch your state. You have to focus on getting hold of your emotions and getting a sense of certainty that you actually really can achieve things. So you're in a better place to set goals for the new year. If you don't do that, this can make you feel very pessimistic. So start off by focusing on wins. You must have achieved some amazing things in 2018, right? I mean, they may not have been huge things, some of them, they might have just been small shifts that you're just really proud of. Maybe you reconnected with some people that you haven't connected with in a long time. Maybe you hit some small level goals and maybe you did achieve some incredible things over the past year as well. Maybe you had a few breakthroughs and a few new experiences that you're really proud of. The key is to just get a piece of paper and just start writing down wins. And the important thing with this process is don't filter yourself. Don't try and like just select the ones you think are important. Anything that you think is a win. It could be eating less sugar over the past week or something like that. Write it down. Sooner or later you'll start flowing and just having tons and tons and tons of wins down on a piece of paper and you'll start to feel really good about your progress, really certain. And this does two things. It makes you feel in a great state to get goals done. Number two, it actually gives you an outline of all the stuff you achieved last year. So you can do better next year, but also feel good about it, right? So that's number one, write down your wins. Number two, review your goals, right? What goals did you have last year? Maybe if you can Find wherever you wrote down your goals for 2018 or just if you remember them, do like, a review of how far you got with each one. Now, hopefully, some of the goals you will have hit them and you can celebrate and you can pat yourself on the back. Maybe some goals you kind of half completed, right? And you got maybe 50% of the way that happens. I've got a load of goals where I got about halfway to where I wanted to go. And that's cool, right? Sometimes we set goals that are too high and only hit halfway. That's fine. Maybe some goals just completely didn't go for them, didn't, you know, maybe your priorities changed or maybe something changed, and it's important to understand why that happened, right? So for every goal that you set for yourself, just write down, like, the result of how far you got, whether you completed it or whether you just set it aside and change your mind on that goal. Then underneath this, right, you've got your wins, you've got your goals. Then you want to have a quick analysis of all the stuff you did that worked and all the stuff you did that didn't work, what worked when you were trying to go for your goals and what didn't work. There's going to be a list of things that, you know, was really, really powerful and really moved the needle in 2018. And there's also going to be a list of stuff that you tried and it just failed miserably. Now, this is going to be your biggest asset for moving forward in the new year, right? Because now you've got solid proof of stuff that works and stuff that doesn't work. And one of the trickiest things to do, the toughest way to move forward, is to buy continually doing stuff that just doesn't work, right? That's honestly the worst way to move forward. The easiest way to move forward is to continue doing things that do work. So pay very close attention to the things that you're doing that are working and just focus on doing more of them. One of the things you actually have a tendency to do as an entrepreneur is, is constantly trying to rewrite everything and reinvent the wheel on a regular basis, right? Something starts working, starts going well, but then you see a new shiny object in the distance. You want to run towards it and just completely throw away everything that's working already. Maybe you've got a product that's been selling really, really well, and, you know, the next step is to logically order more units and just to ramp up the sales. Well, it can be Very tempting to just go for a different product because it looks like it's got better revenue, right? Or it's got less competition or there's a real opportunity there. It's fine to do that. But don't throw away the stuff that's working and make sure you keep focusing on that, right? So we've got wins, we've got goals. What worked, what didn't work. Then from your list of stuff that worked and what didn't work, you can focus on what to keep doing from this stuff, right? What to improve from that stuff, what to start doing and what to stop doing in 2019. So these are like four things you can make a list of. Maybe draw like a graph on a piece of paper. The top left, you can write what to keep doing, what stuff do you want to continue doing in the new year? The top right, you can write what you want to improve on. On the bottom left, you can write what you want to start doing in the new year that you haven't been doing. And on the bottom right, you can write what do you want to stop doing? These four questions are really, really key to consider when you're creating a strategy for the new year. Now, by the way, this relatively rigid structure for a review of my year, I didn't invent myself. In fact, I used to. The structure at the back of Michael Hyatt's Full Focus Planner, right? This is something that I recommend you grab, probably get it for yourself as a Christmas present and order it right now, because this has got an incredible structure for just planning everything. And I use this on a daily basis to actually keep all my tasks in check. So that review of a year I just broke down for you is actually all laid out on a page at the back of the A Full Focus Planner. So you can see this is kind of how it's laid out here, right? So I just wanted to credit Michael because he was the one who structured that whole thing. So that's what I do first, right? Review the past year, go through those points, write it all down on a piece of paper, and that just. It gives you a nice sense of closure for how the year was, allows you to go back and review all of your results, look at your screenshots of your sales, and just see how everything went, and just get a sense of, you know, the fact that you have moved forward because no doubt you have achieved a lot, right? And it's important to remember that. And once that's done, next, you want to start to create a strategy and a map for 2019. Now, might as well pause for a second, really, and remind you don't have to rush this exercise. You don't have to sit down and do it for like an hour. You can kind of gradually ponder through this whole week, really, and think about a lot of this stuff over time, right? Some of this isn't about trying to figure out all the strategy for your whole next year in like, one sitting, but just start to get your subconscious mind thinking about this stuff over the next week, right? Because if you start the process now and just start asking these questions now, writing something down, like when you're asleep or when you're in the shower or in the middle of doing something over Christmas, ideas will start popping into your head, right? This seems to be how my mind works, right? I get my best ideas not when I'm doing the exercise, but like 24 hours later when my subconscious mind is kind of focused on it in the background, things start to emerge. So you don't have to rush this, but either way, let's talk about how we create strategy for the new year. So first of all, like, on top of everything, like, the minutiae of how you get things done, the intermediary goals we want to set for ourselves and the mechanics, really what we want to focus on first is what do you want, you know, now how 2018 went, and if you've done the exercise I just discussed, right, you'll have a bit of a plan and more of a review, right? For how it went. You have an overview of how it went. Question is, well, how do you want 2019 to be different? What do you want to experience in 2019? And that's, to be honest, a very big question, right? Because really, this should all stem from the core reason why you're doing all this stuff, why you're thinking about building a business, why you're moving forward. Is it because you really want to quit your job, right, and just work on the business and travel? Is it because you want to have more financial freedom? You know, what is the real reason behind all of this stuff? Once you answer that question, you can start to paint a picture of what direction you want to go in. So once you figured out what you want and just got really clear on it and how you want 2019 to look, you can actually figure out how to break down achieving what you want into actions. So, in other words, what you have to complete on a monthly basis in order to get to this point. For example, if you want to quit your job and you need to Bring in four grand a month in take home money. Then over the next year, what actions do you have to achieve in order to make that happen? Maybe first of all, it's bringing in a thousand pounds a month. That's your first milestone. Then you have to grow it to two grand a month, then three, then four. Then you can break down how you get to each of those milestones over the next few months to actually make this happen in 2019. Right? Once you have this, you can actually just start to map out what you want to do next year, and it will come from a place of what you really want to achieve. Because sometimes it's easy to get caught up in other people's visions, other people's goals, other people's aspirations, right? It's easy to almost borrow other people's goal, really. You want this to come from yourself, you want this to come from your version of what success really means, so you get the motivation to actually move forward and complete the actions you need to get this stuff done. So I hope this has been helpful for you, given you some food for thought for what to do over the next week. And by the way, if you want some help coming up with a strategy for how to absolutely crash 2019, then I can offer you a free service. Right, over the next week, we're actually still going to be accepting strategy session calls with a member of my team, so. So if you want to talk about your situation right now and how 2018 was for you and how you want to make 2019 better, if you click the link below, you can apply to speak to our strategy specialist and we can work with you on the phone to map out how to make 2019amazing. So that means once you've figured out what your financial goal will be, we can break down the actions for you that you need to take in order to get there. And then if it looks like we'll be a fit, then we can work together and I can actually personally help you to get there. So fill out the form and you can actually book in a call and speak to us for, you know, a few minutes. At some point during this week, we're still going to be doing these calls. And the reason why is because now's the perfect time to get this dialed in ready for next year. So I hope this video has been helpful. Hope you've written down notes on, on all the different stages of the review for the past year and also the plan for the next year. And if you want help, click the button below booking a call and it'd be awesome to help you personally create a strategy for the new year. Have an amazing Christmas. Have an amazing New year, and I'll catch up with you very soon.