BREATHE - The Resilient Entrepreneur's Guide | Transform Your Goals into Realities

Have you ever felt like your New Year's resolutions are just well intentioned wishes thrown into a storm of business chaos? Oh my gosh. I am Sandy Waggett. And today on breathe, the resilient entrepreneur's guide, we're going to turn those wishes into actionable, achievable triumphs. Let's redefine how we set goals and sail through the year with purpose and resilience. Welcome to a journey of monthly milestones that will transform your business one step at a time. So Yesterday was the 25 year anniversary of MSW Interactive Designs and I am number one, so excited. But number two, I have no idea where the stinking time has gone. And I can't even begin to tell you how many resolutions and business goals that I have set every year that just like every other normal human being, we let go by the wayside a few weeks into the year because as business owners we just get so distracted. But I have really honed in on a system that seems to work better for me and I thought I'd share it because it might work for you too. And the idea is to keep ourselves as humans that get bored. My setting goals and themes for every single month of the year. And the themes in every month are different so that we have something to look forward to each and every month. And then those stack and you build the skills around the themes. Every theme then with its own month has its micro resolutions that we set. So let's get started and here are the steps. If you are taking notes and I hope you do, just take a big piece of paper and write down the months. So January, February and so on all the way through December. And I am going to share my month themes with you now. Yours will probably be different and that's okay. I'm just going to share these to give you ideas of what my themes are for each month. And one thing that you might notice is that my themes sound like they overlap between business and personal. But the thing is that as entrepreneurs and business owners, whether you're a solopreneur or a seasoned business owner with a team of employees like me, it's okay to overlap business and personal because the business is you. Whether you've got employees or not. You have to show up at your best, mentally, physically, all this stuff in order to serve others. So here we go. My January is Skill Building Month. And this show is actually why it's Skill Building Month. I'm actually launching three YouTube shows for my business, MSW Interactive Designs in January. I've never done a YouTube show and I'm following Evan Carmichael's advice. So he's like a famous YouTube coach and he says your first many are going to suck. So this probably sucks. Then that's okay. Publish. Get the reps in. Get the reps in and get better. So here we go. My first month is January, so it's skill building. And I'll go into detail and give you my micro resolutions for January so you can see how this works. But January, skill building, February, health month. So in February, I'm going to focus on forming healthy habits. Doesn't mean I'm not going to do healthy habits any other time during the year. It means February is going to be my focus month on building new habits. And so you'll see how these stack. So January, I'm going to get better at YouTube shows. February, I'm going to add in health habits. March, then I'm going to do financial wellness month. And that's going to be for business and personal. So then again, I've got January, which is my YouTube skills, February, which is my health month. So then those are stacked. And then March is my financial wellness month, so now that's stacked. So everything keeps going. April is my creativity month, where I'm gonna really focus on doing some more creative things with the business, with the team. So all my energy and my micro resolutions are gonna be geared at that. May is my mental health month, and I assure you that is going to include some massages because that is mentally healthy for me. June is my outdoor month, so I'm going to get my team outdoors. I'm going to do more outdoors because that helps me clear my head, center me for this, you know, second part of the year where I can reengage, reflect. I love doing that outside, so that's a good month for me to focus on that. July is going to be my connections month, so family, friends, clients, team members, I'm going to be super proactive about building in things that will help me better connect with the people in my life. August is going to be professional development month, so that is professional development, not just for me professionally, but for my team as well. And then September is going to be personal learning month, so that's where I am going to engage. So I actually want to get better at extemporaneous speaking as an example. So that is going to be my month where I'm going to put some very proactive micro resolutions toward getting better at that. October is going to be my volunteerism month. I always volunteer, I always give back that October is going to be very intentional. And then November, gratitude month, of course. So I'm going to be very intentional about building more new, better habits around gratitude. And then in December, that is going to be my reflection month to set me up again for 2025. So every month has a different theme. So the step one for you is to define your themes for each month and they can change. Just go ahead and write them down, get something on paper as far as themes for the month and then take January and start working on micro resolutions that will help you accomplish what you set out to do for January. So as an example for me, January is skill building, right? So I'm going to let me find my list here. I'll just give you a couple weeks of January. So week one in January.

Is going to be video production and editing. So week one I'm going to learn the basics of video editing in a new AI tool. I know how to video edit in Adobe Premiere, but we've got a new AI tool that does a lot of it in one place. It's called the Script. So my focus this week is to learn that tool to the best of my ability and then train the person that is going to be uploading these shows for me. And then my second micro resolution on that is going to be showing the person who's going to be my intern showing them how to push it out to social media. And then we're going to start building an hotline for the upcoming shows. I basically it's one or two micro resolutions per week that are super achievable so that we can celebrate some successes and wins. And by the end of January, all these shows will be launched and then we'll continue to hone them through the year. But breaking it down into micro resolutions for January being my learning month, helps me really stay focused and get accomplished what I need to for the business. Now the whole idea is ultimately this will help me grow my business. But instead of saying growing my business is the goal, it's gotten very specific with micro resolutions and a plan to get there. And we're going to launch these three YouTube shows to help leads for the business, to help educate our ideal prospective clients, and to also serve and help our existing clients. So anyway, that's a simple model that as a business owner and an old one at that, I've been doing this for 25 years, launched the business in 1999 pre Google. So you get it. I think that approach could help, you know, maybe even if you're overwhelmed by the month, or, I'm sorry, a year of these. Maybe just do a quarter. Try it for January, February, March, and see how that goes for you. And I would love to hear in the comments what you think of this particular approach. It works for me. I have a short attention span, so, like, by January, the end of January, I get bored. I'll still do the show, but like the learning part of it, it's just going to come through reps at that point. And then I'm going to shift into health and then I'm going to shift into finances, and then I'm going to shift into all these other things. I'm stacking skills one on top of the other for the full year. And by the end of the year, I will have certainly integrated some new habits and a lot of wins. And you know what, If I don't meet one of the micro resolutions, it's okay. I can just push it to the following week because I'm only setting one or two per week that are highly achievable. And as a business owner entrepreneur, that life frigging happens, right? This show is called Breathe, the Resilient Entrepreneur's Guide. And I say Breathe because there are so many times where you have got the day planned, you've got the week planned, you've got the month planned, you've got the year planned, all of it. And then life just throws curveballs in my business. Sometimes the server will go down, sometimes websites, they just. It's. If we use WordPress or something, they get hacked. It just really sucks. Tech happens and we can be blindsided by employees leaving, we can be blindsided by family issues. As entrepreneurs, it all happens all around us all the time and distracts us from what we really need to be doing. So that's why I absolutely love the micro resolutions idea around the themes. Because if you get distracted, if something happens, if you have to go put out a fire, you can always come back and you have it completely mapped out, which you need to do what you should be doing. I know this a lot and I was probably talking fast. And again, Evan Carmichael says, just record, hit record. It doesn't have to be perfect. This is not perfect. This is episode one at the end of the year. I can't wait to come back and watch it and laugh at myself. But hey, this is how we start. This is how we get going. It's okay to suck and it's okay to be forgetful or to put resolutions aside. But when you have tools like this month, themes and micro resolutions it's so much easier to stay on track. So I hope this helps you. Thanks for tuning in to the first episode of my show, Breathe. The resilient entrepreneur. Just breathe. It'll all be okay. Just breathe. I got you. Sandy Wang signing off.