How to Reset Your Q1 Goals and Actually Achieve Them in 2025

Welcome to the Q1 Priority and Plan Reset Workshop. You are in the right place if you signed up for this event and have indeed showed up for this event. You are in the right place if you are needing some help refining, redesigning, restarting, recommitting to your 90-day priority and success plan. We talked about that in a workshop right at the beginning of the new year. And what I found is that a lot of folks that are in my world, when the second month of the year comes in, they kind of recalibrate and realize, oh, I'm not really making the kind of progress that I thought I was going to be making by this point. So this is your opportunity to recommit, reengage, and if you haven't yet set a Q1 priority, then you'll have the opportunity to do that right now. So what I want to do is if you open up the chat bubble at the bottom of your screen, what I'd like you to do next is on a scale of 1 to 10, with Megan's favorite caveat, no 7s allowed, how on track are you with your first quarter priority. If you set a 90-day priority, how close are you? Are you 8, 9, or 10, or are you 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1? 1 is, you know, I'm— I've completely spun out and abandoned my, my first quarter goal. 10 is I am killing it. And if you put 10 and are here, I wonder about your sanity, because you should be leading this workshop, not me. So on a scale of 1 to 10, no 7s allowed, put it in the chat. Where, where are you right now with your Q1 goal? So we've got some 6 to 8s. Hahaha. Very funny, Bri. Megan is also there. Oh, you guys are finding a hack. I'm gonna have to redesign the, the question. All right. Megan is also a 6 to an 8. Possibly a 5. Molly didn't set one. That's fine. So regardless of where you are on that spectrum, what I would encourage you to think about is, number one, January simply set the tone for where you're at right now. Now, it doesn't define your entire quarter. You have almost 2 full months left. And so if you are feeling a little behind or a little uncertain about where you're at with your Q1 priority and success plan, then today is your opportunity to recommit or reset. And so what we're gonna cover today is we're going to assess where you are right now. Then we're going to identify what's slowing you down, and then we're going to create a streamlined plan for the next 60 days or so, so that you can get some traction and gain some momentum and catalyze your success. So what I'm going to do now is go ahead and share my screen and walk through the process here. So the first thing that I want to do is encourage you to reassociate, remind yourself, what was your 90-day goal? If you have that in mind and are willing to share in the chat, I'd be happy to to walk anybody here through the process as we go through the process. But the way that we did this in the Close the Gap workshop is we started with our lifestyle goal. What is the lifestyle that we want our business to fund and fit around? That's the big vision for the life that we want to be living and the life that we want our business to fund and fit around. That's a vision thing. The objective is what's the next thing that if I accomplished it in the, in the next quarter or in the first— this quarter would catapult, catalyze, move me forward the furthest and the fastest toward that goal. So if anybody has something in mind, would love to see what you got. And if you don't, that's fine too. Here's something that I have found is often a problem with folks that have not made the kind of progress that they hoped or expected to make with a 90-day goal is one, is that it's not specific, measurable, and achievable. Okay. And so I'm not a huge fan of SMART goals, but the SMART goal approach kind of works for me in the context of a 90-day goal. I want to set something that's achievable. I want to set something that I can measure. Like I want to know if I accomplished it or not. To use the language of Dan Nicholson in his book, Rigging the Game, and his new book, which I think is actually titled the solvable problem. You need a problem that can be solved when you're setting that 90-day objective. Oftentimes people will say things like, well, I need more clients, or I need more money. I want more money in this quarter. Well, what does that mean? Like, if you're— one way to get more specific about it is my current monthly average income is $3,000. I want to see if I can add $1,000 a month to that monthly revenue goal. If you currently are getting 1 or 2 new clients a month, can you add client to that. Like, you want to make it a stretch, something that you haven't done before, but you don't want to make it some sort of ridiculous big, bold, audacious thing that you think you can accomplish in 90 days, because that just is going to open you up to all sorts of risk. Like, if you've never— if you've never made $10,000 in a month and your average is $1,000 to $3,000 a month, setting a monthly goal to make $10,000 a month really is too much of a stretch. The things that would be required to get that kind of outsized gain would put you at a lot of risk, would probably take you outside of your, uh, comfort zone in terms of your values and guiding principles. And even if you achieved it, it would be followed probably by the worst month you've ever had, because after every peak, there's inevitably a valley. So with 90-day goals, you want to try to set a, what I call a stretch goal, something that is plus one, right, to what you've accomplished in the past. So I gave an example here. Instead of saying grow my business, sign 5 new coaching clients. Again, that would probably be kind of a big stretch for someone that's only getting 1 or 2 clients a month. But after you've established your goal, you want to establish what are the 2 or 3 things that have to go right? So in this example, I, I might say, well, I want to generate 20 qualified leads from my list of prospects. I want to convert 25% or 5 of those leads into clients over a discovery call. And I want to make sure that I've optimized my onboarding experience so that I don't lose them or have to refund them right after they've joined my program. That would be a 90-day priority and plan. An example. Okay. So the thing that I'm asking you to check right now is, is this a solvable problem or is this a vague and unrealistic thing? That, and one of the things about vague and unrealistic is subconsciously we might set these kind of goals for ourselves because in the back of our minds, subconsciously, we know we can't achieve them. So it's just a safe way of continuing to do what we've always done and get the results we've always gotten, but not put ourselves on the hook for being responsible for hope we're getting a different result this time. So there is a section in your worksheet where you can define the problem that you're trying to solve in this 90-day period. I would encourage you to go ahead and fill that in. And then the first step is we want to take a look at what's the situation, what's happening right now in terms of our 90-day priority and plan. So a question that I would encourage you to consider is what's something that's going right for you right now with your priority, with your plan? What's a win from the previous 30 days that you can point to, that you could look in the rearview mirror and see and acknowledge as I did a thing and I got a thing that will help you perhaps determine that what you need to do is actually double down or increase the leverage or continue to ratchet the thing that's working and stop chasing after any other things, distractions or unnecessary elements of your system that aren't really helping you move the needle. You can get a lot more result, a lot more return on investment for your time, attention, money, and effort by just continuing to, to optimize a thing that's already working. And then the other question I want you to ask is, what— where's the friction? Like, what's, what's the challenge? What's the most immediate constraint to my ability to achieve my Q1 priority? Now, at this point, you might already be thinking, actually, my biggest constraint is I didn't set a very realistic or reasonable priority, or I didn't really have a clearly defined 3-step plan, or I set a priority and plan, but I got distracted by a bunch of digital marketer hacks, or, or maybe there was some sort of personal or family emergency or situation that came up. So identify what's the most immediate constraint. This is something we do every single week in the Close the Gap program, and it's something that actually members of that program get to do with me every single day. They get to write me and say, here's what's going on. I need help with this. All right. And then the next thing I want to do is encourage you to think about this in objective, solvable terms, right? If you are not currently making progress towards your Q1 priority, then you have built a system that is perfectly designed to get the results that you're currently getting. If you're not getting the results that you want, you built this, then you You have to look at the system that's getting you the results that you don't want. You have to make a commitment to tweaking, iterating, improving that system so that you can start to close the gap, so that you can collapse time to target, so that you can get what you want by the end of the quarter with greater ease and velocity. Okay? And the thing that I want you to really take or consider as we go forward is Working harder is not going to help you. Spending more time doing the things you're already doing is not going to help you. You have to find the leverage. Again, rearview mirror, what's working? Do more of that and less of everything else. Unclear priority, clarify the priority. Okay? So when we talk about like work smarter, not harder, Smarter is thinking about things objectively, looking at things from a system reliability point of view, and looking at first principles thinking. What are the 3 things that have to go right? Where is all the cruft and unnecessary filler in my system? And once I get it all distilled down to the 3 things that I need to do, which of those things is underperforming that I can actually work on raising the floor? Brie mentioned that phrase in the chat there a minute ago, right? When you're looking at optimizing a system, the first step is get rid of anything that doesn't need to be there. Then you work on raising the floor on the thing that is performing least efficiently. I'm going to just respond to Brendan here because it'll give us a little real-world application. Brendan says, my goal is having enough income to support several people via producing a class series about collaboratively addressing high-stakes situations, which seems like could attract a larger investment donation if pitched to the right people. So that sounds like Brendan's enterprise is not entirely dissimilar to what I'm working with Megan on. So here's the thing. So Brendan, this is great. And you came in a little bit after maybe we talked about this, but with this, first of all, with this goal, get clear and specific. What the, what is enough income? Like clearly define what's that number. The best way to clearly define that number is what are my actual expenses. I like to do expenses on a monthly basis, but you can do it annually and then divide by 12. Like, how much money do I actually have to learn? Like bare bones. Here's what it costs for rent or my mortgage, my car payment, my insurance, uh, my necessary existential food costs, a minimum amount of entertainment expenses and so forth. Like, get that number and then define the gap. If, if You need $5,000 a month and you're at $3,000 a month. You're looking to enough income is $2K per month is what you're looking to. That's the gap that you're trying to close. So I hope that's helpful. Okay, let's move on to the next step. So we've defined the situation, we've defined where we're at. And just to reference the conversation that we were having with Molly and Megan a minute ago, the situation is perfect in every way because that is the situation. We are who we are in this moment. This is what it is in this moment, and we are already possessing everything we need to get clear about and closer to what we really want. That's why it's perfect in every way. So the next thing is to identify the next most immediate constraint, the actual constraint, the true constraint. So this is where I'm going to ask you to do a little self-diagnosis. What is it that's holding you back? And I gave you some choices here. Maybe it's the lack of clarity about what your priority is. You don't have enough detail or specificity about your priority. Maybe it's a lack of specificity and clarity about the 3 things that are required to help you close the gap. Maybe it's a time management issue. Maybe you're not dedicating enough time every day to raise the floor on the least efficient piece of your system. Maybe you haven't set aside the time necessary to actually do an audit. Of where all your money is going, where all your time is going, all the things that you're paying attention to, all the things that you're spending money on. The first thing is to know is if you've defined your 90-day objective, you have to also know where you're starting and what you're starting with. That's why we always start with a diagnostic or with an audit. Maybe it's an execution thing. Maybe you just are really struggling to do the thing that you need to do or to identify what the very next possible best step is to navigate your most immediate constraint. The next thing is to do what I called a layered reflection. Like, what's the step before the step? What's the thing underneath this thing? We talked a little bit on Friday's call about the A message and the B message, right? We're always kind of focused on the A message, and the A message usually comes with a lot of adjectives, adverbs, value judgments, shame, guilt, all the things. But the B message is usually where we're going to find what's actually true, like what actually needs to happen. So if you're trying to reach a revenue goal, maybe if you're trying to add, just say for the sake of argument, $2,000 or $1,000 to your monthly income target, then you would want to look at not just how can I work harder to sell the thing that I'm already selling, but how can I optimize the Audience that I'm pitching that offer to, how can I create more trust in the process that's on offer? How can I get more people in a room where I can solve their most immediate problem and reveal the bigger problem that they need my help to solve? So there's a something beneath the immediacy or, or apparent urgency of your problem or situation. And so you wanna identify those things and There's— if you have a validated offer that has results for people, you can try to just sell that offer to more people, or you can try to— you could raise the price of that offer so that you can sell it to fewer people. You could increase the number of leads by making sure that the prospects understand that you have some sort of process like a Be a Blessing marketing, marketing web and process that gets more prospects to become qualified leads. Okay, so we want to look beyond the thing that's tripping us up and that maybe comes with a lot of emotional attachments. So when you're thinking about layered reflections, what's beneath this? What's the one thing that if you solved it would improve everything else? Or what's the— what's missing from your system that could make this whole thing easier? And that doesn't mean necessarily adding something new to your system, your 3 steps. It could be that's what's missing. Is efficiency in your system. You have too many things, you need to eliminate things. That's what's missing is you don't have enough missing. Okay, if you have a reasonable number of prospects and leads but you're not getting enough sales at the end, what's missing is an effective and efficient sales process, a way that your— whatever your conversion process is from getting leads to become clients. So the key, Ray, reframe here, and there is an aha moment coming that you obviously— I didn't intend for you to see that, but now you got a peek behind the curtain. But I'm setting you up for the big revelation. The first is that the constraint is not always internal. It's not something that you lack or some kind of inadequacy on your part, some sort of knowledge that's missing or some sort of skill that's missing. It's actually often not that. Like, I would, I would assert that anybody that's attracted to my work has already had enough success at what they're doing and already has enough knowledge, expertise, and experience in what they're doing that there's nothing really missing. You have more than enough to accomplish bigger, better results for yourself. What's missing is some form of external leverage or some sort of force multiplier that will help you do what you do better. And that includes doing the marketing and/or sales better. Okay? And so oftentimes the solution is not what you're doing, but how you're doing it, right? The zespirometer question. If you're not getting the results that you want, you're finding yourself feeling a little exhausted and depleted. Maybe you're doing the wrong thing. That's possible. But what's way more likely is that you're doing too much and some of it needs to be eliminated. And of the things that you're doing, you're not doing them in the most optimized way, which is slowing down your progress, which is putting an, an unnecessary drain on your precious resources of time, attention, money, and effort. All right. Next step is analyzing your constraint. I'm sorry, that is, that's the step in your workbook, analyze and identify your biggest constraint. The next step, the third step, is the reset of your, of your 90-day priority and plan. So what we want to do here is what's the most important thing that I need to accomplish in the next 60 days so that I can increase ease and velocity, collapse time to target that 90-day priority. So what we're going to be doing here is we want to define your 60-day priority because 30 of those days are already gone and we're going to try to narrow it down to one thing or just a few things so that we can really refine and define our focus. We're going to identify the 2 or 3 essential leverage points. What has to go right to make this happen? And we have to determine what your next step, what the actual most immediate next thing that you need to do, the thing that if you did it after this workshop would actually get you some traction or increase your momentum and help you collapse time to target. And then what I have here are what I call hidden challenges, which is oftentimes, and I, you know, this is not true of Penny, Megan, and Bree because they are in the Close the Gap program. They're getting daily assistance from me and weekly help from each other. But many of you, I am guessing that if you're not in the Close the Gap program or leveraging any other mastermind group coaching or one-on-one coaching program, you're probably largely doing it by yourself. It's really hard to read the prescription from inside the bottle. It's hard for us to see the things that we don't see when we're— nobody else is pointing to the thing right in front of us that is clear as day to anybody that's watching from outside and with a more objective view. And then what we want to look at is who or what can we do to remove friction and accelerate our process? So this is in the worksheet. This is your step 3, defining your 60-day game plan. So the aha moment is something I've already alluded to in what I was just saying, which is the number one force multiplier, the single highest leveraged asset that we all have is the company that we keep. And when I say relationships are your biggest force multiplier, you need to understand that force multipliers can work in either direction. Surrounding yourself with the wrong people will accelerate the rate at which you are distancing yourself from what you want to accomplish. At the same time, if you are disciplined and judicious and thoughtful and disciplined about who you spend your time with and who you don't spend your time with, who you pay attention to and who you don't pay attention to, who you seek for guidance and who you avoid, then that is the single highest point of leverage in any of our businesses, in any of our lives. The ease and velocity with which you accomplish the things that you want to accomplish is more than anything else determined by the company you keep. There's all sorts of quotes. I think there's a Goethe quote that goes along the lines of, "Tell me with whom you associate and I'll tell you who you are." And I'm not talking about like the Jim Rohn quote, you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. I— that's actually been scientifically proven to not be correct. What is correct, what the science is showing, is that you are a function of the cumulative average of all of your network, all of their network, all of their network. And all of their network. And it doesn't impact— as you go from concentric circle to concentric circle, it doesn't have the same impact. But there's been plenty of studies. You can Google this. I don't remember exactly what the dynamic is called, but if you want to stop smoking and most of the people that you associate with are smokers, it's going to be also true that most of the people they associate with are smokers, and those people associate with smokers, and those people associate with smokers. Really hard to change behavior when you're surrounding yourself with layers of influence that are doing the exact opposite of what you want to achieve. So the more focused you can be on associating with people that understand the journey that you're on and the things you're trying to accomplish, that support and encourage those things, that offer kind and real feedback that helps you see what you don't see and find the solutions that are obscured to, to you right now because you're trying so hard to read it from inside the bottle. The less time and attention you give to people and family, friends, whoever that aren't supporting that journey— doesn't mean, like, again, I always say this, like, I, I'm not a big fan of like ditch all your loser friends and, and remove all your family members who, who are— who don't agree with you, right? I would have very few relationships in my life if, if I, if I decided that all of the family and neighbors that don't support me are dead to me. But I do get to choose how much of my bandwidth, how much of my emotional, spiritual, psychological, and physical energy they get. If you are not getting the support you want from, from a partner, a spouse, a mother, a father, a sister or brother, a neighbor, a community, then all you need to do is make— design your day so that you spend— put them on minimum effective dose. You're not getting the kind of support you want. Instead of talking to your, you know, talking to these people every single day, make sure that you design your life so you only have to interact with them, you know, once or twice a month. The other thing, and I shared this, I think, on the call yesterday, another hack for improving your relationship average is most people that don't support and encourage the journey that you're on, don't understand the journey that you're on. Invite them into your world. Invite them to take a look. Invite them to come. If, if you find the Solopreneur Success Circle is a community that supports who you are and who you want to become and helps you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be, you always have permission, my permission, the permission of the community to reach out to friends and colleagues and anybody in your network that you would like to better, better understand who you are and what you're trying to accomplish and invite them to a call. Let them experience it. If they say no, then it's on them. They made a decision. It's not on you. There's no reflection on you. You said, hey, this is what I'm doing and this is why I'm doing it. This is who I'm doing it with. I'd love for you to come watch, love for you to come along or check it out. And if they say no, Cool. Now it's a mutually understood thing instead of something where you're trying to convince somebody of something that they can't understand unless they experience it. So your guiding questions here in terms of the, you know, the greatest leverage point is who's your mentor or guide? Who are you going to for strategic insight with your questions, with feedback on your choices or options or strategy? Who are the peers and fellow travelers that are helping hold you accountable and supporting and encouraging your journey? And the reflection exercise here is, if you had one consistent place where you could get guidance or support, what would become different? And worth considering, like, what's the cost of trying to continue to go it alone? Or what, what's the cost of just keep continuing to interact with the people I'm interacting with even though there's evidence that it's not helping you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. There's no judgment in— for me, I'm not judging anybody that is content to stay where they are. We see it happen all the time. How many of us have ever been in an unhealthy relationship but we stayed in it just because it was the devil we knew, and at least we knew how to manage our day-to-day by sticking with someone that was actually causing us to not grow and become the person we want. That's just a natural human— that's programming and conditioning. But if you can acknowledge, like, this is what's happening, now you actually have a— now it's, now it's a, a situation that you can acknowledge and understand, and it makes it possible for it to become a problem that you want to solve later. So the reframe here is that successful solopreneurs, successful human beings don't just work harder. They structure their environment to ensure their success. One of the things that I love about the Close the Gap process is that if you get clear enough on where you're going and clear enough about where you are and what you're starting with and get clear enough about the 3 things that have to go right, and you give yourself enough time and are stepping into possibility, you know, micro-stepping your way to possibility so that you can take advantage of the inevitable black swan events that happen that oftentimes will be catalyst to your progress, your success is inevitable given enough time. So in that worksheets— worksheet section, sorry, you can do a little work on your, uh, on your relationships and defining what those relations are. So this is, uh, this— before we get into the Q&A, the recap is hopefully at this point you've done a reminder, uh, about where you're at, what your 90-day priority is, what your 90-day plan is, and maybe you've clarified that, or maybe you've refined that, or even restarted that. You have a, a, a better idea of what your most immediate constraint is. Is it resource allocation? Is it time? Is it effort? Is it relationships? You've created a plan for the next 60 days that will help you get some traction and momentum in closing the gap. And hopefully I've convinced you that the highest leverage decision you can make right now is to cultivate, curate, and collaborate with the people in your spheres of influence, in your circle, in your network that can help catalyze your journey.