One Way to Organize Your Goals So You Succeed

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Today I'm going to share with you one way to organize your goals so you can succeed. This is a new system I'm using with the same strategies that I share in Plan It Day inside Author Audience Academy. So it's the same strategies, it's just a different physical system. And I'm going to share that with you today. Right now we are in the middle of January. January just happens to be the biggest goal setting month of the year. I love to set goals because I am an achiever. I, I rank very high in the Strength Finder 2.0 test on achiever. That's just something I like to finish things. I like to get things done. I think that's one of the reasons that I'm such a good author coach, because that's who I am. I'm a finisher. I get things done. And I can help you get things done as well. But I digress. But it was only just a couple years ago that I actually started writing. Writing down my goals in pen and paper in a notebook and really working to achieve them. I've always gotten stuff done, but sometimes I've been scattered. So as a typical creative, as a typical entrepreneur, and by the way, I wouldn't have always called myself creative, but now I know that's who I am, that's who God has created me to be. And I just create prolifically, whether it's writing art, videos, blog posts, I mean, that's just who I am. But we are creatives. Those of you that are writers, entrepreneurs, you are creative. And so as a creative, as an entrepreneur, I always had new ideas. I always had new things that I was doing. And so what happened was I would tend to spread myself too thin because I would just do so much and then I wouldn't really see the momentum and really see the impact of what God wanted to do in and through my life until I really started to get focused. So there's a couple really key books that helped me. One book was the One Thing, I think it's by Gary Keller. Another is the Slight Edge. And you can check out those books. But basically the concept is having a focus, having a singular focus. And I know that's really, really hard. Look into my eyes. I know you. I coach with hundreds of authors every day. I hear you, I listen to you, I hear your struggles. And I know that you struggle with wanting to just stick with one project because it's more fun to start something new. Typically, it's more fun. And I'm the same way. It's like, oh, but this is more fun. Or, you know, this. I have this idea. And then you start launching into that new idea before you truly finish this thing or make this profitable or make this successful. And success is different for everyone. God's version, his definition of success is obedience. So it's not always numbers, it's not always sales, but we sometimes need to focus. And so when I began to focus focus, I chose 90 day goals. 90 day goals are a lot more doable than setting a goal for a year or for longer than that. And then what I do is I take that 90 day goal and I break it down into chunks. I break it down and plan it out into doable chunks of time. And this is something that I teach inside Author Audience Academy in my Plan it day training. So if you're an Author audience Academy member, that's usually where I recommend starting. Going through Planet Day getting clarity on your focus. And we can always brainstorm that together. And then going through the training and the coaching, because if you don't have a focus and you're just scattered, it's not going to be as effective. And so in Planet Day, I have you go through a system. Let me pull it up real quick. I have it in front of me on step four, in position. I have you rate yourself in different categories, and then that gives you an overall view of really where you're at. And then what are your priorities? And so then I have you do a brain dump. I call it plotting. And then you prioritize that. And I walk you through all the steps. And then you pick one, you pick it. You pick your breakthrough goal, what I call your breakthrough goal. And so I wanted to share one way to use that strategy and that system. But I'm doing this differently than I have before. This is a little Moleskine journal. And it's short, it's really light. I actually loved a thrift store shop. And so I was out thrift store shopping this last weekend, and I happened to see this packet of three little Moleskine journals. They were brand new, never opened, and I was. It was almost as if God just gave those to me as a little gift. It was just a few dollars for these journals. Normally they're like 11 dol, but they were right there. I thought, oh my goodness, I'm gonna get these and I'm gonna use these with the strategy that I've set up in Planet Day, that, and the reason I set it up that way is because that's what I've done. That's what's really helped me to be successful over these last couple years are the strategies I teach in Planet Day. So I'm not just just doing it to do it. I mean that's, that's what I do and so use my same strategies in a different physical manner. So let me share with you what I'm doing. This is light, it's, it's really easy to put into my purse. I can take it with me everywhere. And what I've done is I'm into now lettering and art and so I created a fun cover. You can do anything you want. I mean, you don't, you know, you can just write something on here. You can have an artist do something for you. Embossing would be really cool. I think once I eventually get the tools for embossing, that would be like a real, like a gold or a real neat lettering on there. That would be really cool. You can buy a journal that already has a front on it. But I customize this for myself. So I have 2017 and it says, behold, I am doing a new thing. This is from Isaiah 43:19. I love this verse for January, for the new year. Behold, I'm doing a new thing. And it's just a verse God has been bringing in front of me, me over and over lately. And I just thought that's what I want to put on the front of this journal. So first of all, it's just really pretty, isn't it cute? And I've been practicing my lettering every day. I'm getting better. Definitely not the best. But then what I did was in one of the first pages, I did what I teach you in Planet Day, the position. And I rated myself in different areas. Typically your breakthrough goal. When you're choosing your breakthrough goal and I just wrote this down here as a reminder for myself, your breakthrough goal is normally something that will give you more money, more time or more accountability. Because typically that's what we really want in life, more money, more time or more accountability to actually get stuff done. That's the power I believe in. Author Audience Academy. It's not just a training that's going to sit on your hard drive or that you go through on your own. It's accountability. I am there for you every day and then every week. Right now we're in the middle of a 90 day accountability group. You can jump in Today you can join us@authoraudienceacademy.com but I meet my members every week in the Facebook group for Accountability. So what do you need? What is your 90 day goal going to be based on? More money, more time or more accountability? For me personally, I'm at the place in my business now that it's gonna be based on more time. Last year it was based on more money because finances were a lot tighter, it was a lot more stressful. Now it's still a little bit tight at times because basically we're in sales. You know, our business is sales. So the sales can come, come and go. But through, you know, the membership of Author Audience Academy and through my members that stay with me month after month, year after year, I have a more reliable income. And now what God is showing me is I need to learn to not work so much. I can be in workaholic. So for me it's more time. And so I wrote down my overall goal is to work less. So to have more time and to have less stress. So more automation, to implement more automation in my business. And right now in Authoritative Academy, we're going through a system called the Author Automation System to really put more automation into book marketing. So you're not sitting behind your computer every day doing social media, doing all these things. And I'm actually doing it too. I'm putting those same things in place this 90 days for my book Broken Crayons Still Color. So I'm not an author coach that just tells you what to do and I'm not doing it. I want to teach you things that actually work, that I'm actually doing myself. And I've used this system for years, but I want to implement it for my newest book, Roquenc Still Color. But however, my really big goal for the next 90 days is to really focus on helping my husband. So as I've grown Authoritative Academy the last couple years, his stuff has kind of taken a backseat and he really needs some of my help with the technical stuff. And instead of hiring it out, we're just working together. And so that's really my primary focus over the next 90 days is to help him create products for his running coaching business and to really help him succeed. Now that's only going to give me more time because as his business grows, that's just going to give us more money and then, you know, it's going to be able to free up my time so that I don't feel like I have to be working all the time because it's going to be more balanced. We're going to both be bringing in income and in a significant way. And so anyways, it's just where I'm at right now is it's, it's his time. It's time to really help him and focus on him. So I wrote that down and then I wrote out 10 goals. You know, all the research says not to do more than 10 goals. And so you can kind of see if you're watching, these are my 10 goals. And I don't mind sharing this with you. I am so transparent and I want you to know how the system works. So I want to share with you. So then, you know, I've written that out, the 10 goals. And these are going to be in the forefront of my mind. It's in the front of my journal. I can look back on them. This is for this 90 days. And you know, this is for this little one. This little journal is for the first 30 days. So there's three of these that come in a pack and you can use one of these for 30 days and then the next one for the next 30 days. And then by the end of the three pack, the end of the 90 days, you should have reached your big breakthrough 90 day goal. So my breakthrough is CJ's products up for sale. But my overarching theme is more time, more automation. My second goal is to get the author automation system for broken crayons still color up. My third goal is to host two virtual writing retreats. Yes. And I'm so excited about this if you're interested. We are hosting one for Author Audience Academy members. January. Let me look at my calendar. 25th and 26th. I have a wall calendar. It's awesome. And I just kind of glance over there when I need to know dates. And then I'm hosting one in March. It's March 10th and 11th. And you can find out more. Let me just pull up the sales page here. Shellyhits.com virtual retreat. All right, so that's my third goal. My fourth goal is to update my automated trainings so I have some trainings that I just share. You can sign up for them at any time, get the really valuable training. And I want to really get that system perfected and really working because it's not really working right now for me. My fifth goal is to get Facebook ads and Amazon ads up. So the Facebook ads are for Author Audience Academy, the Amazon ads are for my books. And by the way, Amazon ads are working well. You can check it out at Amsterdam.

You have to do some work. It took me about an hour to get everything set up to do the keyword research, to upload keywords for each book. But it's working. For a couple of my books, a couple of them I turned off. It was working, but not as well. So I just decided to turn those off. But when you find something that works, wow, it's working. So I want to try some other books in the next 90 days. My six goals to publish my children's book. I have everything ready. I have the illustrations, I have the text. I just need to figure out a system for formatting, what I want to do, how I want to do that. So probably I'm going to work on that book during my writing retreat, virtual writing retreat in March. That's what I'm thinking, but I'm not sure yet. Then I want to set up more of our finances. So there's a few goals with that. I want to exercise at least 10 minutes a day. That's very doable. I'm going through a challenge right now with revelationwellness.org amazing, amazing ministry and community. And I'm using their online videos so that I can just do them from home. I can fit it in at any time and so really want to get into doing that more create art every day. I now have an art studio. And then to journal, I like to two way journal. So where I'm listening to God and I'm writing out what I sense I'm listening to him saying. And then I'm also journaling. So I want to do that three to five times a week. Find a Bible study to get involved in. So there's just some things there's. And then I just, I just wrote out some things of what this would look like for me. And let me see if you can see, I had some balloons in there. And then I just wrote out some things to the side. More automation, more time. So less deadlines, less having to be on. Like I have done so many live videos and so many live webinars, but it really drains me. And I'm realizing that this year I just need to take a little bit of a step back. I'll probably still do my live videos at least once a week, but I may do more screen share. And you know, I'm changing my broken crayons still color podcast to an audio only podcast so I don't have to be on the screen. And I'm just realizing for me personally during this particular season in my life, I need to have less stress and that actually I'm good at it, I can do it. But it really does drain me when I have too much on camera, video time, less book projects and without deadlines. I just think the end of the year 2016, I did too much. I did too many book projects, too many book launches. It was a learning experience.

Less big launches or promotions for Authoritatives Academy. So more automation, the author automation system for my books. You know, more Facebook ads and Amazon ads, more automated trainings for, you know, with autoresponders and all of that. And then I said more fun, more art, more exercise, more two way journaling, more hikes, more day trip trips, less social media. I have deleted the Facebook app from my phone and I have not gotten it back on since I think it was November. It's been a couple months now and it's been good. It's been good for me. So anyways, then I know this is getting long. I just really wanted to give you this step by step and how you can implement this. If this is helpful, please let me know because I want to know if you just want the down and dirty, quick and easy, or if sometimes going into more depth like this is helpful for you. I know for me, hearing examples, seeing examples, hearing case studies, actually seeing someone walk through it, it helps me make more sense of it. So that's why I wanted to do this today. And so then what I did is I took each one of my goals and I teach this in Plan It Day. What I did then is on my notebook, I wrote each of the goals on the top of the page and then I listed out all the things that would have to happen for that goal to take place. What this does is then that gives me an idea of where I need to start. Because to be honest, I wanted to start with my automated trainings and things. But then I realized for some of the things that needed to be in place, I needed to do something else first before I could do that. So it gave me clarity of, oh, this is where I need to start. Sometimes you just need to get things down on paper to get clarity. Are you doing this? Are you writing out your goals? Are you brainstorming all the things that you have to do to get to that goal? And I will give you a word of warning. The first time you do this, it can be overwhelming. So just know that when you first do this and you write out everything that has to be done, guard your heart, breathe, and realize this is 90 days. This is not going to all happen tomorrow. So it's Just giving you an idea of where you need to go and what you need to get done. So I have all my different goals on here and I wrote them out. And then so that's the system, that's what you do. If you're using Planet Day, you use the position, you write out all those things, then you choose your breakthrough goal and I walk you through that. Then don't really choose more than 10 goals, but you can have 10 goals. They can be personal, spiritual, business, all of those. And I give you the categories inside Planet Day. Then you write out each of the 10 goals and you brainstorm and do a brain dump of all the things that need to happen in order for those different goals to take place. And then you start prioritizing what is the biggest priority and what needs to be done first. And then you just start doing it. So this is where I started yesterday. I just put the date at the top here. And then for me, I put the things that I want to do almost every day. So create art every day, exercise 10 minutes and two way journal. And I just put those with little check marks, check boxes so that I would have that. I have my 90 day goal up at the top corner so that I, I have that in front of me every day. So every daily page, you know, rewrite your 90 day goal, rewrite it up there so it's in front of you. You see it, you stay focused, you don't get distracted, you don't get off on all these bright shiny objects. And then I wrote out a list of what I wanted to do that day. So what I recommend is choose three things that will take just depending on your time. They're not going to take more than 30 minutes let's say, but three things that would help you to reach your goals and then just write those out. And I chose two things, but one of the things, it had more steps. So I had add autoresponder bonus. So if you're an Author audience academy member, I just added three bonuses to the member area in the author automation system. So check it out. I posted in the Facebook group, but if you missed it, there's three new bonuses and they're really good. And then I finished that and then I wanted to do my virtual writing retreat sales page. Well, what I realized with that sales page is there were several things I needed to do in order to get that all done. So I finished it, I stayed focused and I have to tell you, I wanted to start doing other things. I didn't want to stay on this But I knew that this was what I needed to do. This was what was going to be, you know, helping me achieve my biggest goals. And so, anyways, these. That's the process. And then every day you do the same thing. So today I have a new list on here, and I put my little. I put my appointments on the sides. So today I have a dentist appointment. So I have to get off here soon because I have to go there. I have a chiropractic appointment. You do that every day. So every day you're writing out three little things or one little thing that's going to move you closer to your goals. Do you think that this system could help you? You don't have to do it the way I do it. You can use a bullet journal. I tried that last year, and it did work for me, but I'm trying something. This is kind of like bullet journaling, but it's a little bit different. It's a little bit different way. I'm going to keep this. The bullet journals were a little bit heavier. I don't have one right here. I think it's out there. But the bullet journals that I was using were a little bit heavier. This one's light. I'm going to take it everywhere I go. And then I'm using this little metal bookmark. Have you guys ever seen these? This one is by the company Folio. I think I just got them on Amazon. And you can basically just put these on your page. And. And then that way, this is on my page for my daily goals. And then I can just keep this in front of me. I did this yesterday. I kept this out, and I'm like, okay, this is what I need to do. And I would just walk away and everything, but every time I came back, I'm like, okay, refocus. This is what I'm gonna do today. Then I would check them off. Anyone else love to check things off? So this is just one way. What do you do? What helps you? I want you to not just be a starter. I want you to be a finisher. I want you to finish the things God has created you specifically to do. There are things that you were created to do that I cannot do because you were created to do that specific thing. You were created to give birth to that book. You were created to create that particular video with that particular piece of encouragement. You were created to do this particular thing. And so I just encourage you to first find a system that works for you. But I do whatever system you use, I do encourage you to set a 90 day breakthrough goal. You can go through plan it day in Author Audience Academy. You can use whatever other goal setting training you want. But I encourage you to really do the work, go through the steps, get the clarity. Once you have that clarity, then you can move forward with so much more momentum. It takes some time. This took me a couple days because I first had to just kind of sit down and I did some work before I started this. I sat down and I just did some brainstorming of, you know, what would, what, what, what, you know, what would my 90 day goal be? Some, you know, the different things that areas I need to work on. So anyways, do the work and let me know how it goes. Let me know how you're doing. I would love to celebrate your success. And if you're interested, please join us in authoraudienceacademy.com we're going to have our writing retreat, virtual writing retreat January 25th and 26th. It's included in your membership here on out. It will be $99 to come and attend, but you can actually join Author Audience Academy today for $59 a month. Join our virtual writing retreat which is like two full days with me and this stuff works. When I did my in person writing retreat, we're using the same format for the virtual writing retreats that we used for my in person writing retreat. The way that I had people prepare and come ready with their book topic and their outline, they were able to then just spend those two full days of writing. Now we have four days at the writing retreat, but one's like the day you're coming in and then the ones the day you're leaving. But we have two full days of writing just like we'll have on the virtual writing retreat. And everyone finished their first draft of their book. I mean it was incredible. It works. And so if you need some accountability to get your book done, to get the first draft out of your head onto paper, I like to say I'm a get it done author coach. It helps you get your first draft out of your head onto paper in record time. Join us. You can join us@authoraudienceacademy.com otherwise just enjoy all of my free training. If you have not checked it out, check it out@shellyhits.com free free. I have tons of free training for you and just use a system that works best for you. Let me know what you found helpful. If you did find this system helpful, please share this training with your friends and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelly's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.