Setting Goals for Your Best Year Ever | Nikki Rogers

Let’s ring in 2021! We’re only in the first week of this new decade, yet this year is already oozing with possibilities. A new year brings in new hope, and what a perfect way to start visualizing and planning to have your best year yet - or better yet - the best year ever!

But as promising as that all sounds, working without a planning blueprint is like walking in a dark room - you don’t know what you’re doing or where you’re headed. 

This is why I’m sharing five key components (courage, strategy, confidence, consistency, connection) to help you achieve your goals and have your best year ever. Each component addresses a specific problem that most people who are starting to build on something often encounter. Apply these five things to create a well-founded structure for your business, career, or life mission.

ADVERTISEMENT: If you are ready to explore entrepreneurship and looking for guidance, book a discovery call with me! With my extensive experience and knowledge, I can help you make a plan before you leap. Visit bladen-group.com/ to book a discovery call with Nikki Rogers.

Listen all the way through the end as I have an important mental exercise that we can all benefit from. This can help you level up your business, relationships, and bring in more opportunities.

Thriving Points:

• “Set some goals that you can measure and reflect on throughout the year.” 
• “Just be honest about where you are right now. Therefore, you can chart your progress and see where you will end up.” 
• “You need people around you who are going to support you. These relationships are key to help you achieve your goals.” 

Sponsored by the Women Thriving in Business Mastermind:

The WTiB Mastermind offers a curated environment of entrepreneurs who provide community collaboration, collective brainstorming, problem-solving, and accountability. The Mastermind reduces the learning curve as you listen and grow from the experiences of other group members. 

We are about to open the Mastermind, which will include six 90-minute sessions, and we are now accepting enrollment from new members. The first meeting takes place January 14th.

Each session helps you move from questions and confusion to ideas for the next steps to execute within your business. 

Click here to learn more and join other like-minded female visionaries and entrepreneurs who are ready to take their business to the next level!

A Team Dklutr Production

Transcript

Nikki Rogers: Your business is an asset that supports a thriving life. I believe this, and I'm committed to making this a reality for every entrepreneur and business owner who listens to this podcast. The Women Thriving in Business Podcast was created with you in mind, whether you're thinking about entrepreneurship or you're a business veteran, WTiB Podcast has something for you.

This podcast features candid and unscripted conversations with entrepreneurs, business experts, authors, and academics who can contribute to your business success. It will also feature discussions with those hidden genius business leaders who have built, grown, and thrived in business. I'm Nikki Rogers, transformation coach and the host of Women Thriving in Business Podcast.

Hello Thrivers and welcome to this week's episode of Women Thriving in Business Podcast. I'm your host, Nikki Rogers and I'm so excited to be back with you again. This week's episode is brought to you by the Women Thriving in Business Mastermind. Have you reached a plateau in your business growth? Are you feeling stuck in the routine operations of your business?

Are you tired of the trial and error method of scaling your business and making decisions in a vacuum? Are you frustrated by the lack of time or energy that you have to brainstorm and strategize about the future of your business? So what if you had a dedicated community of women entrepreneurs to serve as your sounding board and thought partners? What have you had a group of accountability partners committed to helping you achieve your goals?

Well, the Women Thriving in Business Mastermind offers a curated environment of entrepreneurs who provide community collaboration, collective brainstorming, problem-solving, and accountability. This mastermind reduces the learning curve as you listen and grow from the experiences of other group members. Each session helps you move from questions and confusion to ideas for the next steps to execute within your business. The Women Thriving in Business Mastermind is for you if you're an established business owner if you're ready to move from being a lonely entrepreneur to a collaborative empire builder. If you're seeking a community to share your accomplishments and challenges, and you're open to sharing resources and connections.

The mastermind includes six 90-minute mastermind sessions and we are now enrolling new members. The first meeting takes place January 14th. So now is the perfect time to schedule a console call to find out if the Women Thriving in Business Mastermind is for you. Head over to bit.lee/womenthrivingMM to learn more. Again, that website is bit.lee/womenthrivingMM to learn more about the mastermind and schedule a consult call. 

This week's episode is all about goal setting. This is the beginning of the year. So you may have already made your new year's resolutions. However, I'd like you to really focus on goal setting.

Once you create your goals, you can measure your progress as well as adjust them as the year goes along. Versus what typically happens with new year's resolutions is that by February, you've pretty much dropped them. So I encourage you to set some goals that you can measure and reflect on throughout the year to start off with the goal setting, I'd like you to time travel to the end of this year and imagine that you've had the best year ever.

What does that look like for you? What have you created? What have you started? What have you finished? What have you changed for yourself, your community, your family? How are you living? How are you loving? How are you being? Again, it's the end of the year, you've had the best year ever. What does it look like?

Write it down. What relationships have you created? What relationships have you healed? What relationships have you let go? What experiences have, you had during this best year ever? Who have you supported? Either individually or at an organizational level with either your time or your money? What joy did you experience during this best year ever?

What is the state of your help and what have you done to support your health? Either physical, emotional, mental, what do your surroundings look like? Your physical surroundings, where are you living? Where are you vacationing? If you've been on vacation, where are you spending your time? How are your finances? What financial decisions have you made this year? What partnerships have you created? What collaboration's have you been involved in? Again, think about this best year ever. Write down what this looks like. What are your wins that you can document for this best year ever? How are you feeling at the end of this year?

I want you to imagine this. I want you to think about it. I want you to write it down. If you have a pencil and paper handy. You are good and you've time-traveled to the end of the year. And you are just really sitting in, soaking in, being amazed by this great year that you've had. So those really are your in-state.

Those are your outcomes. That's what you want to have accomplished at the end of this year. If those are your goals, what does it take in order to accomplish all the things that you've documented, written down, and thought about? And I believe there are six key things that it takes for you to achieve your goals. And my six for this great year, the best year ever. My six things that I think it takes for you to achieve your goals are courage, strategy, confidence, plans, consistency, and connection. 

For courage, you have to have the courage to tell your truth and to start where you are. So you have to be very clear. You have to be honest, and you have to be transparent about where you are now because if you don't know where you are now, it's hard to build a plan to get you to where you want to go. 

So if we think about any of those areas that I mentioned previously, if we take, for example, finances. You have to have the courage to tell your truth and start where you are. If you are in debt or you don't have a lot of savings, or you haven't started thinking about retirement, or you don't have investments, be honest. Be open, be courageous and just state where you are right now.

Similarly, if you're in business and you don't have a lot of clients or a lot of customers or a huge following. Whatever it may be that you're looking for, that you think you need to have in order to be successful. Just be honest about where you are right now and therefore you can charge your progress as you start off, see where you end up.

So tell your truth. Start where you are. Courage is the first part of this. The other part of courage is just really dreaming big and taking the leap. So I liking this to climbing a mountain. You honestly have to have courage to say, I want to climb that mountain, and taking that first step is often the biggest leap or the biggest act of courage that you're ever going to have to take. So be honest about where you are, tell your truth, and actually take the leap. That's the courage piece. 

The second item is strategy, which is knowing where you are going and why you're going there. I like to describe this as a roadmap and there are three components to strategy. There's the goals, so that's your desired instate. There is the assessment, so where are you right now in your business? I would typically describe this as conducting a squat analysis. So, you know, your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, and your threats, and those are all going to be unique to you in your business. Once you've done the assessment, then you can create a plan.

So you have your goals, that's your destination. Your assessment is where you are right now. And the plan is that roadmap that gets you from point A to point B,  and recognize that your strategy may look different than others in your industry. You have to understand why maybe a competitor is doing something that you might want to imitate or not again, depending on your unique circumstances. So this is why it's very important to understand whether you should be pursuing marketing tactics, whether you should be working to attract clients on social media or not. It's based on your unique circumstances and your strategy.

So understand for every decision that you make in your business, understand why you're doing it and how it's going to help you get closer to your stated goal. Strategy’s the second component. Strategy is understanding where you're going and why you're going there. I like to think of strategy as the roadmap and it has three parts.

Your goals are your destination. You do an assessment of where you are currently, typically in a business. This would involve a SWOT analysis. So understanding your unique strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, that assessment gives you an understanding of where you are now. Goals are where you want to go. And then your plans is the route that you take to get from where you are now to where you want to be. You combine all those three and that’s your strategy. So you have to have a unique understanding of your current situation. Understand your stated goals, and then develop a plan that gets you from point A to point B.

Therefore, you can't always just imitate others because they may have a different goal. They may have a different set of current circumstances. And so their strategy and your strategy are likely to differ. So you have to understand where you're going. Why are you going? And how it was best for you to get to where you want to be.

Confidence is the third one. You have to believe that you can achieve your goals. And you have to believe it, you have to know it. You have to be able to convince others if you need to. But if you don't believe it, how is anyone else expected to do so? 

Consistency is the next component. Pick a course of action and keep doing it until it pays off or it's clear that it will not. Now, this is not just keep doing, make a decision, and then keep doing it just for the sake of doing it. No, you should be learning and adjusting every time you do something. This is about being consistent and making sure that clients, customers, potential clients, and customers can depend on you, whether it is touchdowns, what potential clients are part of your business development and sales process, whether it's content creation. So if you are creating content, being consistent about when and where that content will show up. Being consistent with your word and even in dealing with, again, clients, customers, potential partners do what you say you're going to do. But I would say keep being consistent and doing things over and over, and so you learn from it until it produces the desired outcome, or until you realize that it's not going to pay off, but be consistent. 

And finally, the last one is connection. You need people around you who are going to support you. And this includes friends, family members, customers, clients, vendors, business partners, collaborators, these relationships are key to help you achieve your goals. So it is paramount that you foster those relationships, seek out new relationships, as well as nurture the ones that you have. 

So these are my five components that I think are really key in order to help you achieve your goals. Those were courage, strategy, confidence, consistency, and connection. If we think back to the best year ever, and the goals that you want to achieve, the wins that you want to have at the end of this year, if you nurture each of these five components, I believe that you can actually achieve all of those things on your list of wins.

And before I leave you today, As we think about this year, I'd like you to think of a theme, word or phrase for the year. Mine for this year is level up and that is intentionally broad because I want that to permeate through all of my actions this year. I want to level up in my business and my relationship, and my finances, and my fun and my joy.

All of those areas of my life are places that I want to level up. So that is my thing, raise for the year. I encourage you to pick one that will guide your year as well. And please share it with me in the comments, I love to hear from you. I look forward to connecting with you again next week. Be sure to rate,  like, or subscribe to the podcast so you’ll never miss an episode and as always,  keep thriving. 

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Women Thriving in Business Podcasts. If you'd like this episode, share it with a friend. You can also join us on social media to share your feedback and comments we'd love to hear from you. Be sure to like, review and subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an episode. Until next week. Keep thriving.