We're going to talk about how to plan and achieve your big audacious goals in the next year and beyond. Let's get started.
This is not meant to be a class that you just listen to and casually say to yourself that you will get to it or you will think of some goals. Nope. This is a class that you need to participate in because if you participate 100 percent you will have a much better chance of your business goals becoming a reality.
We aren't here to just throw out a random goal, like lose 10 pounds or make more money.
We are going to discuss setting audacious goals for yourself and for your business. And I know that some of you don't even like goal setting and some have had disappointing experiences with setting goals. But that is not what this is about. This is about believing in yourself and what you are capable of.
Setting big goals for us has literally changed the trajectory of our lives. This isn't about just achieving a goal. It is about who you become trying to achieve the goal.
When we start talking about goals and creating something amazingly new in your life, your brain can go back and forth, staying away from risk and keeping comfortable and the other brain, the more intelligent brain will compete against the one that keeps you safe, will open up your mind to creativity and being conscious of your life.
To change your business, you need to have an audacious goal. This bag, as I will call it to keep it short, will truly help you focus on the future and not live from the past. This is so important. Your brain likes a familiar, it likes what it knows won't kill it or put it in harm's way. It keeps us safe.
When you start making these audacious goals, your future is where you can focus. You become more powerful. When you are decisive like this, you start to create new skills and a new independent power emerges rather than being reactionary in your business. You will start to make decisions ahead of time so that you can train your brain to live consciously and not be on autopilot.
So let me ask you this question, what do you truly want your business to look like? Are you earning way below what you're capable of? Are you struggling to grow? Are you exhausted by trying to do whatever it takes to book that client? Which of course causes disappointment, exhaustion, a feeling of treading water, or just not getting paid enough for all the passion and effort you put into your business.
Then of course you second guess yourself and you start thinking crap about how you run your business and how other people have it all figured out. Right now is the perfect time to create that big audacious goal that you have always wanted. And it starts with having new ideas, not following the crowd, risking something and expending energy in a way you never have.
The real goal is for you to consider possibilities for your life, for your business, that you never imagined possible.
I really want you to think for a minute and ask yourself this question. What do you believe the possibilities are for your business and for your life? Did you immediately go to your past for that answer? Many of us always seem to come up with a limited version of what we have done and what we're capable of.
This is why we need that big audacious goal. Because it is time to start believing in what we are capable of. All of those limitations we've been conditioned to believe about what is possible for us have been swirling around in our heads for years and years. When you think of what you're capable of in your business, where does your answer come from, from past failures, from past successes, looking at your competitors and , telling yourself a story about how great their business is going, or believing what you read about what a business like yours is capable of making, remembering back to when you were told as a kid that creatives can't make real money that women can't make a certain amount that if you don't go to college and get X degree and choose X career that you can't make a boatload of money.
We need to think beyond what we have been programmed to believe by ourselves, by our environment, our friends, and families. Maybe you haven't even considered what you're truly capable of. Let's just stop for a second and think of why the F not have a big audacious goal.
You'll be shocked at the side effect of working towards this big goal. You'll be so impressed with yourself for when you discover what you are truly capable of. As you work towards this goal, you will change. You will become wildly capable of new things, changing who you are.
You are going to evolve. You're going to shift into a new version of yourself. Of course you're going to want to quit or want to go back to your old level. And you may, but get right back up and get back on this big, audacious gold journey. One of the first or most important things you need to do when starting this bag journey is taking massive action.
You continue to take action until you achieve the result that you want. You don't know what you need to do right now, and we will not know how until we start trying.
Resilience is a strength that I know is directly responsible for us continuously stepping out of our comfort zone and creating a new audacious goal. We have had failures, setbacks, days I wanted to give up, days I did give up. But then the resolve, the desire to reach that goal, was greater than my desire to not achieve that goal.
Believing in you, doing what you say you are going to do, is what needs to happen. For you to reach this goal, you can't not believe in yourself. Or this is not going to work. When you keep going, you will stretch out of your comfort zone and keep stretch, stretch, stretching.
Most of you haven't even considered the possibilities that are out there for you. What you want, what you truly, truly want. So let's grab our journal or a piece of paper and write down in really great detail what we want our business to look like for 2025. Be as specific as possible.
Think of 2025 as a blank canvas. We aren't going to look at 2024 numbers to determine what your business goal is for 2025. What do we want our business to look like? This is a future focus goal, no rearview mirror telling us how business sucked last year, or I can't make more than 10 percent more because the market is so overcrowded, or I just don't know how I could create that much more money in my business because I'm only one person, or I haven't done it before, so therefore, how can I achieve it?
But please take the time to reflect back at how far you've come in your life and in your business. I love that kind of feel proof of what you're capable of. You own an effing business. Be proud of that. And then, in your journal, write down what came up for you when you wrote down this big goal.
Let's use Keith and I as an example. Last month, we said on this very podcast that we wanted to make a million dollars in the next 12 months. That downright scares me. Of course, I immediately had doubts. My brain is telling me, Melissa, come on, you've never done this before. How are you going to figure My brain is also telling me that I should be embarrassed to even say something like this out loud, like, who do I think I am,
and then I question my abilities to achieve something audacious like this, saying things to myself like I'll never be able to do this. I mean, listen to that language. I'm using all negative words.
I have pre decided things because my brain wants to keep me safe. It does not want me to fail. But then the other half of my brain tries to combat that and tells me things like, of course you can do this. You have made multiple six figures in your businesses for years. Now you're intelligent. You've been running businesses for 30 plus years at this point.
Of course you're capable of doing this, you just don't currently know how you're going to do it. But you're resourceful and resilient. If you say you're going to do something, you're going to do it.
You might fall down here and there, but if you pick yourself back up, you can achieve this. I like the way that side of my brain is thinking. So now I need to take a harder look at my big audacious goal and start living from that future place of having achieved it, as if it is certain, how will we get to this number? How will we get to that million dollars? That's where a little basic math and projections come into play.
Remember, no looking at past numbers. To reach this goal, we are going to need to create a new path that determines how we need to show up every day in order to create an outcome that we don't know the how for yet.
Now back to you, what is your big audacious goal for 2025? What do you want your business to look like? What number do you want for your revenue? I'll play the part of the primitive brain and ask you, what are the limitations in your way right now between where your business is and where you want it to go?
Keep going in your journal. Write down anything you think is an obstacle for you achieving your big audacious goal. And then let's do a 180 and continue writing. But this time, super positives. What could be done that you haven't done yet?
How can we disrupt the way we think about our current business? How can we be open to possibilities we never dreamed possible?
So to get to where we want to go with this big audacious goal, we need to close the gap between where you are now and where you want to be.
Right now, you're probably thinking that you have no idea how you achieved this big goal because you've never done it before. But the answers will be in you. Trying, failing, learning. Keep showing up. Keep working towards this number. When you keep showing up, in spite of the discomfort, that's when things start to shift.
Let's use hypothetical numbers here, but let's say you want to make 100, 000, a nice round number. So you want to make 100, 000 in 2025.
Right now, maybe you're worried about your competitors, checking out what they're up to on Instagram, jealous when you see how busy they are, or the work they're producing. You keep doing more of the same because you have doubts about what you're doing. you want to get to this next level, but you lack the confidence.
So you continue to undervalue yourself and to compete against everyone else in your niche, rather than being uniquely you. Now, here comes the hard part.
You are going to have to let go of things that are good to get to the great. That's hard. This may mean you have to drop a service or a product that you offer that doesn't fit into the equation of earning the hundred thousand dollars. Maybe your business is doing okay. And you feel like it is on an upward trajectory, but what you currently offer will not get you to that big audacious goal number, and this is where a lot of people get stuck, because they have good or okay numbers and that prevents them from going after great numbers. The little success you currently have holds you back from having great success.
I have been exactly here. We knew we had to raise our portrait prices. We did a huge analysis of our pricing and recognized that our family sessions slash portrait shoots did not have a pricing average that matched our wedding work, which also meant that every time we were out shooting portraits, we weren't making the same amount of money when we were off shooting weddings, looking at it on a per hour basis.
We needed to reconcile this in order to grow, but I got used to the income these portrait sessions brought in. I was afraid when we moved to a higher price model with in person sales that we were going to lose out on that income.
I was afraid that by raising our prices and getting more money for the value we provided was going to take money away from our bottom line. I was perfectly okay with smaller success. And that was preventing us from our big goal. But once I gave in and we finally changed our pricing, we shed the clients that didn't understand our value and we acquired new clients that we love to work with and these clients never questioned our new pricing model and our business took off.
I was preventing us from achieving greater success because I thought that people wouldn't pay more, but I don't get to decide what people value and what they'll pay for. They do. Yep, my limiting beliefs were holding us back to have great success to reach that big audacious goal. You have to let something go and usher in something new, including most importantly, a new way of thinking.
And you know what happens next? When you start booking clients at your new price point or your new uniquely you product offerings, your confidence skyrockets and you start attracting more and more of the clients that you want to work with.
At this point, you've now identified your big audacious goal, your current limitations in getting there, and you've identified what could be done that you haven't done yet. Now our goal is to figure out what could prevent you from getting to your next level. My favorite word in French is bouteillage, a bottleneck.
So we need to figure out where are you stuck? What is in your way? Continuing to do what you're currently doing is not going to get you the big audacious goal results that you want. Doing more of the same is not the answer. We have to stop thinking small that this is all that is possible. We have to let go of our current business model and believe that we are capable of so much more. Stop worrying about your competition and be unapologetically uniquely you. And we can't be wishy washy about this.
We have to commit to our big audacious goal until you commit. Things will not change. If you want 2025 to resemble 2024, then that's great. But if you want to improve and have the business year and life that you truly want, then flip that switch. Decide and commit to this big audacious goal.
So when you think of making a hundred thousand dollars, what comes up for you? Write it down. We're going to do a little self-coaching here. Now. Start envisioning in your mind who you need to become. How you need to show up. How your thoughts have changed about what is possible for you and for your business. I remember when my daughter used to swim and an Olympic swimmer came to talk to them about the mental strength that they needed to compete. And he told a personal story about every time he is prepping for a race and before he gets on the block to start a race, he envisions the outcome.
He plays out in his mind exactly how his race is going to go, how he needs to show up and how he needs to perform. He doesn't worry about his competitors. He focuses on what he needs to do. He doesn't win every race, but he is able to envision himself from this future place of being the best swimmer.
He can be his big audacious goal is winning a gold medal in the Olympics for breaststroke. He doesn't focus on losing. He focuses on the outcome he wants. To me, this is a great example of how you need to approach your business. You need to decide on the outcome that you want.
We do this by changing what we do. Shaking it up, thinking bigger, thinking different. Shed the familiar and challenge yourself to become a better version of you. Remember, you get to write this story. How do you create a big audacious goal? Leave the comfort of what you're doing now and challenge yourself.
You can do this and remember, enjoy the process. Be in love with your business and it will love you back. In our next episode, we're going to use our big audacious goal worksheet to get it out on paper, what we truly want for 2025 and beyond.
Thank you.
