Lisa Larter (00:01):
Welcome to, She Talks Business. If you’re an entrepreneur, business owner or aspiring mogul, chances are you want to learn more about marketing and mastering and monetizing your business. She Talks Business is where you’ll learn all of that and more. My name is Lisa Larter and I’m an entrepreneur, high school dropout, wiener dog enthusiast and your host. Let’s get started.

Lisa Larter (00:25):
Hello. Hello. Hello. And welcome to this week’s episode of She Talks Business. We are officially three weeks into the new year, and I’m not sure about you, but some of my big goals have fallen to the wayside. Interesting, on the heels of last week’s episode with Lauren, where we talked about entrepreneurial burnout, it’s making me think about these big goals that we set for ourselves moving into the new year. And then what happens? Many of us, you, me, set ourselves up for failure. Because we set great, big, huge goals that are seemingly impossible to achieve and then we support the story that we’re not able to get stuff done.

Lisa Larter (01:20):
And then we end up feeling bad about ourselves. So today I’d like to talk a little bit about what if you did it differently? What if you did a reset monthly? What if instead of having a massive goal that you were going to try to achieve for the whole year, you were actually really intentional about a goal that you wanted to achieve every single month. In the strategy lab, I work with members to plan their goals on a quarterly basis, and we meet every single quarter to re-evaluate, reassess and reprioritize those goals. And what I have noticed in my own world is that when goals fall off of your radar or when you have too many goals happening at the same time, and when you don’t have a clearly defined plan to achieve those goals, it’s really easy to just kind of waffle and let them go.

Lisa Larter (02:26):
So here’s what I would like to recommend you try doing. Be super intentional. So I have a couple of goals that are important to me this year related to my health and wellbeing. One is I want to continue to walk, exercise, get more steps in than I did before last year, because I want to stay healthy. Another goal is I want to work on my book, but I’m struggling to find the time to commit to working on my book every single day. So what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to break things down so that the tasks don’t seem so insurmountable. When you take what it is that you want to do and you prioritize a couple of things instead of focusing on a dozen things that once, it makes it a lot easier for you to get momentum towards accomplishing those goals. So I want to give you an example.

Lisa Larter (03:27):
If you went to a restaurant and you looked at the dinner menu and you loved every single meal on the menu. And then let’s pretend you went to a really nice fine dining establishment. So they don’t have a crazy, crazy big menu. Maybe if they’ve got six, seven entrees, but they all look good. You wouldn’t order all of them. You wouldn’t order every single entree and try to eat it all in one setting. You would pick one and you would eat that one thing. Maybe you would encourage whoever you were dining with to get the other thing that you want so you could try it too. Maybe you would even share two meals. But you wouldn’t order all six or seven entrees. Because, A, it’s impossible for you to eat that much food. B, if you did eat that much food, you would end up feeling really, really gross after. And C, you probably wouldn’t enjoy any of the meals because it was just too much. But yet, that’s what we do with goal setting all the time.

Lisa Larter (04:38):
We try to take on too much. We try to take on more than we can manage. And then we let the itty-bitty-shitty committee tell us that we’re not good enough. We’re not organized. We don’t follow through. We can’t get things done. We can never make things happen. And that’s not good for your self-confidence. So I want you to prioritize a couple of things at a time. No more than two. And then I want you to look at what can you do to move the needle on those two things only? And what can you do to do that for a 30-day period? And then decide whether you want to keep focused on those two things because maybe it’s going to take more than 30 days. But instead of trying to do all the things at once, prioritize a couple of things and fall in love with finishing. Finishing doesn’t mean that it’s perfect.

Lisa Larter (05:34):
You know, I just released a new website for a subsidiary company that I opened in the United States last week. And guess what? It’s not perfect. Oh my God, it’s not perfect. But it’s done and done is better than perfect. And it is done now, which means I can iterate and I can make changes and I can improve upon it. But so often people get so tied up in making sure that everything is perfect, that they never cross the finish line and give themselves the grace to just improve on what they’ve done. We also forget to measure our progress. I read in Thought Readers last month, we read The Gap and The Gain, Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy’s new book. And it was such a great book because it talks about measuring your progress from where you started, instead of from where you want to go to.

Lisa Larter (06:35):
So instead of looking at the gap between where you are and where you want to be, look at how much progress you’ve made from day one when you started towards the goal. When you focus on the gains that you’re making, you realize that you are capable and that what you want to accomplish is possible. It might take longer than you expect, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible. Now here’s what I’ve found. And I found this a lot with women. One of the challenges around setting goals and reaching our goals is really a lack of clarity around what it is we really want. We’re so busy shitting all over ourselves that we’re not taking time to really ask ourselves, “What do I want?” We’re not giving ourselves permission to let go of the things that we don’t want and/or encouragement to move towards the things that we do want. Because we’re afraid of disappointing people.

Lisa Larter (07:35):
So I want you to ask yourself these three questions. In your business, if there was just one thing you could do, you had to get rid of everything else, you could only do one thing in your business, what would that one thing be? And if tomorrow you could not do your business anymore, you had to do something different, what would you do? And if money and responsibility and commitments really didn’t matter, you could do anything in the world. Somebody is going to fund your big, wild, crazy idea, what new business would you start? In order to set goals and achieve goals, you need to know what you want. And in order to know what you want, you have to spend some time thinking about what you want. You have to get yourself out of analysis paralysis and into a clear position of knowing, “This is what I want in my life and this is what I don’t want in my life.”

Lisa Larter (08:36):
I want you to start paying attention to the things that you like and the things that you don’t like in the work that you do and asking yourself the question, “How can I? How can I do more of the things that I really enjoy? The things that really make me feel like I’m making an impact in this world. And how can I do less of the things that suck my will to live?” You know, the things that you feel like you have to do, not the things that you want to do, the things you feel like you should do, the things you feel obligated to do, the things that you really wish would go away. I want you to pay attention to those things. Because there is a good possibility that you could either stop doing those things or you could hire and delegate those things to somebody else.

Lisa Larter (09:22):
But most of all, as you continue on this journey of 2022, I want you to give yourself some grace. And I want to remind you, you can do anything, but you cannot do everything. It’s not too late to make this year a great year. It’s not too late for you to sit down and think about, “What do I want to accomplish next? What do I want to accomplish this month? What do I want to accomplish this quarter?”

Lisa Larter (09:55):
And then look at your calendar and set aside some time and be very, very intentional about showing up for you. Showing up for the things that you say are important. Because what you say is important is really only important when your behaviour and your actions align with those very things. That’s what I got for you today. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you again next week on She Talks Business. Bye for now.

Lisa Larter (10:30):
Thank you for joining me for this episode of She Talks Business. If you enjoyed the show, you know the drill, leave us a review, tell someone about it and join the conversation on social media. Thanks for listening and until next time remember, done is always better than perfect.