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Podcast notes:
Worried 2022 might end up being as pants as 2021? Are you scared of making any resolutions this year in case they come to nothing? Here are my five steps for making your biggest goals happen this year and making 2022 YOUR year:
- Be clear on your goals.
- Work out what’s been holding you back so far and learn how to stop it holding you back this time – lean into your fears. Read ‘Claim your power’ by Mastin Kipp for more tips on this.
- Create a plan to make sure it happens.
- Visualise yourself reaching your goal.
- Remind yourself daily that you are amazing by leaving positive affirmations everywhere.
You CAN do this, you just need to be intentional about what you want and take tiny steps every day to make it happen.
Let’s do 2022!
Podcast transcript:
Hey there and Happy New Year. Do those words for you with excitement or maybe dread? I know for so many that 2022 really is a year of high hopes and new starts.
I know myself that in 2020, obviously it was a little bit unpredictable, to say the least. Let’s just say that. And we had high hopes that 2021 was going to be this amazing year where everything came together, where our dreams happen. And obviously, for so many of us, that didn’t happen for obvious reasons.
But that doesn’t mean that 2022 is going to be a disaster as well. We need to take control. You need to take responsibility for making those dreams happen. Now, of course, we can’t change everything, but we can make steps ourselves to make our dreams come true. The thing is that I get that fear about making New Year’s resolutions, because for many years I was like, “I’m not making any New Year’s resolutions because they’re pointless. I can’t stick to them. They don’t happen. I will just do things when I want to do them,” which is great.
But what I didn’t realise at that time is that if I want to live my best life ever (and that’s both for business and for my personal life), then I have to become a better version of me. Now, I’m not talking about being something I’m not. I’m not talking about being a different person. I’m not talking about being inauthentic to myself and pretending to be something that I’m not – I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about being a higher version of me. A better put-together version of me. A version of me that’s not scared to take chances. A version of me that doesn’t shy away from the big dreams. Just a better version of me.
Because as Einstein said, if we keep doing the same things in the same way and expect different results, that’s the definition of insanity, right? If we keep doing the same things all the time and expecting things to turn out differently, that’s not going to happen.
If you want to live the best year of your life, create the best year of your business in 2022, then you need to be the best version of yourself. You need to do something about it. You need to set a goal or a resolution, and you need to stick to it. And you need to find a way.
So I’ve put together this podcast today to help you identify what those big visions and big goals are and to just make them happen this year. Let’s go all in. Let’s go for it. And let’s not be sitting here at the end of 2022 thinking, what happened to that year? The year’s disappeared again. I’ve not done what I wanted to do. I’ve not gone for my dreams. I was too scared to make those resolutions to stick to them. And life got in the way and they didn’t happen. But they can happen, and you can make them happen.
Here are my five tips to achieve your goals in 2022:
Number one, you need to get clear on what you want.
It sounds so simple. I know it sounds so obvious, but it’s not always the case that people know this. They set vague goals about what they want to make their business better, but better in what way? If we don’t know what we want, how can we work towards achieving it? How can we visualise what we want? How do we know we really want it if we don’t know exactly what it is? So really get clear on what you want. Take some time to actually sit down and focus on this. Use whatever tools you need. Sometimes I find relaxing music helps my ideas to flow. I love a brain dump where I just get a big piece of paper and just scribble all over it.
Or maybe you could do a free writing exercise where you time yourself for five to ten minutes and you just write from the heart. Don’t think about what you’re writing. Just write and write and write for five to ten minutes and just see what comes out. Because I find that when I write like that, it allows my subconscious to really speak. Things that I didn’t realise were going on in my head come out on the paper. So that’s a really great way of getting clear on what you want and the goals that you want to achieve for this year, which is absolutely vital if you want to make your goals happen.
Right. Number two, work out what’s been holding you back so far.
The goal that you choose might have been something that you’ve wanted to achieve for years. It might be something that you keep trying to do, and for some reason you’ve got a block on it.
So what is it that’s stopping you? What version of yourself do you need to become to make that goal or that dream happen?
Very likely there’s some kind of limiting belief you have that you may not even be aware of that’s holding you back. For example, if you know you want to grow your business, you might be put off by the fact you need to plan. You can change that by finding a way to plan that works for you. That’s like me, I’m not a natural planner. I’ve had to learn to plan, and it’s something I’m working on all the time.
So, to have a really successful business, you’ve got to be able to be productive with your time. And plan out your time effectively. If you can’t do that and you’re scared of doing it, then that’s going to be a huge block on being able to achieve your goals. There’s going to be a limit and a barrier on what you can achieve. So try and think about what’s holding you back. What’s holding you back right now?
Often it’s the things that we’re scared about, the things that we’re afraid of that hold the biggest key to changing. If you can change that thing, the thing you’re scared about very often, that can change everything.
Mastin Kipp talks about this in his book ‘Claim Your Power’ and he says, “Make fear your compass”, which I think is an amazing idea. And it’s something I’ve been trying to do ever since I’ve read about it.
And that is to find out what is scaring you. What are you afraid of? What are you most afraid of? And run towards it, because that is going to help you get the fastest change. For example, when I started my blog – the Jewellery Spot, I had to reach out to complete strangers. I had to reach out to people I didn’t know because I needed to write their stories. I needed to talk about them on the blog. Was that scary? Yes. Was it scary? Did it grow really fast and help me achieve my goal of getting more jewellers’ stories out there? Yes, absolutely.
It was a game changer, but it was blooming scary because I was having to approach all these people. And at that point when I first started, I didn’t even have a blog. I didn’t have an audience or anybody there listening to me. I was just one person that wanted to make a difference. And I wanted to spread the word about these amazing jewellers out there, not only for the jewellers themselves, but also for the consumers who are missing out on these amazing craftspeople and these amazing products.
But I put myself out there, I addressed my fear and it really did change everything. And that’s something I’m doing now all the time. I try to face into my fears and it is hard and I can’t always do it. And I’m first to hold my hands up and admit that. But it’s where we have the greatest chance of changing things.
If you constantly feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall and nothing is working, then try to face into your fear because that will give you the biggest chance for changing things because very likely it’s that fear that’s stopping you doing the thing you need to do to achieve that dream in the first place.
So I really recommend you reading a book by Mastin Kipp. It’s called ‘Claim Your Power’ and just try to head towards the things that scare you in your business or in your personal life as well.
Number 3 – break down your limiting beliefs and fears
The third thing to do then is once you’ve been really clear on your goals and you’ve kind of got rid of those limiting beliefs or things that have been holding you back, is to break them down.
Now, the only way of achieving anything ever is to do it in small steps. It’s the tiniest steps that hold the key to success. We know this. So if you think about the Olympic athlete that trains, do they suddenly wake up one morning and become a gold medal winner? No, they don’t. They train for years at 5am in the morning to go training, and train several hours a day and work out how to eat better. They work out how to run their life around them. Becoming a gold medalist is their focus. And it’s their focus, not once, not in January, but throughout the year on an ongoing basis. And in small, incremental chunks.
Therefore, if you want to achieve your dreams and goals in business, you need to chunk the goals down into small, manageable chunks and do it over a longer period of time as well.
Think about if you want to lose weight. If you decide to get fitter in January, you’re not going to get fit after going on one run. It is something you have to do in small, incremental steps over and over again.
And it’s the same for business. It is the same for any kind of big personal changes we make. They need to be broken down into steps.
So chunk it down into monthly goals going towards when you want to achieve it or accomplish it. And then even break those monthly goals down into weekly goals. And make sure that you were always doing some small piece of work towards that goal. Whatever that goal is. Whether it’s to grow your audience on Instagram, whether it’s to grow your email list, whether it’s to get a closer relationship with your children by spending more time throughout the year together.
Whatever it is, you need to put effort in on a consistent basis. And that’s why it’s hard. That’s why when we get to December, we often haven’t achieved those goals. Because we don’t make a plan. We don’t make a plan as to how we’re going to achieve those big goals and break it down. And the only way of achieving it is to break it down. So make sure you take those big goals, break them down into monthly goals, break them down into weekly goals and schedule them into your calendar and keep on working towards them on a consistent basis.
Now that’s not always that easy, is it? Because we all know we feel super motivated in January. Then real life comes along. Our family all get Covid. We have different things going on. We may have personal issues, we might have business problems, anything could happen. So as well as the plan, it’s important to make sure you yourself are fully bought in to work in towards that goal.
And there are a couple of things you can do to help you stay on track throughout the year because it’s not easy.
Not only do we have to condition our businesses for success, we need to condition our minds for success because it’s our minds that are going to create the success.
So how do we make sure that we stick to these plans? I know we all have high hopes in January when we’ve got loads of motivation, but we’ve got to keep that going throughout the year. And that’s not easy. We need to condition our mind to help us because it’s our mind that will keep us motivated and keep us going and keep us on the right track for success. So one of the tools I like to use is guided visualisations. Now, this is something I learned about a few months ago when I carried out a mindset challenge to just change the way I was thinking about things. I challenged myself to do this every day for 30 days and I found it doable to do every day and really useful.
So, I just carried on doing it and I’ve been doing it for about three months now and I’ve really noticed a difference. And what the visualisations will do for you is they will, first of all, help you relax and then imagine exactly what it’s like and how it feels to have the success you want. The visualisation will encourage you to see yourself having that success and really make it feel like it’s already real, like it’s already here. And if you practice doing that over and over again and just visualising yourself having that success, it feels like it’s already happened.
The great thing about this is that because you feel it’s already happened, you’re not scared of it.
For example, starting this podcast was pretty scary, putting myself out there. And so I visualised myself having a successful podcast. And when I came to then record those episodes, I didn’t feel so scared because I already was a successful podcaster. In my mind, I already had millions of people listening and it became less scary. And you can do the same too.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking – “Visualisations every day. Are you crazy? I haven’t got the time for that.” But let me tell you how long it takes me – ten minutes a day. If I haven’t got ten minutes a day to help make my dreams happen, then I’m not very motivated and I don’t really want it because all I do is I download my visualisations onto my phone and they take ten minutes. I have my headphones on in bed and I listen to them before I go to bed. It has the added bonus of really relaxing me because the visualisations are always very relaxing as well. I do it for ten minutes and then I go to sleep.
So, I really recommend visualising you succeeding at your goals, having the success you desire, reaching the goals that you want, being the person that you want to be, being that higher version of yourself. And it will really, really help. If you want to find any guided visualisations, then take a look on places like YouTube tube, Google it and just try out different ones that work for you. Because different ones will work for different people.
And you can have visualisations about all kinds of things as well. You can have them about specific goals, about New Year’s resolutions, about just general goals. You can have them about financial abundance. Just have a look and see what works for you. But I challenge you to listen to a guided visualisation every day for 30 days and see what happens. Just see what happens and how it makes you feel. And then eventually it will become part of your routine, like it has done for me.
Number 4 – surround yourself with inspiration
And the last thing that you can do is really, really simple and that’s to surround yourself by positive affirmations that mean something to you.
Now, I know this sounds a bit woo-woo. It sounds a bit crazy that putting a few words around you is going to make you feel differently. But I’ve been doing this for the last few months and it has really helped keep me going. You have to find things that mean something to you, things that really make you fizz inside, make you spur into action. So I’ve picked certain quotes, certain phrases, words that inspire me and I’ve put them around my workplace. So for example, sitting here at my desk, I have a framed print that says, ‘Keep on going’.
It sounds really simple, but the reason I’ve got keep on going is it’s because those small incremental changes that make a difference to whether we achieve our goals or not. So I have to keep reminding myself to keep on going. It may not feel like you’re doing much now, but keep on going. You will get there. Just follow the plan, trust your plan and keep on going.
Another word that means a lot to me is the word ‘believe’. In the past, I often haven’t believed in myself enough. So believe is a really powerful word for me and it’s my word for this year. I’ve picked a word for this year to inspire me. And so I’ve put it on my phone wallpaper. I’ve put it on my watch wallpaper, I’m going to get a sign and put it above my workstation.
‘Believe’ is something that really helps me believe I can create the success I want. If you want to create success, you need to constantly be working on your mindset. You need to constantly be this higher version of yourself. If you want to change, then remind yourself of that on a daily basis or an hourly basis.
Be your own cheerleader. There’s no one that wants to cheer you on as much as you do. You are the person that most wants success for you. So cheer yourself on and don’t leave it to chance.
The bottom line is if you do the same things that you’ve always done you will get the same results. I guarantee that if you do the same things over again you will get the same results.
And come the end of the year, another year would have slipped by, so use this as your call to action. Don’t let another year slip by. Who knows how many more years you’ve got? You can do this. The time to go for your dreams is now. What are you going to achieve in 2022?