How to break down your goals into actions

Today’s episode of the podcast is all about the next step you need to be taking, now that you have set your goals for 2023.

In this episode I take you through a practical example of how to take a goal and break it down into actions, to bring it to fruition.

Spoiler alert, if one of your goals this year is to be more visible, then this is an episode you’re going to want to listen to!
KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
● Practical ways to break down your goals into actions
● When you need to check in on your goals to make sure they’re still right
● How to measure your goals and amend them when you need to
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE
If you set a goal, you need to have an actionable plan of how you’re going to achieve it!
Transcript

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are Things? So how have you started off in the year? Now, it's been really interesting speaking to my community and seeing how I've been, because a lot of them have had a very slow start of the year, and I did the very first week. You know, I said to you before Christmas that basically during Christmas, I always plan to do so much work that I feel like I must have three months off.

I did nothing. Now, this must be for the first time ever that I didn't use that time between Christmas and New Year to get some work done. And I don't really know why I didn't do anything. And I'm quite happy that I didn't do anything. And it does mean that I perhaps came back into this year thinking, oh, I feel behind, but not really behind when no one's behind.

We just set ourselves a kind of, you know, task of when we want things done by. There's no race. I had a pretty slow start to the year. Also, I dunno about you, but I was so tired. So even though I did nothing over Christmas and New Year, pretty much nothing. I was still absolutely shattered. And also there's been loads of illnesses.

I know I sound a bit funny. I've just been sneezing. I'm absolutely fine. Yeah, there's been loads of illnesses and people have not been right and. Anyway, so I feel like lots of us have come into this year not quite firing on all cylinders that we might want to be. One thing that was really interesting was I went on with a session with Mary, my coach, at the beginning of the year, and I said to her, I'm really tired and I don't feel very motivated, and I'm just really exhausted.

And she's like, is that you or is that someone else? Now, You might be similar to me, where I am a bit of an empath and I take in people's feelings, which is a really, like, it can be really positive. It means I can understand very quickly how my members are feeling and before they've even opened their mouth, I normally know whether they're not very happy or if things aren't going right or you know, or if they're super happy, like I kind of get a feeling straight off the bat. But it also means that I take in a lot of other people's feelings and I can sometimes forget whether they're my own or whether I've taken them from someone else. So of course, me listening to everybody saying, I'm so tired, it's been, you know, really hard start to the year.

Of course, I was saying the same, and Mary sat there and was like, and just want us to have a minute and decide, and we did some kind of, you know, meditation exercise and, and is this you or is this someone else? And you know what was so fascinating? We got to the end of the meditation. I was like, oh yeah, no, that's not me.

Yeah, no, it's not me that's super tired. I've obviously picked that up from somewhere else and I'm carrying around as if it's my own,...

Today’s episode of the podcast is all about the next step you need to be taking, now that you have set your goals for 2023.

In this episode I take you through a practical example of how to take a goal and break it down into actions, to bring it to fruition.

Spoiler alert, if one of your goals this year is to be more visible, then this is an episode you’re going to want to listen to!
KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
● Practical ways to break down your goals into actions
● When you need to check in on your goals to make sure they’re still right
● How to measure your goals and amend them when you need to
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE
If you set a goal, you need to have an actionable plan of how you’re going to achieve it!
Transcript

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are Things? So how have you started off in the year? Now, it's been really interesting speaking to my community and seeing how I've been, because a lot of them have had a very slow start of the year, and I did the very first week. You know, I said to you before Christmas that basically during Christmas, I always plan to do so much work that I feel like I must have three months off.

I did nothing. Now, this must be for the first time ever that I didn't use that time between Christmas and New Year to get some work done. And I don't really know why I didn't do anything. And I'm quite happy that I didn't do anything. And it does mean that I perhaps came back into this year thinking, oh, I feel behind, but not really behind when no one's behind.

We just set ourselves a kind of, you know, task of when we want things done by. There's no race. I had a pretty slow start to the year. Also, I dunno about you, but I was so tired. So even though I did nothing over Christmas and New Year, pretty much nothing. I was still absolutely shattered. And also there's been loads of illnesses.

I know I sound a bit funny. I've just been sneezing. I'm absolutely fine. Yeah, there's been loads of illnesses and people have not been right and. Anyway, so I feel like lots of us have come into this year not quite firing on all cylinders that we might want to be. One thing that was really interesting was I went on with a session with Mary, my coach, at the beginning of the year, and I said to her, I'm really tired and I don't feel very motivated, and I'm just really exhausted.

And she's like, is that you or is that someone else? Now, You might be similar to me, where I am a bit of an empath and I take in people's feelings, which is a really, like, it can be really positive. It means I can understand very quickly how my members are feeling and before they've even opened their mouth, I normally know whether they're not very happy or if things aren't going right or you know, or if they're super happy, like I kind of get a feeling straight off the bat. But it also means that I take in a lot of other people's feelings and I can sometimes forget whether they're my own or whether I've taken them from someone else. So of course, me listening to everybody saying, I'm so tired, it's been, you know, really hard start to the year.

Of course, I was saying the same, and Mary sat there and was like, and just want us to have a minute and decide, and we did some kind of, you know, meditation exercise and, and is this you or is this someone else? And you know what was so fascinating? We got to the end of the meditation. I was like, oh yeah, no, that's not me.

Yeah, no, it's not me that's super tired. I've obviously picked that up from somewhere else and I'm carrying around as if it's my own, and I was like, I can put that down now that's not me. And suddenly then I felt absolutely fine and I've been fine ever since, which is really, really funny. How the world works. It's very odd.

Anyway, anyway, just a little bit of a weirdness to get started there for you. So today I want to talk about, and I know I talk about it a lot and I know you're probably getting a bit annoyed, but I'm gonna talk about it anyway. I'm gonna talk about these goals that you might have set. I have done all my goal setting now, by the time this episode comes out, I've done all the sessions for all the different people and for my members and for the exec club and for people who signed up to do my goal setting stuff.

And everyone is walking away with a set of goals that they've put together for themselves. And part of the work I do with them is we use one session to set the goals, and then they have a follow up session to work out how these goals are going to turn into fruition.

Because what happens is we set a goal, we don't actually think. It's like we set a goal, we write it on a piece of paper and then at the end of the year we just revisit it and go, oh, did we get the goal? I dunno. Like it's, and, and most people goal set like that, you'd be amazed the people who goal set, like the amount of people goal set like that, and they don't actually think, and, and I get it, this is actually a really hard thing to do and it's taken me a lot of time and a lot of is to do this and to help other people do this, to actually take that goal and break it down into actions for them to actually help complete the goal.

So, I did a session yesterday with the people who had their goal setting session in December, and one of the people on the session, and I thought it'd be really good to bring it to here, because as I was going through kind of the hot seat with her, other people were like, oh, I'm so glad you did that, because now I understand what I've gotta do.

So basically she was saying that she wants to be more visible. That was one of her goals for this year, I need to be more visible. And quite honestly, I would imagine lots of people have that goal on their, their goal list because as we know, and as horrible as it sounds, it is a numbers game. And the more people who know about you, the more people you have a chance that can actually buy your stuff.

So unless you have a very high-end exclusive stuff, Maybe you don't need to grow your audience, but this person was saying, I need to be more visible. And that's what she wrote on her goal. And I was like, so what are you gonna do in quarter one to get you more visible? And that's where everybody kind of stopped and was like, I don't know.

So what we did is we did some action straight off the bat. I did it with her. So the first thing I said to her, so if you've got this on your list, this is what you need to do. The first thing I said is, let's look at all the different ways that you can be visible. So you can be visible by showing up on social media.

You could be going live, you could go on other people's podcasts. You could start your own podcast. You could go on other people's YouTube channels. You could write a guest blog. You could write your own blog. You could speak at people's events. That's definitely one of the ones I use. You could create a summit for yourself.

Like there are lots of different ways to become visible, so the very first thing to do is write it down all those different ways that you can become visible. Then once you've got them all written down, look at them and the ones that you think, I'd love that. Like, I'd really enjoy doing that. So for me, I love being interviewed.

I find it very easy. It's very natural to me. I really enjoy it. I don't have to prep for it hardly, and I just rock up and I talk and it's ace. So for me that is like, oh yeah, love that. Speaking on stage. Love that too. Again, admittedly, that takes a lot more work in terms of prep, but I really, really enjoy it.

That's the first thing to do. You wanna pick something that you actually like doing. Now, this might sound really obvious, but you'd be amazed the amount of people who do stuff, and when they get on a coaching call with me, I go, do you like it? And they go, no. And I'm like, why are you doing it? Because I get that there are things in our business that we've gotta do that we might not like.

However, If this is something that you've gotta show up consistently throughout the year to do, to help hit one of your targets, if you don't like it, you're not gonna do it. Or if you do do it, you're not gonna enjoy it, which makes you miserable and therefore you're not gonna give it your all. So pick the things that you like to do.

Oh, she had networking on there as well. So one of the things that she said she liked to do was she was more than happy to do training in other people's groups as like, brilliant. Let's look at that one. So we picked that. So that was action one. Write down all the things. Action two, pick which one or two or three.

Don't give yourself too much work to do that you might pick and go, yes, I, I think I could do that, and I'd be happy doing that. Then once you've decided, so hers was, she's happy to go into other people's groups. So her next action, which we put in for January, so bearing in mind we're looking at quarter one at this point, so I said, right in January, by the end of January, what I want you to have done is I want you to have decided what you can train on.

Give me a title, give me some description and tell me what my audience is gonna get from it. So as someone who has people come in and do training in their membership, that's what I wanna know. I want to know, what do you wanna talk about? Why do we need to know about this thing? And what am my audience gonna get at the end of it?

So I said, you need to write them and probably give yourself, like for me now in podcast interviews, I give myself like at least three or four different topics that they can pick from. But you know, if you're just starting off there, maybe one or two. That's the next action. So in January, she is gonna write down and make a plan in terms of what she can actually train on, so that when she does speak to someone, she can just hand it out to them and say, this is what I speak on.

Then in February, what she's going to do is she's going to identify, and if you've got a team, maybe the team can do this for you. But identify where you can possibly do that training. So for instance, she might come to me and say, can I do it in your group? She might come to me and say, who else do you know?

She might look at other people who have similar groups to me, or she might think about where her audience is and think, oh, that's a really good group. Well, that's really good group. So January, she decides what she's gonna talk about. February she decides where could she possibly speaking. And you're literally just gonna write a big, long list.

And you could be, as, you know, as ambitious as you want. It's literally just a list at this point. Okay? So if that fear starts creeping in and starts going, well, that person's never gonna let you speak in there community. Well, doesn't matter. That's not what we're doing at this point. All we're doing is making a list.

Then what we do is we think about how many a month or a week or a quarter might we wanna reach out and ask. Now, bear in mind that everyone you reach out to is not necessarily going to say, "Yeah, great. That's brilliant. When can you do it?" Let's say that if you want to do, and again, you need to decide how many do you want to do a month.

So she might wanna do one a month, she might wanna do two a quarter. So let's say you wanna do one a month. Well, as a minimum, I would say you've gotta be asking at least three a month, and that's good odds. Okay. Like if one of the three say yes, and you don't know, all three could say yes at the moment.

And this is the other thing to note, right at the beginning of the year when you're starting these things, You don't know. So what we have to do is action. We have to take some action and then we can learn from the action. So let's say she has planned in to reach out to two people a month and say, can I come and speak in your group?

So let's say for the first quarter, that's what she does. So obviously she's only really got March. So January we're working it out. February, she's making a list. March, she starts asking. There's two things here. First off, we need more than just one month before we can make a decision as to whether this is working or not.

So I'd probably recommend that she reviews it at the end of month two. So she's got her plan. She knows what she's doing at the end of month, not the end of month Teresa, so at the end of quarter two, I'd recommend that she goes back and looks at how she's asked. What the feedback was, how many said yes, how many said no, and all that good stuff, and then she can tweak as needed going forward.

That's something that people often forget as well. The other reason we make the plan the way we have is we take the, the fear out of reaching out because the, the thing isn't like, oh, I've gotta ask someone. It's just ask. It's like my task is ask two people. Now, we're not putting any expectation on the yeses.

We're just saying ask two people. Now, if we get to the end of quarter two and no one has said yes, There's a problem, obviously we need to look at that is other people were asking wrong, are we asking in the wrong way? Are we offering the wrong training? And we'll only know all that from the feedback we get from those people when they say no.

But if we get to the end of quarter two and they've all been yeses, then okay, we probably only need to ask one a month. Or you know, how many ever they want to get. And we might, we might be able to have a break for a little bit, or we might decide that actually it's easier than we thought and we could up it and do some more.

But again, until we've done something, we can't actually make that decision. So then instead of there being a goal of, I wanna be more visible, which is still the goal, and that's fine. We've attached some actions to it. And then what we can measure is we can measure were we, did we complete the actions? We can't necessarily always guarantee the outcome.

And I've said this many, many times. We can't always guarantee that you know, and I mean, and the other thing is with a, with a goal, like I wanna be more visible, well is that three more people or 3 million more people? So we really need those actions in order to, one, give us something to physically do to get towards the goal, but two, to actually have something that you can physically tick off, that you can physically measure.

Cuz you need to be able to measure these things. Like I said, you know, for that goal in particular, I would probably go, well, what does more visible look like from a numbers point of view? Do I wanna double my email list? Do I want to increase my followers on social media? Do I want to just say I've got in front of X amount of people over the year?

So I'd probably, probably drill down a bit more on that goal itself to give myself more of a SMART goal. But yeah, like I said, then going forward, you've got this action of I do this every month, and then at the end of the month when you're reviewing yourself, which we should do at the end of every month, we should do at the end of every week a very quick check-in.

But at the end of every month when you're like, okay, I reached out to those people, what happened then that helps for you decide and develop, okay, what am I gonna do going forward? How might I need to tweak and change this? So you can see hopefully how. You've taken that one goal and you've pulled it apart.

You've worked out what steps you need to do first, and we need to make sure we plan those steps in this. There's no good saying quarter one, I'm gonna reach out to five people. Cause at this point, you dunno what you're gonna say to them. And you don't know which people you're gonna reach out to. So be realistic with yourself and say again, in January, I'm gonna work out what I'm gonna say.

In February, I'm gonna gather together all the names and you might be able to do it faster than this. And if you can, great. And then I'm gonna start asking, and then like I said, at the end of quarter one or the end of quarter two more likely in this case, I'm gonna review and see what happens. How many people have said yes, how many people have said no?

What were the reasons for them saying no? And then that's gonna help me decide. And obviously at the end of quarter two, you're halfway through the year. Okay. , is this working? If it is, great, do I need to do more? Do I need to do less? If it's not working, what else can I do? And it might be then that you tweaked something else, but at least you've done something rather than just going, I need to be more visible this year.

And then getting to the end of the year and going, "Was I?", well, I don't really know, cuz I can't really think of what I meant by that. So I just wanted to give you that example. Cause I think it's a really, really good example of how you take a goal and you break it down and break it down and break it down and you, you give yourself some actions.

So if you have written your goals, great, well done you. Go back and look at them and decide actually, have I given myself actions against that goal? Are they realistic actions and are they something? And it might not even be something you need to do throughout the whole year. It might just be something that you do.

like in the first quarter or the first two quarters. There's something I have on my goals that basically will hopefully be done by the end of quarter two, and that's my goal to get it done by the end of quarter two. So, come quarter three and quarter four that goal, in particular, might not have much to do. So I really hope that's helped.

I hope that gives you a different way to look at your goals. As I've said to you before, and if you are new to the podcast, if you're regularly, you will know I'm not doing interviews for a little while. I'm gonna do random interviews of like cool people or cool types of interviews, but it is definitely not gonna be a kind of every other week like I've done for all 270 something episodes that I've done so far.

So there are a million different interviews you can go and listen to, and please go back and listen. But from now on, we're just gonna be having a lot of solo episodes, occasional odd interviews. Someone cool I think obviously I've gotta leave the door open for Brene.

You know, I'm still manifesting that Brene Brown might one day pick up our email and go, is there a random woman in the UK that I can be interviewed by? Oh yeah, let's go and pick Teresa. Please help me manifest that. If you know Brene, by the way, please go and have a chat with her. But yeah, so that's how it's gonna be.