How to Set Better Goals and Have Your Best Year yet with One Word
If you feel like January was a “lost month” you’re not alone. Do you know only 8% of people actually achieve their resolutions? That statistic is depressing, but that’s only because most people feel obliged to make resolutions in January and then stick to them. If you’re one of many who didn’t make any resolutions in January it seems easier to just give up right?
But the reality is that January shouldn’t be the month of doing - it’s actually all about resting and recovering. There's a lot of pressure on business owners to review, remove and establish goals during the New Year. On top of this we have our personal lives and a pandemic going on! It has been a wild ride and if you decided to take January off to just rest and recover, good for you because in reality, January is not the month that most people have their lives sorted out contrary to what social media says. I think it's important that instead of berating ourselves for taking a slow period, let’s just embrace it and determine the best way to hit the ground running in February.
How to set and achieve goals as multi-passionate entrepreneurs using anchors
Goal setting is really just like outcome setting and outcomes are things that we want to have and experience. Goals are based on a desired emotion, a feeling, or a vibe and creating an anchor instead of a resolution is going to create a direct connection in your brain between the actions that you take, and the feeling that you're actually chasing.
So let's say you want to make more money. Cool, you want to make $10,000 because to you that amount represents feelings of freedom, security, and safety. Now you need to determine an anchor that is going to help you connect to this goal a little bit better.
The anchor is a filter to use against all your choices, your options, your pathways that are going to present themselves to you over the course of the year. So any time you are taking actions to set you on the course to achieving your goal, you need to weigh up any opportunity against your anchor. Will taking on this new client make you feel free, secure and safe? Will increasing your prices get you closer to that feeling of power?
For me, my anchor for 2021 was freedom and I looked at freedom in different ways. I looked at it in terms of revenue, and I looked at it in terms of my work - moving out of my 9 to 5 and getting full time into coaching so that I had the freedom to grow my business. I looked at freedom in terms of social media content, a big part of why the podcast came into fruition was to free myself from what I feel are the chains of Instagram and feeling like I have to compete and feed the algorithm.
Why anchors are better than generic resolutions
As a multipassionate entrepreneur, consider ditching the resolutions and bringing an anchor into your life. Establishing an annual anchor is not a box that you try to shove all your energy, all your directions and all your passions and interests into. It is not a label that you apply to yourself, your business, your life, your personality, to downplay your energy and your personality traits. It is not a checklist or a rule that you're going to use to restrain yourself or to quiet down what you want to do. It is not restrictive. What it is, though, is freedom, direction, guidance and accountability. It is a roadmap, your internal checking point, your compass, your lens, your filter, whatever you want to envision it that you're going to refer to to make sure that you make aligned decisions, and you take aligned action.
How to establish and organize your anchors
This sounds great and all but you are probably thinking “how do I start?” Well, it’s quite simple. Give yourself like 10 minutes and make a list of everything that you want to do this year and all the things you're interested in. You're going to have like a zillion things on there but that’s okay!
Then take a look at your list and determine the themes connecting each thing maybe there are 4 big themes or a few subthemes.
Afterward, organize your list into your annual anchor and then each quarter will be a different subtopic/sub anchor throughout the year that you can focus on because you can't do everything at once. Essentially you want to envision one big umbrella anchor and then mini little anchors that go under the umbrella term. That way you aren’t overwhelmed with having to do everything in one go, and instead, you’re focusing on taking small steps to align yourself to your big goals.
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Hey there, it's Jenn Hulley and you're listening to Side Notes, conversations for the multi passionate entrepreneur, your go to space for all the things creativity, business, well being and life design, it's time to break free, find joy, and create success in your very own way. So if you're ready, let's get started.
Welcome back, it is season two, I'm so so excited to be here and to be launching another season with you guys. The podcast took some twists and turns and Season One all part of that, starting before you're ready progress over perfection and way finding your way through something. And if you have been here from episode one when we started as the brand authenticity, edit, and then morphed into brand camp podcast, and you're still here, as we relaunch now in season two as side notes, conversations for the multi passionate entrepreneur, I just want to give you a big Virtual hug and say thank you for being here and supporting me through this ride. And for being part of the podcast community. We've been off for a month, we took a little break just to get things sorted out to map out some content and really align the actions that are going to be taking through this podcast on social make sure they're all in alignment with the direction of where I want to go and where I want to take you guys in the next year. And so here we are, it is February, right? How was January for you? Did you hit the ground running? Did you like dive into all the things you're like, I got my plan, I got my word. I'm doing this. I've launched my goals I've got you know, like I'm ready. Are you like that teenager who's sleeping, you know, way past noon, head under the pillow that's like, oh my god go away. Right. And I asked that because December is fucking wild. Like December is mental, right?
It is mental. Socially, it is mental with your family. There's a lot of pressure on business owners to like review, remove, review, set goals, establish the New Year, and your kids are home from school and like let's not forget the panic D the pandemic is still going on. So it has been a wild ride. And if you decided to take January off to just rest and recover good for you. If you use January to hit the ground running and you are already like a month into your strategy systems life and you're feeling great. Good for you, wherever you are. It is Oh, kg. I wanted to talk this week about naming your year I think you know, everyone thinks we need to talk about goals and resolutions and all of that stuff in like December in January. But did you know that most people actually don't sit down to start to write their goals until February? True? Really, really true. January is not the month that most people have their shit sorted out contrary to what social media would make you think and believe the majority of people are getting their shit together in January and then February hits and they're like, Okay, let's do this. And I don't know if you notice that in your own business that perhaps things quiet down a little bit from your customers and clients in January. And then February, it's like they wake up and they're like, oh my god, you know, and they're like, fuck, and they're trying to get their shit together really quickly. But that's why it's just like there's this lull that tends to happen in January. And I think it's important that instead of, you know, berating ourselves for taking a slow period or thinking like, what the hell's happening, why is nothing working? Let's just embrace it and like, say, you know, say what it is and be okay with it, that maybe January was not the month where you got your shit together, you hit the ground running, and you're just working at your own pace, and that's fine. So we're hitting it off in February, we're talking about anchors, we're talking about anchors over resolutions. And like I said, why are we talking about resolutions and anchors now in February? Because here's a fact that kind of sucks, but 8% 8% of people actually achieve their their resolutions? Why are we talking about this? Now? Why are we talking about it in February, you know, 8% of people actually achieve the resolutions 8% That is it. Like I said social media would make you think that like 98% are achieving and you're like in the bottom two, that's not performing bullshit. It's not true. 8% of people achieve their resolutions. And so that means 92% of people are probably right now in February off track, there's a good chance that you set a new year's resolution, or you set an annual goal for your life or your business and you've gotten off course, maybe you've forgotten about it or you've gotten distracted and now you've gone down a path that's like totally unrelated or maybe you just like decided to throw your hands up there and be like fuck it and you've abandoned ship altogether. It does not have to be so black and white. Okay, I want you to remember that just because you like air quotes dropped the ball or whatever, you know, self imposed Hardline, you've drawn up. It doesn't mean your entire year is a wash. New Year's Eve is such an arbitrary date, when really the truth is that you can reinvent yourself. You can pivot and you can Change course whenever you want to or whenever you need to.
So this is where we come in and say like anchors over resolutions, why anchors. So let's step back back and talk about what goal setting is. Goal setting is really just like outcome setting, okay? And outcomes are things that we want to have and be an experience, they're based on a desired emotion, a feeling, or a vibe. And creating an anchor instead of a resolution is going to create a direct connection in your brain between your actions that you take, and the feeling that you're actually chasing. So let's talk about say you set a goal of like, I want to make more money, cool, you want to make $10,000, whatever, you probably don't actually care about the amount of money you want the freedom, the security, the safety that comes with having that money. And so when you have an anchor, it's going to help you connect it a little bit better. So I'll get more into this in a minute. But let's, let's go back a bit. So like, like I said, there's the goal setting is the outcome, right? The outcome is the thing that you want to have, whether it's like, I want this many clients, or I want, you know, 5k months as consistent, I want to sign six new people, I want to launch a new product, whatever, there's that emotion behind it that you're actually chasing. So if we say that, you know, you want to scale to 5k months, a lot of people look at that they go like I want to scale to 5k months, and then their next goal is I want 10k months, it's just seems to be the way that our brains work. Or it's the content that people put on social media. If you say that you want to scale to 5k months, fantastic, but I bet you 5k months could be 6k months, or an 8k or you could even make 4k that month and it wouldn't matter, you would still feel as successful or unfulfilled as you, you know, we're depending on what the emotional outcome was that you're actually chasing, if you're chasing security, or safety or freedom or power. That's the underlying thing or vibe behind you saying I want $5,000 as standard each month for my income. So when we set an emotional anchor or an annual anchor, it is there to hold ourselves to the feelings that we're chasing.
The anchor is a filter, like it's a great filter to use against all your choices, your options, your pathways that are going to present themselves to you over the course of the year. And there is going to be a lot so you can use it as like a hang on hold up. If my annual anchor is power. And this is an opportunity that's come into my place, you know, come on my plate or been served up in front of me, whatever. I'm running out of metaphors right now, or puns. But whatever lands on your plate or your mental desktop, you can look back and be like is this in alignment with power. And if you've engaged in the planning process that I have established and shared with you in the Get It Done business planning framework, you'll know that your anchor then creates phases, right? Your phases will say, if I'm looking at power, maybe I'm going to look at revenue, community connections, income and whatever, whatever. I think I said revenue and income, but you get what I mean, that anchor is the thing that's going to hold you to that feeling because it's like this umbrella. Right? So I'll give you an example. My anchor for 2021 was freedom. And I looked at Freedom in different ways. I looked at it in terms of revenue, and I looked at it in terms of my work, like just moving out of my nine to five and getting full time into coaching so that I had the freedom to grow my business. I looked at freedom in terms of social media content, a big part of why the podcast came into fruition was to free myself from what I feel are the chains of Instagram and feeling like I have to compete and feed the algorithm. All these things that happened for me over the course of 2021 came because I established this anchor of freedom. And I did a lot of things like I looked back. I don't know if you listened to go back to the last episode and season one I talked about like all the things that actually happened over the course of a year and it is wild. And it happened because I had this anchor guiding me throughout the year. This year I'm going to be doing or using the anchor flow. My word is flow for the year and for me flow means a lot of things it means connection. It means revenue. It means creativity. It means joy. It means ease and simplicity. It means streamlining and systems like there's a lot of things in better The word flow right even means energy. So that was the word that came from me, like came out when I was doing all the brain dumping at the end of the year. And just reflecting on what had happened and where I was and where I wanted to go, I really realized that what I was craving over the last over the next year is this sense of flow. And having this anchor has helped me establish those themes, right? Like, I'm going to be working on systems as one of my quarters, I'm going to be working on connection and creativity and scaling. Those are the sub themes within flow, but that concept of flow is going to be that like, stop, do not pass go soak up like border security, where I'm going to be like, do you or does this help with flow? Or does it compete with flow. So I really encourage everyone to consider ditching the resolutions and bringing an anchor into your life. So what I want to talk about, so let's talk about anchors in more depth, let's talk about like, what they're not and what they are and how you can go about creating an anchor for yourself, and why you really, really need to consider doing this as a multi passionate person. Let's start with what an anchor is not. Okay. So establishing an annual anchor is not a box that you try to shove all your energy, all your directions and all your passions and interest into. It is not a label that you apply to yourself, your business, your life, your personality, to downplay your energy and your personality traits. It is not a checklist or a rule that you're going to use to restrain yourself or to quiet down what you want to do. It is not restrictive. What it is, though, an annual anchor is freedom. It is direction, it is guidance and accountability. It is a roadmap. It is your internal checking point, your compass, your lens, your filter, whatever you want to envision it as it's that internal system that you're going to basically upload or download, upload, I guess if you're a computer, to put into your you know, your operating system to make sure that you make aligned decisions, and you take aligned action.
Now, here's the 411 on why anchors are, in my opinion, the best solution for a multi passionate entrepreneur and why you've probably bailed on your resolutions before and also like why that's totally normal and expected. So there is a book called The Renaissance soul. And in it, the author talks about this concept called umbrella careers, or just even umbrella terms, right. But she talks specifically about an umbrella career as a space that you create to house all the things that you love, all the things that you're interested in all the projects, and the pathways that you want your business and your life to expand and all the things that you want to do. And you're interested in. She uses an example in her book of somebody who's multi passionate that loved like everything. Interior design, finance, food and cooking, writing television, like they loved everything. And they decided the solution for their life, the best strategy for them was to build a life around becoming an innkeeper. And you're probably like, What the hell does being an innkeeper have to do with loving interior design, cooking wine, television, writing, finance, like what does that have to do with it, but the innkeeper became the umbrella through which that all of those elements of her personality that she loved all her strengths could sit in like it's the house that they could all be inside of. And because as an innkeeper interior design, she was designing the rooms in terms of cooking and wine, she was developing the menu, she was developing the wine list and doing some tastings and pairings, she got to engage in graphic design by creating social media graphics, her website details or whatever. Finance like anyone that runs a business knows that initially in the beginning until you hire somebody, you are going to be your own bookkeeper. And so for this person who loved all the things, becoming an innkeeper was the umbrella that they needed to fit everything in and to keep themselves engaged and happy and satisfied and able to do all the things they love but still be making progress and making contribution to the world right and their life through using their energy to create something. And so the anchor system like the annual anchor system is exactly the same, it's an umbrella term, that your multi passionate brain can set all your goals, you can try all the things and you can create that flexibility for you to follow your energy and interests throughout the year, as they develop without totally losing your way or becoming like completely off track, that anchor is going to keep you rooted to that overarching feeling, or the emotion or the state of being that you want it. Right, if you're looking at Freedom, like I said, freedom from, you know, one of the things was social media, Instagram, I wanted to look like what does freedom what's freedom gonna look like for me, in terms of content creation, and I developed an email marketing list, I got the podcast going, I started dabbling, researching it, YouTube, because these are all things that are on my list, like when you're multi passionate, I bet if you took yourself like, give yourself like 10 minutes
and make a list of everything that you want to do this year, all the things you're interested in, you're going to have like a zillion things on there. And when you cut off the energy, and the creativity that's in your soul in your brain and your being that wants to like express itself through all those things, when you cut it off. And you say like, I'm going to my annual goal this year is to launch a group membership program or whatever, you are going to get fucking bored, so quick, like, so quick. But if you establish an anchor that's about strength, or expression, or knowledge, or whatever it is, and you set that anchor, and then you establish your phases, one each quarter. Think about it, you've now got four big topics within your, you know, your annual anchor. And then each quarter, you've got three months, you've got 12 Different subtopics throughout the year that you can focus on, you can do all the things, you just can't do everything at once. Right. And that is where we get really off track as we try to do everything at once. And then we do a lot of things, we burn a lot of energy, we don't make a lot of progress, and we don't get the feedback that we need to keep going. And that's where the doubt, the confusion, the disbelief, the thinking like, I'm never going to be able to leave my nine to five because I can't get my shit together. Or I'm never be able to scale my business to the next level or, you know, I'm not able to take my family on vacation because we're not working smartly. And we're trying to either have no strategy and do everything which doesn't work, or we're employing somebody else's strategy and saying, cool. Pick one thing, I'm going to niche down three offers maximum. That's it. I worked with a business coach side note, side note, that's why I'm calling this podcast side notes. Because I say side notes all the time. But side note, I worked with a business coach, years ago, who learned a ton from them really, really did, but also really fucked with my head by telling me that I could only have three services. And can I tell you what the pressure did to me thinking I got to pick three. And that's it. I changed my service guide. Like every week, every month, there was something else I never committed and I never made progress. So that's a good example of like taking somebody else's solution or somebody else's strategy, which is built for we'll talk about this more throughout the season Zoggs zone of genius people were not Zoggs were MPs or multi passion entrepreneurs. And like I said, you either do everything haphazardly, and you're a goddamn mess. Or you take somebody else's word of advice that was designed for a different type of brain. And you try to niche down and you try to laser focus and have one annual goal and one new year's resolution and you're never going to do it because like I said, it's going to suck the energy and the creativity from you. And that is the life force that you need to be who you are and to do the things that you're supposed to do. So as you find yourself now the first week of February, if you're like freaking out because you're like I didn't set a goal, or I did set a goal and I've already fucked it up. Remind yourself that that's not true, right. And you can establish an annual anchor, sit back, relax, brain, dump some stuff out and try to figure out what it is that you're really craving and wanting in your life. One of the ways that I love to do this is or I suggest to people as well is to just write everything, take a big piece of paper and write all the things that you want to achieve and do an experience this year. And then get some pins that are different colored and start connecting lines between them. You'll see ones that like connect up well, you'd be like, Oh, that's related to this and this. This is related to that and that and you'll find you'll have like clusters of them. And when you look and see how many clusters you have, you can start to name them and look at, okay, these clusters really represent this or this. And then you can establish a big word, you can establish that umbrella. Or you know, sometimes just sitting with yourself quietly and asking, like, what is it that I actually crave? And what is it that I actually want? It might just come to you, right? Like me with the word flow. I just knew in my gut, I was like, it's flow.
I know I'm craving flow. I didn't know what it looked like, I didn't know what my quarterly phases were going to be. But I knew that that was my word. But I want you to understand that if you don't know what your word is, right away, and it's not in your gut, you can way find your way to it, you can do some brain dumping, some brainstorming, Mind Mapping, whatever strategy works for you, and start to see patterns of themes, like I said, or phases or sub topics that you want to focus your energy on, over the course of this year. And like I said, the thing I find the most empowering, sorry. And like I said, the thing I find really empowering and liberating about this concept is multi passionate, we love all the things and if you look at it this way, by establishing an anchor, you can then have 12 separate goals throughout the year. And like 12 phases, 12 months 12 goals, that is a lot of variety that has a lot of options, a lot of potential and you are going to be able to do all the things that you want to do. So give this a go give yourself some time, I'd love to hear what your annual anchors are. You can find me on Instagram, I'm at Jennifer Holly. And if you've got your annual anchor established, I would love for you to post a story on Instagram I just say 2022 my annual anchor is whatever you know, style it up however you want to do it. You're multi passionate, be creative, make it look and feel the way you want that post to feel. tag me in it and I'd love to share them. I would love to create a highlight on Instagram where we can share all these anchors that we're working on throughout the year. I know 2022 It's gonna be a good one. I feel it in my bones. I really believe that everyone's got the capability and the skill set and the passion to do be Act have believe enjoy experience all the things that they want. You just need to have some focus and direction and account personal accountability right to keep yourself on course and the first step to doing that is establishing your anchor. I hope this was helpful this episode for you. Like I said, I'd love to hear what your anchor is. Drop me a line on Instagram and I will talk to you soon
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
