Halfway There: How to Reevaluate Your Goals and Crush Them in the Next Six Months - Ashley Mann

Website: https://ashleymanncoaching.com

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00:00 Hi, this is Ashley Mann and in this presentation, I'm going to talk about how to re evaluate your goals and crush them in the next 6 months. And what I hope to share with you is how to recapture the enthusiasm that you may have felt at the beginning of the year when you were feeling really motivated and ready to get everything done in your business by the end of January.  

00:21 You may not feel that way now, and we want to get you back to that place. Now, before we talk about how to re evaluate your goals, I want to talk briefly about what makes a good goal. This is my criteria i don't want to tell you there's a right or wrong way to write a goal anything that works for you is great that's what you should do. But when I think about goal setting, these are some things that have been helpful to me.  

00:46 First of all, I know there's scientific evidence to back this up. I'm not going to try to cite specific studies, but writing down a goal has been proven to make you more likely to accomplish it, even if there was no scientific evidence of that. I think it's important to write down your goals because then you have them in like set in stone or whatever you want to say, but you can look back on them a year from now. You might have completely forgotten about your goals if you hadn't written them down South.  

01:16 Writing down your goal helps you know what it is very clearly it forces you to be clear and specific about what your goal is. And that's actually part of the next thing that makes a good goal. You might have heard of SMART goals before. If not, SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, attainable, Relevant, and Time bound. So this is a criteria for goals that many people have found helpful.  

01:43 And just to briefly go over what that means, you can read more about SMART goals if you're interested and have never heard of it before. Smart specific means that you're being very specific about about what the goal is. If your goal is to get healthier, you're not just going to say my goal is to eat healthy. You're going to be specific you're going to say I'm going to eat more vegetables or I'm going to eat less sugar or something that's very specific about how you're going to eat healthier.  

02:12 Measurable means it's something you can measure instead of eat more vegetables, it's eat 2 vegetable servings per day, five out of seven days per week so it's something you can measure and track and know if you're if you're hitting your goal. Attainable means that you're not too ambitious with your goal to where you get discouraged, but it's also still a goal that's going to push you and challenge you, not just something you would have got done anyway. Relevant means that the goal that you're setting is a good goal for you to help you get towards your long term goals you're aiming towards, not something just a arbitrary vanity measure you're not trying to get followers on Instagram just to impress people, but because you're actually, you know, it's going to get you to the revenue level that you're aiming for.  

03:00 Something like that. And lastly, a smart goal is time bound that means you have a deadline and you're not just infinitely stretching the goal out longer and longer and longer and never accomplishing it. So SMART goals are good goals and then finally, in my opinion, a good goal is one that's not too far off in the future because a year from now you're going to have new information and perhaps new opportunities. And it's hard to have the clarity and forecast out what's going to happen over the next few, the next 12 months or if you know even longer. A good goal is one that you can accomplish, in my opinion, in the next month to three months because that's about how far out you can predict and kind of know what's going to happen.  

03:49 There's a book that I recommend called the 12 week year Get more done in 12 weeks than others do in 12 months. That kind of changed my thinking about goals, where goals used to be something that I would write at the beginning of the year and then not really think about too much until the next year. But this helped me think about more just planning three months at a time and re evaluating after every three months, which is what we're doing here so if you'd like to dig into that idea more, I recommend that book.  

04:20 All right, so let's talk about re evaluating and why you need to do that so like I said, you may have set some great goals maybe they're SMART goals and you wrote them down and all that maybe you did that at the beginning of the year, but now you've gained more experience, you have new information and you've started to feel like maybe some you have new opportunities that have come up. Maybe you feel like the goals you set are no longer relevant. You've pivoted a little bit or maybe you still want to accomplish those goals and now with all these new opportunities, you're not sure how to balance everything.  

04:55 So that is a good sign that it's time to reevaluate and refocus. And in this presentation, the process I'm sharing is one that I would recommend that you do every year, every quarter, every month, however often you feel like you need to check in with your goals and get focused and regain some momentum. All right, So going into the process, Step 1 of refocusing and re evaluating your goals is a brain dump. I do this any time I'm trying to organize my goals and my tasks. I just want to consolidate everything in one place and that one place could be a notebook. I like to use Trello, which is a task management tool.  

05:36 It's a free software. You could use iPhone notes, whatever works for you, wherever you are comfortable organizing your thoughts in a way that you can visualize, them that's what I recommend that you use. So step one is get everything out of your head, out of your, you know, emails and whatever disorganized places this information is now and consolidate it in one place. And I'm talking about everything that you're holding in your brain right now. Your current projects you're working on, urgent tasks and deadlines, commitments you've made, things that you have to get done, recurring tasks that you want to make sure you're prioritizing, tasks that you've been meaning to get around to and haven't started yet.  

06:20 Online courses or virtual summits or freebies or other types of training that you've been meaning to go through and haven't prioritized yet. Or maybe emails that you need to respond to or read or do something about. So all of this stuff is what is in your head right now, just slowing you down and making you feel, I don't know, to me it feels like a burden that you have all the stuff you feel like you should be working on and you're not. When you're trying to focus, you have it in the back of your mind all the time.  

06:50 So try to get this all onto a list that we're going to then use to inform your goal setting and organize into a task list but for now, it can just be all on one list. All right, after you've done that, Step 2 is to take a step back and think about what is it that you want in the 1st place. Visualize your ideal business. So for this step, we're not trying to think as much as we're trying to feel. And how you feel in this moment is what I want you to focus on not what was your goal for your business six months ago, but in this moment, what is it that you want? What do you consider your ideal business? And to come up with that answer, here's some questions you can ask yourself.  

07:33 First of all, what is your end goal? Like 3 years from now, Five years from now, what is it that you want from your business? Think about that and imagine it. Write it down if you want to. Next, think about and feel why is achieving your end goal important to you? What is your why? Why are you doing this? Again, imagine it, hold it clearly in your mind, and then write it down if you want.  

08:02 Next, imagine your ideal business in your ideal business, who are you serving, how are you helping them and how are you spending your time? Visualize that. If you want to write it down and describe it in words, that is the goal that everything else should fall under. All of the projects you take on, all of the tasks you're doing daily, that is your guiding light, your North Star. All right so next we're going to work backwards from that end goal and think about for a second, what is 1 milestone you would like to achieve by the end of this year? And by milestone, I mean kind of like a goal, something that you can say you've accomplished maybe it's a certain revenue target or a certain number of email subscribers.  

08:54 And I don't mean necessarily like the, a project, we're going to talk about a project in a, in a minute here. But think about a milestone what is an accomplishment that you think it's possible to achieve by the end of the year that you would you still have enough time to accomplish and you'd like to aim for? All right, next we're going to look back at your. If you've written goals already, if you have goals from the beginning of the year, we're going to check in with those right now so Step 3 is ruthlessly reevaluate.  

09:26 And in this moment, I want you to feel free to let go, delete or cross out any goals that you have written down in the past that no longer feel right for you. If it's just not something you want anymore, you have no information, things changed. It's OK to just say that's I don't need to accomplish that. I have new goals. Just cross it off or delete it if you want to.  

09:50 Now, it's possible that you have goals that you don't want to completely cross out they are still things you want to accomplish, but they're not priorities right now so if you just feel like your priorities have shifted a little, I would recommend creating a list titled Do Later and then any goals from that you had written down or tasks or projects that you'd written down at the beginning of the year or whenever. If they aren't really the priority for you right now, just put them on this do later list that way you won't forget them.  

10:23 You can check us in with them at a future date and maybe at that point they will be the right thing for you, but they're not the right thing right now so just put them on the Do later list. Ok, so after you've looked at your old goals and you've also written down all of the things on your current To Do List, the next task, the next step is to choose what you're going to work on next your next project.  

10:49 This is going to be 1 big project that you can accomplish in the next one to three months because that's how far out we can reasonably see ahead. That's going to help you achieve your end of your milestone so highly relevant something you're going to feel really good about getting done. So I'll just give you one example from me from my experience or my personal goals. I have a goal of growing my email list and more importantly having my email list growing on a consistent basis by a certain amount.  

11:24 So in order to accomplish that, I am going to be trying some Facebook ads within the next one to three months. And so my big project is going to be to launch my Facebook ads and get them running and get them converting so I've chosen that as my next big project that's going to help me accomplish the milestone I would like to achieve by the end of this year. So think about what that would mean for you. Choose one big project that you're going to accomplish in the next one to three months that will help you achieve your end of your milestone also, something with a definite point of completion.  

12:00 This is not something that you're going to drag out indefinitely it's something that it has a beginning endpoint and an endpoint so for example, using my example, I'm not going to just put learn how to run Facebook ads that's not my project. That's kind of a project, but there's no specific endpoint to that. So instead my project would be get a Facebook ad converting at a predictable rate that's something I can measure i know when that's done, or even just launch a Facebook ad, get one up and running that could be another example of something with a definite point of completion.  

12:34 All right, after you've picked your next project, the last step is to get organized so you have all this stuff you've got your, your brain done, your To Do List things you've committed to also your current goal, your current project. So this is what how I would do, how I would approach organizing all this. First of all, break your project into specific steps, working backward from your point of completion all the way back to the first step you're going to take. So thinking about your end of that project, OK, in order to have that done 1st, I'm going to have to have this done before I can do that, I'm going to have to do this so that's what I mean when I say break it into specific steps think through what are the specific steps you're going to need to take in order to get this project completed until you are at the first step and you're ready to take the first step because you're clear on what that is.  

13:24 Then decide when you're going to begin step one and put it on your calendar do not allow yourself to put this off. Go ahead and decide when you're going to start on your project. Even though you have stuff, you are in the middle of projects that you're not done with commitments you've made. That's OK. Just decide when you're going to get started and then next schedule the rest of the steps. And I would recommend thinking through a week at a time for the remainder of this month. Like what am I going to do week one, week two, week 3 of the remainder of this month? And then for next month, what are some steps I hope to get done next month? And then at the beginning of next month, get a little more granular, What am I going to do the first week, the second week, the third week? And you know how much time you have to work on this project.  

14:12 So take that into account when you're deciding how much you're going to get done each week because you're going to have to balance it with all the other stuff that you always have to do. But prioritize your project because that's what's going to actually move the needle forward for you and your business. And then fill in the rest of your calendar with those urgent tasks and current projects and everything else that you listed in your brain dump. Again, you have to be realistic, I know, but prioritize the project that is actually going to, you're going to feel really good about accomplishing by the end of this year.  

14:43 All right, some final thoughts. Remember, it's OK to give yourself permission to let go of any projects, tasks, or goals that aren't right for you right now. Either just delete them or put them on a do someday list or a do later list if that makes it easier for you. Another thought. The best way to accomplish a goal is to break it down into manageable steps. If you're feeling overwhelmed by a goal, you probably haven't got granular enough in visualizing the steps.  

15:12 And in my experience, if I'm feeling like I can't start something, it's because there's some step that I haven't visualized my way through yet i have some unanswered questions or some research I need to do. So I need to break it down and figure out what step am I getting stuck on and what can I do to get past that is it I need to have a conversation with chat GPT about how to approach it differently, or I need to do some training to educate myself? So break down your goal into steps and then when you get stuck on a step, maybe break it down a little further or do a little extra research so that it feels doable because what you want is the feeling of, OK, it's Monday i'm ready to get started because I know exactly what to do and that it's going to get me to my goal.  

16:01 And then lastly, I did want to mention that I have a, a free bundle worksheets that can walk you through this goal setting. Thinking backwards, working backwards process just helps you get your ideas on paper and has prompts for you to know to like visualize the the actual goals and think through what your goals are what you want. So my goal setting worksheets are available at my website, ashley mann coaching dot com slash clarity it's ASHLEY is how you spell my name if you're just listening Ashley Mann MANN coaching dot com slash clarity if you want to reach out to me for any reason, you can email me at hello at Ashley man dot me.  

16:42 If you want to follow me on Instagram or connect with me there. My Instagram is misspelled on this slide i just noticed, but it's Ashley Mann at A N biz B I Z. So Instagram Ashley man biz with two NS, not one or hello at Ashley man dot me. All right. Hopefully that was helpful to you and hopefully you're ready to get some momentum and renewed motivation for the rest of this year and getting some things done.