4 Strategies To Setting Goals Effectively

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We’re almost to 2022, so are you setting New Year’s resolutions? If you are, do you hear the voice in the back of your head saying what is going to make this time different…

I’m sure you’ve set goals that you didn’t achieve. We all have. You’re not alone!

In this episode, we’re diving into 4 effective strategies that have transformed the goal-setting process so that you set goals you can ACTUALLY achieve! Let’s do this!

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Impulse Spending Like A Pro… the Right Way Challenge – https://aimeecerka.com/impulse

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Podcast Key Points
0:00 – Episode Sponsorship
1:20 – Episode Overview
3:06 – Setting Goals You Can Achieve
3:37 – Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work
5:42 – Cognitive Dissonance
6:30 – Actionable Goals
7:00 – Problem With Annual Goals
9:39 – Key To Goals You Can Achieve
11:47 – Creating Momentum With Your Goals
13:18 – Most Important Part – Keeping Integrity With Yourself
15:10 – Adding To Your Routine In The Smart Way
16:27 – Recap
18:35 – Your Challenge

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Resources & Links

Impulse Spending Like A Pro… the Right Way Challenge – https://aimeecerka.com/impulse

Instagram – https://instagram.com/aimeecerka

Read It! 4 Strategies To Setting Goals Effectively

This episode of the Your Money Your Life podcast is brought to you by Healthy Habits Impulse Spending challenge.

The Healthy Habits Impulse Spending challenge will help you create happy, helpful and healthy spending habits that both your budget and your desire to go buy stuff, LOVE, because not all impulse spending is bad.

Inside the challenge, we’ll create a customized plan that allows you to continue to spend in a way that aligns with your finances, your goals, and your priorities, setting you up to become unstoppable in your finances. The strategy of eliminating all impulse spending and no spend challenges, I’m not a fan. In fact, I’ve kicked him to the curb, because you deserve to spend money on yourself without the guilt.

And honestly, YOU NEED to spend money to create financial prosperity. We’ll break it all down inside the challenge into simple, no fluff trainings.

We’ll kick off officially on January 11th, so all you need to do right now is to get registered.

To see all the details and register, simply visit aimeecerka.com/impulse or text “impulse” to 817-969-4653. And of course, that link’s gonna be hanging out in the show notes for you as well.

Have you set goals before and didn’t achieve them? Maybe you’ve set them and time kind of procrastinated and you didn’t accomplish it because you ran out of time? Or maybe other obstacles came up?

But I think we’ve all set goals that we didn’t achieve.

So, what if you could set goals that you could actually achieve? That’s what we’re gonna be diving into today. So, let’s do this!

Welcome to the Your Money Your Life podcast. I’m your host, Aimee Cerka.

After my husband and I faced three major financial roadblocks in the last six years, I felt like I wasn’t doing all that I could and I had let my family down. It always felt like life was a struggle like I had to work harder than everyone else. It just came easy to them, and I didn’t feel worthy of success.

Until, a coach helped me see the successes in our experiences instead of our failures. This allowed me to create and implement systems to grow our network by 200,000+ while spending time with my loved ones and on my priorities. Now I help motivated women create the happiness, family life, financial security, and long-term wealth they deserve.

If you’re ready to eliminate stress, struggle, frustration and guilt within your finances, you’re in the right place. Welcome, I’m so glad you’re here!

Welcome back to another episode of the Your Money, Your Life Podcast. I’m so excited you’re here.

We’re gonna be talking about goal setting and setting goals that actually work.

In order to do that, we kind of got to start with like the beginning. We do need goals, yes, and we need to be able to set goals that we can achieve.

So we’re, what, 10 days out now from the end of the year? Are we setting New Year’s resolutions? Are we doing this? Or are we not doing this?

I’ll tell you, I’m not a huge New Year’s resolution person. And the reason for that is because often when we set New Year’s resolutions, and this is going to kind of segue us into where we need to be, when we set new year’s resolutions, we’ll set these big goals.

Weight loss is a very common one in finances is another. Let’s use the weight loss because I think most of us have seen this happen. So, “I want to lose 15 pounds”, “I’m going to be great”, “I’m going to go to the gym three times a week”, “it’s going to be amazing”, “or five times a week, it’s going to be great”, right?

Well, maybe you stick with it. Like a week, maybe. By the second week, “Oh, I missed today.” And third week, we’re kind of non-existent.

And the reason that that happens is it’s too drastic of a change.

We are habit-based creatures. So, we need to create small incremental changes in our habits to truly set ourselves up for long term success. Another reason why no spend challenges don’t work.

I think we’ve probably all heard of the yo-yo effect, but this is what happens. It’s yo-yo dieting, we see yo-yoing and your finances all the time, you do a no spend challenge.

So, we’re not going to spend for 30 days and then you start spending again and then you spend more than you already had. You’re not seeing progress because it was a short-term gain for a long-term sacrifice and that’s not what we want okay?

So, setting goals you can actually achieve, we need to make sure that they are achievable.

Now I am a huge fan, we talked a little bit about this last episode, I think it is. Setting BHAG goals (big, hairy, audacious goals). Let’s do it. Let’s set these crazy big goals.

But for your big crazy goals and goals that you can’t control, I would not put a timeline on it.

Now, there’s different schools of thought out there several people, several experts will tell you to put the timeline on there, so you can do it. But my concern, and what I’ve personally seen, is we create cognitive dissonance.

So, for example, years ago, in my business, I was like, I’m going to create $10,000 a month. Okay. Yet it didn’t happen. So the next time that I tried to set that goal, you know what I was hearing in the back of my head? “You’ve tried that already. It didn’t work. What’s gonna be different this time?”

Now you can work through that because that is a mindset thing. Your past does not predict your future. And just because something happened in the past, does not mean it’s going to happen in the future. All of those things.

But for myself, there was enough other mindset issues that we were working on, I didn’t want to add another thing to the pile. So what we do instead, is I set actionable goals.

I’m a huge fan of “The 12-Week Year”, I’m going to start doing some overviews of my favorite books for a couple episodes. I have gotten asked several times about like what my favorite books were, so I think that’ll be fun.

If you haven’t read the “The 12-Week Year”, it’s super empowering because the problem with setting annual goals, I don’t know, the concern with setting annual goals is, you know, a year is a decently long time. I know a lot of us joke about like, you know, time flying by and all those things, but it is decently long chunk of time.

So when you’re first starting out, and it’s like, “Oh, I’ve just got to accomplish this by December”, “What do we do?”, “We can put it off and go in the backburner?”, “Oh, I can work on this instead, it’s not as urgent.”

And then, (I think it’s like 90% of goals are achieved), annual goals are achieved November and December. Because the pressures on, you’ve got that deadline, you’ve got to achieve it.

So what we do instead, is we do “12-Week Years”. Totally love this, okay.

You set 12-week year goals. It’s close to being quarterly, but quarterly is actually 13-weeks. So 12-weeks, what you do is you take the 13th week off.

The way that I structure things around my business is I’m taking a week of minimal work, rest, all those things once a month. So, I kind of structure mine now as quarter.

But the premise of the 12-week year goals is because it’s long enough that you have time to push and work yourself. It’s not like a fast, I don’t know, seven-day goal or even a 30-day goal, there’s not as much as you can accomplish in that shorter period of time. So it’s enough time to kind of give you time to accomplish it, but it’s not enough time that you can slack off. You have to stay on what you need to do.

So yes, it’s gonna keep you accountable. But at the same time, we’re not setting goals that are just overextending ourselves, then we’re ending up burning all the time. That’s not the goal here. We’re setting goals that actually work.

So here, let me back up.

The first step here was, refrain, or be cautious about setting annual goals.

Quarterly? Much better. I typically do like a quarterly overview, which is something I’m just now really getting into. And the monthly goals, the monthly goals break down into weekly, and from the weekly goals, I can set my intention for the day. Okay?

I think we’ve dived into that in an episode somewhere. If not, I’ll make sure we talk about that, because it’s important that we’re able to make the most of the time we have, because time is our most precious resource.

But once you have broken those goals down, so we’re setting goals in a reasonable amount of time, the second key to making sure that you’re setting goals you can actually achieve is make them actionable things that you can control.

Now, this might seem counterintuitive, especially to my business owners out there or maybe sales reps and you’re like, “I want to make two $1,000”, “I want to hit six figures”. Yes, those are great goals to have. But the goals that I want you to set that you’re actually working to achieve, I need them to be actionable.

So what actions can YOU take? You can’t control if somebody buys or not, but you can write the copy for somebody to buy, you can make the offers, you can show up, you can ask people a question. Those are things that you can control.

We set goals based on things that we can’t achieve, or the we personally can’t control. We lead into feeling like we’re in chaos, because it’s out of our control. We cannot make somebody else do something. Unless you’re like mind controlling and that is not advised, okay?

Do things that only you can control, right?

Your goals are like quarterly, monthly based. You have annual goals, we’re aware of some of the pitfalls. You set annual goals, break it down into the sections.

Let’s say you want to, let’s use the six figures example. If you want to hit six figures for the year, maybe your first goal is to make, (I cannot do that math on the top of my head. 10 divided by 4. What $20,000? Normally we’ll ramp up.) we’ll say $20,000 for Q1. So then, you have something that you’re working towards. But again, that’s not something you can really control, we would need to adjust there.

But you see how we had that annual goal and we broke it down into bite size manner. That’s another thing what “12 Week Year” talks about, super great.

It’s okay to set small goals. Goals that you know you can achieve because you build momentum and you build confidence.

For myself when I set my weekly goals, I set like one of the goals is a percentage of my DMO. Now, based off of the week that we’re having if there’s more going on, it’ll be less, but most of the time I write 80%. The reason that I pick 80%, it’s always 80% or higher, is the way that I phrased that.

I know that if I’m achieving 80% of my weekly DMO (like on a daily basis, all adds up to the weekly DMO), then I know that I’m doing what I need to do to move forward. Now the key here is you can’t add a bunch of fluff stuff and avoid the things that you need to be doing.

For example, probably about two years ago, I had “email my list” on my weekly DMO. But I would skip that checkmark, because I can go do other stuff. So, emailing my list became its own separate thing. And you’ve heard from me on a weekly basis for years now because it’s important that I talk to you.

It’s okay to set smaller goals to help you gain momentum. In fact, I’d encourage it because 99% of us are going to continue to work on. So, there’s nothing wrong with boosting your confidence because you CAN do this. The most important part here is keeping integrity with yourself.

How many times have we broken our word to ourself because nobody else knew? When we start to keep integrity with ourselves, that’s going to grow your confidence as well. When your confidence grows, guess what, you’re going to be able to achieve more of your goals.

It’s not about creating the actual results. With keeping the integrity with yourself, it doesn’t have to be great. It’s about proving to yourself that you’re willing to do the work. So when it comes down to the wire, and you’ve got to get those things done, keep the integrity with yourself and do the work because that is much more priceless than getting those results.

But it’s also, if you plan accordingly, you’re not going to have to work down to the wire like that. It doesn’t have to be that last minute thing, which again goes back to the annual goals and we broke it down and we’re setting more reasonable timeframes that we can plan accordingly. If you’re managing your time efficiently, you’re going to be moving forward and that momentum is like a train going down the hill. You’re unstoppable.

And that’s what I’m here to help you do is to become unstoppable. So set unstoppable goals, break it down into those sections, make it actionable, things that you can actually control. There can be easy goals and they’re easy wins for yourself. That’s a confidence booster, but I want you most importantly to make sure that you’re keeping integrity with yourself while you do it.

Don’t commit to a great big change that’s not going to happen. Commit to the small steps.

When I was adding exercise into my daily DMO… (All of my exercise geeks are going to like be shocked at this. Exercise is not something that I do on a super regular basis, outside of what I’m about to tell you), but it’s also not a priority for me right now. I make sure that I’m taking care of my health, with what I’m putting into my body and being managed with like my emotional, mental, and physical health in that manner, doing 45 minutes of exercise, 30 minutes exercise, all that it’s not, not for me.

But I wanted to make sure that I was doing something, so I had added exercise to my daily DMO because I find that taking care of myself is important. So when I first started, I was literally doing three minutes worth of stretches. I tend to store stress in my shoulders and my lower back. I was doing stretches for three minutes, for my lower back. Doesn’t sound like it would be a big deal, right?

I could see such a difference that I was consistent with those three minutes every day. And even when I first started, it was committing to like once a week, twice a week, three times a week, worked my way into the commitment that slow incremental change makes the biggest difference. Okay?

Well, let’s quickly recap and then I’m going to give you your challenge for today.

First thing we talked about was setting a realistic timeframe, being cautious of annual goals, quarterly monthly goals = so much better. We could have visions of where we want to be 12 months from now, like I have a vision board that we just put up over here, you can’t see it, but it’s right here for the next 12 months and it is something in exercise that I still do. We’re going to be talking about this next month inside Money Masters Inner Circle. I’m really excited because it’s going to be very powerful training for the month.

There’s nothing wrong with having that vision and setting those goals, but they’re not like time deadlines, and they’re not the goals necessarily that we’re taking action on (like the action-based goals here, that was the second part). Setting goals that we can take action on; those are the things that we can control. And when we accomplish those, we can’t guarantee that we’re doing the work that we need to, to have the other ones happen. Hopefully that makes sense.

So reasonable timeframe, actionable goals that you can achieve easy goals, easy wins are encouraged because we need that confidence boost, because you know what? You are awesome. You need to be reminded of that. And then the fourth thing was keeping integrity with yourself and making sure that we’re doing what we said that we would do, just because someone else is watching. The most important person is watching and that’s yourself.

And the way that we view ourselves, the confidence that we have is greatly increased when we keep the integrity with ourselves. Now, if you break integrity with yourself, I don’t want you to start beating yourself up. That would lead me down a whole different rabbit hole.

Just leave that there. Don’t beat yourself up. Ask for forgiveness is fine, and move forward. But keep integrity with yourself just because nobody else knows. The most important person knows and that is you.

So ready for your challenge? The challenge I’ve got for you today is I want you to pick three things that you’re going to work on.

Now I know like the timing of this is around Christmas for a lot of us and it might look a little bit different. So maybe just picking one thing that you’re going to take action on or three things that you’re going to take action on before the end of the year.

This could be setting your goals; this could be revisiting the goals you already set. But the pro step here, is taking action on one of those goals that you have set what is something that you can do that will help guarantee that you’ll move forward closer to that goal that you’ve already said? Start getting into momentum now instead of waiting.

Send me a message on Instagram (@aimeecerka). I can’t wait to hear what are you doing to take action? What are you taking action on? And well, let’s do this. We’ll see you next week for another episode of the Your Money Your Life podcast. Bye for now!

Thank you so much for listening to the Your Money Your Life podcast. My favorite place to hang out is on Instagram. You can find me at @aimeecerka. Send me a message or post a screenshot and tag me! I love hearing from podcast listeners.

When you’re ready to master your money, go to https://workwithaimee.com. You and I will work together to ditch financial stress and struggle for good with a customized plan that works for you, your goals, your priorities, your life. I’ll see you next time on the Your Money Your Life podcast.

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