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MERRY CHRISTMAS Y’ALL!
This week, we’re focusing on getting you in shape for next year’s abundance of opportunities by getting into the right mindset.
But before we do, we’d like to let y’all know how thankful we are that you stuck around with us through 2017.
It has been a wild ride, full of adventures, surprises and lessons.
Congratulations on making it through this year, and we pray that the succeeding success stories be sweeter than the last.
You guys rock!
Now, let’s get on to business… online business.
The 5 Steps to Making Your Dream A Reality
STEP 1: Celebrate last year’s successes
Take time to be grateful for what you’ve already achieved.
Being mindfully appreciative of all your successes helps you to stay positive and focused on the target.
If you don’t celebrate your successes and are being too hard on yourself, negative things become amplified.
What should you do when you feel bogged down?
When personal victories are scarce, be happy for your loved ones’ success, celebrate with them, and bask in that positive energy.
Don’t dwell on the bad stuff, learn from it and then move on.
Channeling the spirit of gratitude is a powerful thing. There is so much good in the world, believe in it, and in yourself. Make gratitude a habit and you’re already one step closer to your dream.
STEP 2: Focus on experiences
Hard set goals are good, but if you really think about it, you get that exhilaration from living in the moment.
Experiences are things that move on to your next adventures, they add wisdom to your years and teaches you to persevere in times of hardship.
Focus on what you FEEL as you’re working towards your goals — how are you experiencing your everyday life?
The goal isn’t all there is. Money isn’t all there is. Fame isn’t all there is.
Now, be honest. What do YOU want to experience in life next year?
STEP 3: Identify your areas of strength and weakness
What do you need to learn in order to make those experiences possible?
Focus on what makes the biggest impact in your life.
Sometimes we aim at multiple targets in the hope that we’d hit a good opportunity, but this just distracts us from focusing all our efforts on hitting the best opportunity.
Analyze your mindset and skills. Your success depends on what you put your mind into and the consistency of your actions.
STEP 4: Take consistent action!
Taking action builds your momentum to get to the next level.
You can form this habit by committing yourself to the cause.
There is no magic pill, success requires hard work, commitment and passion.
When you take consistent action it allows you to learn more, experience more and consequently DO even more.
What are three things you can do to make your life and others people’s lives better?
List and commit to three actions.
BONUS: The conditioning of your mind becomes rewired when you take action, you are more alert and can make use of previous action’s data to help you decide an even more educated next step.
STEP 5: Focus on others: Paying it forward and giving back
How are you going to help others?
Amazing opportunities happen to genuinely helpful people.
Giving is an awesome paradox. When you give, you receive. This is true, and for the most part, what we receive is something intangible like friendship and hope. These intangible treasures are a great source of fulfillment, and allows both the giver and the receiver to grow a mindset of abundance and gratitude.
“And God will generously provide all you need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others.”
- 2 Corinthians 9:8
Thank you for listening!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Click Here to Download the New Year Success Guide
To learn more about working directly with Shane & Jocelyn in their Flip Your Life community, visit: https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife
Join HUNDREDS of entrepreneurs from around the world pursuing the Flipped Lifestyle online!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thank you for listening!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey, y’all! On today’s podcast, we recap the past 12 months and tell you how you can achieve your goals for the upcoming year.
Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright, let’s get started.
What is going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. This is the last podcast for 2017. Super excited to be with you guys today to kind of go over and recap last year. We’re just going to highlight some of the wins that we had, some of the goals that we achieved, and then we’re also going to give you a process to make everything that you want to happen next year come true in your own life.
And if you’re anything like us right now, guys, you probably have an inbox full of goal-setting programs and new-years-resolution setting videos and everybody is basically trying to sell some kind of journal or some kind of something right now so that you can set goals and have these big goals that you are going to accomplish and get all your new year’s resolutions out there.
But the thing about it is guys, setting goals doesn’t always really work and most of the time, New Year’s resolutions just kind of fall to the wayside for a lot of different reasons.
Jocelyn: The thing that bothers me about goal setting — there’s nothing wrong with goal setting. I’m all for goal setting. — But I don’t like making a year-long goal because do you even remember what your goal was last year? I don’t remember mine.
Shane: I don’t even remember my New Year’s resolutions. I’m sure I had New Year’s resolutions .
Jocelyn: It’s been 300 and something days ago. It’s a long time to try to fulfill a goal.
Shane: To keep the arrow pointed straight ahead at that goal for the entire year. And I was actually reading an article the other day. It was saying that when we set goals, like when we say, “I want to make a million dollars,” or “I want to have 5,000 people in my membership community,” I was reading the other day that it said when you say that goal or when you set the goal, it tricks your brain sometimes into thinking it’s already achieved it.
Like, if I tell Jocelyn a goal, then my brain’s like, “Oh! Got that one! Tick it off the box,” then you don’t even do it, you don’t even take action on it, and all your goals fall to the wayside.
Jocelyn: Maybe if I tell you I’m going to lose 20 lbs, it will happen.
Shane: No, actually, you’ll just feel like you lost 20 lbs, but you’ll feel lighter. You’ll feel better about yourself because you said the goal out loud.
Jocelyn: I’m not sure that that will work for photos.
Shane: So as Jocelyn and I were setting our goals for this year, we wrote some goals down and then we wadded up the paper, and kind of threw it away because we just realized, this isn’t’ going to work. This isn’t how we should do it. We can’t just set these means-based goals of, these are the things we’re going to tick off the box, and 364 days from now, we’ll be able to check all the boxes, and we got it all done.
There had to be a better way to make things happen, to take action, to get your life to the next level, and to get what you want out of life without these arbitrary goals that you may or may not achieve. Being the action-takers that we are, we started looking at achievement, and we started looking at success. We started looking back at the last year, and we said, “Okay, how did we actually achieve these things? How can we actually achieve them going forward?”
What do we need to do? Because that’s what makes anything happen in your life, is you actually go out and do it. How can we do the things that we need to do to make our life go to the next level?
We came up with a five-step process to make your goals and dreams actually come to pass. Not just write something down on a dry-erase board, not stick it on a post-it note on your mirror. But things you have to do to actually make those things happen, and make them come to pass.
Jocelyn: When we think back on the success that we’ve achieved like even in the last five years, we realized that really consistent action-taking is really what is the most important for us in achieving any kind of goal.
Things change, we adapt to them, we take action, we look back on what we did, we see if it was right or wrong, or we make changes and we move forward. Action taking is probably the most important thing that we have done.
Shane: We started looking back at what has led to this success that we’ve achieved, and we started noticing trends like being grateful for things and really celebrating your successes. Almost anything that we’ve done that we’ve achieved any kind of success in, there has been relationships involved or helping other people go to the next level as well.
Every time we’ve achieved any kind of success, we had to grow, we had to learn, and we had to find out something new and figure out how to do something new to make that next step and to take it to the next level. As we were talking about all of this, just in the car, driving the kids around town or little meetings on the couch at night before we go to bed, we recognized five things that we had to do next year if we were going to take it to the next level, if we going to grow our business, grow our life, make our kids’ lives better, make our lives better.
We put those into a nice little process, a little system because everything in our lives has to be systemized when Jocelyn gets a hold of it. You’ve got to have a process. We put all those things in order in a five-step process that we could use to make our goals happen.
What we’re going to do to today is we’re going to go through this process ourselves right here live on the air, we’re going to explain to you how to do it as we go along, and then at the end of today’s show, we’re going to show you how you can print a copy of this goal-achievement process for yourself totally free. All you have to do is put in your e-mail address, we’ll send it right to you, and it will help you take your next year to the next level as well.
Jocelyn: Alright, step 1 is to celebrate the wins of the past year or the past month or whatever type of goal-setting that you’re doing. Right now, you’re doing year goal-setting and when we were in Mexico a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about how we were not very good at celebrating our wins. I think something that’s hard about being a super ambitious person is that sometimes, you have so much ambition that you don’t take time to celebrate what has already happened.
One of the things that we’re doing this year is we’re trying to be more mindful of that and trying to celebrate even small things along the way. So, we don’t just get bogged down in nuts and bolts in getting stuff done, and always trying to achieve some crazy goal.
Shane: The problem with not celebrating your wins first is you don’t get rid of all the bad things, you don’t forget about all the bad stuff, and the worst thing you can do going into a new year is bring in the baggage from the last year in with you. When you get into that new year, you want to look back and say, “You know what, this was pretty good. I achieved A, I achieved B, I achieved C. Good Thing 1 happened, Good Thing 2 happened, Good thing 3 happened.” That just resets your brain and get your mindset looking forward, and focus on achieving more of the good things and forgetting about the bad things.
Also, if you only look at the bad things, or you forget to celebrate your wins and your successes along the way, the little things are magnified in the human psyche. We always look at the bad things a hundred times worse than all the good things that happened.
One thing that we were guilty of when we first started our podcast is we had dozens, maybe hundreds of really good reviews. But if one person said anything negative on a Facebook post or one person said anything bad, send us an e-mail that didn’t like what we were doing, it would just crush us, and it’s so easy to get focused on the bad things.
You’ve got to consciously make an effort to focus on all the good things that are happening in your life. Before we got on the air, Jocelyn and I were talking about all the good things that happened in 2017. We wrote down our biggest wins from last year.
Jocelyn: My biggest win in 2017 is probably the sale of one of our websites, Elementary Librarian. It was kind of a hard thing for me to do, it was a very difficult decision because it was a fantastic business. But I really needed the mental space to be able to work on other things. I felt like as long as we had that business, I was never giving 100% of myself to this business.
Shane: Flipped Lifestyle is what you’re talking about, like in other things.
Jocelyn: Yes, and it’s something that’s really important to me. We want to help other people to be able to live the life that we do. As long as I had the other site, I was never fully immersed in this business. That’s something that was a big win for me. It was also a financial win of course. It was a fantastic site. We had a really good sale price for it.
It allowed us to do a lot of other things in our life, we were able to work on our house some. A lot of you all knew that we moved last year, so we were able to finish up our house decorating. We built a deck and a dock outside of our house.
Shane: Put in a new balcony up top.
Jocelyn: We did some traveling and we did a lot of investment into our business. That was definitely the highlight of 2017 business-wise for me.
Shane: I think the highlight for me last year was just all of the travel that we got to do. When Jocelyn and I were school teachers a few years ago, we didn’t really get to take many trips. If it was more than a couple-hour day trips, we really couldn’t afford to go anywhere. And we were looking back at the amazing amount of travel that we did in the last 12 months and our minds were just blown at all the cool places we got to go, all the things we got to see, and all the experiences that we got to have with each other, with our friends and with our children.
We got to go to Disney multiple times, we got to go to multiple Disney parks, we took a Disney cruise, we took the kids out of the country for the first time. They got to go to the Bahamas. Isaac was dying to go to the Bahamas for the last couple of years because he saw YouTubers going to the Bahamas, so we gotta take them to the Bahamas. I got to go to Wrestlemania again with one of my friends. I’ve done that a couple of years in a row now.
Jocelyn and I went to trips to new cities, we went to Dallas, TX for a conference, we went to Boise, ID so we could go up to a conference up there, and we just got back from Mexico. We’ve really traveled a lot this year, and we got to have a lot of cool experiences. We got to see the pyramids that the Mayans built and all this crazy stuff that I never would have even imagined that we could have done. I think we traveled more last year that any other year in our marriage, didn’t we, Jocelyn? Pretty much?
Jocelyn: Yeah, probably so. It was a very busy travel year. We also did some local travel. Our daughter, Anna, she is part of a cheerleading team. We travel with her on the weekends to places that are pretty nearby, like a couple three hours away. But yeah, we’ve done a lot of going.
Shane: I think, professionally, the big win for us is that we just helped hundreds and hundreds of people in our Flip Your Life community. It’s just been amazing, especially in the last six to seven months, watching the Flip Your Life community grow, to see this community of hundreds of entrepreneurs, working parents who are out there building their online business, flipping their life, and just watching dozens of people start their online business, quit their job, take total financial control of their life, has been so rewarding and so fulfilling and just that validation that we needed after selling Elementary Librarian. That was good to get that money, but the goal was really to free up time so we could focus on helping other people.
But just watching so many more people coming into the community, watching other people helping each other, and just learning more how to serve that community has been the most rewarding thing, probably for me, this year.
Jocelyn: I think another cool thing that we’ve done this year is we’ve been able to meet a lot of people in our community. Some of the people we’ve met before and we’re like meeting with them again. I got to spend time with Jeannette Stein this year. We also went to lunch with Rebecca and Dan Decker. We saw Chris Greenwood, who is one of our members, Lea Saccoman, yes, she’s one of our members, and we were also able to meet with Dan Engler and his family during a trip.
Shane: Just so many people we’ve been able to connect with at conferences. We talked to Brian Stevens at a conference in February. It’s crazy when we go travel now, and people come up to us, and are, like, “Hey, I’m in the Flip Your Life community.” When we go somewhere, we always go into Infusionsoft, our customer service thing when we’re going to a city, and we’re like, “Okay, let’s see how many members we have in this city.” We’ll pull it up and just send an e-mail out and see if anybody wants to meet for dinner or lunch or something like that.
Jocelyn: And there is probably somebody we left out and if I did, I’m so sorry. It was unintentional, but there are several people that we were able to meet this year.
Shane: And make deep connections with, not like just take a picture with. It’s like, have a meal, break bread, be able to talk about business and actually get into each other’s lives a little bit. Reflecting on that win is awesome because looking forward, that’s going to be a huge part of next year is us connecting with our community.
Jocelyn: I also met a lot of ladies. I went to an event in October, the BizChix live conference. I met a lot of ladies there who listen to our podcast, and I was so appreciative of them coming up to me. A lot of them say they were fangirling me, which was so funny to me, still. They were so sweet and so complimentary of our podcast. If you are one of the many people that I met at BizChix Live who was so complimentary of our podcast and what we do, thank you so much, it meant a whole lot to me.
Shane: Celebrating these wins in this first step, it makes us feel good. I mean, we’re both sitting here grinning and smiling as we tell these stories and talk about them. But it reinforces that all of the actions that we took to make those wins possible were worth it. We just had a discussion on a member call yesterday, too, where one of our members as really discouraged. She asked, “How do you overcome discouragement?”
You do that by focusing on the positive, focusing on the wins, focusing on other people’s successes and being happy for them, because when you’re not experiencing some of those successes, if you’re not having some of those wins, focus on your friends’ wins. Focus on your colleagues’ wins. Be happy and grateful for other people, and say, “Hey, if they can do that, I can do it, too. It is worth it, all these actions, all this work, everything I’m doing is going to pay off. It did for them, it did for me in this instance and in this instance. I had this small win.” That’s going to lead to a bigger win later, and once you put those wins on paper, and once you get that grin ear to ear, and you realize, “Hey, this stuff does work. It is working!” You can move forward into the next part of the process, and really take the actions necessary to get to the next level.
Alright, so we’ve celebrated wins from last year, and that’s what you should do as you’re thinking about 2018, you’re thinking about going forward, you should be celebrating anything, no matter how small that went great for you in the last year, and just forget all the bad stuff. You know, if the bad stuff is clouding your mind, then scribble it all on a piece of paper, and go throw the paper away and set it on fire, and then it’s gone. And then just focus on the wins, focus on good things.
Now, you might be thinking, “Okay, this is where Shane and Jocelyn are going to set their goals for next year.” But we are actually not going to set hard specific goals during this podcast because like we said earlier, that doesn’t really work. We actually got four other areas we’re going to focus on so that we can do what it takes and be in the right mindset to make our goals and our dreams come to pass.
Jocelyn: Alright, instead, the next thing that we’re going to do is talk about what types of experiences we want to have in the upcoming year.
Shane: When Jocelyn and I were looking back at last year, when we were sitting here, “What were our goals? What did we even write down last year?” And we started thinking about that, we couldn’t remember the goals. But when we started writing down our wins, almost every single win was an experience. That’s what your life is built out of, it’s just a chain of experiences that you go out and you make happen in your life.
Jocelyn and I this morning, we took the kids to the babysitter, we came back so we can record these podcasts, and we were talking about the experiences that we want to have next year. What do we want our life to feel like, to be like in 2018?
Jocelyn: Alright, for me for the upcoming year, one thing that I really want to experience is more calm in my life. The way that I personally get calm in my life is to have more structure and fewer surprises. I’m a person who likes to have everything planned out. I’m all for having free time as long as it is scheduled in the calendar as free time. You know, that’s fine with me.
Shane: You know how to party, baby. You know how to party.
Jocelyn: If it were up to me, I mean really, every minute of my life would be scheduled and I would be totally okay with that. That’s what makes me feel in control. I also like to be in control about this. That’s what makes me feel very in control, it makes me feel happy. A lot of people aren’t like that. The person sitting beside me– not like that.
But one thing that we’re planning to do, a lot of you may know– I think we even talked about it on the podcast before– is that we actually purchased a house to serve as an office location. We had sort of been against that for a long time before now, but we’ve gotten to a point where we have a lot of people coming in and out of our house every day.
Shane: And our kids are getting older. Our kids are just getting older. When you’re parenting, and you’re raising your kids, sometimes you get lulled into a sense of security. You’re like, “Okay, I’ve got this stage figured out. I’ve got the potty-training figured out, I’ve got the bedtime routine figured out.” And all of a sudden your kids, get a year older, all of their interests change, their personalities change. They’re experiencing different things in their bodies, their teeth are falling out, whatever.
You’ve got all these different things going on, and it can kind of sneak up on you. It throws this structure or this illusion of control out of whack. I think we experienced that this year, Jocelyn, don’t you think? The kids, they just changed a lot after they got out of second grade and kindergarten. All of their activities really ramped up. The things they were doing for fun changed. It kind of threw us for a loop a little bit.
Jocelyn: 2017 has been a hard year for me in a lot of ways, and I’ve talked about this a little bit on some member calls that we’ve done. Basically, in the last 365 days, we’ve moved into a new house, we have remodeled that house, we have redecorated that house.
Shane: We traveled almost every month.
Jocelyn: We’ve traveled a lot. We had someone who was working in our house, and that didn’t work out. We had to let them go, there were three months out of the year where I had to go back to doing mom stuff: laundry and dishes and all those types of things that people have to do.
Shane: While trying to run a seven-figure business.
Jocelyn: And trying to get our kids from activity to activity. The mental stress of that for me was really intense. We were also building a deck, we were remodeling a balcony outside. We had just gotten dogs. Getting our dogs was something that happened in the end of 2016.
Shane: And neither one of us has raised a puppy before or potty-trained a puppy which was hard, very hard.
Jocelyn: We started a new all-star team, which has been really fun, and I’m glad that we did it. It’s a little bit further away from our house.
Shane: We started a real estate company, and started having rental properties.
Jocelyn: We’ve done all this in the last 365 days pretty much. It has been really, really hard on me mentally. I have had to just sort of pull back a little bit and really think about things. For the upcoming year, I just want to slow down a little bit and take our foot off the gas a little bit and just take a little break.
Shane: Focus on one thing at a time instead of 10 things at a time, basically. Instead of setting goals, what do you want to experience? What do you want your day-to-day, month-to-month experience to be? It makes things so much clearer than a goal.
You could set your goal to be, “I want to work 45 hours a week, and I want to make X dollars.” You can set that, but then all of a sudden you’ve put all these expectations on yourself, and you’ve got all the stress about figuring out how to make that exact thing happen, and if you don’t get there, you fail.
But if you focus on the experience and the feeling of calmness like Jocelyn just said, maybe your focus is going to be like, “Man, I want to travel more.” Maybe your last year was, you felt isolated, you were maybe at home some, or maybe you were calm, and you had that nice, easy year and you’re ready to ramp up the travel. If that’s what you want to experience, that’s awesome.
Whatever you want your experience to be is what you’ve got to strive for in the next year if you’re going to achieve happiness in your life.
One thing that I want to experience along the same lines with Jocelyn here is, I want to experience great health. Jocelyn and I are healthy people. We exercise pretty regularly.
Jocelyn: We exercise sometimes.
Shane: Sometimes, like two to three days a week. We don’t go hardcore like we used to be. But we don’t get sick very much, we don’t have any kind of health problems or anything like that. I’ve noticed in the last year as we’ve sold businesses, moved, started businesses, that health and that focus on feeling good has really went into the background. That’s what I want to experience this year, I want to experience great health.
That’s physical fitness, getting the right sleep, eating the right things, not being so obsessed with growing our business, and so obsessed with 10x-ing and all that stuff, that I can focus on my health and I can be healthy, and I can feel rested, I can feel like I’m eating the right things, and my body’s not sluggish, and getting in shape. I’m going to be 40 next year.
Jocelyn: Ha ha! I’m going to be 38.
Shane: She’s got a couple more years in her 30’s.
Jocelyn: I’m a youthful 37 right now.
Shane: She’s a youthful 37. I like my younger women, I guess. I’m going to be 40 years old in March.
Jocelyn: Yeah, you better leave me out of this, buddy.
Shane: Yeah, I better leave you out of this conversation. But I’ve just kind of made a re-commitment to myself. One, I’m never going to be as healthy as I was in my 20’s. Come on, now, y’all, that’s just unrealistic. But I want to be really, really healthy. I want to set a good example for my kids and I want to wake up every day and just experience great health.
I want to make sure that when I look at my priority list, I’m not putting business above my health anymore, because I think I did that in the last year or two. Sometimes you have to get unbalanced to make things happen, but now I want to kind of shift my focus back to that.
Jocelyn: I was thinking about this yesterday, when we were talking about this and everything in your life fits into a pie chart. People always talk about balance. Well, there’s no such thing as balance. But basically, we all have a pie, like a round circle and if you spend more time on one thing in the pie, then something else in the pie is going to get less time.
That’s hard. I think it’s hard for everyone, I think it’s extremely hard for high achieving people. And we are very high achieving people. Excellence is very important to us in all areas of our life, and I think that’s what really got to me this year, is that I want to be excellent in all areas of my life and I was falling well short of that in most areas.
That’s something that’s really hard for someone like me. I told Shane earlier this year, I’m being crushed under the weight of my own expectations. That’s something that I’m working on. I’m definitely doing better now. A lot of people have been really concerned, and they’ve sent me messages and stuff, and I appreciate you guys for being concerned.
I am doing a lot better, so that is good. I want to be more mentally healthy. I also want to be physically healthy, but mental health is something that’s going to be really important for me in the upcoming year.
Shane: I think that’s why you’re focusing on structure, because that helps you with your mental health. We’ve realized that we all have 12, 15 things on our pie chart. We’re parents. We’ve got our jobs, we’ve got our side hustle, we’ve got our kids, we’ve got our relationship with friends, our relationships with our parents, with God, our relationships with our siblings.
We’ve got all these things in our pie chart, and what we’ve realized is you can only focus on three of those. The majority of your time is going to go to only three of those things at any one time which is automatically going to make the other slices of the pie smaller.
What you’ve got to really do is just be really aware of where you’re at, how you want to experience the world, and focus on the three things that need fixed at the time. That’s what we’re going to do is just focus on being healthier, focus on having a healthier experience every day and that’s what we want.
You need to do the exact same thing in your life. What do you want to experience next year? How do you want your life experience to feel every day? Write those things down, put those down in front of you. That’s what you need to work toward achieving. Not some arbitrary goal of, “I want to make $100,000.” That’s just a part of the bigger puzzle. We’re going to start focusing on experiences instead of hard goals.
Alright, so the first thing we have to do is focus on, and celebrate our wins from last year so that we can start off 2018 in a positive mindset. The second thing is experiences. We focus on what do we want to experience next year, whether it’s a trip or a feeling or health or structure, whatever that is for you, what do you want to experience next year?
Now the third thing that we have to focus on when we’re getting prepared for the next year is growth. How are we going to grow next year? What do we need to learn to make those experiences that we want to happen possible? You’ve got to figure out how you want to grow next year, what are the things you need to learn, how do you want to grow as a person, and if you could figure that out, that will make those all those experiences that you want to achieve possible.
Jocelyn: Alright, so I talked before about how I really want to improve my mental health, and one of the ways that I want to do that is by improving the way that I prioritize things. Right now, I am a big peoplepleaser. If someone asked me to do something or they need my help with something, then I want to automatically say yes, because I don’t want to be the person who says no. I don’t want to be that girl.
Well, here’s the thing: sometimes you have to be. There is only so many things you can do in a day, and I’m learning that the hard way. There had been a lot of times in this year where maybe the kids’ school asked me to do something and I know that they need help. They don’t have enough help. It makes me feel guilty because I work from home and I should be there helping my kids. I want to do that, but I can’t say yes every single time they ask me, because it doesn’t make sense with other things that I’m trying to do in my life.
One way that I want to grow in the upcoming year is to work on ways of saying no without making the other person upset with me, and also without making myself feel bad.
Shane: And you can see now how this process is starting to tie things together because Jocelyn wants to experience more calm, more structure, and she wants to minimize surprises in her life. Now, by focusing on what she needs to do to grow into that, and what she needs to learn about, she can learn to say no, which is going to take things off her plate, which is going to give her more control over her time. She is actually going to achieve the life that she wants, not some arbitrary goal.
For me, one of the things that I definitely want to grow, one area that I need to grow in, is focus. I’ve gotten a lot better at this since we’ve been business owners. But I suffer from shiny objects syndrome, I’m terrible. I’m always looking for the next thing. Jocelyn is laughing at me right now.
Jocelyn: In case you didn’t know this already.
Shane: In case you didn’t know already.
Jocelyn: Exactly how many podcasts did you start this year?
Shane: Let’s not talk about that. I’m just not going to get into that how many podcasts I’ve tried to start this year. But I suffer from, I guess, opportunity envy. I see all these people doing these cool things or achieving these amazing things, and I see someone over here creating a software as a service product, and I’m like, “Oh, I want to do that.”
Jocelyn: Or an app.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I see someone else wanting to start an app, and I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got an idea for like five apps, or another app,” and then I don’t do anything with these things that we create. One of the worse ones since we started buying real estate this year, I’m just constantly looking for another house, and Jocelyn has actually banned me from buying any more houses this year.
I’m just constantly looking for the next opportunity. Sometimes, that just takes me away from the focus of the best opportunity. I really want to grow in that, I want to study ways to focus. One of the books that I’m going to re-read at the beginning of the year is, “The One Thing” so that I can just really get zeroed in and focused on what we’re doing that actually has the biggest impact on our goals, on our experiences, and on our life. I want to focus on being focused.
One of our big points of emphasis from a business standpoint on Flipped Lifestyle is we really want to focus on monthly members. We want to get as many people as possible to understand that online business training is affordable. They can do our monthly plan and they don’t have to spend $10,000 on some guru’s magic sauce or whatever to be able to go out and make their thing happen, and we want to focus on that monthly program in our branding, in our advertising, in our marketing.
Even when you’re selling your product, you can confuse people by saying, “Well, there’s a monthly plan, and an annual plan and a six-month plan and a quarterly plan.” We want to refocus that and focus on that one offer at that one price, and get it in front of as many people as possible. But if I’m constantly trying new things and trying new products, and trying to create new stuff and go make new podcasts, and buy new houses, and constantly doing all these other things, I can’t focus on the one thing that not only grows our business the best, but helps as many people as possible to afford the training they need to take their business to the next level.
That’s my area of growth that I really want to put an emphasis on this year, is improving my ability to focus and to really prioritize down to the one or two things that matter most.
Jocelyn: If you can do that one thing, that would make me so happy.
Shane: Maybe that piece would be on your experience pie. Like, “I want to experience Shane being focused and not suffering from Shiny Object syndrome.”
Jocelyn: Yes, this is like the story of my life. You guys know this.
Shane: Imagine how much better our business would be and everything else if I can stay focused, and you can say no to more things, ah, we will experience the good life. It’d be good, it’d be good.
Jocelyn: Alright, the next area we are going to dive into would be actions.
Shane: We’ve celebrated our wins, we’ve written down the experiences that we want to have next year, and we’ve identified areas of weakness or strength where we need to grow, we need to improve in to make all these things happen so that we can achieve the things that we want to achieve. But what really makes it all happen, what really ties it all together are the actions you take, the consistent actions you take on a daily basis that move you forward, that help you make progress, that put one foot in front of the other and keep marching along until you achieve your goals, your dreams and all of the things that you want out of life.
When I was a football coach, every team that I had joined as a football coach, we would always ask the players, like, “Hey, what do you want? What do you want to happen?” And it never failed that most of the kids would come up to us, or most of the parents would come up to us and say, “We want to win, coach! Oh, we want to be undefeated! We want to be 10-0. We want to win some playoff games. We want to win a state championship!”
It was all these goals, all these things that they wanted to do, but they never knew how to make it happen. It never happened for them in the past and it was because they were not taking the consistent daily actions that they had to put in place to make it happen.
You want to win? Well, you’ve got to be able to block and tackle. How do you do that? Well, you go out four days a week, 50 weeks a year and you practice blocking and tackling drills. You have to be stronger. How do you do that? You’ve got to take action. You’ve got to be in the gym four times a week, lifting the weights to make it happen.
After you’ve celebrated your wins, after you’ve identified the experiences that you want to be in your life, after you’ve figured out how you need to grow to make those experiences happen, you have to write down concrete actions that you are going to take on a consistent basis to make those things come to pass.
This is so much more powerful than writing a goal down. If you will just write down these things and commit to doing them consistently, you can’t help but succeed. All the things are going to happen. You’re going to win games if you do what it takes to get better. If you go to practice, you’re going to get better every Friday night and it’s the same thing with your business, it’s the same thing with your life. That’s how you’re really going to take next year to the next level is to commit to taking actions and don’t just write down arbitrary goals or new year’s resolutions.
Alright, so what we did before we got onto the podcast mic here is Jocelyn and I identified three things that we could do, three actions that we could take on a consistent basis that would help us to grow as people, that would help us to make those experiences a part of our life, and help us have even more wins next year to celebrate than we did this year.
Jocelyn: My first action that I’m going to work on for the upcoming year is uninterrupted blocks of work. That’s something that’s been really difficult for me in this calendar year because we’ve had a lot of people here for various reasons. We’ve have an assistant who works in our house, who takes care of household chores for us. We have someone who comes in and does cleaning for our house. We’ve had a lot of people here with the remodel, painting, building decks.
Shane: We’re going to have somebody come in that’s going to start cooking like meal prepping for us a couple days a week.
Jocelyn: That’s a lot of stuff to go on in your house, and no matter how disciplined or how serious you are about your work, it’s really, really hard to get stuff done when people are here–
Shane: And the kids are here, one of the dangers about working for yourself and being self-employed working at home, is anytime the kids miss school for a holiday, for a sickness, for anything, they’re right there with you. And it is impossible to get work done in the house. Task switching has been really deadly to our productivity this year.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I went to that event in October, the BizChix live event, and one of the speaker said that every time you get distracted from what you’re doing, it takes 20 minutes for your brain to be able to come back to whatever it was doing before. That has been a big issue for this year. Because there’s been so many things going on. My mental space is all over the place, and it’s been hard for me just to consistently work on things that need to be done.
One of the benefits of having the new office is that we’re going to be able to go over there, shut everything down, no one is going to be there to talk to us, and we’re going to be able to have uninterrupted work time for at least a few hours, and I think that’s going to be huge for us in the upcoming year.
Shane: That’s going to help you experience more of that calmness because you don’t have to feel like everything’s always in chaos trying to get everything done.
Alright, so the first thing that I want to work on is working early at least three days a week. I want to get up before the kids go to school. We usually wake up right now around 6:30. I’d love to back that up to about 5:00 because that’s going to do a lot of things for me and the experiences that I want to have.
I want to experience more health. By having to get up early, I’m going to have to go to bed a little bit earlier to try to get a little bit more sleep. It’s also going to remove a lot of those things from my plate early in the day if I can get 90 minutes of my work stuff done and over with and get the kids up and get them to bed, that’s going to allow me to go work out more consistently.
Right now, I’m going to school, we’re taking the kids to school, and that’s taking us about an hour to get everything done, get back here, and we’re not even really sitting down to get any work done at all until 9:30 or 10:00. All of a sudden, my workout gets skipped.
We keep saying we’re going to work out in the afternoon and the evenings, but we were kind of early work out people. We either do it in the morning, or we don’t do it at all. To be able to have more rest and be able to experience more health and workout more and eat better, I’m going to have to change something in my schedule. I’m going to make a consistent effort to work early at least three days a week, get my day started, get the kids to school, and then use that time that I’ve bought back to make sure that I’m exercising and being healthy and focused at least three days a week so I can get more exercise and be healthier.
Jocelyn: Alright the second action that I am going to take consistently in 2018 is to base more decisions on data. This is something that’s really important to me, and it’s been important to me for a long time, but up until this point, I have not really had the extra mental space personally, or any help to do this.
What we’ve done recently is we’ve actually hired someone to help us compile some data, and actually quite a large amount of data.
Shane: It’s been shocking when you really dig into your data. It’s opened my eyes big time. I work off my gut instincts a lot.
Jocelyn: Sometimes that works out really well–
Shane: But man, I’m telling you, when you start looking at the numbers, decisions become less stressful, they become easier. It’s just a lot easier to do it basically.
Jocelyn: In the past, we’ve done a lot of, “Well, three people told me they like it this way so it’s got to be that way for everybody,” and I’m like, no. We have to actually look at numbers and see what the numbers are telling us. That has been a very, very eye-opening experience and I look forward to continuing this data collection and looking at it every single week to make decisions moving forward in 2018.
Shane: So that action to get more calmness in your life is, we’re going to look at the numbers once a week at least all through 2018. That’s an action we’re going to take. The second action I’m going to take is related to how I want to grow next year. I want to be more focused. Specifically, just like an archer looking down the range and wants to hit the bull’s eye, I want to focus on our audience, on our community more and connect with them.
So, I’m committing to doing at least three live somethings every single week next year. That could be Facebook Lives, that could be YouTube live broadcasts, that could be webinars, whatever it is. I just want to connect with our audience at least three times a week next year. Because I know if I’ll take those actions, if I’ll do that, it doesn’t even matter what I’m doing, it could be a Q&A, it could be a presentation I’ve worked hours on. It could be anything but I know if I do that three times a week consistently over the next year, then our community will grow, our business will grow, and it will help me be more focused on that goal, and making everything bigger and better next year.
That’s the second action step that I’m going to commit to for next year, is doing at least three live somethings every single week for our audience, for our members in the Flip Your Life community, and staying 100% focused on that one task.
Jocelyn: The third action that I plan to take in 2018 is to do some more delegation. I’ve done this a lot lately. It’s been something that’s really been hard for me in the past because I’m a very controlling person, I like things to be done my way. But if I’m going to be the best me that I can be for this business, I have to let go of somethings and allow other people to work on them.
So, something that I’m going to do is work on trying to delegate at least one thing that I need to do every single week. One way that we’re going to do this, Shane had mentioned it earlier, I’m going to bring somebody in to do some cooking a couple times a week. We found it really hard without schedule and our kids’ schedule to do cooking and food prep, and try to eat healthy things while running the business and while running the kids here and there a million times a week.
Because that is something that is really difficult for us and we’re also spending a lot of money going to out to eat, we are making unhealthy decisions because of that, and we’re going to try to fix a lot of things with just that one person coming in a couple days a week to help us out with that.
Shane: Basically, you’re going to say no to at least one thing a week. That’s going to magnify your growth goal as well as you’re saying no to delegating these things.
Jocelyn: Exactly.
Shane: Alright, and the third and final action that I’m going to commit to taking next year on a consistent basis is to use more of the tools that we have available. Jocelyn and I have so many tools that are disposable, and sometimes we don’t maximize those tools.
Most of you may not know this, but we have a Flipped Lifestyle app. We’re going to start promoting that more in January. That’s actually been out for a couple months now. I don’t think we even mentioned it more than once on the podcast.
Jocelyn: Probably not.
Shane: Probably not.
Jocelyn: That was one of your shiny objects in 2017.
Shane: It actually came out really well. We’re going to start using that more next year. But we also have all of these tools that we don’t even look at like data in Infusionsoft, and we use all these different tools like Clickfunnels and Leadpages and they have all these analytics and data, but also just ways that you can contact people more. Sometimes, I feel like we don’t maximize the tools that we already have available and that leads to more shiny object syndrome and messes up my focus.
I want to commit to taking action and only using the tools we have available. Maximizing the tools that we already have at our disposal instead of constantly looking for something new, or some bell and whistle that we don’t have that someone else is using. I want to maximize the tools that we already have in our arsenal.
Jocelyn: Alright, the fifth and final step in achieving what you would like to achieve for the upcoming year is a focus on others, paying it forward and giving back.
Shane: You know, when we were making business decisions earlier this year, if we were going to sell one of our education businesses, if we were going to close down other things or sell them, and really only focus on Flipped Lifestyle, we started looking beyond contentment, beyond happiness because if you’re only focused on monetary goals, and you’re only focused on making everything bigger and scaling and 10x-ing and all that stuff, you might find some happiness, you might find some good times in that, but you really don’t experience true fulfillment.
As we were talking to each other and we said, what do we want our life to look like, what do we want our business to look like? Helping others, paying it forward, was what gave us the most fulfillment. It really needed to be the exclamation point on the end of any goal-setting or dream-making that we had is, “how are we going to help others? How are we going to pay it forward? How are we going to give back? What are specific things that we can do to make sure other people are moving forward in their life, and that we had a part in that?”
We each came up with one big major thing that we wanted to focus on next year that would have the most impact on other people’s lives, that would help as many people as possible.
Jocelyn: What I have been working on, and will continue to work on in 2018 is a Flip Your Life live event.
Shane: Now this is not a small event that Jocelyn is working on. This is something that’s going to happen next September, is that right? This is going to be a huge undertaking. This is a massive conference-style live event. It’s not one of our ten-to-twenty person masterminds. Jocelyn has this crazy, huge idea that she’s put together. I’m not going to lie; this one even scares me a little bit.
Jocelyn: Yeah, it is very scary. When I went out to California in October for the BizChix live event, I knew that it’s something that I wanted to do for our community. I love the amount of connection that I had with the other attendees there. We were able to eat together, we were able to sit together, we were able to work together, and I just love that community feel that Natalie Eckdahl, she’s the person who is the BizChix live podcast leader. It was her event, and she did a great job of putting all that together.
When I was there, I was like, “We have to do this for our people. We need to bring our people together.” Let me tell you something, this is not easy. It’s not a small undertaking. It is huge. It is something that we have never done before. It is a little bit scary as far as financially. We are not going to make any money at all off this. It is break even at best, and probably we won’t.
Shane: But it totally fits into this slot of helping others paying it forward and giving back because live events really are probably the biggest catalyst that changed our life. We were doing okay online then we would go to a live event and we would 5x our life or we would 10x our life. Something crazy always happens every time we go somewhere live.
We knew that we could provide the experience that we always wanted to have at a live event. We would still come away from a live event going, “Oh, I wish this one more thing, I wish this one more thing.” And when we started talking about doing this, it was like, this is the best way we can get 100 people in a room. It will change their life, they will come out of this, they’ll do more than they could ever have imagined before. It’s probably, I would say, the biggest way you can influence as many people in one or two days as possible.
Jocelyn: Live events have been so critical to our success. That’s why we feel so strongly about having an event to bring our people together.
If you are interested in our event just because we are talking about it right this second, you can head over the flippedlifestyle.com/live, get on the waiting list because this is going to be a very limited event.
Shane: And it will sell out because we’re going to open this up to our community, to the audience of the podcast, and anybody that comes to our website.
Jocelyn: We don’t want you to miss out. If you’re interested, get on that list. But that is what I’m planning to do to give back. It’s going to be a lot of work on my part. It’s going to be a lot of work for basically not a lot of money because we’re not making anything off this event. If you’re interested, be sure to get on that wait list. It’s going to be an awesome event; we’re really looking forward to it.
Shane: My focus for helping others, for paying it forward and giving back in the new year is going to be creating content. Jocelyn and I have consistently now, for almost four years, had a podcast every single week, Flipped Lifestyle podcast rolling out, delivering what we think is some of the best make-money-online online business content. You guys know our commitment to not having gurus and experts onto the program pitching products. You know our commitment to bringing on real people and helping them in real-time take their business to the next level, and our commitment to being open and transparent and letting everybody listen in so that they can take their business to the next level, too.
We’ve realized how much of a difference this content is making in people’s lives. Not only from the Flip Your Life blueprint and all the courses that we have in our community. But just every single week, someone writes in and is like, “Oh, this little nugget, this piece of content. That was the missing piece of the puzzle that I needed to take my business to the next level, or the inspiration that I needed to take action and make things happen and stop making excuses.”
I really want to be more committed to getting as much content out as possible. To go back to my growth goal of being more focused, Jocelyn and I have really been delegating and figuring out in our business what makes the biggest difference. What can we do everyday that makes the biggest difference in the bottom line and helping as many people as possible. Basically, I’m just taking over content creation. Those Facebook lives that I talked about earlier, those Q&As, to answer as many questions as possible. Also to get more of our courses and trainings out to as many people as possible.
My big thing that I want to do is just to create as much content. I want to triple my content output next year so as many people as possible can get their question answered and that they can take their online business, their life, their marriage, their kids’ lives, everything to the next level, and I think by giving out more content, by creating more content, it’s going to allow that to happen at a faster pace for people.
Alright guys, so let’s do a quick recap of how you can avoid goal setting, how you can avoid setting New Year’s resolutions that you know you’re not going to keep, and how you can actually achieve the things that you want to achieve next year.
The first thing you need to do is celebrate the wins from the prior year before. The second thing you need to do is to write down the experiences that you want to have next year. That might be a trip, that might be a relationship, that might just be the way you feel every single day. But write down those experiences. How do you want to experience life in the New Year?
The third thing is how you want to grow. What are the things that you want to learn in the next year and what are the things you need to learn to make those experiences come to pass? The fourth thing is committing to specific action steps that you can do on a consistent basis. Don’t do something crazy like I’m going to do this every single day next year.
Something that you can do two to three times a week that are going to make things move forward in your life, and finally the fifth step is how can you give back, pay it forward and impact other people’s lives.
If you can take those five steps, we know that next year’s going to be better than any year before. We know that you can do that things that you have to do to take your life to the next level. All you have to do is focus and commit to win.
To help you guys out, we’ve actually created a little guide that you can print out totally for free. This is not something we’re charging for. We’re not going to upsell you anything afterwards. We just wanted to give you a great tool to be able to succeed in 2018.
Head over to flippedlifestyle.com/newyear, all one word.
That’s flippedlifestyle.com/newyear and you can download this free guide so that you can get off to a great start in 2018.
Jocelyn: Alright guys, that’s all the time that we have for today. Thanks for joining us today and be sure to join us next week. We have a great show coming your way for the first week of the New Year. Until next time, get out there, take action and do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life.
Shane: Bye!
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