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In today’s podcast, we are going to help you set big goals and dream bold dreams for next year!
We are also going to let you in on a few of our dreams for next year!
We have set some HUGE goals and can’t wait to share them with you in today’s podcast!
You will also learn:
- Why you should be dreaming big and aligning those dreams with your partner
- How often you should be goal setting
- The goal setting exercise we do to reach our goals every time
- Why setting an actual measurable goal made all the difference in our business this year
- The importance of acknowledging your obstacles and how to overcome them
- How to figure out exactly what to do to accomplish your goals
- How to find a mastermind group and accountability to see your dreams come to pass
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle:
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- The Flip Your Life Community
- Elementary Librarian
- Amazon.com
- BONUS: Get our FREE couples Goal Setting Guide
Can’t Miss Moments:
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
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’re going to talk about how to set and achieve goals for your life in online business.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on guys? It’s great to be back with you again this week. Hope everyone out there had a fantastic Christmas and I hope you are getting ready to have an awesome New Year because it’s just a couple of days away. Since New Year is only a couple days’ away, we thought this would be a great opportunity for us to share with you guys our dreams and goals for next year. Every six months or so, Jocelyn and I, we really sit down and write down on paper our big dreams and our goals for the future. We want to make sure that we’re aligned together, that we’re moving in the same direction but also that we’re reaching for things that are really worthwhile and are really, really big goals that we want to go after so that as we’re working toward things in the future, we’re always kind of moving toward that objective.
You may hear a little background noise today. We’re actually recording in our daughter’s bedroom. We’ve set up a makeshift studio and she has a window unit air conditioner and it’s on like literally five feet behind me but the painters that we have hired to come in and paint our house are actually painting our home office today. So we got ran out of that room. We had to make do. We have to get something done and that’s kind of how online business works. You just kind of wing it, you’ve got to fly by the seat of your pants sometimes, and you just got to get the job done one way or another.
Before we start talking about our goals and dreams and we guide you through the process, we’re going to show you exactly how we do this every six months to a year how we sit down, how we get on the same page, and how we set our goals, what’s the process that we do for that. We’re going to kind of let you guys peak into that in our show today. Before we do that, Jocelyn is going to read some comments from Twitter.
JOCELYN: Our first tweet today comes from Gina and she is @starlightlife and it says, “Very happy to follow such an awesome couple. Aloha.”
SHANE: I wish we were in Hawaii and we could say “Aloha.” We’re going to say aloha now for a couple of times today. I’m going to say aloha when we close the show.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to work for us.
SHANE: Probably not because we’re in Kentucky and it’s freaking cold but whatever. All right, go ahead.
JOCELYN: All right, the next is from Matt Greenburg @Greenburg77 and Matt says, “Shane and Jocelyn, heard you on SPI. You guys are my new heroes.”
SHANE: That’s Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn.
JOCELYN: Wow, thanks, Matt. That’s pretty kind and we’ve got a reply actually from a guy you may have heard of named Pat Flynn. It says, “Aren’t they awesome?”
SHANE: So thanks, Pat.
JOCELYN: Thank you, Pat. If you would like to leave us a message on Twitter, you can tweet us @FlippedLS and we might read it on the air.
SHANE: All right, let’s jump right into our topic today. We are going to talk about how we set our goals and dreams, and we are actually got to let you in on a couple of our goals for next year so you kind of see how this process works. Jocelyn and I have procedures set up where we work together to align our dreams. In this online business thing especially when you’re working with your wife or your husband, you’ve got to be on the same page. You can’t both be chasing different objectives. Everyone has got to be moving in the same direction. Jocelyn and I often disagree on how we’re going to get to a certain point.
JOCELYN: You don’t say.
SHANE: Yeah, all the time. It’s a daily disagreement probably happen in our household.
JOCELYN: And just the way that we are, just our personalities, we have a lot of different dreams and sometimes, it is hard to get on the same page.
SHANE: What we usually do is we sit down every six months and we make sure that 1) our dreams are aligned. We have to be moving to the same place and then we kind of work out the actual procedures for how we’re going to get there. That’s where a lot of the conflict lies but what we found is if you have a process if you have a procedure that you can follow, kind of rules or guidelines, it makes the process of getting on the same page much smoother. We’ve actually created a guide for dreaming big dreams and setting goals that we give to couples for free, and it’s the exact process that we use when we’re setting our goals and making our plans for the future.
If you want to get a copy of that, you can go to FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast24 and we will have a copy of that in today’s show notes. That is actually what we’re going to go over today. We’re going to actually start at the beginning, walk you through that guide, and show you how we use it and kind of how you can use that process yourself to make sure that you and your spouse are on the same page for next year, or you could even use it by yourself if you wanted to, to kind of set yourself up for success in the future.
JOCELYN: This kind of exercise is really important. A lot of people don’t really like to do this because it is sort of a lot of work and it may seem unnecessary if you’re the kind of person who just floats around in the wind, like some people I know.
SHANE: I’m a leaf in the wind just floating around.
JOCELYN: Yeah so it’s really helpful just to do this and to literally get on the same page, to write it down on a piece of a paper. This is something that is right up my alley. I like to have things written down. I like to go step by step in a procedural way and that’s just the way that my mind operates. For Shane, he has lots of dreams but…
SHANE: I’ve got the big dreams but Jocelyn wants in on paper with a roadmap to get there basically. I’d say a lot of couples are like that so this exercise lets me be a big dreamer and it lets Jocelyn step by step put the procedures in play. We actually did this when we first started our online business.
JOCELYN: Yeah and it was really helpful. It’s really what helped us get to the point that we are at today. It’s so important when you are starting out or even if you have started for a while to do this every so many months even. At least once a year at the very least just to get on the same page and make sure everyone is going in the right direction.
SHANE: So we’re going to start with step 1 if you’re following along. If you listen to us, you can go print out the guide and actually walk through the process with us as we talk about it. Step 1 is to dream bold dreams. A little aside here, FlippedLifestyle.com was actually originally going to be BoldDreams.com but the problem was, we couldn’t afford that domain name. We were in negotiation to buy that domain name at one point and we couldn’t get it because we didn’t have enough money at that time. It’s funny that we wrote “bold dreams” here in step 1 because that was almost the name of our website but we went with FlippedLifestyle.com and the rest is history, as they say.
You have to dream really, really bold dreams. When we say that, what we mean is don’t dream small. If we had just said, “We want to make $200 extra a month.” Well, there’s a tendency as a human when you set a goal like that, you’re only going to go to that point and maybe even a little bit before it. A lot of times, your goals might come a little bit short so we always try to set really big dreams. One of the things that we always ask ourselves at the beginning of our goal setting is “what is something that we would attempt if we knew it was impossible to fail” because a lot of times you think to yourself, “If I set this huge goal, I may not be able to attain it and a lot of people say to set realistic goals” but we don’t actually like to do that.
We like to set huge goals. If we had infinite time, infinite effort, and infinite energy, what would we accomplish? Are there going to be limits to that? Well, sure. We don’t have certain components to it right now but that’s not the point at this part of the process. The point is to say, “What is the biggest thing that we could accomplish if we knew that we had no chance of falling on our face?” Kind of a little that we add to this question is, “What would we do if this was the very last chance we had to accomplish something?” It’s kind of like the Tim McGraw song, “Live like you’re dying.”
JOCELYN: Please don’t sing.
SHANE: A country music there for you guys. If you knew you only had one year left and you had to accomplish something, then you would really put all of your effort, energy, and time into doing that because none of us know, we’re not guaranteed tomorrow. You don’t know if you’re going to be here in a year. You don’t know if you’re going to be here in six months. You have to set goals with urgency and have some kind of immediacy to them. In our life, while we may not say, “Oh, I may not be here in our year. I got to put all my energy into it” but if I put it on paper while I’m goal setting, it really lets you think outside the box and kind of expand your horizons a little bit.
JOCELYN: And on the subject of making big goals, I went to an event recently and one of the people there said that your goal should want to make you pee your pants. If they don’t, they are not big enough. It’s kind of funny to say that but I thought about it and it’s really right. The thing about it is usually what happens is we’ll end up somewhere between our realistic goal and our “pee your pants” goal if you set that high goal.
If you only go with that lower goal then chances are, once you get there, you’re going to be happy but our point is, don’t settle. For example, if my goal was maybe to have a $10,000 a month, then I’m not going to set my goal there at $10,000. I maybe going to double that to $20,000 and so hopefully, I will aim for that $20,000 number and hopefully, I’ll get there. But if I don’t, chances are, I’m going to end up somewhere in between that $10,000 and $20,000 number.
SHANE: The big point here is just set huge goals. Even if they seem unattainable, you’re going to chase that number. A lot of people say, “Set realistic goals and be realistic.” That is true. We’re going to talk about that later when we talk about procedures on how to get to those big goals but you’ve got to dream big if you’re going to accomplish anything big in life. Now, in each of these questions that we go on, here’s what we do.
Jocelyn and I each get a turn to talk about our specific dream. When we say, “What would you attempt if it was impossible to fail? What would you do if you knew it was the last chance you only had one year to accomplish something?” We actually have it set up where one person gets to talk. We might flip a coin and say, “Okay, your partner one and I’m partner two.” Partner one gets to lay out their dream first and then partner two gets to lay out their dreams. Jocelyn might say, “This is what I want to accomplish this year” and I have to sit there and listen to that. It’s her turn until she’s finished.
Once she has written down and explained her dream to me, then she has to listen completely to me and my dream and what I want to accomplish that year. Then, we have a discussion to see how we can align those goals. Even if your partner is not in online business, like say your wife or your husband does not want to get involved in this and you’re really fired up about it.
You want to be an entrepreneur but they don’t, that’s okay. You still have to align your dreams. You still have to figure out your direction so that you can figure out how you can work together in your relationship and make those dreams come to pass. Your wife may not want an online business. Her goal may be something else. Your husband’s goal might accomplish something else. It may not have anything to do with business for money.
You have to understand each other’s dreams completely if you’re going to have any chance to actually accomplish them. That’s what step 1 is, to set bold dreams and then get on the same page with them.
JOCELYN: All right. We’ve already done this exercise so what we’re going to do is share our aligned goals with you. For this first one, what we would attempt if we knew it was impossible to fail, what we would like to do in this upcoming year is to help 1,000 families either get started or take their online business to the next level. Maybe if you’ve never started an online business, we want to help you get started or help you create a digital product, whatever the case may be. We want to help you do that or if you already have an online business, we want to help you make it better.
SHANE: We’ve always said that our ultimate goal was to help as many people as possible because when Jocelyn and I were able to quit our jobs and really changed our lives, change our family’s future, change our kids’ lives forever and all the opportunities that we’re now able to provide for them, and then as people around us are starting online businesses are helping us, create digital products and we sold it for them or whatever it was that we were helping people, we saw other lives being changed. The reason we started Flipped Lifestyle in the first place was we wanted to change as many lives as possible by introducing people to this world and what’s possible online.
We thought this year that we needed a concrete number. We needed an actual measurable goal that we wanted to chase this year and try to achieve. We started out kind of looking at it and we were like, do we want to do 30 people a month and get them in our eCourse, the Flip Your Life thing, or do we want to take on more consulting calls? How can we help as many people as possible? We kept coming up with these low numbers. It was always like 20 people a month, 25 people a month. Finally in the car one day, we just said, “You know what, we’re talking about our goals. Let’s just have 1,000 people, 1,000 families that we’re going to help this year.” That’s a huge goal. That’s…
JOCELYN: Math problem.
SHANE: Wait a minute, how many people is that in a month, Jocelyn? I can’t think. 1,000 people a year is how many people a month? Okay, never mind. We’re not going to do the math here. Get your calculators out and figure it out, but that’s a lot of people a month. It’s more than what we thought but we’re settling around 30. We’re probably up around 80 or 90. We’re not going to do the math. You know us and math don’t really get along over here at the Flipped Lifestyle.
Basically, we’re going to try and help 1,000 people this year. It was a big number that we really want to go after and get people online and get them started. That’s our bold dream this year is we want to change 1,000 families’ lives. We want to change the future and the direction of 1,000 families all over the world or more and really get them started online and help them move forward in their journey. That’s our bold dream. That’s not a small goal. It’s not just that we’re changing their future and their family. I mean, you can change a family tree if you get started online. The kids could do something different. You could really impact a generation of people by changing their lives. That’s our bold dream and we want you guys to set bold dreams. When you’re thinking about the next year and you’re thinking about your online business, stop thinking small. Think big.
JOCELYN: Now we’re moving on to step 2 and step 2 is where are we at right now? In order to get to where we’re going, we have to know where we’re at. You have to look at your life or your circumstances and think what is stopping us from making these dreams a reality? What is holding us back and what could we do to overcome the obstacles? For us, the thing that is really holding us back right now is scalability of our course. Our Flip Your Life Course right now, we’re doing a very hands-on approach. We have about 30-35 people in the Facebook group that we’re working with every day. While we love that interaction, it’s getting a little bit…
SHANE: Overwhelming basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s kind of a little overwhelming to try to do that every single day and we know that if we have this big goal of trying to help approximately 100 families per month that we’re going to have to do something different because there’s no way that we can make all this happen with just the two of us in the limited amount of time that we have to do it.
SHANE: So what we did once we pointed out to each other these obstacles that we had in the scalability of our program, we broke it down piece by piece and we said, “All right, what are we doing and how can we fix it where more people can take part of this?” One of the things that we were doing is we were dripping out the content so people would sign up for our 29-day course and maybe every other day, I would release a video and we weren’t really letting people get ahead because we wanted to make sure all the conversation in our Facebook groups, they are totally focused on one topic and really what we found was that really wasn’t what people wanted anyway. Some people wanted to work ahead, some people were a little behind, and it really wasn’t keeping the conversation in place anyway.
What we’ve done is we actually overcame that obstacle. We went in and fixed everything where all the stuff is available. Every module is available where if people wanted to work ahead, they could. If they got a little behind, they could catch up. That took us out of the process of having to drip that content and it really opened the door and made it more accessible for all of our other participants. Another thing that we’re doing to scale is, we realized that maybe about 25-50% of the participants weren’t in the Facebook group all the time. They may jump in for a question here and there but they really weren’t using it every single day. They just wanted to kind of roar through it and only use it when they needed it. When we talked to the people who took our course, those people that weren’t always using the group were telling us, “Hey, I just want the course. I just want to go through it.”
We’ve decided that we’re going to create a self-study option where people can just do everything on their own if they want that and they don’t really need our handholding. Maybe they are more advanced users. They are a little bit farther ahead in the game. They kind of got WordPress completely figured out. They’ve got LeadPages figured out. They’ve got all these tools, and they kind of understand how to do everything, they just need that guidance to get them from step A to step B and they can do that in the modules. So one of the ways that we’re going to overcome our scalability is we’re actually going to have a self-study option that’s cheaper. It’s a lower price that’s going to make it more accessible to people and people can just get in there and do it on their own.
Another problem we had at first is we were moderating everything and that was taking up a lot of time because we were having to answer all of the questions as people went through all the modules. But now that we’ve been through the Flip Your Life, we’ve had a ton of participants move through the course over the last three or four months.
We actually have five or six really, really solid people now that are going to join our new group and they are going to help us administrate. They are kind of our super users. They are the people that really understand the program, they really believe in the program and they are going to partner with us, join with us, and go into these Facebook groups that we set up for our Flip Your Life sessions. They are going to go in and moderate everything and help alleviate some of that off of us because they believe in the program, they’ve seen it flip their own life, and they want to help other families flip their life as well. We’re going to have a lot more help now as we’re administrating all of these groups and be able to scale out. We won’t have to be present at every single thing
The last thing that we’re going to do to make our Flip Your Life course scalable and really be able to attack that goal of reaching 1,000 families is we’re going to hire a project manager. We’re going to get a virtual assistant who is going to come in and really monitor all the systems, make sure all of our videos are working, make sure all of our technical support problems, if someone has a problem logging into the system or something like that, we’re going to make sure that we have someone in charge of all of that so that we don’t have to do it and we can just focus on helping people with their online business because that’s our passion. That’s what we want to do is really help people flip their life and help people change their family’s future. We’re going to try to eliminate ourselves from everything maintenance wise, everything systems wise by the time we launch this thing in January. That way, we can really totally focus all of our energy on getting those 1,000 people to the next level.
JOCELYN: All these may sound a little daunting to you when you start listing all of the obstacles. Sometimes, that fear gets in you and you just think, “There’s no way that I can do this.” We have those thoughts too but this is where you’re really going to spend a lot of time just figuring out how you can solve these problems and really putting them on the calendar, and just making that work. That’s going to be one of the hardest things that you’ll do but if you can get it done and overcome many of these obstacles, it’s going to be totally worth it when you are trying to reach these goals.
SHANE: Usually, what we find is when people get overwhelmed with their online business, it’s because they have not planned and they have not put everything on paper. So when an obstacle shows up, they freak. You freak out and you quit. But that’s why we do this upfront in our goal setting. Identify the problems, solve them on paper, and then when they come up later, you’re not going to have any issue dealing with them. The last thing that we do in step 2 is kind of a fun exercise to remove that fear and apprehension. I actually got this tip of Oprah Winfrey. I know you wouldn’t think that old Shane Sams would be watching Oprah Winfrey out here but this is one of the best tips I’ve ever heard anybody say and I got it from Oprah. I just like to be there, I’m just saying. I’d go to Oprah and I’d hope that I’d win all of those prices that she gives out, right Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: Yes, something like that.
SHANE: So this is from Oprah. I’m going to credit this to Oprah. Oprah says whenever you’re dreaming big dreams, you’ve got to say to yourself, what is the worst possible scenario, the absolute worst thing that could ever happen? I’m talking about like, I’m going to the store. What’s the worst thing that could happen? I go outside and a tornado hits. It picks my car up and it throws me to a billboard. I crash into a water tower. The water tower comes down, floods the whole town. I float into the river, float away, and go off a waterfall. Maybe something crazy like that, just the most awful consequences that you could ever face if you rolled the dice and went for your dreams, something just bizarre like I just said.
For our goal, we might say, “We want to help 1,000 people.” Well, the worst possible thing that could ever happen is we put all this time and energy in and nobody signs up, people start tweeting, “This is the stupidest goal ever.” Everyone unfollows us and our Facebook gets banned because we made a stupid dream.
JOCELYN: Please don’t do that just to prove a point.
SHANE: And our podcast crashes and all of our computers set on fire and we help no one. Our business collapses and we’re broke in the gutter. Besides the tornado going through the billboard, that’s the worst thing that could happen to us when we set this goal that nobody takes part and it’s just embarrassing. But then once you set that goal and you write it down on paper, you know, we get all these things, these fears in our head, but once you put them down and you’re looking at them, you can say, “Seriously, is that actually going to happen?” Of course, it’s not. None of that stuff is actually going to happen. Maybe a part of it happens but you can overcome that.
Once you get those fears on paper and you see how not true they are, how absolutely ridiculous your own fears are. You can push those aside and say, “That’s not going to push me back because those are irrational. That is fear and I’m not going to let fear stop me. I’m going to do what it takes. I’m going to make it happen and I’m going to go forward.” My dreams will become reality because I’m not going to let fear stop me. That’s the last part of step 2 is write down all your fears, make it just ridiculous, what’s the worst thing that could happen, and you’ll see that it’s not going to be true. You can brush it aside and it will help you really be confident as you move forward to tackle these obstacles and achieve your bold dreams.
JOCELYN: In step 1, we talked about dreaming our dreams and in step 2 we talked about where we are right now. Next, we’re going to move into step 3. Step 3 is all about being honest about what we need to do, and this is my favorite part, the actual steps that we need to do to make our dreams a reality. When we first started in online business, we knew that we were going to have to change some things. We had a lot of things in our life that were making our dreams a little bit hard to reach.
SHANE: They were holding us back. Straight up, we had to sacrifice some stuff.
JOCELYN: When we tell people a lot of times that we sold our house and moved into a smaller house, I think that a lot of times, people think that we’re nuts.
SHANE: Crazy, yeah.
JOCELYN: To us, it was a sacrifice and it was a hard sell, but at the same time, we knew what our end result was going to be or what we wanted it to be. We knew that there was no way we were going to get there the way that we were currently living and with the things that we were currently doing. So we had to make a change. We did sell our house. We moved into smaller house. We freed up money to use in our business. We had to give up some fun things. We gave up our cable.
SHANE: Stopped going to the movies at all. We would go check out DVDs from the library instead of going to like Red Box or even renting something on Netflix. We just found other ways to entertain ourselves.
JOCELYN: We really made some sacrifices that a lot of people wouldn’t be willing to do but we knew that if we did that, it would speed up our progress so much that we would be able to achieve our dreams much faster.
SHANE: What we usually do in step 3 is we write down three things we must do. What are three sacrifices that we must make or actions that we must take to make our dreams a reality? These have to be brutal. They have to be honest, and as with everything, Jocelyn will write hers down and I will write mine down, then we’ll align them. That’s going to go ahead and take that pain and put it on paper so that when we do have to make that sacrifice, we’ve already planned ahead to do it and we’re kind of ready for it.
For our current dream of helping 1,000 families next year to get online or take their online business to the next level, we made the decision that we were going to give up all of our vacation time and all of our free time and some things that we had planned last month in December and next month in January so that we could work every day as much as possible, seriously going to overdrive to redo the entire Flip Your Life eCourse, make it better, take it to the next level, and make it what we needed it to be.
It took us a lot of work to get this course to where it is and even more work that’s going to be in the future to really get it to where we want it to be. We were going to take December off. We were like, “We’ve worked hard all year. We’ve made a ton of money. We’ve made a lot of great contacts and we’ve done some good things. Let’s just take December off, have fun. Christmas and New Year, going on a couple of trips with the kids but we kind of looked at that and said, “Once we set that goal that 1,000 family goal for next year, there was no possible way that we were going to be able to achieve that if we took December off. So we scaled back and we said, “We can put all those trips off. We can do that. Helping 1,000 families is more important and that is our goal. That is our dream. If we’re going to make that a reality, it’s going to take a lot of work upfront.”
We have been working pretty much daylight until dark on this eCourse. Anytime we’re not recording podcasts or managing ElementaryLibrarian.com or working on Coach XO, anytime we’re not working on our other projects, we have been working at night, we have been working in the mornings, we have been working in the car while we’re driving around town. We will go to the post office blocks and I’ve got my laptop on my lap working on this project right now. We go forward with that and we do it because we knew that we were going to have to sacrifice a lot of time to get this thing to where it needed to be to make it valuable for families so families could succeed and so families could do what we hope that they do. It’s going to take a lot of effort and sacrifice to make your dreams a reality and in step 3, you’re going to put those sacrifices on paper and prepare yourself mentally for when you get to them so you don’t have to worry about mentally dealing with them when they actually come up.
JOCELYN: The thing about this, don’t make this into a negative thing because yes, it is a lot of hard work, it is a lot of sacrifice but the thing about it is, our lives are so much better because of it. I can’t imagine where we would be right now if we hadn’t made these sacrifices and we didn’t do all of the things that we have done so far. It’s not really like patting ourselves on the back because our goal in the end is to help other people. It just energizes me. I love having this concrete number because it doesn’t really let you sit back and rest a whole lot. We know that we always need to be moving and working toward that goal.
SHANE: Jocelyn always tells people too that if something is important to you, then you’ll make it happen. If it’s not important to you, then you’ll make an excuse. Think of these things as kind of the sacrifices you have to make, like, they are kind of you excuses and you’re kind of punching your excuses in the face. Like, “Oh, I’ve got to give up cable to free up $100 a month. But I won’t be able to watch football on Saturday and I won’t be able to watch basketball games. I won’t be able to see sports.” You know what, that’s an excuse. If those things are more important to you than accomplishing your online dreams and changing your family’s future, then you will prioritize them with the way that you spend your money and time. Put those sacrifices on paper, get those excuses down in front of you and smack them around and get them off your plate, move forward and take your family’s life to the next level.
JOCELYN: Now that we have our big goals in place. So we know where we’re headed, we’ve talked about…
SHANE: The direction where we’re going, kind of deal.
JOCELYN: We talked about the obstacles and how to overcome them, once we’ve done that, we need to start some planning. This is also my forte. I love planning. We need to talk about our long-term plan and a short term plan. For us, we know that we want to help 1,000 families in the next year. What does that look like? Well, we talked about earlier that we sort of broke this down into a monthly goal also. In that, we know that in order to help all of these families, we have some things that we have to do along the way. One of those things is increasing our audience. If we’re going to help 1,000 people then we need to get more people coming onto our website, listening to our podcast, things of that nature.
The ways that we have thought of to do this are by purchasing some ads on Facebook, on Twitter, maybe some other social media platforms, maybe even Google Ads. We haven’t exactly put all the nuts and bolts to that yet but we know that that’s one way that we need to increase our audiences by paying for ads. Another thing that we’re going to do is try to appear on more podcasts as guests and just get in front of people’s audience that way so that they can possible come back and consume some of our content as well.
SHANE: So to achieve the big goal of helping 1,000 families over one year, we’re going to focus on these smaller goals, these chunks, like month by month. and I actually just pulled out the calculator and we got to help 83.3 families a month if we’re going to reach our goal of 1,000 people. We know that mathematically, we’re going to have to go out and spend enough money on ads, do enough leg work, getting our message out in front of other people that we can increase our audience big enough. We’re going to focus on that x number of people we need to come to our website to get 83 people into our programs so that we can help them, we’re going to have to do all of that work, but if we focus on that, it’s a lot easier for us to say, Okay, we only need 83 people this month, 83 people the next month, and 83 people the next month. As long as the end result adds up to our big time goal, it’s a lot of easier to kind of eat the elephant one bite at a time, kind of deal and focus on those small goals each time.
So basically here what you need to do in step 4 and this actually bleeds into our step 5, once you figured out your short term goals, you need to create measurable milestones like that. At the end of January, have we helped at least 83 families? At the end of February, have we helped 200 families, which puts us ahead of pace, whatever? You’ve got to have measurable milestones when you’re setting these short term goals that help you and add up to the big goal, and something that you can watch along the way to make sure you’re on track. If we only helped 70 families in January, then we know somewhere inside of our systems, we’ve got to pick up the pace, we’ve got to work harder, we might have to spend more money to be able to get our audience to grow and get more people in to make up for that in the next one because we want to stay on pace toward our goals.
Along with step 4 when you’re setting you’re setting these short term goals, you’re setting these short term things that add up to your big bold dreams, you need to create measurable milestones that you can confirm you’re on track that you could look at and say, “Hey, I know for sure I’m accomplishing my goals. I’m moving forward” or “Something is wrong and I’ve got to change that.”
JOCELYN: The sixth thing that we do is we always want to have some type of immediate action steps. So maybe it’s something that we do in the next 24 hours, by the end of the week, something that’s very, very soon so that we can go ahead and get the ball rolling. If you set your goals and then a couple of weeks later you come back to them, you’re probably not going to have the same intensity and focus that you have when you first set them so it’s really important to get something down on paper or to do something that helps you to reach one of those goals immediately.
SHANE: That’s kind of what we’re doing right now. When we set our goal that we wanted to help 1,000 families next year to take their online dreams to the next level, we immediately told our mastermind group. We actually work with a couple of different people where we all set goals together and keep each other and hold each other accountable. We told them immediately what our goal was. That way, it was out there within seconds of writing our goal. So now we took action on something. We put that into motion so it was real life. We’re actually doing it right now. We’ve pretty much broadcasted to the entire world.
This is one of our action steps was tell as many people as possible what our goal is so that once we put it out there, we had to accomplish it or we would fail. We would let everybody down. All these people would be watching us to see if we actually accomplished our goal. That was kind of our action step was to immediately call people, immediately tell people, email people, put it on the podcast. Our action step was to get that out there.
For example if you’re goal is to start your website, that’s an immediate goal but it’s going to take you a couple of days and some systems to set up. You’ve got to get everything installed, blah, blah, do this do that. Don’t make your immediate goal to be “set up my website.” That’s too abstract. Make your immediate goal to be “Write my About Page” or “Write the first blog post.” You don’t need a website to write your blog post. You can open up Microsoft Word, you can write your first blog post and boom, you are done. You’ve got it. It’s there. Now when the website comes up, you copy and paste. That’s an immediate goal that you can accomplish in the next 30 minutes or the next hour and get that done. If you’re going to start a podcast, that’s fine. You can’t just go ahead and start recording. Go to Amazon right now, order your microphone, and get it there. Now, you’re ready to start recording your podcast. You’ve done something. You took action to make it happen.
If you’ve already got an online business and you’re going and maybe you’ve got an email list. It’s 500-1,000 people, whatever, you’ve been building your online business, you’re kind of successful, and you’ve had this big dream of this course you were going to create or this digital product, some kind of ebook, and you were going to make it, then go get on your email right now and send everybody a message and say, “I’m writing this ebook. I’m creating this digital course” and go create a sales page right now, charge for it, and say, “Anybody that wants in, I’ll give you $100 discount.” Boom, it’s for sale, it’s right now. You’re going to create it. That’s your goal but you’re already charging for it. You’re already asking people if they want to be involved.
Do something immediate that is going to start the ball rolling. That snow ball you’re throwing down the mountain to bring down the avalanche. Get it going, don’t wait. Don’t make it abstract. Don’t make it distant. Do something in the next 24 hours to make your goal. Once we did that, once we started taking action on those first steps, it’s almost like every dream we’ve had since then when we make these plans has come true because we didn’t wait for it. We actually went and got it. The last thing you’ve got to do is take action either right then, as soon as your goals are done, or do something within the next 24 hours to make those dreams a reality.
JOCELYN: Finally, we just want to stress that accountability is so, so important. We have been connecting with several other couples, a mastermind group, things like that, and it is so, so beneficial to get that out there. Tell them what your goals are and then somebody is waiting there for you to see if you actually get them done. You cannot do this alone. It just does not work. If you don’t have a partner or someone who is right there with you who is helping you to get through all these things and just set these goals with you, you must have someone on the other end.
A lot of people ask us, “How do you get into mastermind groups,” things like that. The best thing you can do is go to live events. That’s where you’re going to meet people who are like-minded, who have the same types of goals that you do as far as online business goes. That is going to be just so beneficial. They will pay for themselves, I can assure you. Sometimes they are kind of expensive but we have had just the most tremendous success going to live events.
SHANE: Now if you’re like us, we live in a very rural place, very far from any major city, in the middle of the mountains in Kentucky. A lot of you out there are probably listening and thinking, “There are just no entrepreneurs around me. There’s not even a live event around me. What can I do?” One thing that we’ve done is we’ve joined masterminds on Facebook where we get on and we get to talk to people. We join groups on Facebook.
We’ve bought some courses where we get to join private Facebook groups and we get to work with those like-minded individuals all over the world, all over the country from the comfort of our own home. That is also an option if you can’t afford to go buy an airline ticket, stay in the hotel for five days, pay $1,000 to go to a live event. If you can’t afford to do that, then get online and find groups, courses, and mastermind groups that meet online about your subject.
We actually added that accountability to our Flip Your Life eCourse as well because a lot of people felt like the course was awesome. They got done, they did this, but most of the feedback that we received has been, “I’m so glad that I got to be put into a group with 30 or 40 other entrepreneurs because there’s just nobody around me that even understands what online business is. I was just so happy that was there.” It’s amazing watching the group from four months ago, the first one we ever ran, they are still in that Facebook group every single day talking and they are actually meeting on Google Hangouts and doing all kinds of things like that, so it kind of formed that mastermind group.
If you’re looking for some accountability, we actually do provide that in your Flip Your Life eCourse. If you want to learn more about the course that we’re setting up, the thing that we have designed to help 1,000 families take their online journey to the next level next year, you can do that at FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife or if you’re on your cell phone right now and you’re listening to the podcast, all you have to do is text the word “flip,” F-L-I-P, to the phone number 38470 and we will shoot you a link that will take you directly to the Flip Your Life home page and you can check out all the accountability and all the things that we’re up to in our eCourse that we’re putting on for all these families next year.
JOCELYN: All right, we’re going to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment. We’re just about out of time for today. We have had just a really exciting last couple of weeks. We have been really, really trying to improve our home. The house we live in is great but it needed some cosmetic updates so we are right in the full swing of that.
SHANE: Remodeling basically.
JOCELYN: And our Can’t Miss Moment this week is just being here to help the people that are working in our house. We’ve had painters, we had flooring, and just being here to answer their questions.
SHANE: To watch the process as we go.
JOCELYN: And change things as we go along. I’m notorious for changing paint colors in pretty much every room that we’ve started so it has been great just to be here and just to see things as they are happening, know what’s going on, and be able to answer questions for them just on the fly. It has been just so, so great. It has been a great experience even though it has been a little bit stressful here at the end of the year. We have just really enjoyed this process of getting our house fixed up.
SHANE: That was actually one of our goals when we moved in here. Last year, our goal was we’re going to downsize and sacrifice to the smaller house that needs a little cosmetic work but one of our goals was we’re going to have enough money, enough time, enough energy to fix it up and do whatever we want with it after we make all of our money and we succeed and achieve our dreams. Now, we’re accomplishing some of these goals.
We bought a car, we’re remodeling our house, we’re doing all of these things because we took action on the goals that we set in the past. That’s what we encourage you guys to do at the end of this episode – set big dreams, plan it out, make it happen, overcome those fears and objections, and we know that you can do anything you want to do. You can take everything to the next level. We would love to be a part of your journey if you need any help doing that.
JOCELYN: All right. That’s the end of this week’s show. We hope that you will tune in next week. We’re going to be talking about getting out of debt and how online business is the best way to pay off your bills.
SHANE: Until then, we will catch you all on the flip side. Thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: See you later, bye.
Chris McCall says
Hi,
I have enjoyed your podcast and will be creating a real estate training program this year.
Chris
Bob Call says
I like this. Your methods are helpful. It’s very exciting to actually spend time with oneself listening, dreaming, planning and acting! Thanks for the inspiration!