Episode 32: Goal Setting for 2022

Hannah:
Welcome back Burn Pod listeners. If you haven’t yet already, I’d love you to jump back and listen to the previous podcast, which was taking us through a major reflection exercise of the year that was.

Hannah:
Because this is really critical to help us strategise and recognise the areas that needs some love or some focus, or the areas that you want to improve upon for our 2022 planning. Jump back if you haven’t yet already.

Hannah:
If you have, I’d love you to grab out these notes guys that you’ve taken, hopefully you took notes, because let’s kick into it. This podcast is all about planning for the year ahead. We’re going to use the notes that we took when we were doing our reflection exercise to help us do this.

Hannah:
Now, planning is super, super important for us to focus our energy into something and create a pathway to actually achieve it. It also gives us a chance to create some excitement and some positive energy around what we’re focusing on as well.

Hannah:
This is a health and fitness business burn theory, we’ll focus a little more on that side of things. But you can also use the below questions and steps to help you focus and plan ahead for any aspect of your life.

Hannah:
If you refer back to those reflection questions, there might be your mindset, or your professional life, or your social health that wasn’t where you wanted it to be last year. That might be something that you are wanting to plan and focus on. Use this for any and all aspects basically of your life.

Hannah:
But first things first, I want you to really encourage you to take some time with this. Really block out a few good hours, just to sit in it and really get stuck in and immerse yourself.

Hannah:
It’s sometimes really hard if we’re getting distracted by things around us, to really dig deeply into why the particular goals we’re setting are important to you. And then writing out an actual strategy to make those goals happen.

Hannah:
If you’re listening once again to me in the car right now great, listen, have a think. It’s nice to get the juices flowing, but come back to this once you’re home. You’ve got a little bit of space to really start planning out what it is that you’re wanting to do, achieve, progress, finish for the year ahead.

Hannah:
I love to do this. It usually takes me to be honest 30 minutes for me to switch off and get into the planning. I do really like to give myself a minimum of three or four hours for this. To be fair, a lot of that will be doing some planning for burn theory, because that’s such a major part of my business. A major part of my life, rather.

Hannah:
It might take you three or four hours, it might just be one or two, but it is just a really nice chance. Let’s get into the questions. Grab yourselves a pen and paper and find some space and let’s get into it. First one guys dream big and brainstorm opportunities.

Hannah:
Now have a look at your reflection pieces. Let’s firstly, looking at those reflection pieces, brainstorm your opportunities and your big dreams. I want you to look at where your gaps are in those reflection questions, or the opportunities for improvement that are evident there.

Hannah:
You might find that you only gave yourself for example, a five in your fitness and health. That might line up with vision or your bigger goal to comfortably run for example, five kilometres. You might have found that you’ve lacked a bit in the nutrition department, and so your focus in the quarter is to reduce your sugar intake or alcohol intake.

Hannah:
I want you to dream big here. Don’t let anything hold you back. If you get stuck with what to dream, use those reflection pieces, those five areas. Your physical health, your nutrition, your mindset, your … I’ve just gone blank on that just for a second there. Your professional. Sorry guys.

Hannah:
Your professional and your social, those five. I want you to use those five to help guide you and dream big and brainstorm the opportunities around that. Nothing stupid. Nothing’s unreasonable at this point. Just start jotting things down.

Hannah:
I want to run a marathon. I want to climb Mount Everest. Whatever it is, just throw it down there. That gives us the start. Now, the next step we want to look at is our non-negotiables.

Hannah:
Now this is my favourite step, and it really makes sure that your planning is honest and related directly to you, your lifestyle and what’s important to you. Now one thing that is just as important as those big opportunities or goals guys, is to look at your non-negotiables.

Hannah:
What are you not willing to do, or experience, or even cut out to reach those goals to enjoy your lifestyle? You can tell we are getting right deep into this. Let’s make sure it’s actually realistic.

Hannah:
For example, say you wanted to run a marathon, but your nonnegotiable the thing that you are not willing to do, you’re not negotiating on it is running. There you go. There’s your answer for the marathon. That was a pretty basic example.

Hannah:
But what is it you’re not willing to do to cut out or to experience when you’re on the path to these goals? This is going to be different guys for everyone. What are things in your life that are not negotiable? My non-negotiables for example, are spending time, quality time with family on Sundays.

Hannah:
Sundays are usually my switch offs. Either, hanging around with my partner or I’m catching up with a couple of good friends and my partner, I’m seeing my family. This is usually my social. Saturday night, Sunday are usually my social time. That’s something that I’m not willing to forego.

Hannah:
If my goal was to take over the world and I’m being a little bit exaggerating here, but go with me. Take over the world. And the only way that, that’s possibly going to happen is if I work 24/7 365 days a year.

Hannah:
That can’t be done then, because my non-negotiable is my social time and my family time. It might be that you just really, really, really hate getting up early to exercise. It’s no point making that part of your goals, that you’re going to start a morning routine, and that’s going to include exercise, when you actually really hate getting up early and exercising.

Hannah:
We need to look at these beautiful big goals that we’re setting these big opportunities, and look at the things that are also non-negotiable and are really important to us in our life.

Hannah:
That one’s going to take a little bit of time and even I’m not quite clear. Obviously, non-negotiables do change over time. It might be your non-negotiable is making sure that you are available on Wednesday through Friday to pick the kids up from school, so you can spend the time with them.

Hannah:
But one of your big goals is to get a massive promotion, but that means that you won’t be able to pick the kids up. Where is that interim? Where’s that medium. It’s nice to go that’s my goal. Hang on, what’s that going to actually impact in my life right now, that’s really critical or important to me?

Hannah:
And then maybe I need to look at this goal in a different light, or I need to maybe shift the focus a little bit, so it’s not affecting my non-negotiable as much.

Hannah:
The next one guys and this is an interesting one, is what are you going to stop doing? If you look back at those reflection questions and look at particularly the ones that you’ve given yourself the lower ratings for. Why did you give yourself those lower ratings?

Hannah:
It’s usually because you were doing something. Sometimes it’s not doing something, but you were usually doing something that was getting in the way of you getting a higher score in that area. For example, let’s say we gave ourselves a five in nutrition.

Hannah:
The reason you gave yourself a five in nutrition, is because you snacked everything chocolate that you could possibly find all the time. One thing that you might want to stop doing is snacking all the chocolate all the time. Maybe only snacking chocolate half the time.

Hannah:
Do you see what I’m saying? What are the things that you’re going to actually stop doing? What do you hate doing? What brought you no joy last year, or even got you stressed out that you definitely don’t want to take that into 2021?

Hannah:
I want you to put a stick in the sand right now, declare you won’t continue doing that, or you’ll let it go into 2022. For me something that I’ve worked on in 2021, because it was a big, this is the one I didn’t want to bring into 2021 when I did this last year, is saying no on the weekends to invitations in order for me to continue doing busy work.

Hannah:
I’d feel guilty that I’d even try to have some social family life on the weekends, and I’d feel I’d have to work all the time. I’ve shifted that back now, I don’t have that guilt on the weekends, but I’m quite bad still at being at home and just being. I feel I’m wasting my time and I feel a bit guilty and I should really be doing something.

Hannah:
I should be moving forward and working. Half the time when I’m in that state, I’m not getting anything worthwhile done at all. I’m just busy. I’m procrastinating and I’m fluffing around here and there goes the day.

Hannah:
One, I haven’t actually got anything of worth done for the business, but two, I actually haven’t rested either. The thing that I want to stop doing is what I start doing, is putting in parameters around my days and my weeks where I have shut down.

Hannah:
I have an ending process. It might be on a Tuesday, I’m finishing after classes and I’m not going to open the computer when I get home and that’s that. I’m going to stop doing the busy, busy procrastinating work, and I’m going to stop feeling guilty like I should be doing things.

Hannah:
I’m going to start working on that and that’s a big goal for me moving forward. What’s yours? What is it? What are the things that you want to stop doing? What brought you no joy or got you stressed?

Hannah:
That’s a really good thing. What did you hate? You absolutely freakin hated doing. It might be cleaning the house. If you hate doing that is a goal for you to get a cleaner once a month, and then that’s just one less thing that you needed to do. I don’t know.

Hannah:
Do you hate or not even hate. Do you feel stressed or do you get no joy out of having to do the basic, the responding, or doing invoicing if you’re part of a … you’re running your own business, for example? Can you outsource that?

Hannah:
There’s things that you can look at and it does really help to work out with what you just hate. It sucks doing it. You feel it just doesn’t bring you any joy at all. Is that something that you can maybe shift somewhere else, to bring more joy into your life? Because you have more space and time for that.

Hannah:
The next one guys is we’re going to look back to move forward. We’ve been doing that anyway over the course of this conversation, because we’ve been looking at reflection pieces. Anyway, when we did the first component of our planning.

Hannah:
But I’d really love you to come back to it. Look back over your 2021 year and your reflection and just look at generally, what are the areas that you want to focus on? I want you to choose some goals in those areas.

Hannah:
We started this with the huge big scary audacious goals that we’re talking about, but what are the smaller ones? What are the little things that you could do, or you want to do to bring that number from say a five with your nutrition, maybe up to a seven?

Hannah:
They don’t need to be huge big scary. I’m going to change my lifestyle around completely. They could just be the little things that you could start to work to implement, to lift those numbers up to that little bit of a higher level.

Hannah:
For me in this section, the one thing that comes to mind is working through this ongoing moving feast of learning how to run to studios and putting all the systems and processes in place.

Hannah:
My couple of small goals around there, is to get really cohesive flowing systems in different areas like communications and marketing and stuff like that, in place in the first quarter of this year.

Hannah:
That’s my smaller goal. That’s going to ultimately help overall my larger audacious big goals in terms of the business. But it’s one little step that I can focus on one little miniature goal, sort of miniature, to help me get there and feel motivated and focused on the way through as well.

Hannah:
The other one for me, a goal is maintaining the fitness routine and the consistency that I’m currently in right now. It’s not a big goal. Next year I don’t know if I necessarily have any major big fitness goals. I’m not planning on running a marathon or anything, but it’s a smaller goal so to maintain that consistency.

Hannah:
Guys the last bit. Now that we’ve gone through your reflection for those that have gone back and listened to that one. We’ve gone through that bit of brainstorming and considering what we want to focus on over this year coming. We really need to bring it all together into our calendar planning.

Hannah:
This section is going to take the longest, and you definitely need to have pens and paper handy and probably your diary as well. Get your calendars out, your fresh 2022 diaries. I want you to start mapping out how you’re actually going to get to these goals.

Hannah:
I do like to look at 90 days. I think anything longer than 90 days yes, it’s lovely and great, but it’s too wishy washy. It’s too far in the future for you to really put in place tangible actionable steps to get to that.

Hannah:
I think if you look at your larger goal, break it down into your smaller goals. Say you want to run a marathon this year. Then I want to be able to run half marathon by the middle of the year. Then you need to be able to run around 12 kilometres comfortably by three months. There you go.

Hannah:
My focus over the first 90 days of this year, is to build up my fitness levels for running 12 kilometres without stopping for example. Does that make sense? Look at breaking that bigger goal down, and I want you to do this with all your goals.

Hannah:
If you’ve got 400 goals here guys, still do it with all of these, we’re going to come back to maybe looking at where there’s probably too much going on, but just do it for all of the goals. Break them down to smaller lots.

Hannah:
Then would like you to look at the actual specific activities you need to do each week to work towards that goal. You need to write them down and you need to make time for these in your schedule. For example, if you’re wanting to clean up your diet for example, the activity you need to do each week is to go and do your grocery shopping, organise your meals and do a little bit of meal prep.

Hannah:
There’s your three things. That might need to be then two hours on a Sunday that you sit down, you write out your meals or you plan your meals out for the week. You go do your grocery shopping, you come back and you spend another hour doing just a little bit of chopping and sorting and prepping.

Hannah:
If you are wanting to say get to that full marathon by the end of the year, we know we need to get to say 10 to 12 kilometres by 90 days. Well, then we need to run each week. There’s no point in missing two or three weeks out of that 90 days, because you’re not going to get there.

Hannah:
What you need to do is you need to run consistently. It might be little things in order to do that, I might need to look at getting some guidance on that. I might want to look up a training programme for how to run 10 kilometres by the 90th day.

Hannah:
And then you can fall that plan. Or if you are wanting to eat healthier, but you’ve got zero idea where to start, reach out or find those people, or those support articles, or whatever it is that you need to help you do that.

Hannah:
It might be jumping into Thrive Online and looking at all the recipes in there. It might be reaching out to a nutritionist and getting them to help you do that. It might be just spending a bit of time researching and starting to do your own understanding and thinking around food, and what works for you and what feels healthy and right for you.

Hannah:
Once you’ve had a look at these specific activities guys, and you’ve written them down into each week. I want you to work through those goals and check them off against as we know, the smart goal principles. Specific, your goal must be clear and defined, detailed and precise. Measurable, make sure you can actually measure improvement or success against it.

Hannah:
This might be a time a date and number or amount required. For example, by week six, you’re running comfortably 6K. Then that’s tangible. That’s something else, so that’s measurable. You can measure that. You can see that you’re getting further. You’re running further each week comfortably.

Hannah:
Now, is it also attainable? If you’ve never run before, you’re possibly not going to go couched a marathon in 30 days, or 90 days, or even in six months. It’s something that you can reasonably attain whilst getting you motivated to strive for that.

Hannah:
When we talk about attainable guys, it also means it’s not impacting your non-negotiables. Come back to those. Look at if it’s going to start impacting upon things that are really important to you for example, family time on a Sunday, maybe it’s not actually that attainable. Maybe it just needs to be tweaked.

Hannah:
Look at your ability to actually put in the time. If you want to do a marathon runner, but you never completed that marathon before, it will take time. You need to be running, building up your running training closer to that marathon day.

Hannah:
You’ll be running, spending 10 hours a week running. Is it attainable for you to be taking that amount of time out, for your running training to get to this goal? If it is, awesome. Make sure you can build the time in and schedule it in.

Hannah:
But if it’s not, then we don’t necessarily want to set these goals and then fail because they’re not really attainable, because you don’t have the time and they’re affecting your non-negotiables. We need to be really conscious that the goals we’re setting aren’t going to make us feel deflated, or demotivated because we’ve made them unrealistic in the first place.

Hannah:
Next one, obviously realistic similar to attainable. Are they actually realistic? And time bound, meaning that there is actually a completion point. Take your time with all of that guys, firstly write it all down. Someone need to put me on pause for this.

Hannah:
But the final one now is show up. It’s a big one, but show up. You’ve done the hard work, you’ve reviewed, you’ve reflected, you’ve found the areas in your life that maybe weren’t so great last year that you want to focus on this year.

Hannah:
You’ve spent the time looking at your big scary audacious goals. You’ve looked at your non-negotiables, the things you want to stop doing. And then we’ve looked at the smaller little tasks and goals. We’ve then mapped out how that looks over the first 90 days, to make sure that we are really working towards those larger, bigger goals.

Hannah:
The key now then is the mindset. You know that without the right mindset rather, it’s really hard to reach a certain goal. Every success and failure, usually begins in your mind. I’d really love you to ask yourself what kind of person you need to be to hit these goals, to hit the finish line and to reach that success?

Hannah:
Who do you need to be? If you are looking at these goals and you are already finding some resistance against them, you are feeling a bit oh God, that’s going to hurt, or that’s just annoying, they’re not the right goals.

Hannah:
You need to go back and spend some more time and really dig in, because the goal should be things that light you up. Get you excited, that make you want to strive to be the person that’s going to succeed and create in that goal.

Hannah:
Check that. Check it against how does it actually make you feel looking at these goals? What thoughts and what feelings do you need to have to keep you moving forward? Because even if this big goal lights you up, you’re still going to have moments where it’s going to feel tough. It’s going to feel shitty. Excuse my French.

Hannah:
It’s going to feel what’s the point. I can’t be bothered. I’ll give up. There’s going to be all these things that are going to creep up. You need to know what the thoughts that you need to have are, in order to overcome those feelings and keep you moving forward.

Hannah:
Keep you moving towards being that person. You need to speak to yourself like you are already someone that’s accomplished that goal. If it’s you want to run regularly, speak to yourself like you’re fit and active. Ask yourself what would a fit and active person do in this situation, when you’re having doubts or self sabotage for example?

Hannah:
I know that’s a little bit woo-woo, but it really will just tie things up. We can have these goals and I think we’re really great at putting these big awesome goals out on paper, but we’re not looking inward and we’re not recognising that in order to reach those goals, we must become the person that can succeed with those goals.

Hannah:
We need to make sure that we are thinking and having those feelings and thoughts and the inner dialogue, that’s going to support us reaching that goal. If we don’t, then that’s where you need to start. You need to start focusing on changing that in a dialogue, so it supports the capacity for you to reach that goal.

Hannah:
Guys finally, we just need to do the do. We need to take the action. We have a plan set out and hopefully, it’s real beauty. It’s sitting into your lifestyle. It all works in, you’ve got it all mapped out.

Hannah:
You know what you need to do. What are the actions that you need to do each week. You know the mindset that you need to start to cultivate. You’ve got a big beautiful awesome colour coded plan. Maybe not colour coded, but you know what I mean.

Hannah:
You need to now just do it. Just get in there and start moving. Sometimes the best thing you can do is not overthink things, particularly when it comes to your fitness, because I know that you all do it. I do it too. When I think I really should go for a run and then you start talking yourself out of it. Sometimes you just got to get those shoes on, get the tights on, get moving.

Hannah:
Once you’re moving, you are there. You’re halfway there. Start doing the do and keep yourself accountable. Tell your partner, tell your hubby, tell your friends or your colleagues your goals that you have. Work with a coach even, to help you get to those big goals that you’ve set for yourself and see yourself through.

Hannah:
That was big. That was big. I really hope you get a lot out of this. I’m super excited to hear. If you have done work through this, because I’d love to hear about it. Let me know. What are your reflections, or what did your reflection look like? What are your big audacious scary goals for 2022?

Hannah:
I really hope you get stuck into this and get a lot out of it. Have a wonderful rest of your day. I really hope that you’re still writing things down. I’m really looking forward to a very incredible, exciting, fun and laugh the field 2022 ahead with all of you guys. Until next time, have a good one.