You might be tempted to abandon the personal and professional goals you set in the new year. But this is NOT the time to walk away from what you committed to just a few months ago.
It’s a new quarter. A fresh (ish) start. It’s time to assess the last 90 days, including these last few roller coaster like weeks.
I’ll show you how with my simple and effective quarterly review process: the Sexy Debrief. It's a system I created for my personal and professional goals that helps me build a habit of frequent check-ins so I can pivot when needed and stay on track with the big picture.
EPISODE SHOW NOTES👇
➡️ https://heathersager.com/episode32/
🔗 Grab the latest FREE resources: https://heathersager.com/start
🔗 Browse all episode shownotes: https://heathersager.com/blog
👋 CONNECT WITH HEATHER:
Work with Heather: https://www.heathersager.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theheathersager/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/HeatherSager
If you’re loving this episode, please take a moment to rate & review the show. This helps me get this message to more people so they too can ditch the hustle 24/7 life.
You might be tempted to abandon the personal and professional goals you set in the new year. But this is NOT the time to walk away from what you committed to just a few months ago.
It’s a new quarter. A fresh (ish) start. It’s time to assess the last 90 days, including these last few roller coaster like weeks.
I’ll show you how with my simple and effective quarterly review process: the Sexy Debrief. It's a system I created for my personal and professional goals that helps me build a habit of frequent check-ins so I can pivot when needed and stay on track with the big picture.
EPISODE SHOW NOTES👇
➡️ https://heathersager.com/episode32/
🔗 Grab the latest FREE resources: https://heathersager.com/start
🔗 Browse all episode shownotes: https://heathersager.com/blog
👋 CONNECT WITH HEATHER:
Work with Heather: https://www.heathersager.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theheathersager/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/HeatherSager
If you’re loving this episode, please take a moment to rate & review the show. This helps me get this message to more people so they too can ditch the hustle 24/7 life.
You're listening to Finding Your It Factor Episode 32. We're 90 days into 2020 and holy crap has it been a roller coaster this year? Setting goals? Remember back when we did that back in December and January and we talked about all the hopes and dreams we had for 202, that feels like an eternity ago. Does it not? Oh my goodness. You honestly might be feeling a little tempted right now just to scrap all those goals or do the ostrich thing where you put your head down o n the s and and just pretend that they're not there b ecause you're just trying to survive and function or if you're like me, you're just trying to make it to the next nap time, not your nap time by the way. If you have littles at home, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't have l ittles at home, parenting is just a s eries of trying to survive until nap time and bedtime. Side n ote, I'm mostly joking, but I think this is something we n eed t o talk about today because this is not the time to abandon your goals. This is not the time to abandon your goals. Now you might need to pivot or adjust a bit, but this time right here, regardless of what's happening in the world after you ended quarter, it is so important that you implement a end of quarter review process for yourself personally and for your business professionally because we shouldn't be coasting in life. We need to be really intentional around where we're going and how we're growing to get there, like what I did there. We need to be more intentional, which requires self reflection and assessment and when I was thinking about today's episode, which I've had scheduled for quite a while, I was thinking like, Oh, do I need to rethink how I a pproach this topic today? And after thinking about it, I decided that the answer was no. That I still think regardless around what's happening right now and how much your business a nd life around you has changed in the last couple of weeks, it's still so important for us to reflect on where we are. I don't want you to throw away all of the good things and all of the lessons you've had over the last 90 days just because of what's happened in the last couple of days or a couple of weeks. Obviously we're not g oing t o ignore it and we need to take into consideration as we move forward because it is, everything is different in how we do business or many things are different i n how we do business, depending on who you are, what your work is and those kinds of things. So obviously take this with a grain of salt, apply it to how it fits into your life, but I want to give you permission. Give yourself permission to still be able to dream and to plan and come back to those goals and give yourself permission to have some grace that it's okay to have goals. It's okay to keep going and it's okay for you to make some changes if that's what's right for you.
:So today I'm going to share with what I called my super scrappy process. It's really simple and really fricking effective on how you review yourself on a quarterly basis yourself and your business so that you can make sure that you're tethered to those goals, to the right goals. You're making progress and you know how to show up with focus and discipline every quarter, every month, every week, and every day. So I can't wait to walk you through it, but before we do kind of exciting thing going on up in here, but I'm thinking about a lot of us are trapped in our houses, this is a big opportunity for us to think about our habits. I know for me, I've been thinking about how I could actually set up some new routines right now since I'm not going to be traveling for the foreseeable future. There's some big opportunities for me to reassess my health routines, my meal routines, just my daily schedule. I have to get more efficient in how I moved through my work days. I have to plan around kids napping or Lego time, all the things. I'm just rethinking a lot of things. And I saw this the other day as this is an incredible opportunity for me to make sure that I'm as efficient as possible, which is kind of crazy to think about. But yes, I crazy to think about because I'm trying to manage my life and chaos of having kids at home while running a business full time. Circling back to you, what I wanted to focus on today is I wanted to be able to share with you some of the tools that I use daily in my life and in my business and I also wanted to celebrate a milestone that I've hit recently here with the show.
Speaker 1:We've been together now for seven months, 32 episodes, 7,500 downloads, and the show is just growing more and more every single week. And one, a big reason of that is you and being so generous and sharing it with your audiences and continuing to come back. So I wanted to celebrate you, so I'm doing a giveaway. If you would participate along with me, were one of our lucky listeners is going to win in the mail a box that I'm going to ship you with what I'm calling the It Factor Boost bundle, and in it I'm going to be giving you the Start Today journal by Rachel Hollis, which I use every single day. Also the full focus planner by Michael Hyatt, which I also use every single day along with a few of my favorite books and some other goodies. So if you'd like to get your hands on the IT Factor Boost bundle, all you have to do is one, subscriber to the show. Two, leave a review and make sure that you leave your name on the review so I know it's you. And then three, I want you to make a post on Instagram, tag me@theheathersager with#itfactorboost and I want you to share your favorite takeaway of the show. It doesn't have to be this episode, any episode. Share your favorite takeaway and why you keep coming back to listen. It's thinking about goals this year. One of my big scary goals is around getting this podcast into the ears of more listeners and I'm going to need your help on doing that. So this is my ask. and in return I'm going to send the It Factor Boost bundle to one lucky winner, maybe two. We'll see. But if you could do that, it would mean the world to me and I would love to be able to share some of these goodies with you that is completed by April 10th and you will be entered to win. Okay Friend, I'm super excited to jump into my scrappy techniques for goal setting and assessment. And let's get you kick it into action in the second quarter of the year. Here we go.
Speaker 3:Have you ever wondered how some people just seem to have a way with words, they have this spark that lights you up when you're near them? They have the It Factor. And while most people think it's something that only a few are born with, I believe that you can find it so it can become your super power to grow your business. It's about you bringing your brand to life by becoming a magnetic communicator in person and on camera, showing up with confidence, authenticity, and inspiration. So are you ready to become magnetic? I thought so. I'm Heather Sager and I'd like to welcome you to Finding your It factor.
:Well friend, welcome back to another episode. I'm really excited to dive into this topic today with you because this process that I'm about to teach you has made a world of difference for me. When I bunkered down bunker, is that a word? Hunkered down bunk. I like bunker down. That's fine. When I got really serious about setting goals in my personal and professional life, and I want to share with you, it setting goals, which you probably already do this so many people set goals. Setting goals is only one step of the equation. Having that really big picture around where you're going, maybe even you've do a vision board. Mine's in front of me on my wall right now. Setting goals and dreaming about the future is a really powerful way to pull yourself out of the reality and you're in right now and think about what's possible and what life could be like in your future.
Speaker 1:Thinking about things from a health perspective, from the relationships in your life around your business, around your finances, around your quality of life, around the experiences you want, around the type of house you want to be in, around the circle of friends and family that you have in your life and how you enriched them. Dreaming about all those things I think is really powerful because it keeps us connected to the reason why we keep showing up every day and it keeps us connected with making the right decisions to lead us closer towards those pictures that we have for ourselves. But just dreaming about the future and just thinking about that picture isn't enough. It's like, I mean, have you ever written goals down on paper one time and then tuck them away somewhere and then never came back to them again. I always laugh at these, because here's the thing, sometimes just writing it down works. They say if you write your goals down and you're good to go, there's even studies that show that when you write your goals down, you're far more likely to achieve them. But here's for me, I don't want just a correlation of like a little more likely to achieve something. I don't want to just put it out in the universe and trust that it's going to happen. I mean there's nothing wrong if you believe that. I like to take a little bit more, how do I phrase this? A little more control. Even though that I know I don't have control, but I like to get into action and get clear on the progress that I'm making, knowing that I can't control everything. Obviously with what's going on right now, nobody could control this. We couldn't have foreseen something of this magnitude happening and I'm not going to get the argument around. We could have seen it coming or whatever. That doesn't really matter. All of it's in the past. The reality is things aren't going to happen, but you have the ability to adapt and adjust how you react to them. We talked about that a lot last week, but when it comes to your goals, you have to think about your goals are like a GPS. Where you're programming the destination of where you want to go and you have to be mindful that you might constantly be rerouted with street closures and construction and traffic or whatever else. I mean, imagine this. Let's say that you've plugged a destination in your phone. Let's say you're going to get your hair done, which is something I really wish I could go do right now. Let's say you, you put the address in and you're driving on the road and then all of a sudden there's a road closure. Would you just stop and turn around and go back? Would you just throw your GPS or the map? If you still use the map to suite you. People still use map, I don't know, but just throw it out the window and just be like,'Well, screw it. I can't get to my appointment.' No girl, you want to get your roots done. Like you're going to figure out a different way to get there. So if your goals are truly important to you, you have to figure out how to make them happen. You have to reroute, reroute, reroute, every time, reroute. Maybe you need to change the destination. Sure. Maybe, I dunno. Maybe it's by the time you figured out the salon is closed, so you need to pick a new salon. I don't know. This example no longer works here, but let's go back to your goals. Like you might need to adjust the where you're going. You might need to change your route on how to get there. You might decide that you need to take a pit stop, meaning that you actually need to pull over for a second, take a hot minute and regroup and give yourself some time. Give yourself some grace to just relax for a hot minute. That might be the time right now for you, but it doesn't mean that you need to completely turn your back on your goals and your dreams. And just because you have goals and dreams and you put time, intention and energy into it right now doesn't mean you're turning your back on the hurt and the pain that others are also experiencing right now. They don't have to be, they don't have to compete against each other. You can have empathy for what's happening. You can have respect for what's happening. You can support and do whatever you can to contribute to solutions around the pandemic that's happening in a world and you can still have goals and hopes and dreams for yourself and be thinking about how you're going to get there. You can do both. You have to give yourself space to reflect on how much ground you've covered in the last 90 days even if everything hit the fan in the last two weeks. I don't want you to discount the successes and the things that have happened in the last 90 days, so that's where we're going to start. The secret for assessing where you are is looking back at where you've been and then considering where you're going to regroup and I'm going to walk you through this specific process. It's five steps and these are the steps that I would follow. You'll notice a little bit of some tweaks as we go in, but what I want to tell you is you can use this for yourself, for your personal goals. You can use this process for yourself, for your business goals. You can use this for your relationships, for your financial goals, wherever you want to apply this. You can follow this same process. The most important thing is I want you to get into action on this and don't just say, because things might be different for you right now where there's things that are unknown that does not mean that you need to stop completely. Like I said, if you do need to take a pitstop and you give yourself some time to go through whatever it is you're going through right now, that's fine, but then jump back into it, but don't lose ground on the traction that you've already built and and made on your goals even in times of uncertainty. So where are this after action review came from was back in my corporate world days. You guys know, I manage a team of trainers and event creators and we produce these transformational learning experiences for entrepreneurs and their teams to help them adopt business best practices into their teams. So we taught leadership and team development and operations and finances and sales and all those things, and we created experiences where people got excited and adapted these processes in a way that really, they were excited and they embraced fully and technically, really competently. So what we would do is every time we would end a program, whether it was a live event or a virtual program, what we would do is we would do a, like a post-program review. It had one of my team members always called it a post-mortem. You've probably heard that term before. I hated that term. I felt like it, I always thought of a morgue. I just, I don't like it. So I don't call it that. I wanted to have something a little bit different. So I, I can't believe I'm saying this out loud. I call it my Sexy Debrief meeting. I want a debrief to be fun and functional. Have you ever been to a debriefing meeting? Maybe this was back when, if you've worked in corporate where everybody would sit in this meeting and hem and haw over what happened and talk about what worked and what didn't work, and then the next time the project would come around, nobody would ever go back and revisit their notes and it just felt like those meetings often felt like they were really big waste of time. So for me, this process needs to be fun and it needs to be functional. If it's, if it's going to actually make a difference in how you show up moving forward with your goals for yourself and in your business. So let's dive in to the five steps of implementing this sexy debrief. Oh my gosh, I'm going to regret calling that out loud to you. But you know what? Let's just, we're just going to go with it. I'm embracing full authenticity to share with you guys the language that I would actually use for myself and my business. All right, here we go.
:Step one. I want you to review what happened these last 90 days. I want you to open up your calendar, go through it, and I want you to think about this 90 day review in two buckets. You have your quantitative bucket and your qualitative bucket. I don't want you to try to be super sciency about this and get really, really granular. If you need to stay higher level and make some estimates, that's fine. You can get granular later and get the numbers. But what I like to do is really important in this first step is I don't want you jumping to judgment thinking about what works and what did and I don't want you to worry about any of that. I just want you to assess what happened. Don't tie an outcome or a meaning or a judgment against them or a weighting or any of that. We're going to get to that a little bit later, but just pull out what happened. I like to do this on post it notes and I'll explain why in step two. But what I would do is just get a big stack of post it notes in every post it notes, write down something that happened. So on the quantitative side, here's some examples of metrics that I would be looking at. I'd be looking at my list size and I might be looking at my list size, my email list size, starting January 1st and then uh, on March 30th. That comparison, how did my list grow? I might be looking at social media followings and in online marketing as probably are you, so I might be looking at my Facebook followers, my Instagram followers, who I'm connected with on LinkedIn, YouTube views and subscribers. I might be looking at Facebook group, my free Facebook group growth. How much did that grow? I might be looking at downloads for my podcast. When I say I might be, I'm Looking at all of these things. I might be looking at video views. I will be looking at my sales numbers, revenue for the quarter, revenue by customer. I'm looking at the number of podcast interviews I did so on other people's podcasts, speaking gigs, those are quantitative things. There's actually a number of there around something that happened, a result and outcome. But on top of tha, I'm also going to be considering qualitative things like projects or activities or you might have some goals that y ou set for yourself, some progress y ou had on those. So for me, one of the projects I had for the first quarter was recording my digital course. Another one, consistently producing weekly content, emailing my list each week, completing a learning p rograms. Maybe there was a digital course or a program that you were participating in and you were focused on that. So I just want you to review your calendar, review your project software if you use it. Review your numbers and just write out, post it notes. You don't have to go super crazy. You might come up with a list of 10, 20, 30 things, but get them all out of your head. Even little things, and this is where I think look at your calendar or your daily to do l ist. This is where I u sed the Michael Hyatt full focus planner. I go through and I have action items for myself each day. I go through and review these and say, What actually happened? Get it all on post it notes. That is step one.
Speaker 1:Okay. Now that we have everything that happened or not, maybe not everything, the the key things that happened on paper, or post it notes. Now we can move into step two. That is we're going to categorize each and every action. So let me walk you through how I categorize because this is where I say it's not technical, it's super scrappy. This is what my team and I used to do. We were a little quirky and so we like to use fun names on things. So we'd like to categorize everything in the three categories. Good, ugly but good, or fugly. Now good was this thing was a win. This thing was a win. It was accomplishment, it was a positive thing that happened, we put it in that category. So I want you to look at your Post It notes and anything that you feel ultimately was a win. For example, for me, podcast growth this quarter, it's exceptional, I'm going to put that in my win'Good' category,. Ugly but good, this means this thing, this action, this outcome, it was scrappy but when you reflect on it ultimately you would still consider it a win, but you know you're going to need to tweak some things if you ever did it again. You might want to have a better process or use a different software or whatever the thing is you would make some tweaks if you have the ability to do it again, but ultimately you'd still call it pretty good. Scan your list and figure out what ultimately worked out, but you weren't necessarily in love with how it got there. I want you to put all those post it notes into the'ugly but good' category. Finally, the'fugly' category. You can only imagine, these are the things that were, no boy, no. It just did not work out. It was a big miss. Maybe it was a project that you said you were going to get done, that you never touched it. Maybe you completely flopped on a launch. Maybe you were completely stagnant in this area, whatever that looks like. Anything that you feel was a complete and total flop. I want you to put it into that category. So as you look through your post it notes, categorize all of them,'good','ugly but good' or'fugly'. Moving on to step three, I want you to to capture the lessons. As you look at all these post it notes, which hopefully by now you have these up on a wall or maybe on like your kitchen floor, a kitchen table, wherever you can have them laid out. I want you to take some time and go through and reflect on each one. Look at the trends, look at the categories, and here are a few questions that you might ask yourself and I highly recommend that you talk this out with a member of your team. So for me, for example, I do this with my virtual assistant. I also do this with my husband depending on the different categories of things. By the way, on a personal note, my husband and I do this on our personal lives where we talk about our finances, our relationship, our parenting styles. I do this when I think about my health and my personal goals. So if you do it on your own or if you talk to someone else, what I really want you to do is get out of your head and verbalize it and or get it on paper. I think journaling is a really beautiful way to do this. I talk about this a lot on the show is I'm a big fan. Get it out of your head and onto paper. So what I want you to do is reflect on the different categories, on the different items, and ask yourself, what did I learn? What did I learn? Just see what comes up for you and I want you to write out as much as you need. What did I learn? How can I improve and what can I replicate? You might have some other questions that come to mind for you. Trust your gut and just keep exploring it, but I want you to ask yourself these productive questions. What did I learn? How can I improve? What can we replicate? And you might even ask, what should we never do again? That's a good, powerful question, but I want you to reflect and journal, not in your head. Get it out loud or on paper. That is step three.
:Moving on to step four, I want you to review your annual goals. So go back for a moment and I want you to review what you had intended to do for the year. So reviewing the quarterly goals. Great. Look at those, but I want you to go back out to the higher level perspective that you set for yourself for your goals this year, whether those were personal goals, professional goals, your business schools. I want you to get your vision back, hat back and I want you to be thinking about what is the goals for the year? What's the vision of the organization? What's the vision of my life? I have nine months left. I want you to reconnect it. Are you on track? Has your goals changed? Have you already made adjustments? Do you need to make adjustments? How can you re-imagine these goals? Are you still 100% committed to these goals? These are another series of questions that you need to think through out loud and journal on paper. You need to work through these questions in step three and step four so that way you have clarity around how important these goals are to you and start thinking about how they fit in. Do you have the lessons learned? Do you have the insight of what's transpired over the last two weeks to equip you in how to navigate these goals for the next nine months? This is a reflection that I think a lot of people skip. They just look at the result, the goal, and then they set new targets and I think that's a really big missed opportunity.
Speaker 1:You have to ask yourself the tough questions and that doesn't mean you should jump into Facebook groups or ask other people what they think you should do. You need to sit with your own thoughts because you're really wicked smart. You're really resourceful. You need to trust that intuition. You need to get quiet or with a trusted friend or a trusted partner or a trusted team member and you need to get really clear around thinking through these things together or for yourself. Don't bring in external parties because they don't know the context and their recommendations and advice are in a vacuum and who knows if they'll even work. But you need to give yourself some credit that you can think through these things and be extremely resourceful. So do not skip steps three and four. They'll make a big difference in your personal life with goal setting. So let's say you had some health goals for yourself this year and you're not on track. Sure. You can tell yourself I'm not on track and you can set a new goal and say, well, this time I'm going to workout four days a week, or this time I'm going to go X, Y, and Z and do this. But if you skip over the reflections in step three and step four to understand what's actually happening and reconnect to the bigger picture around why this matters, you're not going to be successful if you skip that. So do yourself a favor and do not skip the reflection exercises and steps three and four and do not do them in your head. Do them out loud from your head out of your mouth. And what I would recommend on to paper. Side note, if you do this, I would come back to them next quarter cause I think you'll be amazed on just how much your mind and attitude and progress, how it'll grow in the next 90 days. And you'll look at your reflection and be like, Oh I've come so far or man shoots, we get smart. I should take some of that advice again. So I want you to do those two steps.
:Okay, let's go to step number five. This is now where you start setting your goals for the next 90 days, 90 days. I don't want you to focus on the full year. You've already brainstorm around that. But I want you to get clear on the next 90 days and do yourself some favor and don't try to do a dumpster load of goals. Get really clear, really specific. Pick one to three projects that will help you connect to that bigger goal. And I want you to think about these goals as quantitative goals and qualitative. So quantitative, I want you to think about specific metrics and outcomes that you can hold yourself and your team accountable to that you can tie activity to. So whether that's a revenue goal, maybe that's a list growth goal, maybe that's a, let's see what else. Uh, maybe it's a, did I say a download goal? So think about things that are actually key performance indicators, drivers in your business that you know, if they move, the business will move forward. You need to make sure that you're clear on those. But in addition to that, when I say qualitative, I want you to think about projects that are, if you have ever read the book, Traction, they refer to them as big rocks. So the things that are most important to the strategic outcomes if you're a business, so they're related back to your bigger goals. So when you think about qualitative goals, I'll give you some examples of some of mine. So I will be launching my digital course coming up in the end of the second quarter. It's the first time I'm launching a digital course up until now I've just done a group program with coaching. So I'll have a digital course coming out. So for me that is a huge big rock, big goal for Q2. It means that I have to focus on a sales page. It means that I need to have all of my onboarding emails ready to go. It means I need to have all of my emails for the program ready to go. I need to have all my promo emails. So there's all those pieces that go into a launch that is a big frickin rock. That for me is a big part of Q2. I also have some visibility goals for the second quarter. So number of podcasts I want to pitch and be interviewed on. Speaking opportunities that I want to pitch. No, that has to change a little bit because stages, the physical ones are not open in the second quarter so I have to reimagine that a bit and part of this process for me is going, do I want to reimagine that by being on my virtual stages or do I want to reallocate that time elsewhere? Other big goals that I'm thinking about, a quantitative goal is around podcasts downloads. So you have to think about what works for you and when you set your targets and goals for this next quarter, get really, really, really clear. Keep it simple. One to three projects that are tied to those annual goals that you are 100% committed to getting the results from. To think about that one to three, and that might be really hard because you might have, maybe you don't have two big rocks, but you have a giant pile of pebbles. It's a giant pile of pebbles, one going to get you to your overall end goal while keeping your sanity. It might be time for you to really think about what that looks like. So do some work here and really think about there. What would be one or two big projects, maybe three that if you finished a quarter, you would look back and if those things were completed, you'd be like, heck yeah, I climbed a mountain and the view up here, Oh damn, it's good. That's the mindset I want you to get in. I also want you to think about here in step five, this really important question. What new habits or processes will you put in place to course correct. Now, this gets into a little bonus thing here. This was a big difference for me, so I mentioned for you, I do, I used to do this assessment for myself, this whole assessment I'm walking you through. I used to do this twice a year, once in January and once in July, and I now both myself and then also my husband. We now do this on a quarterly basis and I have adopted this in my business every single quarter. I do this quarterly sexy debrief, by the way. I also do that after every project, but I do this every quarter because it helps me continually assess where I'm at, how performance has been and where I'm going, and it also allows me to stop and celebrate milestones more often because here's the truth, I'm terrible at stopping to celebrate accomplishments for myself and others. I just move quickly. I'm always moving forward to the next project. I didn't really create space for that in my life, so this process allow me to do that and so I accelerate it. Instead of doing every year, I did it twice a year and now I do it four times a year, but I pull it down even smaller than that, and this is my recommendation for you. I want you thinking about how are you going to put a habit or a process in place to this sooner. It doesn't have to be this full process, but I want you to think about a something that is doable for you. Here's some things to think about. From here, once you have these things, you might be the kind of person who's like, I need a project plan. That's me. Put what you put out. Get your project plan together, pull your team members in that youneed to pull in. You need to get a project plan out so you can see how success looks from a month to month basis within the quarter and how that breaks down for you and your responsibilities on a weekly basis. Project plans, important. Put key dates or milestones in your calendar. That's super important. And then this is the thing that has really been a game changer for me. It's weekly checkins, so this is where I've talked about it many times before. I used a full focus planner. I've been using this since it came out back in 2016, 2017 and this is a game changer. So the full focus planner, if you're not familiar, it's by Michael Hyatt who has a series of programs online. I originally took his course best year ever. It was a goal setting course. I took it back in 2013 I want to say, and consistently I took it for four or five years. He's a big motivation and inspiration to me for setting goals in different aspects of my life. I learned a lot from him. I still do, but this process has been powerful for me. I use the full focus planner, so here's how it works. Each week I set what's called my weekly big three, which are the top three things that I have to get done that are tied to the goals I have for the quarter, so they need to be tied to the top two, three, however many projects. You said top two to three things for the quarter. That was has to be in your weekly big three. Your weekly big three should not be like administrative tasks that you have to do. Those things might have to happen also, but the weekly big three should be tied to your bigger projects and rocks, so you do that every week. You set them. There is a little bit of reflection that asks every week how, what was your progress? How did it go? What are you going to do differently? Just a lighter touch on those reflection questions that I gave you to do for the quarter. Then every day in the planner, you set your daily big three, so I want you to think about this like Russian stacking dolls where your daily big three fits inside of your weekly big three and your weekly big three fits connected probably to like a monthly target big three and then your monthly big three would fit to your quarterly projects. They all nest within one another. They're all one-line guiding you towards your big, bigger vision and those goals you've set for yourself. Things should not be disconnected. Now, if you remember the example I gave you, if you had a dump truck full of pebbles as your quarterly target, can you imagine trying to tie your daily activities to a series of crazy pebbles? You become scattered. You don't know what's happening, so let's just go there for a second. If you do find yourself with a ton of things that you have to get done in your business, what you need to do is step back and understand how do these things fit together. Because a lot of tasks that might be similarly related, those actually might be coming together under one strategic project. So what you need to do is look at all the tasks, maybe get them out on paper, maybe pull back out those post it notes and write everything down and then start asking yourself the questions, how do these things work together? And could you pull some of these things together into a strategic project. Let's say the projects around content strategy or the projects around visibility and getting yourself out there on more stages on more podcasts or those kinds of things. I'm not quite sure what the project is for you, obviously, but can you ask the question, how could these things work together? And if you cannot tie all these pebbles together, you have to ask yourself the question, which of these pebbles is going to could grow into a boulder, meaning two reasons or two meanings actually, which could actually, you think it's a pebble, but as closer inspection there's scope creep, which means it gets bigger and bigger as you get into it and takes far more time than you ever considered. So that's one consideration. The other one is a consideration if what are you treating like a pebble, but really it has a significant opportunity in your business that you should make a boulder. Asking yourself that. I want you to run through these things because if you cannot come up with your top projects and priorities for the quarter, you're not going to hit to your goals for the year at least at the pace that you would like. You might end up there, but it might come with a lot of overwhelm and chaos along with it, I dunno. Or it could work out fine for you. But the question is how are you approaching things right now? Is it working and are you exactly where you want to be or do you wish y ou're a little further along?
Speaker 1:I always find the balance of both where I know where I'm at is exactly where I need to be, but I also know that to get where I want to go, I need to, here's the word again, I need a bunker down and I need to make some progress here. So it's time Friend for you to give yourself some grace for exactly where you're falling right now, but also kick yourself a little bit in the high knee and say it's time for me to lean in and be more strategic and more intentional with where I'm going. More strategic and more intentional with how I show up every single day. Because if you're anything like me right now, the time you have to allocate to your business and your goals is limited, which requires you to be clearer and more strategic with how you use that time, which at first glance stressed me the heck out. But now after I've been in it here for a hot minute, balancing life with having kids here and working full time, balancing things with my husband when he is home cause he's still having to work at this point. I'm learning that having this clarity of my daily three, my weekly three and my quarterly three, it's made a profound impact of trimming out all of those pebbles that really didn't matter in the first place. And I think that'll be true too for you. So Friend, I would love to hear from you around what your top takeaway was with this episode. Let me actually recap those five steps for you one more time just so if you're at a point ready to pause, pullover, grab a notepad, write them down. Let me give them to you again. Step one, I want you to review what happened and I want you to look at both the quantitative, the metrics and the outcomes and the qualitative, so think the projects and the priorities. Step two, I want you to categorize each thing in the following format. Good meaning this was a win, ugly but good, where you're like, Oh, that was a little painful, a little scrappy had some hiccups, but ultimately we'll call it a win, or it was straight up fugly, which means it was totally no boy, no and you don't want to go there again. Once you've completed this, I want you to move on to step three. Step three, I want you to reflect and capture your lessons and remember the important part on this is get out of your head and get it out of your mouth. Verbalize it and bonus points, write it down in reflection. I want you to reflect what did you learn? How can you improve? What can you replicate? Then I want you to go to step four where you review your annual goals. You ask, am I still on track? Have they changed? Do I need to adjust? What do I need to do to re-imagine these? Am I still 100% committed to these goals? And then lastly, step five, I want you to picture the next 90 days and get really, really clear with what you need to accomplish to realize that bigger vision for yourself, both in the quantitative, what metrics and outcomes need to happen and the qualitative. What are the top one, two or three big rocks, big strategic projects that need to happen for your business or for you personally? If we're talking about personal goals in the next 90 days. And lastly, I want you to ask yourself the question, what new habits or processes will you put in place to course-correct? Whether that's you adopting what I do, which I look at my weekly big three, my daily big three or you find something that works for you. Ask yourself these questions is going to set you down the path to find your success to make it happen. And I think if you do this, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised around just how much you can accomplish this next quarter, even in the face of not quite knowing exactly how our business is gonna operate in this very virtual and constantly evolving world. Done.
:I hope what you've learned here today has been helpful. I can't wait to hear what takeaways you have. As always, please tag me as you put your top takeaways from this episode on Instagram@theheathersager and if you want to get your name into the giveaway for that It Factor Boost bundle, be sure to one, click subscribe on the episode, subscribe on the show. Two, I want you to leave a review and please be sure to add your name so I know it's you. And then lastly include me and the#itfactor boost in a post on Instagram where you share your top episode takeaway along with why you keep coming back to the show and you'll be enetered to win that Boost bundle including the full focus planner that I talked about so many times today along with a Star Today journal, some of my favorite books and a couple other goodies. All right Friend, I'm thinking about you. I hope you and your family are safe. Keep chugging along, keep doing the best that you're doing. You're doing great. Keep it up. Give yourself some grace and go have a glass of wine. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Guys, thanks so much for listening to Finding Your It Factor and Hey, if you have a talk coming up, you have to check out my free resource. It's called Nail Your Next Talk. 10 must ask questions before taking the stage so you can show up as an authority and turn that talk into future business. These are the questions that I use myself to prepare for my life talks, and they're going to help you ask the right questions of the person who booked you for the event. So the meeting planner or the client, and it's going to help you serve your audience to the best way possible. It's going to help you anticipate potential tech or 80 snags. Turn the Q&A time into a strategic place for content and make this speaking opportunity, a lead generator for your business. So go get it now. What are you waiting for? It's over at heathersager. com/10questions