4 areas to focus on to crush your goals in 2017!
Check out our Free Accountability Group HERE.
Hello, and welcome to episode three of Momentum Monday. I’m your Host, Paul Halme, and in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about crushing your goals in 2017 and setting up a great year. I get so excited and so motivated this time of year, because it’s a clean slate. No matter how bad 2016 was or the goals you didn’t reach, you get to start over! You get to make new plans and implement them to have an awesome year!
This is when you get to write down your dreams and your goals, then work backwards to make a plan to reach them, but the trick to doing this is you have to be accountable! If you’re not accountable for your goals, you’ll see where you won’t reach them. You’ll see a drop off. A very common thing with New Year’s resolutions…people start off with great intentions, but end up quitting. If you’re not being held accountable, it’s easy to give up.
I started a free Facebook group for listeners of the show to be able to do this, to have accountability, and the results have been awesome! We go in there each week and post our goals, what we’re going to do, and what we’re going to be held accountable for. It really makes a big difference. At the end of the show, I’ll tell you how you can join that group for free, but today, I want to get into the topics of how to make 2017 the best year yet. To do this, we’re going to look at four areas of focus.
The first area is your habits. “How you do one thing, is how you do everything.” Is a quote that I love. Down to even the smallest of things. If you’re lazy and slacking off on the little things, it’s going to compound and make the big things even worse. So you have to look at all the little habits you have, and try to make them better. Getting up in the morning, setting up your whole week, and planning things out. Develop good strong habits, because those are going to compound into the results that you want to see this year.
The next thing is setting your week up on Mondays. When you get up, write out what you want to do for the week, what your goals are, and what you need to get done. It’s super important to get it written down. That way, you can follow it in your morning routine. What I like to do is write out what I’m going to work on this week, what I need to get done, and then the habits that I have to have to reach these goals.
A big thing for me that I started doing at the end of last year, and it’s carried over into this year, is journaling. Just writing things down. Every day, writing things down. What I need to get done, what I got done, what I didn’t do, it takes a lot of stress away of trying to reach your goals.
Another thing you need to focus on this year is your health. If your health is bad, it’s hard to be motivated, to push, and get the things done that need to get done. So get up and get moving! Take care of your health so you can enjoy your life, because you are the most important thing in your world. If you don’t take care of your health, what good is working so hard and making money for anyways?
You’re just going to end up sick, old, and more than likely, die way too young. Take care of your health so you can enjoy all the work that you’re doing. Give it a purpose! So you can see your kids grow up, so you can go on awesome vacations, so you can go see the world. Don’t just always focus on making money and being miserable.
Next is your personal development. This is a big one for me. It really helped when I started to get around successful people. You have to elevate your game. Like the old saying, “You are the average of the five people you’re around the most.” If you’re around five broke people, or four broke people, you’re the fifth. If you’re around four grumpy ass people, you’re going to be the fifth. Look for positive people that are out there that you can follow and see what they’re doing. See how you can get around them.
Try to do everything you can, and if you can’t get around them because they’re unobtainable, listen to their podcasts and read their books. Successful people put out a lot of good content, so the more you can take in, the more you can learn. You can get into their world without actually physically being there. Hopefully you can eventually get around them, meet them, and learn from them. Whatever your niche, or business is, start reading books in that area.
Look at some of the most successful books. If you’re in business, sales, or entrepreneurship like a lot of people on this podcast are, read those books. Make it a goal. Start off with one, just read one book a month. Make it a goal, then journal down what you learned and what you can implement, so you get more out of it. Just don’t power read through the book. A big thing, too, for personal development, is learning to outsource and delegate things that you don’t like or suck at. If you can do that, it can help you a ton.
In the book, The 4-Hour Workweek with Tim Ferriss, it talks a lot about outsourcing and delegation, and that was a big thing for me! That made a huge change in my life when I was able to outsource and delegate things that I wasn’t good at, or I could be good at, but they just wasted time. They were low dollar activities. When I can make time for the high dollar activities, so I can grow my business and the things that I want to see, instead of just working on the little things that are pointless. You can hire anybody to do them.
The next area to focus on is one that nobody ever wants to talk about…your wealth. You have to start saving. You should start saving yesterday. Before I ran my gyms and became an online entrepreneur, I was a stock broker for six years. So I learned a lot about money, a lot about finance, and luckily it helped me build a foundation for the future. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of sales people that make good money, but they don’t save anything. They don’t have anything saved for the future. You have to start focusing on your wealth!
What I want you to do, listen to this, is read the book called Profits First. It’s a great book. It gets your mindset right on how to pull profits out of your business. If you’re not in business, if you’re working for somebody and you do sales, or whatever you do, there’s always profits that you can pull out and put towards building a future for you and your family.
Nobody wants to talk about money. I mean, growing up, my parents never talked about money, things like that. We had a discussion about this in the Momentum Monday group on Facebook. Whenever somebody mentions money, everybody gets real quiet. It’s the 500 pound elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about…but the sooner you can embrace it and talk about it, then you can start pushing to the future with a good plan and reaching the goals that you have.
Start building up a nest egg, emergency fund, all the little things like that. Those will make the biggest difference when you have crazy expenses pop up. You don’t have to freak out like, “Oh, my God. How am I going to pay for this? I can’t do this…,” because you have an emergency fund that you can take money out on. Start saving. Go read Profits First and start building your wealth!
A big thing I got from 2016, I actually got from the Tim Ferriss podcast with Derek Sivers. It was a quote that really hit me pretty hard. If somebody asks you to do something, or you need to think about doing something, your answer is either, “Hell yes or no.” I’ve learned this the hard way. Things that weren’t a, “Hell yes,” had me saying, “Oh, man. Do I really want to do this?” and usually were things that were a total waste of time or sent me down a wrong path, where I made some bad decisions.
It has to be motivating! You have to learn to say, “No,” to things. Once you learn that, it frees up time to be able to do the big things. You’ll find more time in being able to get the bigger things done in life, but you have to be motivated, too.
You have to have fun and make sure you’re making a good use of your time. We only have 24 hours in a day, and if we’re wasting time doing things that aren’t productive, then you’re getting set farther and farther back. Everybody always says, “Oh, I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough time.”
Look at your day. Look at your schedule. What are you doing? What shouldn’t you be doing? What could you outsource? What could you say, “No,” to? Just look at that. That’s going to be my model for 2017. It’s going to be a, Hell yes or a No.
The big thing, and you’ll hear this a lot, “Resolutions don’t work.” That’s true and false. Honestly if you have accountability, resolutions will work. They’re just goals. Set goals for the year, come up with a plan, and be held accountable.
You can do that real easy. Find an accountability partner. Twice a week, I meet with Travis Lutter. We sit down and ask, “Okay, what’d you get done? What didn’t you get done?” things like that.
I decided to take it on a bigger sale. I started a Facebook group where we can help each other work to crush our goals in 2017. If you want to join that group, go to facebook.com/groups/mmwpaul.
That’s it for today! Make sure to subscribe and share this episode with someone who could use it, and keep listening to this show! If you have any questions or topics you’d like for me to cover, let me know in the group. I’d love to hear it! Just keep out there, crushing it, and hitting your goals.
This is Paul with Momentum Monday.