John: Fire Nation in the house. JLD here with an audio master class on five effective ways to meet any goal without fail, and to drop these value bombs, I have brought Jennifer Dawn. Jennifer owns Jennifer Dawn Coaching and founded Best Planner Ever. She’s built two multi-million-dollar businesses and is a master at helping entrepreneurs clarify and achieve their goals. And, Fire Nation, we’ll be talking about the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when setting goals. How do you get unstuck with a goal you’ve been trying to achieve, how to deal with overwhelm, and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsor.

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Jennifer: Oh, fantastic. Hey, Fire Nation. So happy to be here. So, most people don’t know that, in college, I worked in a funeral home, of all places. And let me tell you, it was probably one of the most – it was one of the saddest jobs I ever had, but it was also one of the jobs that taught me, I would say, the most about life. When you work in a funeral home, you learn a whole lot about life.

John: There’s actually a book, The Five Biggest Regrets of the Dying, that was written by a woman who worked – I don’t think it was a funeral home, specifically, but it was a place where people were pretty close to going there. And you can just learn so much, Fire Nation, from just really have reality in your face, that we are not on this earth forever, and a lot of people realize that way too late. So, give us, maybe, one example, Jennifer, of something that you really kind of have taken with you from that experience.

Jennifer: It sounds kinda morbid, but I saw so many examples of death, from the woman who had miscarried her little baby twins to the little four-year-old who had drowned to the elderly person, and was really interesting, to me. You would have an elderly person who would pass away, and, usually, within six months, their partner would also pass away –

John: Wow.

Jennifer: - and just things like this that were happening that I was seeing, and I was just like – for me, I was 19 at the time. For me to be seeing these things so young, it just made a huge, huge impact on me of watch your kids when they’re swimming and –

John: Definitely.

Jennifer: - the beautiful love that people can share for a lifetime where, when one partner goes, the other – excuse me – the other partner is not too far behind. So, to me, that was actually a very beautiful thing, that the partner would go within such a short period of time.

John: Fire Nation, live in the moment. Make sure you’re grateful for what you have, who you’re sharing this life with because, snap of the fingers, you never know. So, we’re gonna kinda pull back from that morbid beginning, Jennifer, because we have a great audio master class on the five effective ways to meet any goal without fail. So, that’s a big, big ambitious goal that we have for this episode, to talk about these five effective ways to meet any goal without fail, and let’s kick right in and talk about setting goals. What is the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when setting goals?

Jennifer: Absolutely. This is such a great question, and I see it all the time in my work with entrepreneurs. And there are two mistakes, but one is bigger than the other, and the first one is we do not spend time getting clear on our vision, and I did this in my first two businesses. I don’t do it anymore. But in my first two businesses – you’re busy, busy, and you think, “Okay, I’ve gotta go set some goals because I’m a business owner, and that’s what I’m supposed to do.” And so, you go set a bunch of goals, and then you get busy, busy on getting all the actions and daily stuff, and you just start doing stuff, and you just work all the hours that there are, and you’re so busy.

And, yes, you might make some forward progress, but it’s usually not as far as you wanna go. It’s not as fast as you wanna go. And one of the things that I saw is I was sacrificing so much of my day, of my personal life, of my health because I was just so, so busy in the business. And the biggest mistake that I made, back then, the biggest mistake I see so many entrepreneurs now making is that we don’t take the time to slow down and get clear on our vision. The vision is really the direction. It’s where we wanna end up. It’s that outcome.

And so, we’re so busy setting goals and getting things done that we don’t actually pause to get clear on, well, where do I really wanna end up? And all these things that I’m doing all day long, are they really going to get me there? And sometimes, months and years can go by without ever slowing down and stopping and taking the time to get clear on the outcome, the vision that we’re really after.

John: Vision, Fire Nation, is the direction. It’s the outcome. So, Jennifer, talk to us. How do we get that vision? How do we get that direction? How do we ensure we have the right outcome? What are those steps that we need to take?

Jennifer: Yeah, absolutely. So, the first thing that we need to do is, one, we need to make a little time. We’ve gotta carve out some time to actually work on this because it is truly so important. And before we ever set goals, we should be spending time on the vision of where we actually want to go. And if we never set time – because, so many of us, we know we need a vision. Many listening are like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I know I need a vision,” and, maybe, even some of you have spent some time creating one. But what I see is that, yeah, I created it, what, six months ago, a year ago? It’s in a file cabinet. I don’t even ever look at it anymore. Or maybe you never learned how to actually create a vision statement and flush it out properly.

I like to kinda correlate it to driving a car. Nobody ever just got in a car and knew how to drive. We all had to go through some sort of learning of how to really drive a car the right way. Your vision statement is no different. And I don’t know about you, but in school and college, I never was taught how to do this. And even when I started my first business umpteen years ago, nobody ever taught me how to do this. And so, we need to, first, learn how to create a vision statement.

And then, once we’ve created it, we’ve gotta set time aside to always be updating it and actually bring it into our lives. Not like, I made a vision statement, I’ve checked it off the list, and, now, I never have to do that again. We actually have to bring it into our lives, be aligning with it every day, and then let the goals fall out of that, and don’t put the goals before the vision.

John: Make time, Fire Nation, to make that vision statement, and then don’t just keep it the same. If you’re evolving, update that vision statement and bring it into your lives. This isn’t a separate thing from you. This isn’t a separate entity. This is you, your vision, your goals. Bring it into your life. Now, we’ve done some of these things, Jennifer, and we’re seeing some progress on these goals, but we’re impatient human beings. I mean, it’s just not happening fast enough. So, what can we do to speed up the realization of this vision of these goals?

Jennifer: Okay, so, what we should do is actually the opposite of what we think we should do. We should actually slow down because, what happens when you wanna see your goals go faster? You start to go faster. So, you start to work more hours. You start to sacrifice time with family. You start to sacrifice things in your life that matter because you’re like, “Oh, I’m so driven. I want these things to go faster, go faster.” But what we actually need to do is we need to slow down a little bit because, when we slow down, we’re gonna be able to then take the time to flush out that vision statement. And when you flush out the vision statement, from the vision statement, there will be your goals. They’ll almost just fall out.

And what we talked about, the biggest mistake that people are making, which is not having a vision – the second biggest mistake is not doing the strategy work. The strategy work is that pre-planning work. You get in your car, and you wanna go take a trip across the country. You look at a map, or you type it into your GPS. You make a plan for how you wanna get there. But often, because we’re so busy, we don’t take the time to do that strategy work around the goal. So, if we’ve done the work to say, “Okay, now, I have a vision statement. I know where I wanna go. It’s flushed out. It incorporates all areas of my life. Now, I’ve got this. I’ve set some goals. And now, I wanna get there as fast as I can.”

The fastest way to get there is to actually do your pre-planning, do your strategy work so that, before you take action, the goal is actually falling out that much faster. My goals, when I do the strategy work, fall out so fast right now that – when I look back years and years ago where I used to just really struggle and just push so hard and, now, I look at how fast I can manifest a goal, it’s simply because I spent so much time pre-thinking through it all before I got busy that, when I got busy, it actually fell out so much faster than I ever anticipated.

So, really, the answer to that is, if you want your goals to go faster, you’re gonna wanna slow down a little bit and make sure that you’re doing the strategy work behind it so that you’re not making a lot of mistakes and having to redo work and then working harder than you need to. And when you’re working harder than you need to, you’re gonna get stressed out. You’re gonna get burned out. You’re gonna get overwhelmed. You’re just not gonna be as productive. So, if you can take a little step back and slow down and make sure that you’re getting the strategy piece in, things will fall out so much faster.
John: Slow down, Fire Nation. Sometimes that might seem counterintuitive because we wanna achieve our goals faster, we wanna get to our vision quicker, but guess what? Slowing down will make that happen for you because you’ll be doing the things right. And what are those things? Well, what about that strategy work around the goal. That pre-planning that Jennifer was talking about, so critical to your success. But now let’s just say, Jennifer, that we get stuck while trying to achieve our goal. How can we get unstuck if we’ve been trying to achieve this goal for, say, a year or more and we’re still not having any success? I mean, that’s a long time.

Jennifer: It is a long time, and I’m sure many of you can absolutely relate. I know that I’ve had these things where it’s just like, “Oh, my gosh.” I look back, and, year after year, I’m still stuck in this goal. Sometimes it’s we can’t get over a certain revenue in business. Sometimes it’s our health or our wellness or, maybe, our relationships. It can be in any area of our life where we have just been struggling. And what happens is, the longer we struggle with it, the longer we struggle with it, we have built up so much resistance. We’ve built up so much bad self-talk. We’ve beat ourselves up. We’ve put more pressure on ourselves to get it done.

It’s like, “Hey, what’s wrong with you? Why do you keep failing at this? Why can’t you get it done?” We just have all this junk that’s built up, and it almost starts to feel like, “Ugh, I can just – if I could only get over that hurdle,” but we just can’t quite figure out how to get over it. And so, when that’s happening, what I like to use – this is a great tool. So, if you’re listening, if you’re not driving, you can drive a sheet of paper, and what I like to use is a momentum grid. On a momentum grid, what we’re gonna do is, whatever that goal is that you’re really, really stuck and it’s been over a year, we are going to make a grid.

And on the grid, along the downside of the paper, you’re just gonna make list of all of the teeny tiny action steps that you can take that get you closer to the goal. But here’s the trick: You want these things to be so small that you literally cannot fail. We are literally going to lower that bar so far that you cannot fail at it, okay? So, for example, we’ll use health and wellness. This is one that everybody can pretty much relate to. And so, you’re trying to get healthy, and you keep failing, and it’s been a year or more, and you just can’t seem to get healthier.

So, down on your list, you might have things like, “I could drink an extra glass of water today.” We all have the resources. We can do that. We can all drink one extra glass of water today. So, that’s on your list. You might have, I’m going to get up and stretch my body for five minutes. I’m gonna stretch for five minutes, or I’m gonna move my body to minutes for five minutes, or I’m gonna take five minutes, and I’m going to walk around the block. It’s so simple. We can’t really fail at it. And as you make this list of all the teeny tiny things that you can do on this goal, you simply put a check in the box. We’re entrepreneurs. We love to make lists. We love to check things off. You check the box. I did that today. I drank one extra glass of water. I walked around the block. I did something that moves me forward that, really, it’s so small, I can’t fail at.

And then you just continue this process each day, each day, and what this does is it builds positive forward momentum on this goal so that you’re not carrying so much of the weight of the failure with you. This is just a tangible practical thing that you can do every single day to start getting your forward momentum. Once you get that momentum and you start feeling better about it, the pressure’s gonna come off of you. You’re gonna be like, “Hey, I can do this, and maybe I can go from one glass of water to two glasses of water,” and you can kind of start to up the game. But if it, at any point, you start to feel overwhelmed, you start to feel pressured, you just back down a little bit.

I use the momentum grid anytime I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I got off track. Let me get back on track.” I’ve used the momentum grid with clients any time they’re like, “I’m so struggling in this area. I can’t get forward momentum.” I’m like, “Not a problem. We’re just gonna lower it so you can’t fail so that we can get your momentum going again.” And once you get that forward momentum, you can then start, of course, adding and adding and adding until you’re back on track. And before you know it, you have accomplished so much more than if you had just stayed stuck in the goal and not done anything.

John: Momentum grid, Fire Nation. What is that goal? Now, make a list of your tiny action steps that will take you closer to achieving that goal and make it so simple that you just can’t fail. Get that initial momentum because I can tell you, Fire Nation, when you’re stuck, you’re stuck in the mud, and it’s getting that initial momentum that’s so hard. But just like that big boulder on top of a hill that won’t budget, once you do budget it and you get it rolling, you can’t stop that momentum because gravity takes over, baby, and it’s a great thing. So, Jennifer’s been dropping some value bombs. We have more coming up after we get back from thanking our sponsor. So, Jennifer, we’re back, and let’s just pretend, for a second, that we have clearly defined goals, but we can never find the time to work on those goals. What do we do?

Jennifer: This is such a great question. It happens to so many of us. I work with so many entrepreneurs, and we are just busy. We’ve got families. We’ve got friends. We might have aging parents, children, and then, on top of that, we’re growing businesses, employees, contractors, clients, vendors – all of these different things coming at us. It’s a very, very real problem. And so, if we’ve managed to take the time to get clear on our vision, we know where we wanna be, and we’re aligning with that vision every day – and it is so important – and I’ll drop a quick little value bomb here about your vision.

Once you’ve taken the time to create it, you want it to be no more than a page, a half to two-thirds of a page typed up. I keep mine by my nightstand because I want it to be the first thing I read every morning, the last thing I read at night. I always wanna be in alignment with, this is what I’m after, setting my intention. So, once you’ve got that intention, you’re setting it every day, you’re starting to live in alignment with that vision, you’ve got a clearly defined goal, but let’s say you’re still really busy. So, now, what do I do? Because I have very limited time to, now, start moving these goals forward. I like to use a very simple system to prioritize my time each day, and I call it the ABCs of productivity.

And A is probably the most important thing if you’re trying to move a goal forward. You’re A task is the task that steps you outside of your comfort zone. It might even bring up a little bit of fear. It’s the task that might be in your heart that you know you need to do that will move your goals forward, but for whatever reason, you’re procrastinating it. It might make you a little bit uncomfortable. It’s that push. And we might be tempted to think that this is something that might take an hour or two hours a day to complete, but that’s not true at all.

An A task can, very often, be a 10-minute, or less, day task that you do, but it’s one that really taps into something that you might be afraid of, or it taps into, how can I get to this goal the fastest way possible? And so, for even the busiest entrepreneur, I’m like, “You can find 10 minutes.” John, you can find 10 minutes. I can find 10 minutes. We can all find 10 minutes once a day to do one thing that’s gonna push those goals forward and get us closer to the vision statement. And so, when you’re just super, super busy, I say start with one A task a day, just one A task. But the trick is it’s really gotta be something that will move those goals forward. So, it might be that pitch that you know you need to make or that networking group that you know you need to sign up for or maybe that coach that you’re like, “Gosh, I know I need to work with them, but I’m kind of afraid.” You sign up. You can do all of these things in 10 minutes or less, and you know it will move you forward.

So, that’s the thing that I’ve used the most in my own business and life. That’s what I’ve used the most with my clients because we can always carve our 10 minutes a day. And if it’s something that you’re like, “Ooh, I’m a little afraid to do that,” perfect. That’s probably a perfect A task because it’ll set you outside your comfort zone, and it will help you to manifest those goals even faster.

John: Step out of your comfort zone and find 10 minutes, Fire Nation. Do one thing that’s gonna push your goals forward. Now, you said A, B, C, Jennifer. Did you go through all three of those?

Jennifer: I didn’t. So, an A task is the most important thing that’s gonna move a goal forward. B’s are gonna be things – so, when you’re sitting there, and you’re looking at your day – and these are all the things that I have to do. And so, I’ve actually created a daily planner, and, in my daily planner, when I sat down to design it, the first thing that, when I sat down to design it, I was like, “Oh, my gosh –,” that I was missing was my vision. And so, that’s at the beginning of the planner. And on the daily list, it’s like, “Okay, get in alignment with my vision. Be clear about what my goals are.” And now, when I sit down to map out my day, A, B, C, D, A is the thing that’s gonna move the goals forward.

B is something that I’ve got to do no matter what, but I’m going to do it. I’m gonna show up for my interview with John at Entrepreneur on Fire. I’m gonna show up for my client meetings. I’m gonna show up at the vendor meetings. So, those are B’s. They’re important, but you’re gonna do them no matter what. C’s are things that, in fact, can be put off until later. D are things you need to delegate, and delegate could be to your family. It could be to your partner. It could be to your staff. As entrepreneurs, we like to take everything on and control it all and never get any help.

And so, D is that reminder; what do I need to delegate to my staff? Even if it’s just saying to my husband, “Look, you need to cook dinner tonight. I need a little bit of help.” D is delegate, and E is actually eliminate. It’s those things that we need to say no to so that we can, again, slow down a little bit, make the time so that we can work on the goals that are the most important to us and that will manifest that vision even faster.

John: Overwhelm is so common in life. I mean, we all deal with it from time to time, but how can we deal with overwhelm, which is gonna happen, but still accomplish the goals in our life?

Jennifer: Yeah, great question, and I see this so often where overwhelm is very, very real. In fact, I haven’t suffered from overwhelm in so long. It was so funny. After the holidays this year, I came back after New Year’s, and I was sitting at my desk, and I was just like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so overwhelmed,” and I truly haven’t had to deal with it in so long I kinda forgot. And my husband, he came into my office, he’s like, “What’s wrong with you?” And I said, “I’m really, really overwhelmed,” and he’s like, “Well, maybe you should do your own brain dump exercise,” and I said, “Yes, that’s a great idea. I should totally do my own exercise.”

And I did it, and then I was like, “Oh, I feel so much better. I don’t feel overwhelmed anymore,” and I was like, “This is how my poor clients feel all the time.” And so, what I do – and you can do this, too, if you have a blank sheet of paper – is I take them through my brain dump exercise, and it’s super simple. And many of us are familiar with the brain dump where we take everything that’s in our head, and we put it on paper. We’re pretty good at that, but then what happens is we end up with a big list of a lot of crap on paper, and we still just don’t know what to do with it. Overwhelm is simply not knowing what to do next because our brains are not storage devices. They are thinking devices.

And so, we’ve got so much in there it literally clogs up the gears, and we just can’t think. And so, if you sit down and you get everything out on paper, that’s the first step. The second step is to use the ABC’s of productivity that we just talked about. So, you go through everything on that list, and you ABCDE it. So, now, you’ve got a list that’s prioritized. And, no, everything cannot be an A on your list. That is not allowed. Everything is not an A. And you go back through. You ABCDE it.

So, now, if you have five A’s, this is manageable. If we have five A’s, we can say, “All right, I’m gonna do this one first, this one second, this one third. These are the things that I need to delegate. These are the things I need eliminate.” And now, we can take action because it’s manageable. It’s out of our head. It’s my brain dump exercise, and it is the best thing for overwhelm. It’s something that you could do weekly. Some of you, you’re so overwhelmed, you might have to do this daily for a few days to just sorta get everything out of your head and on to paper. But then, after it’s out, it might become a weekly thing. It might become a monthly thing. And once you get really, really good at this, and if you start using the ABC’s of productivity every day, you’ll find that you’ll be so much more intentional with your time that you won’t ever even get into the state of overwhelm. But if you do, you know the exercise to do to get out of it super fast and get right back on track.

John: Do the brain dump, Fire Nation. You won’t regret it. And, Jennifer, we hear about the importance of mindset all the time, but break it down for us. How important is mindset, in actuality, in achieving our goals?

Jennifer: Mindset is everything. I like to think about it as, if you’re gonna get up, and you’re gonna go for a nice long hike, and you’re gonna pack a backpack, and you’re gonna put in that backpack – you’re gonna put water, and you’re gonna put a compass, and you’re gonna put things that are gonna help you along the journey. That’s basically your mindset. And when you get up, and you have your backpack, and you fill your backpack with rocks, and they’re super heavy, and this is the stuff like excuses that we’re making. This is the bad mindset. This is the bad self-talk. This is beating our self up. These are all the things that you’re basically putting in your backpack to go on this journey.

And, yes, you can make forward progress, but at what cost? It’s gonna be slower. It’s gonna be harder if you’re carrying around a backpack full of rocks, and that is basically what your mindset is. If you can shift your mindset first before you start taking action on your goals, it can make all the difference. I’m a huge believer – and I know you’ve seen this in your own life. What you put out is what you get back, and this is your mindset. If your mindset, when you get up every morning, says, “I’m so fat. I’m so ugly. I’m such a failure. I never have any time. My team are idiots. My partner is a moron –,” if these are the things that you’re putting in your backpack as you get up and you’re filling your mind with, then, guess what? That’s what you’re putting out. That’s what you’re gonna get back.

But if you can get up every day, and you can start to shift that mindset, and, instead, you’re feeding your mind with positive things – and what’s the most positive thing that you can put in your mind at the very, very beginning of the day? Your vision statement. If it’s sitting right there on your nightstand, and it’s this picture of your ideal life, and it’s the very first thing that you put into your mind every day, you’re feeding it with that positivity and that joy and that ease and that flow, and it makes such a difference in your mindset as you go through the day. It’s going to change everything. And you know this. Even Olympic athletes, the most successful people in business, it always comes back to your mindset. So, if you’re going through your day, and you just have all these terrible things that are filling your head, and you’re complaining about all of these things, that is what you’re putting out, and it’s usually not a surprise that that’s what you’re getting back.

So, I always suggest, this is the very first place to start. And again, right back to that vision statement. That’s why it’s so important, because you’re getting into the right mindset of the life and the business that you wanna create, and you’re setting your intentions so that you can stay in that mindset. And when you’re in that mindset, you’re gonna attract it so much faster.

John: Fire Nation, value bombs being dropped left and right here. And, Jennifer, you dropped so many of those, but just give us one key takeaway that you wanna make sure our listeners really get. Give us that final call to action that you have, and then we’ll say goodbye.

Jennifer: Absolutely. So, my final takeaway would be, invest the time in learning how to flush out a vision statement. It’s a simple thing, but it can be so hard because it is so simple we think, “Oh, well, I’ll do that later. I’ll do that later,” and we have a million reasons why we’re gonna procrastinate it. But like driving the car, if you take the time to learn how to do it the right way, it will serve you for a lifetime. And then once you’ve got it, really bring it into your day. Your goals will fall out so much faster, so much easier if all you did – okay, if all you did was get in complete alignment with your vision statement every single day, your goals would fall out so much easier.

But it does require an investment in time. It requires you to shift your mindset to say, “Hey, this is important. I’m gonna make some time for it. I’m gonna learn the right way to do it, and then I’m gonna incorporate it in my day-to-day life because this is the life I’m after.” That would be my final takeaway. Just take a little time and learn how to drive that car because you’ll never have to unlearn it again.

John: And what’s a final call to action?

Jennifer: Final call to action would be go create a vision statement. Go create a vision statement. I can even take you a little, short exercise. If you’re like, “Oh, I just don’t have the time to do this,” a little short exercise to go create a vision statement would be sit down, clean sheet of paper, eliminate all distractions, and write down a list of everything you complain about in a day. This is usually pretty easy for most people to do. Make a list of everything you complain about in a day. Be honest. Nobody’s looking at it.

Once you have that list in front of you, now, take it, go line by line, and flip every statement. Flip everything you’re complaining about to what you actually want it to be, take all those statements that you flipped. That’s the beginning of a vision statement right there. So, call to action would be just do that short exercise. Right away, you’ll have the beginning of a vision statement that you can at least have something to start with to start this process.

John: And how can we find out more about you?

Jennifer: Oh, you can visit me on my website, which is bestplannerever.com.

John: Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you’ve been hanging out with JD and JLD today. So, keep up the heat, and head over to eofire.com. Type Jennifer in the search bar, and her show notes page will pop right up. These are the best show notes in the biz, links to everything we’ve been talking about today. You know that. And, Jennifer, thank you for sharing your truth, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.