2025 Goal Setting for Success: A Step-by-Step Guide

Your Dream Business

In part two of my review and plan series, I provide a step-by-step guide to setting goals and creating a marketing plan for the year ahead. I’ll guide you through the importance of reviewing past performance, setting SMART goals, and breaking them down into actionable steps. I also cover the significance of creating a consistent content calendar and leveraging various marketing channels to reach your target audience in 2025.

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Transcript

There is a reason why some of the most successful business owners in the world goal set. That reason? Because it works. Because having a direction that you are going in is so powerful. Not only does it give you something to aim for, but it also really helps to keep you focused. One of the things that business owners struggle with, and I'm sure you have too at some point, is the shiny object syndrome. It's so easy to get distracted by other things, to think, oh, that's the thing I should be doing, or that's the direction I should be going in. But when you have a clear, set path that you are heading down, and it's one that aligns with you, and it's one that you want so much, it is going to help you stay focused, stay on track, stay on goal, and keep you motivated throughout the whole year. And that's what I'm teaching you to do in today's episode of the podcast. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast. As always, I am your host, Theresa Heath Wang, and I am very grateful that you have decided to join me today. I never take that lightly. I am so honored that you are spending your time with me. So thank you. I appreciate you being here today. We are [00:02:00] talking about goal setting for 2025. This is part two in a two part. podcast episode that I've done. The first part was episode 382. So if you haven't listened to that, then I would suggest you go and take a listen to that first. And then this is the second part. And to go along with both of these parts, there is a download. So if you go to teresaheathwaring. com forward slash 384, the numbers. then you will find a link to the download. If you listen to episode 382 and you click the download there, then it's the same download. You don't need to re download it again. Okay. So in part one, we focused on reviewing your 2024 and some of the questions that I ask myself every single year. And in this part, we're going to be looking forward. We're going to be looking at how do we actually goal set? What are the goals that we set? How do we do deep dives on and how do we plan our marketing for the rest of the year? So again, get the workbook if you [00:03:00] haven't got the workbook, because basically I'm walking you through what is in this workbook for you to do yourself. So the very first thing I talk about is setting the goals. Now, when I do. this for my clients and my members. I take them through a number of different activities. One is the questions that I asked in part one, episode 382, which was reviewing 2024. The next thing I tend to do with them is go through a Wheel of Life exercise, so that we can look at where things are right now and where their life is right now. And then I actually took them through a meditation. So I did a future them meditation, a visualization of thinking forward, what will life look like at the end of 2025. And then I use all three of those things to help us start to set goals. Because when you have all this information kind of in front of you, you're able to see Some of the things that kept coming up, and even if you don't do the meditation, you don't do the [00:04:00] Wheel of Life, you can go back and look at your 2024 review, and you'll start to see, actually I didn't do that, and that's important, I'd like to make sure I do that, or I did do this, but I'd like to improve on it. This is where you're able to come up with your goals. I normally suggest that people have anywhere between 4 and 12. goals for the year. I wouldn't have more than 12 and I probably wouldn't have less than four. Sometimes people think, well, I've just got one goal to make money and that's fair enough, but actually there are some other goals that you can put in there. And in terms of the goals, you really do want to try and think big and think ahead and put some kind of dreams behind it. You don't want the goal to be like, yeah, I'll definitely get that. You want it to push you a little bit. And in the workbook, one of the things I show you is the smarter framework from Michael Hyatt. We've had Michael on the podcast before. We'll link to that episode. It's one of the best episodes or one of the most [00:05:00] downloaded episodes, if you haven't heard it. And maybe you want to just. hear it again, then we will link to that in the show notes, but basically his smarter goals go through things like specific that it needs to be simple, sensible, significant, measurable, meaningful, and motivational actionable. Start the goal with an action verb to be verb. Risky. Don't make it too easy. You need it to be, to stretch you. Key times. It needs to have a deadline, a time trigger, or a frequency. Exciting. You need to get excited when you think about it. And relevant. Make it appropriate for your season of life. And this is super, super important. And actually in last week's episode, if you didn't catch that with Nikki, we talk about seasons of life and how that affects us and our business and what success looks like for us. So there's no point in you saying you're going to work really hard in this season. You have got other things in your life like [00:06:00] children or aging parents or something that is going to get in the way. Maybe this point in your life is not the time that you can do that. Maybe this point in your life is exactly the time you can do it. So bear in mind, where are you in your world and then start to write your goals. What do you want to achieve? I tend to write personal and business goals every year. In fact, I tend to find it easier to write the business goals than I do the personal ones, but it should be things like Well, not should be. My stuff is like how much money I want to earn. Like, how much do I want to grow my audience by? Do I want to focus on something new, like doing YouTube that I've talked about before? Do I want to travel new places? So, one of my goals last year was to go to new places with my daughter and my husband. And I ended up traveling to the Philippines, to Japan, to Canada, and America twice. All new places. So that was amazing. So totally [00:07:00] tick that goal off. It was awesome. And that's probably not going to be one of my goals for this year because the season I'm in at the moment is, I want to really focus in on making some money and I have a new product that's coming out. So I need to focus on getting that right. So yeah, so write down your goals. Like I said, in the workbook, I've actually given you spaces for eight. You don't need eight. You can have more. You can have less. It's entirely up to you. Then the key bit is once you've decided your goal, I've given you a sheet called the goal deep dive. Now I'm going to go through it briefly here, but really this is kind of where you do want to get this download because it breaks it down on a sheet and I give you an example. So the things that we look at with the goal deep dive, and this is how you get from having a goal to actually how on earth am I going to achieve it. So the first thing on the sheet is your goal summary, which is basically the thing that you've just written down. Then I get you to break this down into three mini actions. So taking that big goal, what three actions could you break this down into? So the example I give in the workbook is [00:08:00] if you want to build your email list to a thousand subscribers by the end of 2025. So the three mini actions I've put down is you could run Facebook ads through the year. I could have three different lead magnets and I could make sure that I post about joining my email list. Then the next step is take each of those three actions and give me one next step that you can take. This is where we're turning that goal into the actions. And one of the things that is so key and important here is a goal is great. But you can't always guarantee that you are going to achieve that goal. What you can guarantee is the action you take. So for every goal, we want an action attached to it. Let's say your action, your goal is to get a thousand people on your list. You can't guarantee that you're going to get a thousand people on your list. What you can guarantee is what actions you can take to help that goal. become a thing. So if by the end of [00:09:00] quarter one, you have taken some of these actions and it is not giving you the result you wanted, or it's given you a better result than you wanted. Now, you know, either I need to change up some of the actions or I need to do more of what I'm currently doing. And you can pat yourself on the back, regardless of that number of people on your email list, because well done, you took the action and now you have something to do. Measure and you have something to review. So this is why taking the goal to the action is so, so very important. So next three steps. So in my example that I've given you in the workbook, I talk about that you're going to, or one of the things I'm going to do is plan when I will run ads and what kind to run the other action. The other next step from the action that was have three lead magnets might be to review your lead magnets and come up with some new ideas. Next step for the action that was make sure I post about joining my list. I will add posting to my email list to maybe my habit tracker. [00:10:00] Okay, next thing is how will I know when I've achieved it? Well, this is a pretty simple one because it's basically I'll know because I've hit a thousand. And then how will I feel when I've achieved it? And this is really important and it maybe sounds a little bit woo, but honestly, when it comes to, we don't like, We don't want a thousand people on our email list just for the sake of having a thousand people. It's to do something. It's to get somewhere because the more people we have on our list, the more chances that we can grow our business. So how will I feel? And take a minute to think about this. How will I feel when I've done that? So I've put here in the example, I'll feel proud and happy that I'm growing my business. The next section, which is key, is how might I self sabotage? Now, setting your goals is great. Setting your actions is even better. Sitting down and giving some time to how you might mess it up yourself is key because whether we like it or not, self sabotage is a thing. And I should [00:11:00] imagine that when you reviewed 2024, there was probably some stuff on there that you were like, Oh, I could have tried harder or I could have done something different. That's why we do this work preemptive. That's why I am asking you to sit and think how might you self sabotage some of this. And then, the next box to it is, how do I prevent this? Like, what can I do to prevent this? So, I've given three examples on this worksheet. So, I think I don't have enough budget for ads. Well, my, how will I prevent this? I will make sure I keep money aside for ads no matter how little. This is an investment. The self sabotage in terms of the lead magnets, not posting back my email list, worrying that I might be annoying people. How can I prevent this? I'll remind myself that I'm in business and I'm there to serve, add it to a habit tracker. And then I might find myself procrastinating while trying to create new lead magnets. So how will I prevent this? I will break it down into smaller tasks and give myself a reward as I do it. And then the last section on this deep dive for your [00:12:00] goals is where are you starting today? In business, it's really easy to get distracted by other people because when other people have successes and share it, which is amazing. And I celebrate them. Sometimes we can find that we compare ourselves and think, Oh my gosh, they just celebrated getting a hundred thousand people on their list and I'm trying to get a thousand or whatever it might be. So the reason I've put this last section in is because I want you to remember where you started and celebrate the move that you've had. If you've not read the book, The Gap and the Gain, I highly recommend it. It's a really, really good book and it really helps you realize how far you've come. And instead of at the end of the year going, well, I've only got 900 subscribers, not a thousand. And therefore I failed. You'll look at the, the gain that you've had. And in my example, on the worksheet I've put, my list is currently 350 people and I have one lead magnet, which I don't post often. So. And then when you're doing your review, either quarterly or at the [00:13:00] end of the year, you can look, okay, that's where I started. Have I improved? And you can celebrate that improvement no matter how big it is or how small it is. Okay, that's how we deep dive into the goals. The other things that I've included on the workbook for you is then going into KPIs. I've just given you a sheet where you can basically track numbers. Some of the numbers you might want to track are things like the size of your email list, your sales, how many, uh, If you do things like clarity calls or sales calls, how many of them you have and what your conversion is, you might want to track things like your social media followers, your engagement. Obviously, I would track things like my podcast downloads. If you've got YouTube, you can track that. So I've just included a sheet for KPIs just so that you can track them throughout the month, uh, each month for each, for the year. And then we talk about marketing. I've broken it down into a very simple marketing funnel of free content that is short and long, gated content that is [00:14:00] your stuff that's in your list or maybe on a Facebook group, and then sales. And what I want you to do is I want you to make a note of what you're planning on doing for each of these sections, because there is a reason why all of the people that you look up to Short form content, long form content, gated content, and then they sell something. It's because it works, and yes, it takes a bit of work, but unfortunately, no longer are we just business owners, we're content creators. On the form, I have given you space to decide what you're going to do from a social media point of view, what you're going to do from a long form point of view, What you're going to do from an email point of view, i. e. when you start emailing or if you are emailing, how often are you going to do it? What you have from a lead magnet point of view. So I would list what lead magnets I have. And if I want any more, I've also included a section for other people's audiences, because if you've listened to me for a while, you'll know this is a big, big [00:15:00] section that I talk and teach on. And then the last section is just other. So anything that I haven't included that you're doing, it could be something like networking. It could be events, whatever that is. But the aim of this is to go through and list what you're going to do and then list how often you're going to do it. I want you to make a commitment to yourself because as we know, That horrible word consistency really is the most crucial thing here, but each of those things, how often are you going to post on social media? How many emails are you going to send out? How often are you going to blog or podcast or do a video on YouTube? I want a slight kind of word of warning here. If you're saying monthly for long form content and email, I would really highly encourage you to try and do more. But on the other hand, I'm also going to say, I don't want you to set the bar really high and then fail and then beat yourself up. If you've not done a blog before, if you've not, [00:16:00] if you started YouTube or if you're starting something and you're like, I'd love to do it once a week, but actually you're just not sure, then go for every other week. And then as you know, and as it. helps and, and as it gets easier, then you can up it. I don't want you to fail. I do want you to do something more than once a month because once a month really is not very often. It's 12 times a year and it would be great to try and do more than that. However, I don't want you to set yourself up to fail. And then the last thing I do is look at the first six months and decide you've got all of the marketing that you're going to do consistently as you go through. But some of those things like creating a new lead magnet. Or if you launch, which obviously I do, when are you going to launch? When are you planning on maybe putting a new product out there? Whether you're planning on putting a new lead magnet out there. So it just take a minute to go through the first six months and just sort of pencil in when I'm going to do things. And then at a later date, I then go through and do it more detail. And I actually do it in Asana and we [00:17:00] really plan out what's going to happen. Okay, this was a short and sweet episode again, and I really was flying through that document. So if you haven't got the download, obviously you can take notes as I was talking. That's not a problem. You don't have to get the download, but the download will certainly save you some time. The download is available at TeresaHeathWearing. com forward slash three eight four. I really hope you've enjoyed this episode. I really hope that you are ready to go and get 2025. However, that looks to you and achieve what you want to achieve. I am excited that I am here doing it with you and I have got you every single step of the way. Have an amazing week and I will see you next week.