Transcript
Episode: Your Midyear Goal Rescue Plan
Michael Hyatt: You were very gracious and you said to me, “Look, Dad, if you feel like you can’t do it, you can’t do it, and that’s fine.” But the next morning I got an email from you and I want to read this because I saved it here in Evernote and it’s really powerful. Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.
Megan Hyatt Miller: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.
Michael Hyatt: And this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed at life. Well, guess what, guys? The year is halfway over. Some of you have made huge leaps towards accomplishing your goals. Others of you, maybe not so much, you’re struggling to get enough attention to your goals. You want to achieve the goal, but with so many competing demands, you kind of run out of gas, and you’re just not making the progress you want to make. Well, we’ve got some good news because we’re going to talk about that very problem. No shame, no judgment. We’re just going to fix it. Megan, are you ready for this?
Megan Hyatt Miller: Yes. I’m so excited about this because at the time of this recording, it’s early June, we just made it, those of us who have kids who are school-aged through the hell month of May, which is just like, it’s like December, so in a way, June is kind of like January part two, sort of like our just natural reboot time of the year. I don’t know about you guys, but I mean, I really feel like I need this. There are some of my goals that I’m off track on, some that I’ve made good progress on, but what I know from my past experience is it, the second half of the year is always, always my most productive half, and there’s plenty of time left on the clock to do all the things that matter to you, that you’ve set your mind to.
Michael Hyatt: Yeah, this is a little bit of a reframe, but in a sense, the fact that there’s less time will help you.
Megan Hyatt Miller: Oh, yeah.
Michael Hyatt: I think one of the challenges, when you start out in January, you tell a story to yourself, you think, “Oh, I’ve got 12 months. No reason to get too excited about those goals now. I can do them later.” But now, all of a sudden, you’re beginning to feel the heat, so you see that deadline’s looming, and so this can actually act in your favor if you embrace it, and see the value of it. Today we’re going to be talking about basically four steps that you can use to rescue the goal. Okay, so think of this as a goal rescue plan. Let’s start with step one. Meg?
Megan Hyatt Miller: Well, step one is simply to recommit. To do this, you want to review your key motivation. Maybe you didn’t carry this forward in your planner and you have to go back to your first Full Focus Planner of the year, or maybe you have carried it forward, but just look at what those key motivations were for the goals that you set at the beginning of the year. What did you put down on those goal detail pages? Why were these goals important to you? When you read those reasons, ask yourself, “Do those reasons still resonate with me? Are there other reasons?” Maybe things have changed and maybe there are even more compelling reasons than the ones that you came up with in January. Then ask yourself, “Okay, can I just recommit to this?” because sometimes we lose track of things because we forget the why.
This is something I really can struggle with is I get sort of just swept up in all the activity of pursuing a goal ,and maybe I don’t like it very much, like I have a goal this year to manage my expenses that I have in my personal budget, to hit that monthly expense target 11 out of 12 months for the year, and that looks like some tedious tracking and things like that. If I forget why I’m doing that, because actually, I have some pretty big things in mind with regard to saving and investing and whatever else, then it can just feel like busywork, but when I reconnect to that why, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s why I’m doing it. That’s so worth it.” It enables me to recommit to the goal. That’s step one, recommit. That’s always our first line of defense.
Michael Hyatt: Okay, I’ve got to tell a story here about recommitting because there are times when you want to quit, you got into a goal, and now you feel like, “Man, I’m too much over my head,” or, “I’m too far beyond my capabilities,” or maybe just life circumstances have happened and you feel like, “I just can’t do this.” I want you to think back Megan to this was back in December of 2012.
Megan Hyatt Miller: ‘Kay.
Michael Hyatt: Okay, so I had committed to run a half marathon, the Country Music Half Marathon. It was a goal for that year and I wanted to bail on it because I’d been sick and I’d had an incredibly busy week leading up to it, but I had a whole team that I was leading. They were going to run this with me. I said to you, I said, “I really feel like I need to bail on this.” We were running, as you may recall, this for New Hope Academy. You were very gracious and you said to me, “Look, Dad, if you feel like you can’t do it, you can’t do it, and that’s fine.” But the next morning I got an email from you and I want to read this because I saved it here in Evernote and it’s really powerful.
You said, “Hey, Dad, I’ve been thinking about our conversation about the marathon earlier this evening, and I have a couple of thoughts I wanted to share with you. I completely understand why it seems like a reasonable decision to opt-out of the race this year. However, as I’ve thought about the implications, I think it might be worth reconsidering. I am concerned that backing out now creates a situation where people may question, even subconsciously, whether or not they can trust you. After all, you are the reason that most of your employees signed up to run the race in the first place. Without you, many of them wouldn’t have had the vision to think it was possible. They’re following your leadership. I think it could strongly undermine the faith they have in you and could be incredibly demoralizing.
“I also think it gives people permission to back out. When you promote the marathon next year or for that matter, try to enroll your people in any initiative, I think backing out now could really work against you. It would cause people to doubt your sincerity and commitment to them and the cause you are promoting. I don’t think that’s what you’re after. Bottom line, I don’t think this decision is in alignment with who you are. You’re about integrity, keeping your commitments, and showing up. I think you could walk the course and finish by 12:00 PM, minimizing the physical impact dramatically, and still allowing you to get out in time to do what you need to do. I realize it would be a big sacrifice, especially in light of the schedule you’ve had this week and you being sick, but I think it’s worth it. I might be completely misguided in my sense of the situation. Regardless of what you do with my input, I love you and respect you deeply. It just seemed like the risk here was much greater if I didn’t say anything.”
Well, I’ll tell you what happened when I read that note from you, Megan, I immediately recommitted, and I just thought you reminded me of what was at stake. I think if we’re going to recommit to anything, and you talked about reading the key motivations, this is why those are so important to identify when we’re the most motivated at the beginning of the year, to write down what’s at stake, both if we fulfill it and if we don’t fulfill or don’t accomplish that goal. This brought me back and got me really centered on my key motivation and what was at stake and you know what? I ran that and I felt great and that afternoon I got on an airplane, flew all the way to California, felt fantastic.
Megan Hyatt Miller: Wow. I love that. I love that story because I think we’ve all been in situations where we just lost track of what was at stake. It’s really helpful if we have somebody on the outside who can remind us of that, or if we can go back to those key motivations, like you said, so we can recommit.
But that’s not always possible. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we’re just not able to connect with our original passion, our why for the goal, and so then step two is to revise the goal. Sometimes the reason that we can’t imagine ourselves recommitting is because there’s something that if we were able to revise it, it would all of a sudden go from maybe being in our delusional zone, as we talk about with Your Best Year Ever, to our discomfort zone.
Remember, we want this to be in our discomfort zone. We don’t want it to be delusional. We don’t want to look at it and just kind of roll our eyes and think, “There’s no way that’s remotely possible.” We want to think, “Yeah, that would be challenging. I’m not quite sure how I’ll do that, but I’m game to go for it.” That’s what we want. For example, you could adjust the size of the goal. You could adjust the timeline, all kinds of things here that enable you to bring something from a delusional zone, which is usually what causes us to think we can’t recommit to something, back into a discomfort zone. I’ve done that with a couple of my own goals lately and found, “Okay, I feel like that makes a lot of sense. I feel like if I can just have two or three more months to do that, yeah, okay, I can imagine doing that.” It really helps me not give up on the goal and instead revise it if I wasn’t able to recommit.
Michael Hyatt: Yeah, so another example that I’ve got here, one of the goals I wrote down back in December for this year was to go on a one-month sabbatical. This year, we wanted to go to Italy, so we were super excited about that. We were planning it. We had one of your sisters that was going to go with us. Then the war in Ukraine broke out. Now, frankly, if I knew then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have changed things, but I just didn’t feel comfortable at the time going to Europe, so we revised the plan. We said, “Hey, we can still do a one-month sabbatical, but instead, let’s go to Peru,” so that’s exactly what we’re doing. Basically, the same idea, but we’re able to revise it and get over the hump ’cause we were feeling a lot of hesitation about moving forward. Once we shifted everything to Peru, bam, we were back on track.
Megan Hyatt Miller: Well, and I think one of the ways you can get at, “Okay, what revisions do I need to make?” is by being committed to the outcome. The big outcome, for example, in your case, that was taking a one-month sabbatical. That’s really what you wanted as a time of rest, a time of rejuvenation. You’ve done this for many, many years. The destination was not really the outcome. That was just how you were going to accomplish, or one of the ways you could accomplish the outcome, and so it’s important to think about where you need to be rigid and where you need to be flexible. There’s usually more places that you can be flexible that enable you to remain committed to the outcome than you might initially think and just play around with it a little bit. I think so many of us, myself included, tend to go to, “I’m either doing it or I’m not doing it,” this really kind of binary thinking.
Michael Hyatt: Oh, definitely.
Megan Hyatt Miller: It’s not really like that in goal-setting.
Michael Hyatt: No, it’s really not. I had another goal, too. Just to keep it real, there was another goal that I came up with in December that I was super excited about, and that was we were going to renovate our vacation home. We had bought this property. It wasn’t in great shape and so we decided we were going to renovate it. Gail literally had worked on it almost a year with a contractor with an architect and we had big plans. We were ready to rock and roll and then we started to kind of get a whiff of inflation and of the possibility of a recession and we thought, “This may not be the right time.”
Now, I don’t know to this day if we’re going to have a recession or we’re not going to have a recession. Most of the experts I read seem to suggest that we might, but nobody’s really sure, I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but instead of just chunking that goal, or throwing it away, we said, “What if we do a more modest redecoration? Instead of a renovation, let’s just do a redecoration.” We’re well into that project now and that’s essentially going to get us much of what we want to achieve with a renovation, anyway, but all we were able to do, or all we did in that situation was to revise the goal.
Megan Hyatt Miller: Yep, I love that. I think, again, flexibility is your friend here. Make friends with flexibility and it will enable you to accomplish a lot more.
Okay. Well, sometimes when you can’t recommit yourself and then you think about revising and you can’t revise the goal, you actually need to replace it because sometimes there are enough changes that have happened in your life, or your motivations, or whatever, that your original goals just don’t make sense any longer. This happened to me last year when I had a rare heart attack. I had a goal, to run a Tough Mudder, to complete one of those events, and if you know anything about, those are really intense. My cardiologist said, “Hey, you can definitely work out. I know that’s really important to you, but we can’t have you be out there doing extreme sports, okay?”
That is a pretty dramatic change in my life that caused me to replace that and so I ended up replacing that with, much less exciting in some ways, in other ways not, completing a cardiac rehab program that enabled me now, a year later, I’m back to doing what I was doing a year ago. I feel great. I’m in the best shape of my life, all kinds of good stuff. I had to allow myself the space to say, “I may just need to replace this goal because it’s not relevant to me anymore,” which is part of the SMARTER framework.
Michael Hyatt: This usually happens when life’s circumstances change and suddenly makes the goal irrelevant. That’s fine. I guess the thing that we want to make sure that you don’t experience is goal shame. This isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing, because life happens, and when you set your goals back in December or January, you’re looking through a glass darkly. You can’t know how it’s going to play out exactly. You’re just doing your best. A part of the future, it happens when we create it, but sometimes there are things that are beyond our control that happen that force us to, as you said, Megan, be flexible and to adapt.
That’s where this replace option comes in, so if something is suddenly irrelevant because change in life circumstances, no problem. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t hesitate. Just replace it with something that’s meaningful now because here’s the truth, it’s not the achievement of the goal that is going to make you happy, it’s progress toward a goal that’s going to make you happy, so you’ve got to have something out there that you’re working toward because that’s the essence of growth. Goals are really not about what you accomplish, but who you become in the process. Megan, I’ve seen so much growth on your part this last year after suffering a really tough year in your health last year, but now, like you said, I mean, you’re kind of the picture of health, but all that happened because things changed and you were able to reframe it and see it as a positive thing that got you toward ultimately what your best goal was, which was to be healthy
Megan Hyatt Miller: Well, okay, so we’ve given you three steps that you can take with your goals as you’re looking for this midyear reboot, so you can recommit yourself, you can revise your goal, or you can replace it, but regardless of which one of those three steps you choose, you need to resource your goal because one reason oftentimes that we’re not making progress on our goals is that we don’t adequately resource the goal to begin with, right? For example, you could not allocate enough time. This is oftentimes, as we look back at this halfway point of the year, this is what we find, we just didn’t allocate enough time, or we didn’t put it in our schedule to do the work that is necessary to make progress on that goal, or we didn’t spend our money strategically. Maybe there was something that we needed to buy or invest in some way to enable us to make progress on that goal.
Oftentimes what we see is, and have experienced, just quite frankly, is that we didn’t get the right help. We were trying to do something that was new to us, that we didn’t have either the skills or the expertise in, and we just kind of come up empty-handed. There are some really good options about this. We are passionate about coaching of all kinds here at Full Focus and coaching comes in many forms, so it could be that you just need to go to YouTube. Dad, I know that you are an avid fisherman and you were forever asking questions in your Facebook groups, you’re watching YouTube videos on which lure to use in this case, and something else. That’s one of the ways that you don’t let resources become an obstacle to something that is a really important hobby for you. Want to talk about that for a sec?
Michael Hyatt: Yeah, there’s lots of times that I’ve hired a coach and got some additional help that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. Certainly, YouTube is a way to do it that’s really inexpensive. Man, there are YouTubes on everything. I installed automated lighting in my house, not because I have any electrical experience, I didn’t, but watching YouTube videos, I learned how to install a Lutron system. I only got shocked once, but I got it up and running and I’m enjoying it to this day. Nick, our producer, just challenged me to put some automated blinds in, but I’m going to think I’m going to leave that to the experts, but that’s going to be cool.
But another example, I wanted to learn to play Native American flute, so I hired an instructor. I hired Johnny Lipford, who’s an amazing Native American flute player, and so I met with him every week via zoom, and I learned how to play. It was amazing. Last summer, I took three months off for the summer, and I really wanted to up my guitar game, so I played guitar for a long, long time, since I was 14, but I thought, “I’m at a place in my life where I’d like to get back to learning the guitar.” By the way, turns out there are gazillion people out there over the age of 50 that suddenly discovered the guitar. I have a friend that works for Gibson guitar company and I was asking him if he could get me a special deal on a guitar. He said, “Dude, no way. There’s a six-month wait on almost all of our guitars right now because guys like you rediscovered the guitar and they’re buying them all up so the kids don’t have anymore, so thanks for that.”
Well, at any rate, I’ve hired coaches to do fly fishing. I’ve hired executive coaches, I’ve had an executive coach of one type or another for the last 20 years. Why? Because trying to learn a lot of this stuff is the slow, dumb way to do it, right? I mean, why should you make all your own mistakes when you can go to school on somebody else’s mistakes? I tried for years to try to tie a fishing knot and I’d see my dad do it and he did it effortlessly and I’d always try it. And I always felt like I gunked it up and I was a little bit embarrassed, so I got on YouTube one Saturday and I started looking at all the fishing knot-tying videos. I found the ultimate one and I am a Zen master when it comes to tying fishing knots because I got outside help. I think the same thing is true for business, the same thing is true for fitness. Whatever you want to learn, coaching can help you go further faster.
Megan Hyatt Miller: Yeah. Well, when people occasionally will ask me, “Okay, what’s one of the biggest lessons that you learned from your dad?”, when I think back to being a kid, the thing that I saw you doing, and this is way before YouTube, and this is way before a lot of things that we have now that we take for granted, like video courses, you were reading books and learning all this stuff. What I learned was that if what is standing between you and what you want is some information, all you got to go do is find the right person, the right expert that can bridge that gap. At that time, what that really looked like for you was books. You were just reading, reading, reading, reading, you would go to conferences, whatever you could get your hands on, and I think that drive in you to not be limited by the extent of your own expertise enabled you to accomplish so much.
Then fast forward, here we are now, I think that’s really one of the big drivers be behind why we created a small business owner coaching program with Business Accelerator, because we knew from our own experience that we didn’t want people to have to learn the hard way, to have to learn the slow and painful way, we really wanted to help accelerate people in their journey to growing their business and avoid so many of the costly and painful mistakes that we have experienced in the past and that they can circumvent jumping on our shoulders of things that we’ve learned, so I love that with Business Accelerator.
But whatever you’re focused on in terms of your annual goals, ask yourself the question, “Have I adequately resourced this? Is there an expert,” again, there’s the gamut in terms of what you can invest “that would bridge the gap and enable me to accomplish this goal?” A few weeks ago, we talked about our personal trainer, Lisa Hiscock, who does group fitness training online, and she is fantastic. There’s so many people like her that if you have a health goal that could really make the difference for you between whether in the next six months you accomplish that or you don’t accomplish that, just don’t tell yourself the lie that you have to do it all on your own because you really don’t. There have never been more coaches of all kinds for all areas of need that you may have to allow you to do things that you want to do in your life.
Michael Hyatt: Okay, so let me just share one thought about business coaching. Whether or not I learned to play the Native American flute probably didn’t have a lot of consequence. There’s not a legion of fans out there who are waiting to hear from me on the Native American flute, or on the guitar. But business, if you’re running a business, the odds are against you. You’ve got to get help. Based on the Department of Commerce in the US, 80% of the businesses that start this year, about a million businesses will start in the US this year, 80% of those will be out of business in five years. Of the 20% that survive, 80% of those will be out of business in the next five years.
If you do the math on that, it means you’ve got a 4% chance of surviving 10 years as a business owner, so wouldn’t make sense to get the kind of help you need in order to not only survive, but to actually make that dream of owning a business and running a successful business come true? Because I think for what a lot of people discover when they get into business for themselves is their dream has become their nightmare. Then all of a sudden, the thing that they thought was going to enable them to get out from under somebody else’s leadership and run the show, now all of a sudden, they’re working for the worst, the most impressive, the most demanding boss they’ve ever met, and when they look at the mirror, it’s them.
Business coaching can help you get further faster, can give you sort of a insurance policy against failure. I mean, obviously you got to do the work, but to have a coach that’s been there before, that can help you navigate through all the challenges and through the landmines that are out there, and there are a lot of them, things that you don’t know can crop up and put you out of business, but business coaching helps with all of that.
Thankfully, we have a wonderful business coaching program called Business Accelerator. It’s designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses and what starts really with what we call a business growth coaching call, where you talk with one of our business growth consultants, it’s a free call for 45 minutes where they focus exclusively on you. This is not somebody that has an agenda in terms of trying to get you to do something you don’t want to do, but it’s somebody who can provide an objective perspective and give you the help you need. They’ll try to dial in whether you join our program or not. They’ll try to dial in and give you some real help, some real takeaways that you can implement immediately, and you could do that. You could register for that free call by going to leadto.win/call. One of our business growth consultants will talk with you. If they feel like you’re a good fit for our program, they’ll invite you to join it. But again, no obligation, it’s not a sales call. It’s really designed to help you. You owe it to yourself to give this a shot.
Megan Hyatt Miller: Especially if one of the goals that you feel like you’re off track of is a business goal this year, maybe you set an aggressive goal for your profit this year, or your top-line revenue growth, or a new product that you want to bring into the market, and you’re just struggling with it, maybe it’s time for some outside help, so whatever area of your life it’s in, whether it’s your health, your business, your relationships, where you feel like you’re just not making the progress you want, I just want you to consider this last step, step four, resourcing. Get yourself the resources that you need to accomplish your goals. It’s not too late and you don’t have to do it alone.
Michael Hyatt: Okay, as we bring this to a close, let’s just review. We’ve said that half the year is all you need to achieve your goals if you follow these four steps. Step number one, recommit if you possibly can. Get re-energized, get reconnected with your motivations, and recommit. Step number two, revise. Maybe it’s a small tweak, maybe it’s a bigger tweak, but that’s probably all you need to accomplish. Most of your goals that you’re struggling with is a revision step. Number three, replace. If the original goal no longer makes sense, fine, remove it and replace it with something that’s relevant now. Then regardless, step number four, resource the goal. Give it the time, the financial commitment, if necessary, the attention that it needs for you to achieve it. Megan, any final thoughts?
Megan Hyatt Miller: Well, I just think it’s easy to be discouraged midway through the year and think, “Ugh, I’m just really off course. Maybe there’s not enough time left. Maybe I should just focus on what’s in front of me.” I just want to encourage you guys, don’t buy the lie. There is plenty of time left on the clock. Especially if you’re a business owner, you’re probably naturally geared toward making the most of a limited amount of time. Let that work for you. Follow the steps that we’ve outlined here today and get yourself back on track. It’s easier than you think and it’s more rewarding than you think to make the most of these last six months of the year, so I’m excited. I’m excited for myself. I’m excited for you, to hear what you accomplish because there’s a lot at stake here in the last two quarters of the year.
Michael Hyatt: Okay, guys, that’s the goal rescue plan. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Hope you found this helpful. Until next time, lead to win.