3 Tips To Stay On Track

Hello, and welcome to the podcast!

So glad that you're joining me. I want to say Happy New Year and welcome to the 100th episode of the Productive Therapist podcast!

Yes, I know - it's amazing. Thank you so much. No, stop, stop! I had to use that sound effect! It's kind of fun.

I've been recording this podcast since February of 2019, and I put out an episode every week, every Friday. So very happy to be to Number 100.

And today I want to share with you three tips to help you stay on track with your goals.

So the first one is to set up a regular review process. In my mind, being reminded of my goals regularly is the best way for me to stay on track. Here's what I do; three main things:

Every Monday morning, I review my quarterly goals, and then every Tuesday I review the business goals with my leadership team in our standing meeting.

And number three, I read my success letter once a month. And actually, if you're interested in that, I'll tell you more about it later. And I'll actually read you my success letter, but essentially what it is it's sort of part of my planning process where I write a letter at the beginning of the year as if the year had already ended and I had achieved all the most important goals. So it's sort of setting an intention for the year. I really enjoy doing that. I've done it several times, and this year I'm picking it back up again, and I'll read to you what I wrote for this year a little bit later, so that's number one: put your goals in front of you, set up a regular review process.

Number two: build in some accountability for me. I find that I need consistent accountability to fully reach my potential. And here are a few things that work for me: every other week I meet with my business coach; that's vital and I never miss a session every other week.

I also meet with my mastermind group, which has been super supportive, and I've got other episodes about mastermind groups, but I highly recommend them. The three factors of my success have been my business coach, my mastermind group, and just working hard in a consistent direction.

Number three: for accountability I participate in Focus Club, which is an accountability program that I run for therapists, and it helps you reach your big goals faster. There are all kinds of fun things that are built into the Focus Club.

There's a private community where we share our intention at the beginning of the week and then share our progress and our wins.

Towards the end of the week, we ask questions, we share resources, we do all kinds of fun things in there.

You can get connected with an accountability partner, so you can meet more often and know a little bit more about somebody else, what they're aiming towards, and then they can support you in figuring out how to get where you want to go.

All kinds of fun things built into the Focus Club, and we're actually opening up enrollment for that next week. It only opens once every three months, once per quarter, basically. And I would love to have you check that out if you're interested! Go to ProductiveTherapist.com/focus 

And if you're listening to this episode after January 11, go ahead and get on our email list and we'll let you know the next time Focus Club opens up.

But I participate in Focus Club as well. And one of the things that's most valuable about that for me is every other week we have work sessions where we just get on Zoom, we set our intentions, and then we mute our mics and we get to work.

And for about 45-50 minutes, we just focus on the most important tasks we've got, and then we come back, circle back, and then sort of give an update to each other. And I find that's really helpful, even though we're not directly talking throughout that time, and it's not a coaching sort of call. Being there with other people, it helps me stay focused and get things done. So I really like that.

Number three here is: adapt as needed. So the last two years have taught us that just about anything can happen, and it's not a bad idea to expect the best and prepare for the worst.

So don't feel bad if you need to adjust or even abandon some of your goals. To be perfectly honest, I changed or dropped many of my goals last year, and I didn't feel great about it, but it was actually what needed to happen. And then the things that I ended up being able to focus on and accomplish, they ended up being the right things. And some of those shifts and pivots were absolutely what should have happened.

So I recommend committing to your goals fully, but also practice holding them lightly so that if you don't reach your goal or like I said, if you abandon your goal, that doesn't mean you're a failure or you are not good enough - it doesn't mean any of those things. It just means that what you thought you wanted or what you knew in the beginning of the year might not have panned out the way it did. And that's okay. It's important to adapt as needed.

So the three tips here for helping you stay on track with your goals:

Number one, set up a regular review process, keep those goals in front of you.

Number two, build in some accountability. Almost everybody benefits from this and check out the Focus Club.

Number three, adapt as needed.

Actually, I don't think I've ever done this before, but I'm going to share with you my Success Letter for 2022, and it doesn't touch on every single one of my goals - business and personal - but it's sort of an overarching...just imagining if I had reached the end of the year and it had been an amazing year, even the best year yet. And what would that look like?

And what I'll do is I'll read this about once a month or so or whenever I feel like it really and then it inspires me and it's actually a way for me to see my goals in sort of a narrative format and then reviewing them in that way is kind of nice.

Okay, so here's my success letter for 2022:

"This has truly been the best year yet. I can absolutely say that I'm thriving and reaching my potential in both my business and personal life. I've been able to keep my weight consistently below 195lbs. I'm making better choices around nutrition and exercise. I subscribe to Thistle for easy access to healthy food, and that made a huge difference. I even hiked over 100 miles and the time in nature was exactly what I needed.

"Both of my businesses are more profitable than ever, and they're running smoothly without needing my attention daily. Everything is just humming.

"It's easier than ever to take vacations half days and make time for other spontaneous fun stuff as well.

"Productive Therapist has effective systems that run like clockwork with a leadership team that is empowered and absolutely rocking it. We doubled down on our existing programs and saw significant growth across the board, including a profit margin increase of 10%. Wow!

"Also, traveling to attend and sponsor five therapy-focused conferences was a blast.

"The rebrand for Intune Family Counseling finally came to life and it's perfection. I've stepped mostly out of the day-to-day operations of the practice and handed it over to my new super-competent executive director. What a great decision that was!

"The group practice is in a good place to be sold or continue running profitably for a long time.

"I also went to five amazing concerts this year, which was a definite highlight. There's nothing that thrills me quite like live music. In keeping with that theme. I also finished the Guitar Quest Online course, and I'm enjoying playing the guitar even more every day.

"I'm also continuing to work on my lettering skills and making fun graphics for the tiny book that I'm going to launch next year, or maybe the following.

"I also made time for many fun, silly and spontaneous adventures with my kids, creating memories and teaching them hopefully some valuable lessons along the way.

"Our community of friends has grown and feels more deeply connected and supportive than ever.

"This year was not without pain and challenges, but I have so much to be grateful for."

So there you go - that's the success letter that I wrote and I'm pretty pleased with it, pretty happy. And I'm going to review that on a regular basis and live that story.

So those are the three tips and my Success Letter. I hope you found that very helpful.

If you're interested in Focus Club, please come join us. All the information is at ProductiveTherapist.com/focus.

I hope you have an awesome day and keep listening to the podcast. Take care!