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How do you feel about your current goal setting practice? How about the ways that you’re currently measuring the success and growth within your business? If it’s anything like mine, it’s almost always evolving and changing. In today’s episode I’m sharing about a mindset shift, goal setting  and metrics strategy that will help you create SUSTAINABLE change, set goals with more ease and joy, and also allow you to feel more EMPOWERED as you think about the direction that your business is growing.

I can’t wait for you to dive into today’s minisode and I’d love to hear your takeaways! 

Share yourself listening into this episode on IG and tag me @heykristamarie — I can’t wait to shout you out! 

XO

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READ THE FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hey there, christa, here I’m excited to intro you into today’s mini-sode. Sometimes we don’t have 20-30 minutes to dive into a topic, but we just want something short that can help us to shift our perspective and to see things from a different light, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do in today’s episode. So I’m excited for you to dive in and I’d love to hear your takeaways. Let’s go.

As entrepreneurs, we are always chasing goals. We’re driven to succeed and sometimes because of that, we fall into a trap of sometimes chasing the numbers right or the stats, or like the success that we want to see. And what I mean by that is that sometimes our goals that we have turn into numerical goals right, like, for example, you know, when I talked to other business owners, they’re like oh, I want to book 10 new clients this year, or I want to make X amount of money, or you know, whatever that like number numerical metric might be, I want to have this amount of followers right. And while having those goals I think are helpful, today I want to re-flip the script. I want to talk about how we can tweak those goals in order to kind of better serve us and to give us more clarity around the actions that we actually need to be taking in order to hit those goals. So, having recently felt the pressure of this, I knew that something needed to change. I was in that similar boat where I was chasing numbers. I was chasing metrics, you know, I was every month tracking my numbers. How many followers did I end the month with? How many? You know, like, what were my podcast episode stats? Like you know, how many likes was I getting on things like. I was tracking numbers, which, don’t get me wrong, is really helpful.

I think that this is a tool that we can all use as business owners to just see the big picture in our business over time, because the truth is is that nothing grows overnight, right? I mean, it’s very rarely that any business owner all of a sudden wakes up the next day and their follower number has, like you know, tenfold, like exponentially, you know, tripled or doubled or whatever it might be like. Chances are that these things are going to change slowly over time. So if you’re not tracking these numbers, I do highly suggest that you track them, because then, a year from now, you can look back and really see how your business has grown. And if you’re thinking right now. Oh, krista, but my numbers aren’t big enough. Like I don’t have enough clients, like I want you to get rid of that limiting belief. Even if you have zero clients right now, even if you have like one Instagram follower, I want you to start tracking it because I promise you a year from now, you will be so grateful that you can look back and actually see how your business changed dynamically, month after month.

Okay, so let’s go ahead and dive in to this topic. So I mentioned earlier that I kind of had some experience with this, and so I found myself again tracking my numbers and chasing my numbers in a way that was very strict about the type of goals that I was setting. I was very much setting goals in order to hit these numbers, and what I found for me is that not only did I very quickly get burnt out, I found myself very much over strategizing the way that I did my business right. So again, let’s just say, for example, let’s say you want to increase your Instagram followers by like 100 people this year or this month, 100 new followers this month. So in my head, the way that I would have set goals around that is okay. I need to make sure that I’m like doing all of the things that will help me get 100 followers. So that includes sharing as many reels as I can. That includes showing up on stories like all the time. That includes making sure that my posts you know I was sharing a certain number of like posts every single day. It also means that I was going to be like going on and like DMing people, engaging with people, following people, commenting on people’s posts right? All of these things that, when you think about it, it makes sense, right? Like, if you want to gain 100 followers, like those are the things that you need to focus on. The problem is is that, while those things will likely lead you to getting more followers again, we don’t really set up any boundaries or anything in place to make sure that we’re not overworking ourselves or burning ourselves out. So I was setting goals like this for pretty much every part of my business. So, whether it was Instagram, the podcast, pinterest, blogging, like whatever it is, I was setting these types of goals.

After chasing that, month after month, I very quickly realized this goal setting process was not sustainable. Like I can’t. I can’t do this right, and I didn’t want to pull back on any of those Tasks or actions, like I didn’t want to cut my Instagram tasks in half, right, because I was kind of like what’s the point? I mean, I hate to say that, but that’s in my mindset. I was like what’s the point if, if I’m cutting in half, I’m not gonna get to where I want to go? And it’s that mindset that I want to talk about. Right, there is this idea that when we start to think about you know well, I can’t pull back on it because then I’m not gonna get to where I want to go. And if I’m not gonna get to where I want to go quickly, then what’s the point in doing it at all? And it’s that small mindset shift that I want us to kind of eliminate today in this conversation.

Because it’s that mindset that tells us that the work that we’re doing, like we have to be burning ourselves out, we have to be overworking ourselves. You know, as entrepreneurs, as solo business owners, like we wear all the hats, and that is a hundred percent true. But I find that usually we don’t Underwork ourselves. It’s not that, like every business owner I know is like lazy and like never does anything for their business it’s usually the opposite and that they are working so hard and burning themselves out over and over and over again In like every season of life, and what I found is that what is more beneficial to focus on are the Activities, like actually the things that you want to be doing on a day-to-day basis. What feels like the right thing for me to be? To be focusing on my business right now and I’ll give you an example of what this means, because I know that that can be kind of hard to like really get when I’m going but I’m asking myself what intuitively feels right for me to focus on right now, and what I found is that when I ask myself that question, I dig into the actual core of what I need to be working on. Let me explain so.

Sometimes, as much as I love Pinterest and Instagram and all of these wonderful tools that we have to grow our business, as much as I love them, sometimes, when I am chasing those goals or like really going all in on those platforms, I find myself chasing shiny objects again like, oh, how many reels can I make? And you know I’m on Instagram. I see someone share this really cute, educational, fun reel and I think, ooh, I should share that, right, and then all of a sudden, I’m going down this reactive rabbit hole. It’s like reactive marketing, where I’m like seeing what other people are posting and now feeling like I need to post that too, and then it just like Spirals out of control and it doesn’t matter what platform like really you can, I think, no matter what platform you’re on, I think there’s a good chance you’ve experienced something like this. And so instead, right like, my goals this year are to grow the podcast, To obviously like grow my photography clients and to do more one-on-one coaching, and so I have Kind of narrow that down to where, this month, what I really want to focus on is Going all in on the podcast, right, and photography clients.

And with photography clients, right now I’m not so much working on the marketing of trying to book more people. Right now I’m kind of in that really busy season where I already have a lot of clients coming in. So now I’m tightening up all of my workflows, all of my processes, right Like my system, so that when someone emails me, I have an automated response that goes back to them and I have an entire basically automated workflow with, like pre-assigned, like tasks, everything that I would need. So that way, when I’m working in my business, I don’t have to spend and like waste time on things that don’t need to be spent on. So my two goals right now really like kind of tighten up my systems for my photography business and go all in on the podcast and instead of getting so worked up into like, oh well, how do I go all in on the podcast, how do I make sure that I get X amount of downloads and have all of these people sharing and liking and sharing in their stories and like all of this stuff I’m like all I’m gonna focus on is like how can I show up consistently in a way that feels good to me?

So my goal this month is to just commit to showing up for the podcast, right Like every week, releasing an episode every week, having something queued up for you, having interviews lined up so that I can share them consistently, and I’m just trusting that by doing these core activities the numbers will come. Because in previous months, when I got so focused on the numbers, ironically what I found was that these core things that I needed to do kind of dropped to the wayside, because now I was focused on well, how can I promote the podcast on Instagram more and how can I get people to share it? And how can I get people you know to like, pin it on Pinterest? Like I was so focused on all of these other activities that then I found myself getting behind on like actually showing up for the podcast. Like I was spending so much time on the marketing side of it that I was like stressed and frazzled about having to record episodes and finding guests and all this stuff. So I’ve decided to push all that aside and just trust that I will show up here, meet my mic and my computer and my little outline, and I will show up for you every single week and I trust that by doing that and by like. Yes, of course I am sharing it on Instagram, right, but like I’m not like stressing so much about the sharing strategy, I’m focusing more of my energy on just showing up, right, and it’s the same thing for photography, and so what I want you to kind of take away from this is to start to shift away from shiny objects. I know that it’s so much easier for us to think about an Instagram strategy and a marketing strategy and all of these things, but not only is it not like super helpful because we’ll easily get distracted from, like, the core activities that we actually should be focusing on, but it’s also really detrimental to our mindset because, honestly, when we’re chasing after those numbers, when we’re constantly feeling like more clients and more money, more numbers, more likes, more story views, all of that, we’re training our brain to be disappointed if we’re not hitting the numbers that we wanna be hitting, and that just breaks my heart. For business owners, like this journey is already hard enough. Like being a business owner is hard and so don’t make it harder on yourself emotionally and mentally by stressing out about all of these little things and these metrics. And like how you’re measuring up to either someone else in your industry or just like the voice in your head that tells you that you should be further along. And so that’s mostly what I wanted to talk about today.

And the second thing, really quick, is just changing the way that we think about success. So, again, when we’re measuring our success based on our like, number of Instagram followers, or the amount of sales we make in a month, or how many Instagram likes we have or how many new clients we book, when we’re thinking about our success in that way, we’re measuring our success based on all external things. We actually have no control over how many people Instagram shows our posts to. You can do things to help out the algorithm, but, at the end of the day, like, we have no control over that. We have no control over you know, like not, we have no control because I won’t get into that, but we have a lot less control on how many people are gonna go to your website, right, or like want to book you this month. There are some things that you can do, right Increase your SEO, blah, blah, blah. Do all this stuff to get more people to come to you, but, at the end of the day, like, it’s up to other people If they want to work with you or not. So all of these things are external things.

Let’s stop tying our success, like how we think about success for ourselves, to all of these external factors and instead let’s flip it around and let’s change our perception to know that success for us is actually measured around something that we are in control of, right?

So, instead of success you know being how many people comment on or share Instagram post or like blog post, instead of that being your measure of success, how about we measure our success by committing to blogging three times a month and showing up consistently each time, three times that month.

Right, like, let’s measure our success by you know what? I sat down, I wrote those blog posts like I didn’t always feel like it and I didn’t always feel creative and I sometimes felt like I had no idea what I was doing. But I sat down and I wrote them out and I served my audience and I served myself. Well, let’s start using those metrics for our success. One last thing before you go I’d absolutely love it if you left a review on Apple Podcasts, or if you’ve already left a review, I’d love for you to share this episode with your business bestie. I love getting to shout out my listeners on the show, and the more listeners that we have, the more that I can help others create a thriving and sustainable business too. Thank you so much again for being a part of this community, and I can’t wait to hear your takeaways from today’s episode.