Goals to Fruition: Part 1 of 2

No one could have predicted the chain of events that unfolded in 2020 after the COVID-19 epidemic began. What started as a widespread feeling of doubt and disbelief quickly transitioned into fear, stress, sadness, and quite possibly anger about our newfound ugly reality. In addition to how this situation affected us personally, the accompanying economic crisis created challenges for entrepreneurs and small business owners in unimaginable ways. Despite this, savvy businesswomen know that setting strategic business goals is a key component in their ongoing success.

In this two-part mini-series, Christie Ruffino will show you how to identify your BIG goals, create new habits, and develop a plan to make exponential growth in your business over the next year. She will not only discuss the key characteristics that should be considered when defining your goals, but she will show you how to create and implement a plan of action to ensure that your goals will truly come to fruition.

Show Notes

Today we are having our very first episode of 2021. And since you’re with me, I want to share something that I heard recently on another podcast. I believe it was the Driven Entrepreneur podcast, an amazing resource from my friend, Matt Brauning. He mentioned in one of his episodes that as humans, we are meaning-making machines. We make meaning out of everything. Think about our stories, think about our lives. I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s experienced this. If something happens to you, and you interpret it a certain way, and you get your feelings hurt, or you get upset, or tell yourself a story about that situation, which is completely different or completely not the situation that the other person intended. And in their story, they’re telling themselves something completely different. Now there is a divide in what you believe, in what they believe. And unless you communicate about it and figure out what the real story is, you both go on your merry way. We make meaning out of things that don’t necessarily need to happen. That is the same thing with our life.

Think about where you are right now. We want to live every day as humans, of course, believing that there is a purpose to our life that we were created for a reason. This time of the year, as the new year is just rolling in. We tend to take stock in our lives and think about what we’ve accomplished in the previous year. I know I do that. I’ve been doing that for years. Every year I take a piece of paper and jot down my business and personal goals for the next year. As I look upon my previous years, I see a pattern of success where I have created goals that I wanted to accomplish for the year to come. I love having this intention. I love being able to take stock of what we’ve done because we can’t just coast through life. People do coast through life, but then we lose our passion, we lose our motivation, and we lose our drive. I have had the very great fortune of building many relationships and meeting a lot of people throughout the years, specifically women who have connected with me because they had an amazing story. Their story is what led them to discover their purpose. They then took that purpose and created a business around it and were able to step into their power and get on a trajectory that they thought was in perfect alignment with what they were excited about and what they believe they were created to pursue.

We all have different seasons in our life. One of the seasons I had was to become the best mom ever in my purpose. I loved being a mom. I loved having the freedom to spend a lot of time with my kids. I was a stay at home for many years. I always had some other work outside of the home that I was able to do. That honestly, for me, allowed me to keep my sanity. But during that period, my goal was never to pursue creating another business. I was happy. More importantly, for me, my purpose was to be the best mom I could be. That was perfect for that season of my life. Then things happened, and my life pattern or my life trajectory changed, which brought me to a different season. I realized I could make my own goals, and I could discover my purpose. But I didn’t know what that was, and I was lost.

My purpose became making money, which isn’t a life purpose. I got lost in what my purpose was. I got caught up in the day-to-day task, and I got busy pursuing actions that would allow me to meet my needs and the needs of my family as a single mom. But then I lost touch with what I wanted to do, who I was, and my purpose. Over the years, as I’ve been able to talk to other women and help them discover their purpose and get more in touch with my purpose simultaneously. As I planned our schedule of podcast episodes for our 12 Days of Christmas launch, we had some amazing guests. The guests were some dear friends of mine who were experienced in the podcasting world. They helped me put the podcast together, and other friends who have successful businesses came on and were my premier guests. I have so many other clients that I’ve worked with that have already recorded for future episodes. I had to learn this whole process because putting a podcast together isn’t easy. I brought the right people together, and we made it happen. Then I remembered the end of the year is here. I knew what I was going to do as far as goal setting for the year to come. I knew I needed to interrupt the schedule and bring a couple of goal setting episodes to our audience. That way, I can not only implement my strategy but share what I’ve been doing over the years. I decided to juggle things around, and we’re going to have a couple of episodes on bringing our goals to fruition.

Key Takeaways

If you don’t know who I am, I am the founder of the Dynamic Professional Women’s Network. My name is Christie Ruffino. And I founded that organization 16 years ago. I started the Overcoming Mediocrity Project about eight years ago. With that, I have produced nine co-authored books for our clients under the Overcoming Mediocrity brand, and I’ve helped other clients produce their co-authored books. Co-authored books are a great way to have a first book completed and get many viewers to your story. We’re now bringing women together for book number 10, which is super exciting. Now our podcast is another platform for our clients to be able to share their stories. That leads us to where we are now. I will share my five-step strategy with you to be able to set goals and have them come to fruition. This is going to be a two-part miniseries. In this episode, I’m going to go through steps one through four. Next week, we’ll dive into step five and then go into all of the mini-steps associated with that specific step. As I talk about what this first step is, I will be sharing a few stories along the way.

#1 – Analyze your year in review.

The first step is to analyze your year in review. The bottom line is you can’t set a new course of your direction unless you know where you’re coming from. Before I have my goals set for the next year, I need to take a good account of my previous year’s goals, what I accomplished, and what I didn’t do. Maybe you didn’t set goals for last year. Maybe you only had them in your brain. But what I want you to do is if you don’t have that your goals written on a piece of paper, I want you to pull out your calendar and take a look and remember what happened the year before. Take a piece of paper and list all of your accomplishments, everything you were able to do. Then think about what you’re grateful for, the milestones you were able to meet, and how you felt to accomplish them. Take a moment to write those down.

Then look at all of the things that you almost succeeded at. What did you try and maybe not finish or not accomplish? You don’t want to set your goals to be so big that you fail. Because then you get discouraged. Now we want to have big goals, but we’re not going to always meet them. There are going to be times that you don’t accomplish your goals. And that’s okay. Don’t look at that as a failure. You look at that as a work in progress, or an opportunity to pivot, or an opportunity to grow. When you look at those goals that you didn’t achieve, what stopped you from making them happen? What did you learn? When thinking about your goals for next year, what will you do differently to make them happen? I’m going to challenge you to be open to the possibility of doing things a little differently.

#2 – Your wheel of life.

Step number two is your wheel of life. I have a handout that you will be able to get at the end of this miniseries, where you can go through all of the exercises and fill in the blanks. In step two, there will be a wheel of life for you to look at. I’m sure you’ve all seen it, but there are eight different areas of your life. And the goal is to take a good look at your wheel of life and make sure you have balance. You’ll need to fill in the blanks on how well you’ve achieved having balanced in that specific segment. Envision a wheel, and it’s got eight different segments, and then every segment can be filled up based on how fulfilled you feel and how well you accomplished meeting that specific area. The different areas are spirituality, personal development, education, personal growth, hobbies, wellness, exercise, and physical activity, personal finance, your profession, and the final segment of the wheel is your family, friends, and relationships.

When you make your goals for the next year, we need to ensure that we keep balance in our lives. We can tend to have our wheels be out of balance. I can be filled up in the career profession area, and all my goals will be about my career and my profession, but I don’t have a lot of goals around my exercise, or my finances, or my relationships. I would like you to have a brain dump of the eight areas and put down three to six goals on every single area that you want to accomplish. I want you to realize that you don’t have to only set goals at the beginning of the year; you can have goals at any point in your life for any period of time. This does not have to be your yearly goals; this could be your next six-month goals, and so that’s why I don’t want you to have a ton of goals. I want you to have one goal for each of these categories that you want to pursue.

#3 – Identify your purpose and your mission.

Step number three is where you need to identify your purpose and your mission. I honestly believe that everyone was created for a specific purpose. Whatever your purpose is, it’s going to be epic in its own right, and it’s going to be perfect for you. You can’t just move forward without some purpose. And I believe, especially since I know firsthand from talking to hundreds and hundreds of women, that many times the biggest challenges in our lives happen for a reason. We can not only step into our purpose, but we can gain the wisdom and the skills, and the experiences to become good at something specific. I have a whole class on how to discover your purpose. I’m not going to get into all of the details on helping you define your purpose right now but think about what you experienced in your life. Think about what is the thing in the world that you want to change? Who needs that change? Who is the person out there that you feel you can help? Think about what you want to do and what big change you want to see happen globally. And I want you to own the fact that your purpose may be bigger than you even realize right now. You can grow into that purpose when it’s time. Feel free to let your brain not only think about a bigger purpose for your life but also accept that the purpose you’re in right now is perfect just for you.

When you can identify your purpose and feel like you have a good plan of action or a good path to follow, what activates our reticular activating system, and when you’re able to envision something specific and set your mind on it, the world seems to be bringing you people, places, and resources that support that mission. It’s because now you recognize things differently. Stimuli are happening every moment of every day, and we have to open up our minds to our purpose for it to come to fruition.

#4 – Recognize the cycle of quitting.

Recognize the cycle of quitting. Figure out your limiting beliefs and making sure you stay motivated to accomplish your goals. In step number five, which will be on the next episode, we will get into the action plan. Today we need to recognize that there will be things that come into our world that will stop you or overwhelm you to the point that you feel like giving up. Many of those feelings and actions you have are because you have been conditioned to do certain things and think about certain things over the years. We have had things in our lives that we’ve created specific meanings around, and that’s conditioned us to act certain ways or believe certain things. Until we can move forward, we need to recognize that some of the cycles are happening, and we can do something to stop them. Before we can stop them, we must recognize what they are. I have a list of things that could be stopping you. Take a piece of paper, and jot down beliefs that you feel stop you from doing certain things. There is a lot of limiting beliefs that you can have around each one of those topics. It’s going to be empowering for you to discover what those beliefs are so you can do something to overcome them. You can do something to ensure that these success habits we’re going to create for you will help you accomplish your goals, and you’re not going to let these limiting beliefs stop you. If you have my handout, feel free to check off all of the items that you resonate with, or go back to your top goals, and discover what possible limiting beliefs you have around each one of those.

I want you to do is write a new empowering decision around each one of those eight goals. I want you to make an empowering statement around each one of those goals that will help you set your brain to activate your reticular activating system; that event is going to happen. Don’t say it may happen, or it could happen. We have to believe that it is happening right now or that it’s already happening. Writing the empowering decision down means it’s already starting to happen. Take a moment to write down one empowering decision for each one of these goals as if you are already on the path of making it happen.

I would encourage you to join us on our next episode, where we’re going to dive deep into your success habits. These are the actions that will take your goals and have them come to fruition. Until then, have an amazing day, and I hope you have a great 2021; and I know that these exercises will help you accomplish your wildest dreams to not only have your best year ever but to have your best month, your best week. Your best life ever.

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