Ep #64: Innovate Your Goals With This One Key Money Tool

Hey coach. Do you love the idea of creating goals, but when it comes to actually doing it, it starts to feel overwhelming? Trust me, I feel you on this one. I'm Kendall, tune in this week to discover a unique way I discovered to create goals that act as a powerful catalyst for you making those important massive shifts in your coaching business that you desire, for you accomplishing what matters most, and most of all, for staying out of overwhelm in the process. It's all here for you in this episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. Let's dive in. 

Welcome to The Money Coach School Podcast. To really excel at coaching women, you have to be skilled, confident, and even fearless at money coaching. If you're passionate about women holding genuine money power and love supporting women entrepreneurs, then this is the show for you. Now, here's your host, money feminist Kendall SummerHawk.

Hello, beautiful coaches. We are right in the middle of what I call goal season. If you've been following me week to week, or if you're binge listening, then you're seeing I actually ended up putting together a series on goals. I had not originally planned on that, but it's unfolded that way because, well, I love goals. I love goal setting. I love writing down all of the little steps it takes to achieve that goal, then checking off each step as I complete it. Oh my God, all of that makes me feel so good in a super geeky way. 

What I don't love at all is choosing my goals. The reason is because I have so many ideas, so many interests in my business, so many different directions I could take or initiatives I could pursue, that the whole thing, it just gets overwhelming. Then that makes me feel really, really anxious, like heart palpitating, want to run for the hills and hide kind of anxiety. 

But getting clear is the hallmark of achieving success. You sure will not achieve what's on your heart without getting this clarity. So today's episode is one that I created as much for me as for you, my beautiful, wildly creative woman in coaching, to help you choose your most important goals for the new year, even if you're listening to this later in the year. It doesn't matter. 

I don't just set a few goals now at the end of the year. I refresh throughout the year to stay on top of creating a business that stretches and challenges me to expand what I think I'm capable of, to expand the income that I create and expand the number of lives I'm impacting through our various coach certification trainings and courses. So let's dive in. 

First, if you still have lingering feelings about unmet goals, then definitely check out episode 62 on how to close out 2024 strong. We keep getting comments and amazing feedback about that episode. I have a feeling it may end up being one of our most popular episodes ever. So I'll link to it in the show notes, or you can also go to the podcast webpage, which is themoneycoachschoolpodcast.com/62. I know that's a really long URL, so I'll say it again, themoneycoachschoolpodcast.com/62.

All right, so the goal-setting exercise I want to lead you through here today, it capitalizes on my very well-known money word of the year tool. So if you missed that episode, you'll want to catch it ASAP. It's episode 63. It's also an all-time favorite, and there's also a money word of the year checklist that you can download, which I'll link to here below in this episode. So there, again, you can go to themoneycoachschoolpodcast.com forward slash 63. 

For today though, I'm going to assume you have your money word of the year. A quick reminder that your money word of the year is you choosing a word, or really letting the word choose you, that supports you in creating results by pulling you forward, by helping you make decisions, by helping you release obstacles and nonproductive habits, by helping you spot opportunities and create what I call sole-sourced success. 

Your money word of the year becomes your energetic standard for everything that you do or that you don't do inside of your coaching business. Now what comes next is applying your money word of the year to setting goals, and that's what today's all about.

But you know, I don't even like that phrase setting. For me, it feels static. It feels hard. It's not very engaging. So I like thinking of choosing my goals because we're always a choice. I think the energy of choosing feels less restrictive than setting. For me, it feels that way. I'm a word nerd. I truly believe words matter. So if you like that word setting, go for it. For me, I love choosing goals, which already feels calming and less anxiety producing.

All right, so money word of the year and choosing your goals for this year. What I like to do is very simple, of course. I lead with my money word of the year and I let it inspire or catalyze what goal to achieve. Now this is actually really simple. I have six areas of my business that I want to consciously and specifically apply my money word of the year to. Those are number one, income, number two, profit, number three, list, number four, offers, number five, marketing, and number six, support. That's it. 

Because I know that when I see each of those areas through the lens or another way to think about it is from the perspective of my money word of the year, I am going to get ideas and inspiration and direction and clarity. Oh my gosh, clarity is queen.

So this is what I call a top-down approach to goal creation. It's letting one central theme, your money word of the year, inspire, guide, and direct the goals that you choose for this year. So let me walk you through a couple of examples using my money word of the year from this past year, which was the word focus.

So let's apply that word focus to that first area of my business, which was income. So when I thought about income through the lens or the perspective of that word focus, I started creating a vision of how I wanted to create income.

I knew right away my goal was to create more of a shopping experience for people where they could come into my world at a lower price point, get a feel for how amazing, high quality, and in-depth our trainings are, and from there want to keep investing in learning more of what I teach on. Which is all about, on the coaching side, coaching skills and how to run a coaching business, and on the money side, how to change your personal relationship with money. Like really, really shift that relationship into a positive, very empowered relationship, and how to coach clients on money.

So with that goal in mind, I decided that I would create three new training certifications and courses in the first half of 2024 and then focus on having each of those upsell or cross-sell or promote to each other. Simple, right? This is not rocket science. It's not earth shattering. It's just a simple, clear direction. 

From there, I laid out the marketing calendar, brought my team in on it. Most importantly, I put it all in my calendar so everything for the year was accounted for. What I love is that in past years, I would have moved dates or have been planning next month's launch this month, and instead, I kept all the dates intact except for one, and I only moved it by like a week. We hit our launch execution goals and we enrolled more clients in each launch than I had originally estimated that we would.

Let's look at the area of list, meaning list building, list growth, and how that word focus applied to that. This is really interesting. So focus to me in terms of list growth, it meant that I stopped being random about list growth. List growth has never been my zone of genius. It's just not something I've given much energy to like ever. So as a result, you'd probably be shocked at what a small list I have. But it's always been small, and I've made millions from a very small list. But back to applying my money word of the year of focus to the list.

So the goal I created from applying that word of focus to list growth was to double the list and to increase engagement with my launches. That's it. So with that goal in mind, I was able to easily and quickly list out key initiatives or projects that we would do throughout the year.

There were five things that happened because of this. Just because of setting that goal. Oh my gosh, I used the word setting there. Excuse me, choosing the goal. Gosh, it just feels so different that we're choosing. I just love it so much. So just because of choosing that goal, here are five things that happened. 

Number one, the biggest change was I started treating my list like a true community. That felt so important to me, and it was a real energetic shift and a real shift in how I was really inspired to create a lot of new and different ways of engaging with the list. So this impacted my messaging and how I invite my community into my launches. So that was number one. 

Number two, because I decided to change how we ask my list to participate in my launches, it cut down tremendously on complexity for each launch. That resulted in us being able to hold double the number of launches this year compared to last year and past years. Every launch wasn't big and sophisticated. My launches are very, very simple, but we did twice as many of them as we normally do. How cool. 

Number three, I got serious about Facebook ads and new lead magnets. We had talked about it for a long time. I had dabbled a little bit with it, but not really put any effort into it. But by choosing that goal of how I wanted to double the list and create engagement, we created two new lead magnets that have performed really, really well in terms of having people come onto the list and eventually enroll in one of my certifications or courses. 

Now, I'm not advocating Facebook ads exactly here. What I'm saying is that the focus of the word focus was to create those two new lead magnets. Because of that word focus, we did that early in the year. So I really had the advantage of all year, like from February, March of this year, to have those two new lead magnets working on behalf for us. It's worked out really well. 

Number four, we created a teeny tiny two-piece baby funnel. I mean, itty bitty for people coming onto the list through the lead magnets. Number five, we increased the list by, as of today, almost 100%, like almost 100%. I think it's like 80%. So I am thrilled.

So all of that change happened because of my money word of the year. That word was the word focus. It really doesn't matter what the word is. My word was focus. Your word could be entirely different. I can tell you that for sure, if I had not applied my money word of the year like that, I would not have accomplished half of everything that we accomplished.

So I think you're getting the idea here of how to use your money word of the year to number one, spark what your goal is. Then number two, once you know the goal, once you've chosen the goal, write down the key initiatives or projects that come underneath that goal, that support that goal, that really bring that goal to life. 

From there, of course, you can pull out your calendar and start getting into your calendar where your launches will be, where you want to be with your projects quarter by quarter. So for example, I knew that I wanted all of my new trainings that I was creating to be completed by June of this past year. So I put those milestones into the calendar, and I met that goal, which felt amazing. 

That's really it. I know it sounds simple, and you'll notice that no, no spreadsheets were involved. I'm laughing because if you followed me for more than five minutes, you know, I'm basically allergic to spreadsheets. They make my highly creative soul wither and make me want to cry.

So this money word of the year process is much more organic. It's intuitive, and it's creative. I'm a highly creative person. I attract highly creative people. This is the creative process that I've created to stay in my creativity and to create my accomplishments. Whew, how many times can I use create or creative in a sentence, right?

All right, so you're letting your money word of the year be your catalyst instead of trying to be linear and systematic. That always makes sense. But every time I've tried that approach, I end up either staring at a blank piece of paper, which doesn't feel good, or worse, I make a list of a hundred things I could do in my business. I then get overwhelmed. Instead of doing anything about it, I just go start eating too much dark chocolate. 

All right, so as I mentioned in episode 63 on choosing your money word of the year, your money word of the year gives you a new lens to see through, a new way of stepping into your gifts and genius, a new way of elevating yourself that will rock your world. But in reality, it takes very little effort.

All right, so you have episode number 62 on how to end your year strong. You have episode number 63 on choosing your money word of the year. Now you have this episode, number 64, on how to innovate your goals using your money word of the year.

Be sure to go to the link in the show notes and download the checklist that I have waiting there for you. It's going to really, really help you in choosing your money word of the year. I think that's a wrap for this mini-series in goal-setting season. I hope you've loved it and found it useful. Remember, coaching changes lives, starting with yours. 

So thank you always for listening and for your loyalty. I would so love it if you would take a minute or two and go to Apple and leave me a five-star review. That would help me so much in getting this podcast out to other women in the coaching space or who are contemplating becoming a coach, be able to think about their business, their coaching skills, and money in ways that are innovative, different, and really help support their success and growth. 

Thank you so much if you would do that. I would so love it. All right, have a great rest of your week, and I will see you here next week for another episode. My love to you.

Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of The Money Coach School Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you follow so you never miss an episode. Also, I would so love and appreciate if you would leave a 5-star review. Your review supports women just like you in discovering all of the juicy tips and insights I’m sharing here on how to coach women on money.

And if you want to learn how to excel at coaching women on money, definitely go to KendallSummerHawk.com and check out the wealth of money coach trainings that we have for you. Thanks so much for being part of this money coaching movement and for tuning into the show every week.