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Introduction

Hello, and welcome to this episode of The She Calls Her Shots Podcast. I’m really excited about this topic today because honestly, this is one of the most common things that I hear from other business owners and from conversations that I have, even with listeners of the podcast, most of you are business owners. But this is something that I feel like I have conversations about pretty regularly. And it’s something that collectively as a community we all struggle with. So I really wanted to bring light to that today. And that is this idea of being able to zoom out in your business enough and see the bigger picture in your business. This is something that whenever I have conversations with people, especially that if you are working full time in a different job and want to take your business full time, this is a common thing that I hear time and time again, from people who work two jobs is that they have a hard time zooming out and seeing the bigger picture of how exactly they’ll be able to take their business full time. So I want to dive into that today and go into the details of ways that we can start to look at the bigger picture and start to have that mindset around it. 

Before we dive into that, I just want to say thank you for listening in. This podcast was something that I started, we just released our 50th episode a couple of weeks ago. I started this, I think a year and a half ago. And it’s really been such a fun journey. And I’m just so grateful for all of you that have been here from the beginning. For anyone who’s just listening in, who’s finding me, thank you so much for being here. This is a passion project of mine that I’m so excited to continue releasing episodes. So thank you so much for being here, it really does mean so much to me. 

Like I said, I feel like when we’re thinking about this topic, one of the most common things that I find is that as business owners, especially when we’re working another job, or especially when life gets crazy. We have families, we have friends, we have priorities, we have personal needs, we have relationship needs. When all of these things are happening at the same time, what we end up doing in our business is focusing on those things that have to happen in order to keep the business. So things like checking and responding to emails, actually providing the services or things that we offer. Just anything that you can think of that’s like, if I didn’t do this, I wouldn’t have a business, those are the things that get done. But the things that we start to neglect or don’t think about or really start to create time and space for are those larger goals. The things that we want to do one day, these are the things that we struggle with doing because we’re not giving any time or space or energy to actually think about doing them. Because of that, it’s really easy for us to be put into this box in our business of really not being able to grow because we’re only doing the things that are keeping us where we’re at. And we’re not focusing on the things that are actually going to help us grow and reach those bigger goals. So, again, we’re gonna dive into a lot of this today, because this is such a big topic. I’m going to try and keep it light hearted, keep it fun, because honestly, I could probably talk about this for hours. So before we get too much into that, I just wanted to note that if you love listening to the podcast, I would be so honored if you left a review. Not only does it make me so happy to read through them, but also it just helps other creatives and other business owners like yourself, find the podcast. My mission with this whole thing is to help as many women as possible achieve these big goals in their business. So I would absolutely love it if you would leave a review on Apple podcasts. And I’ll also include a link in the show notes for you to make it super simple. 

Be Intentional About What You Want Your Business to Look Like

Okay, so let’s dive into this topic. So first things first, one of the things that I think is really important for us to do is to kind of see that bigger picture in our business and to be able to grow and dream and achieve the things that we want to achieve. The first thing we have to do is actually set aside time every week to let ourselves dream about what we want our business to look like. It is actually really interesting to me, because when the more conversations I have with women who are either starting their business or in the first one to two years, it’s interesting to me that when I ask them what their goals are, outside of money goals, or outside of client goals, I think all of us can easily think about, oh, I want to make this much money, or I want to work with this many clients. But when I asked them, what are your goals? Besides financial goals, besides monetary goals, what are your goals in your business? 90% of the time the answer is, I don’t know. And I think that is such a crucial part to being able to zoom out and see the big picture because if we don’t know what we’re working towards, we won’t know when we get there. And we won’t even know what to do in order to get there if we don’t know what that end goal is. So I really think it’s so important, if we want to focus on the big picture, we have to let ourselves visualize it and think about it on a day to day basis. Because I’ve talked about this a million times, but if we don’t have clarity around something, it’s likely not going to happen. 

If we don’t know what we want, if we don’t know what we’re looking for, what we’re asking for, we won’t know it, even if it walked by us on the street, we would have no idea. So it’s great to have an income goal, it’s great to have a goal of how many clients you want to work with. But my bigger question for you is, what will you do with that income? What will your life look like when you make that amount of money? When you are working with this amount of clients, how are you going to spend your time outside of working with those clients? Maybe you want to go full time in your business? Awesome. What services do you want to offer? And what do you want your life to look like outside of that full time job. And these are the things that I think we sometimes shortchange ourselves, and we stop at those initial goals. I want to go full time, I want to make X amount of money. So today, I want to encourage you to take it one step further. What do you want your life to look like when you achieve that initial goal?

Set Your Goals and Make Them Happen

The second thing that I think is really important, is just to talk about how to create goals, and what does that look like? Because also when I have conversations with women business owners, one common thing that I see is women struggle or the business owners that I’ve chatted with have struggled with even creating those goals. They might have one or two goals. But that’s it. And they don’t really know how to think about goal setting. And one thing that I’ve noticed is that for a lot of us that worked full time while also growing our business, for example, I worked full time for nine years before actually taking my business full time. And I have spoken with a lot of other women who are in similar situations. The majority of us work full time jobs while we’re building our side business. One thing that’s a commonality between all of the conversations that I’ve had is that when we’ve had that experience, a lot of the time, we get so used to other people creating our goals for us and just telling us what we need to do. For example, when you work for a company, you don’t get to set your goals. You don’t get to set your quota, you don’t get to set the things that you’re going to accomplish or finish that month. That’s just not how it happens. Your boss or your boss’s boss, or someone up the chain creates these goals. And eventually they trickle down to you. And you just get told to do it, no matter what, it doesn’t matter, make it happen. Whenever that happens, whenever we have those kinds of goals. We’re not really too afraid of consequences in the sense that we know, let’s say for example, you work in the marketing department, and you get told to create X amount of content for them to be able to share this month, whether it’s on social media or whatever, right. You create the content, you get your pat on the back. Great job, looks great. We love it. However, you might not necessarily be the person who’s going to hear about it if that content doesn’t do well. And also, sometimes with content, sometimes it takes a little while, you have to share it to the right places, there’s a lot of other things that have to happen. But for us, there’s a certain amount of accomplishment that we get from, okay, someone assigned me this task or this project, I completed it, I can rinse my hands of it and be done at the end of the month. We don’t carry on that responsibility. We don’t carry on that responsibility for next month’s goals. We’ve accomplished what they’ve asked us to do, and we’re done. And we don’t have to think about it anymore. And that’s the case for I would say, the majority of someone who works in a business. 

Of course, there might be some instances where you actually do carry that weight, depending on if you’re a manager, if you’re higher up in the company, you know, XYZ. But for the sake of this example, for a lot of us, we get used to being told what to do, and then we get to wash our hands of it at the end of the month. We don’t really have to think about it. That’s not the case when we’re when we’re our own boss, and we make our own decisions. And we are the ones responsible for it all. We created this content, we put it out there, it didn’t do well. We don’t get to just wash our hands of it and be like, Oh, well, that didn’t work. I’ll try something else. That’s fine. But if we don’t dig into why it didn’t work? Is there something that I could improve? Is there something I need to do better? Do I need to share it in different places? Do I need to talk about different topics? Do I need to bring in different examples? There’s all these questions that we need to dive into because if we keep putting out the same content that doesn’t resonate with our audience, we’re not going to grow, we’re not gonna get anywhere. 

Understand That Doing Everything in Your Business is Not Sustainable 

So for a lot of us who come from this full time job background, there’s a certain amount of comfort that comes with knowing that as long as I accomplish my tasks, I’m good, I’m done. And then when we create our own business, now all of a sudden, we don’t know where to start. We don’t know how to create these goals, we don’t know what to focus on first. We don’t know how much time and energy we should be spending on marketing versus on selling versus on creating content versus talking to customers versus actually providing the services. All of this is brand new. And so the first thing that I want to dive into around that idea is, it’s so important to remember that you don’t need to tackle everything at the same time. Because for so many of us, we do get that feeling. And it’s the same thing that if you come from a full time job, or even if you didn’t come from a full time job, we just want things to be done. We want to be able to say that we’ve been able to accomplish something and not only one thing, but we also did this and we did this and we did this this month. We want to feel that sense of accomplishment by doing a lot of things at the same time. But the problem is that’s just not sustainable. It can feel really fun in the moment, and I find myself doing this all the time. I’m not typing in the sense of it has to be perfect, because I just very much prefer to get it out there. See if it works, tweak it, change it. But I am type A in the sense that I want to have everything done right now. Like, these are all the big goals I have for my business, and I have a lot of them. And they’re really, really big. And I want them all. I want to start working on them all right now. And this is a common struggle that I always find myself in because I will go through these cycles of burnout. And then I wonder, why do I feel burned out? Oh, it’s probably because I tried to tackle all five of these really big things at the same time. So I want to really drive home that it’s totally okay to either be in that boat if I don’t even know what my goals are or how to even start accomplishing them. And it’s also okay to be in that boat of, I know what all of my goals are, and I want to accomplish them all at the same time. I want to just let you know that no matter where you fall on that spectrum, it’s completely normal, and this is a normal part of business. 

What Do You Want Your Life to Look Like?

The thing that I want to encourage you is that if you’re on that side of the scale where you’re like, I don’t know what my goals are, I don’t know what to focus on. I really want to encourage you to think about that first question. What do you want your life to look like? What is important to you? What are your values? What do you want to look back on in 5, 10 years and think I’m so glad that I did those things? Because our business life and our personal life as business owners, they blend together. They’re really not separate. Who we are as a person and in our relationships is the same person that we are in our business. There’s not a whole lot of separation there. So I want to encourage you, if you’re not sure how to think about your goals, I want you to think about what are some things that you want to spend time doing? And it could be business stuff. For example, you might really love talking to people, you might be debating starting a Podcast, you might be thinking, I want to reach more people, I want to help people, I want to be that encouragement for people, I want to be the person that someone comes to with their questions and I can help them work through certain things. Great. Maybe one of your goals is to eventually be a speaker at a conference, or to be a panelist for something or like maybe do a TED talk, or maybe it is to start a podcast. But I want you to think about the things that bring you joy, the things that you love doing, and think about how that can translate down the road in your business and what that could look like. If you find yourself on the other end of the spectrum of trying to do all the things at the same time, I know how difficult that is, and I know how hard it can be to prioritize. But I just want to encourage you to pick one thing and trust that by going all in on one part of your business, even if you just save for the next three months, I’ve got all these five really big goals, I’m going to pick this one to go all in on for three months. And then I can reevaluate and see how it goes. So you don’t have to commit to only doing one for the year, you don’t have to commit to putting all the other ones aside. But it’s really just deciding that you’re going to go all in on one, and then being able to reevaluate and see how it’s going in a couple of months. So that’s the first thing I think is really important is just being able to think about creating goals, and figuring out where you are on that spectrum. 

Why You Need to Have a Holistic View of Your Client Experience

Then the third thing is really having a holistic view of your client experience. Because even if you aren’t working with clients, we can do this exercise whether you’ve worked with clients, or whether you haven’t worked with clients. Zoom out and say, what do I want the experience to look like? When someone first inquires, when they send me an email and say that they’re interested in my services or my products, whatever it is, what do I want that to look like from there? What does that email response from me look like? Do I want to immediately hop on a call with them? Do I want to send them sample products or sample galleries, if you’re a photographer? Think about all of these questions throughout the process and ask yourself, what does that ideal client experience look like? And the reason that this is important is because if you don’t know what you want that client experience to look like, what’s gonna happen is every single time someone inquires about your products or your services, you’re going to spend so much time redoing, remaking and tweaking that process, and you’re going to waste so much of the precious time where you could be doing other things in your business. Other things that are actually really moving you forward. So, again, whether you’ve worked with one client, no clients, or 100 clients, it’s so important for your time’s sake, for your energy, for your big picture goals, to really have a clear understanding of what you want that to look like. And this isn’t going to be aware of any systems or automations, or templates, these things are going to be your best friend. Because once you understand what you want that to look like, you want this process to be duplicatable, right. You want it to be something that you can reuse each time someone sends you an email or reaches out about your services. So taking some time to map that out and figuring out what that looks like for you. And what would be not only the best experience for your clients, but also sustainable for you. You want to automate as much as possible so that you’re not constantly having to live in your inbox. Because again, if you’re constantly living in your inbox, you’re going to have less time to think about these big picture goals. So that’s the third thing. 

The Benefits of Always Adapting Whenever Necessary

The fourth thing that I want to talk about today, before we dive into some of the mindset tips, is to not forget to let yourself adapt when necessary. I want you to remember that all of these processes, all of these tips, all these things, they’re things that I want you to try. Like when we talked about goal setting, go all in on something for three months, and then reevaluate. I want you to start being able to identify with the fact that you don’t have to commit to something for the long term, forever. You can try something out and see how it works. So let’s say for example, thinking about these big picture goals, let’s say you realize, you know what, I love talking to people, I love being able to be a resource. I think one day I want to be a speaker at a conference, maybe a large conference in your industry. Awesome. So now, let’s break that bigger picture goal down into super, super tangible action steps for you. Okay, well, it’s likely that you’re not going to reach this goal next month. You’re not going to all of a sudden next month be this well-known speaker at this large industry conference right? I’m not saying it can’t happen, but it’s probably not likely to happen. So let’s break it down. Let’s figure out what is the step before that. So before you’re a speaker at the conference. What’s the step before that? Maybe you are interviewed on TV or interviewed on some really, really, really big podcast that has hundreds of 1000s of listeners. Okay, well, what would be the step before that? Maybe it’s to be on a lesser known podcast or a local news station. Okay. What’s the step before that? Maybe it’s just being a guest on a podcast. Or maybe it’s writing an article for a publication, whether it’s a local publication or something online. But we have to start with that very, very first step and figuring out, okay, what’s something that I could do to just start helping me get on my way. And it takes all the pressure off, because now we can just focus on okay, well, I just need to find one place that will let me write an article or one podcast, even if they’re just starting off, I know that I need to just build that muscle of being comfortable being interviewed, or speaking live or speaking about a certain topic. 

So taking those really, really big goals, and just breaking them down. And for any of you listening that are like Krista, that’s great. But I still don’t really know what my goals are. I want to encourage you, okay, think about the things that you really love doing. Maybe some of your values are that you want to build a business, but you also want to be present with your family. That’s a pretty big goal, that’s a big value to have. The thing that I then want to encourage you to do, if you’re really struggling with goal setting, is just asking yourself, okay, what do I want my life to look like, in five years? Well, I want to have a successful business. But I also want to make sure I can sit down and have dinner with my family every night. Or I want to have a successful business but I also want to make sure that we can have family weekend trips to different cities or places. Figure out what you want your life to look like, and then ask yourself, am I doing any of that right now? Am I so consumed in my business that I’m not having dinner with my kids or my family? Am I so consumed in building my business that I’m not doing these other things that are important to me? And just start there. Start to figure out how you can incorporate those things, how you want your life to look like, how you can start incorporating that today. And that’ll help you start to get that clarity around this feels in alignment, this feels like where I want to be. And it’ll help you start to gain clarity on what those bigger picture goals could be for you. So those are my four main tips

Recap

So to recap, the first one is making sure that you set aside time every single day, ideally, every single day, but at least every single week to dream about what you want your life to look like and visualize that. The second thing is to get really clear around your goals. Some goal setting tips, breaking them down into tangible bite-sized goals, and then also just figuring out what those values and things look like for you. And the third thing is getting that holistic view, that bird’s eye view of your snapshot of your client experience. And what does that look like? How much time are you currently investing in it? Are there things that you can tighten up and make it so you don’t have to live in your email all the time. But really figuring out a duplicatable system of how you want that client experience to look. And then also just checking in with yourself every few months, figuring out what feels good for you right now. And the last thing I want to just wrap up with quickly is just a few mindset tips. 

Because I know that this is a big topic. And so I want to just encourage you, this might bring up a lot of feelings for you. When you’re thinking about goal setting, when you’re thinking about your future, when you’re visualizing the success you want to have in your business, this can bring about a lot of really strong feelings. And I want to encourage you that those fears come up, and they will come up, recognize them and understand that they’re not going to go away. We’re not going to get to a place in our business where we’re just not afraid of anything anymore. So just accepting that fear, knowing that it’s there for a reason. But also knowing that we are able to have that fear and still do big things. This fear could be a fear of failure. This fear could also be a fear of success. Sometimes we’re so afraid of, what if I actually put in the work and it works? What if I build the business that I love? Because no matter where it is, it’s still new, and it still feels scary. And so accepting that that fear is going to be there and knowing that we can still move past it, even though we still might feel afraid. And I just want you to remember that you and your business are so much more than the emails and the busy work and the tasks that we have to do every single day, while those are really important, that’s not why we started our own business. We didn’t start our own business so that we can be consumed by email and tasks and management of all of these things. We deserve to be able to also focus on the big things, these things that will absolutely transform your life and your business. And then also recognising, what are those limiting beliefs that I have? What is that voice that pops up when I start to think about that person that I want to become, or the life that I want to have? And give yourself grace, understand that those voices, those fears, all of that will be there. And just learning to still move forward anyway. So I hope that this was so helpful. Trust me in saying, I know that there’s a lot easier said than done sometimes. But I hope that there’s at least one little nugget that you’re able to walk away with, even if it’s just a reminder of something, right. I think a lot of us intuitively know this. But it’s really easy for us to get caught up in this cycle of day to day things. And so I hope there was even just one little nugget that you could walk away with to remember that there’s something that we can take action on today. And there’s something that we can do today to help us really start becoming that person that we want to be and building that business that we want to have. So I would love to hear your takeaways. If you’re not connected with me on Instagram, it’s just at Hey@KristaMarie, send me a DM, let me know what it was that your takeaway was, let me know what thing maybe sparked an aha moment. Send me a DM @KristaMarie and let’s chat about it. And until then, I’m just so grateful that you’re here. And I will see you in the next episode.