114: Apply this 3-step technique to always know what to do next with your money goals

Transcript

Apply this 3-step technique to always know what to do next with your money goals

00:20

Hello, hello, hello, gorgeous human. And welcome to another episode of the Money Mindful podcast. I am your host, Meaghan Jean Smith, and I am a money mindset and life coach for women. I am so excited to share with you a three step technique today that is going to help you so much I can barely even get this introduction out because I just want to get all the information in your ears straight away. So when you set goals to increase your income, or net worth, there's a process you might be missing, that will make all the difference to reaching your goals. Over the course of working with my clients and being on lots of consultations with women, there are two common obstacles I see that often come up to achieving your money goals and life goals for that matter. And today, I want to share what those two common obstacles are, and also how to overcome them. This is such a simple technique. It is so easy peasy you are going to be able to do it today. So let's get on with it so I can tell you all about it.

 

01:52

But before I do, I just have to give a shout out to one of my clients. Tara, hi! I'm guessing you're probably in the car listening to this now. My client Tara just recently won the New South Wales tourism award for her incredible vacation holiday rental Simpson Cottage, which is in Bundeena. And I just had to celebrate this significant win for her and share it with you but also because I wanted to just tell you we were writing, talking, on Instagram. And I was congratulating her and she just said, 'You know what, I couldn't have done it without you.' And of course, I wrote straight back and said that's totally not true. She definitely could have done it without me because all my clients are super amazing, incredible, capable women. But by working with me, we collapsed the timeline, right, we made it happen quicker and in a way more fun and enjoyable way.

 

03:10

And not only do I want to celebrate Tara and this achievement, because it's a big deal to win the New South Wales tourism award. Incredible. So well done, Tara. But I also wanted to just point out that your goals and dreams are achievable, and sometimes we get bogged down because the people around us can't always see our vision. You know, it's like our friends and family, they don't always understand these dreams that we have and the things that we want to achieve. And I want to tell you that you don't need your friends and family to understand what you're going for. You just need to understand and be fully behind it. And when you are really going hard for your goals, it is such an amazing gift you can give yourself when you have a coach or a mentor or someone that is 100% in your corner, backing you all the way. Because of course you can achieve your goals on your own. But where's the fun in that? You don't have to struggle and hustle and take forever to get to where you want to be. You can get help. You can do it with a coach, you can do it with somebody who just stands behind you and supports you and helps you with different tools and techniques like, you know, a sports person would have, like having a coach, or the difference between doing exercise on your own at home, of course, you're capable of doing that, but isn't it so much more fun and easier when you have a personal trainer. So just, big shout out to Tara, it's an absolute delight to work with you and I'm so thrilled for this amazing achievement. Well done.

 

05:24

So let's get into this three step technique so you always know what to do with your money goals. So, first of all, there are two common obstacles that I see to achieving your goals. And here's what they are. The first one is not knowing what to do next with your money, or what goals to set. This is so common. I just did a consult this week with an amazing woman who was telling me, 'Look, I just don't know what to focus on, you know, should I be putting away money for this? Or should I focus on just saving my money? Or should I start investing?' A lot of confusion around not knowing what to do next, right? And the second one is that you want to create more money, you want to create more money in your business, or you want to create more net worth, but you're not taking care of the money you already have. Right? And this is a common thing. It's like we think we want more money to solve our problems but we're not actually looking after the money that we already have.

 

06:53

So I want to talk to you about how to solve these problems. And I want to teach you a process that you can do before you set money goals. And also, this process is something you can do before, during and after a goal. And using this information is going to supercharge your results, it's going to put you in a position where you never not know what to do next, you are always going to know what to do next with your money goals. And this technique piggybacks off the journal prompts, what I taught you last week on the podcast, so if you haven't listened to last week's episode, go ahead and listen to that, because I think it will help you. And it's very related to what I want to talk to you about today.

 

07:51

So when you are going for a new goal, or you want to just set a new goal, one step that so many of us don't do, which is really super freakin' easy, is to evaluate. Right? Like, evaluate what you've already done in the past. What worked? What didn't work? What are you going to do differently? So wherever you are at with your money right now, like whether you're wanting to double your income this year, or whether you've got a goal to save $100,000 or whatever else, you want to buy a house - the first thing that you can start with is what worked and why. Now, this question is not going to work if you're going for something totally new that you've never ever done before, you can do this a little bit down the track. But for example, let's say you want to increase your net worth, well, what have you already done to grow your net worth, and what worked? And why did it work? Okay, so, for me, for an example, I was able to increase my net worth by investing in property. That has significantly increased my net worth. So I know that if I want to increase my net worth, something that I've done previously, that works really well, is to invest in property. Okay, so that's just a little example.

 

09:41

Another example from one of my clients when she was wanting to increase the revenue in her business, one of the things that she identified that was working, was invoicing her clients in a timely manner. Now, this might seem really obvious, but some of this stuff, we just don't create conscious awareness around it, like when we spell it out, it's like, oh my gosh, of course, if I invoice my clients straightaway and put a deadline on it, the revenue is going to come in. And we need to spell this stuff out for ourselves, because we're always just moving on to the next thing, right? Another one of my clients is going for a big money goal this year, she wants to save a significant amount of money. And we were talking and she's actually saved this amount of money before, but in not as short a timeframe. So it's like, okay, well, what did you do that worked last time, right? And one of the things was that she had a budget where she was allocating her money. So she's identifying - so do you see how simple this is? Just by asking yourself this question, 'Well, what worked, and why?' So last week in the podcast about the prompts that I use, the journal prompts to help me look after my money, one of the questions I asked myself was 'Well, what did I already do in 2021 for looking after my money that worked, and why?' So, identifying those things. Because the things that are working, you can apply those again, right, you can continue to do the things that are working.

 

11:32

Now, the next question is, 'Well, what didn't work? What doesn't work?' And so if we go back to this example of my client who wanted to increase her revenue, well, one of the things that didn't work was that she wasn't invoicing her clients in a timely manner. And she was letting invoices slip. So if her clients weren't paying the invoices on time, she wasn't chasing it up. She didn't have reminders in place, she didn't have set due dates, like this is when you've got to pay it by. So looking at what didn't work is so helpful, because - not that we want to focus on what didn't work or what we've done wrong - but it's just like, 'Hmm, when I don't invoice, when I don't set a due date for my clients, they just don't pay, and I can be chasing them for money for months, like, I'm not gonna do that anymore.' So you can use that data to change what you're going to do in the future.

 

12:43

Which leads to the third question, that is, 'What will I do differently?' Okay, so if we stick with this same example, well, what my client is going to do differently is actually have a set due date, on her invoices, have a follow up reminder email that goes out if people don't pay. And these things, honestly, when you start implementing them and doing them, it's so simple, things that we thought were a big problem clear up really easily. And when you're embarking on something completely new, and you're doing something that you've never done before, for example, when I was building my business, I didn't know how to build a business. This was all new to me. And so what I would do is, I just would try stuff. Okay, so you can just try stuff out when you're going for your goals, and then evaluate. You could evaluate every week, you could evaluate every month, you could evaluate every six months, you could evaluate after a particular project that you've been working on.

 

14:01

So the beauty of this simple three step technique is that you're always going to know what to do next. Right? Because you're always looking at, 'Okay, well, what didn't work? So I'm not doing that. What did work? Okay, let's do that again, let's do more of that. And what am I going to do differently?' And when you answer that question, 'what am I going to do differently?' that's when you get to be creative, use your imagination. You're not going to know what will work and what won't work until you actually try it. Right? So try it and then see what happens. So if we go back to the example of the client I was talking about increasing her revenue, when she started invoicing her clients and putting a due date on it, that worked. And then occasionally she had to, you know, follow up with someone because I mean, look, we're all human, who hasn't forgot to pay a bill before, you know, I've got my hand raised, just because life, right? And so when she has a reminder, it's like, oh, and then they just get reminded and pay it. So that worked. But she didn't know that that was going to work until she tried it. Right?

 

15:35

So there's plenty of things that I've tried in business that haven't worked. But by doing this evaluation process, it's like, 'Oh, okay, this worked. This didn't work. What will I try differently?' And then you can try something different. So for example, this amazing woman who came to me in the consult the other week, she wants to know what to do next with her money. Well, one of the things that she just mentioned is that she's great at saving. She's really good at saving money. And so that's something that's really working for her, right? But she wasn't even aware or acknowledging that, right, it only came out in conversation, when she was talking about that she'd spent a long period of time living off her savings. And it was like, wow, well, you have to be someone who's pretty good at saving money to be able to live off your savings for a long period of time, right? And that hadn't even really registered for her. And so then it's like, well, what does she want to do next?

 

16:46

Here's the thing. You can just decide, 'What am I going to try? What am I going to do differently?' Okay? And then just do it. And then once you do it, you evaluate and then you see whether it's the best move for you, or whether you need to tweak things or whether you need to change things. So go forth, use this technique, to your heart's content, this evaluation: What worked? And why? What didn't work? And why? What will you try differently next time? Or what will you do differently next time? This is so simple. Obviously, like when you're hearing me talk about it, you can ask yourself these three questions, but the information that you get from these three questions, it changes everything, because you can use it to inform all your next moves moving forward, and you will never not know what to do next, again.

 

17:53

I hope that helps. If you are loving - and only if you ARE loving - and that is a serious comment, if you are absolutely connecting with me, you love what you hear on the podcast, you just feel like you're totally on my wavelength and vibe and you really want to take this work deeper, I want to encourage you to reach out and book a consult with me. I'm currently opening up new spots for clients, probably in mid to late March. Yeah, that's not confirmed. But if you want to work with me, now is the time to book a consult and get in and chat with me and meet to look at working with me in the future. It looks like mid March to the end of March will be when I'm taking on new clients again. But you want to get in now. There's a bit of a process when we get started and we don't rush into anything. So if you would like to take this work deeper, I would love to help you. All roads lead to a consult. If you go to the moneymindful.com.au website or the meaghanjsmith.com website, you will find a link where you can book a consult with me. Okay, until you hear from me again next week, have an amazing week. Bye bye.