In this podcast, Kia interviews Matt about goal setting. He compares goal setting to creating a road map so you know what opportunities to take throughout the year. He recommends brainstorming everything you want to accomplish for 5 minutes, dreaming huge and small. Think about where you want to be 3 months, 3 years, and a lifetime from now to give you short term and long term goals. Listen in to learn more about SMART goals. Matt also has specific questions he uses to reflect on the past to help shape the future; you’ll want to take notes! Then Matt explains how he turns his goals into action plans so he can accomplish them.

Resources – Questions Matt uses to reflect

What was the best part of 2018?

What was the lesson learned from that?

What was the most challenging part of 2018?

What was the lesson learned from that?

Who & How did you positively influence someone in 2018?

Who made you laugh most in 2018?

Who or what were you most grateful for in 2018?

What still feels incomplete to you?

What will you do to handle it?

What would you change about how you managed your stress in 2018?

What do you wish you would have done differently this year?

What are you most proud of in regards to your finances in 2018?

Where did you find the most peace and calm in 2018?

What advice would you give yourself at the beginning of 2018?

What will you do less of in 2019?

What important relationship do you want to improve the most next year?

What do I most want to be thankful for 1 year from now?

What do I want to become an expert in the next year?

What are you most excited about for the next year?

Read Full Transcript

Transcription was done by Temi.com which means it’s an AI generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video.

Speaker 1: [00:01] Welcome to from nothing to profit, a photographer’s podcast with Matt and Kia where each week they talk to photographers about what is working in their business now so you can swipe those ideas and grow your business faster. Hello everyone.

Kia: [00:18] Welcome to from nothing to profit. Today is our goal setting show and I’m Kia bonderant and I am going to be interviewing Matt Hoagland about how he sets the goals throughout the year and I’m super excited because I have some ways that I do goal setting, but it’s not my main thing that I do where we have our new year’s show. We talked about word of the year and that’s really my way of starting the year. So Matt, I’m super excited to hear what you have to say about goal setting.

Matt: [00:50] Yeah, it’s really fun. This is something I felt like I kind of thrive in. I would love to know what my wife and employees think, whether I thrive in it or not, but it definitely helps me a lot and I feel like it moves our business forward in a major way. So yeah, I’m excited to share what I have to offer.

Kia: [01:06] Okay. So tell us about like what you do when you set goals.

Matt: [01:10] Yeah, so I think it’s important to set goals every year because it’s kind of like, for me it’s like a roadmap, you know, it’s really hard to know where you’re going unless you have a map to kind of tell you where to go. So it, it goal setting starts as the start of the process of figuring out what the roadmap is for the year. But, and part of the reason that happens in the roadmap happens is because you’re establishing priorities as soon as you say these are my goals and there’s actually I think a bigger part than goals which is called, which I call an action plan, but we’ll get to that in a second. But it establishes your priorities so that you can start looking at the world, your business, whatever it is, through a certain lens and decide like, okay, all this stuff coming at me. Like what actually, what do I need to pay attention to? Because you know, as you get a million opportunities in the, in any given year to, you know, to change things in your business, but if you don’t have your roadmap and you’ll have your priorities, you don’t know which ones to take and which ones not to take because they all sound like good ideas at the time.

Kia: [02:06] Absolutely. I feel like I always come up with so many things that I can just run around like a crazy person. So yeah. So how do you do that? Like what kind of different goals do you set?

Matt: [02:17] Yeah. So, well I have a couple of different goals. So one of the things that I do is I kind of design. I start the process. So like I said like a five minute timer and I kind of just do like I just write down everything I can think of that and dream up of for like the next year. So this case 20, 19. So all set. I’ll set a timer and I’ll say what do I want for 2019? And I’ll just write down all these different words and brainstorm it and just get it all out on paper and some of the stuff is so crazy that it’ll, it’ll never happen, you know, like win the lottery, you know, like I could write that down if I really wanted to and I can turn that into an action plan and try to win the lottery. But like that, that some of that stuff is so far fetched and I put a.

Matt: [02:54] But the secret is I do put that stuff down. Not that particular one, but I put far, we just read stuff down. So. And then even the little things and just that five minutes of quiet time by yourself running down. It’s amazing what you actually write down. So wait, wait, wait. Okay. So how long do you set the timer for? Five minutes. Oh, okay. Did you say that? And I missed it? Yeah. Just so just five minutes. And then B, you find yourself writing the same things down every year? Mm. Yeah. I mean there’s some core stuff that I write down that was kind of the same every year. But then kind of what drives our action plan for the year is some of the new things we write down that are come from the clarity of writing and those other things down. Let me rephrase that. So there may be something we write down five years in a row and the reason it never gets put in place because that’s maybe not the right way to say it.

Matt: [03:45] Eventually you get clarity around that particular word and it becomes, it morphs into a new word that you actually like, oh, that’s what it actually means. This is what I really want, you know, so like, like it may make more money maybe written down for five years, but you know, on the fifth year you actually, you say it’s not really about making more money, it’s actually about making my business more profitable or something like that. And then it kind of changes the whole thing. So total side note real quick and then I’m going to get back to the kind of goals with question, the kind of goals that I write. So one of the things that allison did recently, my wife, which was pretty cool, is she watched, I sent her a video and then she actually did this, which was amazing, cause I don’t even remember the video, but she took it into action is they had you write down 25 things that you wanted to do and then you’re only allowed to pick five because supposedly there is science behind the fact that you can only pick five things to actually accomplish.

Matt: [04:38] And so she, there’s 25 things she wants to do, but what are the top five? And then once you accomplish one of those then you can pick something else off your list, but you can only focus on like five at a time. So that’s kind of a side note that I’m going to look at doing this year. But with that being said, the goal to kind of the kind of goals I set, it’s like I have like one year goals. Where do I want to be from a year, a year from now? Where do I want to be three years from now? Where do I want to be? Just three months from now and then I kind of have like these lifetime goals, they tend to be around like retirement or you know, longterm super longterm things. So I kind of group, once I write down for those five minutes, I wrote down on my dreams, I kind of group those into like, is this, are these one year things, three things, three month items or lifetime items.

Matt: [05:21] Um, and the idea is I want longterm and short term goals to keep me motivated because you need short term goals to be able to feel like you’re winning, but then you need longterm goals to actually steer your life, ship a certain direction. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, and then the other thing that I always focus on, and I’ll get to this in more detail in a second, but I always make sure people have probably heard this a thousand times, but that your goals are smart and if you haven’t heard it, the idea I have, I have it written down here. So it’s basically, they’re specific, they’re measurable, they’re attainable, they’re realistic, and then trackable and some other people have used, instead of attainable, they’ve used like achievable, realistic, they said relevant instead of trackable, they said timebound and I actually liked the time, the time bound one better than the trackable one. So all I just make sure all of them are specific, measurable and that I could actually pull them off and know that okay,

Kia: [06:17] your, uh, your first list, your first list is like, just everything you can think of and you start organizing them into the different categories and then you make you change them to be smart.

Matt: [06:31] Yeah, exactly. So that’s kind of just, that was kind of like the overview of how I view the process, how you use the process. So, so one of the questions people always ask me is like how do I reflect on the past year and, you know, how do I actually get some of these ideas out of my head because, you know, like what do, what do I ask myself to actually think about it? Because, you know, goal setting can be kinda overwhelming. So I have a list of questions that I go through an answer, um, and I don’t necessarily just do this in five minutes, but I definitely make some quiet time for myself and I answer these and I don’t always have to answer them just in one day, but when I read, when I’m reflecting, so I say like what was the best part of this last year and what lessons did I learn so that, that flushes out some ideas. Okay. What’s the most challenging part of last year and what did I learn from that? So it brings up some different.

Kia: [07:24] The best part, the worst part kind of,

Matt: [07:27] yeah. Who, who and how did I positively influenced somebody last year. So that brings up like giving back and stuff like that. Yeah. Like who made me laugh the most last year? So that kind of like who do I probably need to be around more because I see them in a positive light. Who or what was I most grateful for last year? So that starts to really make you think, oh, you know, what was really good and just good reflection question. Right. And I have a bunch more, I’ll keep going. So what, what makes you feel and see what still makes you feel incomplete? So like what are you still missing or what do you still thriving after?

Kia: [08:05] Like frustrated about or like this the, I didn’t get that done.

Matt: [08:10] I also have a sub question for that. Like what will you do to handle it? So like it starts that starts the action plan process of what’s, what can I actually do about that? Incomplete filling. What would you change about how you manage your stress last year? So that helps you think, okay, what was stressful last year and what did I in hindsight now since I’m removed from it, what should I have done differently? Uh, what do you wish you would have done differently last year? That’s just kind of a general question. And then switch back to the positive. What are you most proud of last year? And I always do. What do you also most proud of in regards to your finances? Because finances are really important to me. A lot of my, unfortunately a lot of my happiness and um, how identify success and stuff is wrapped up in finances, so I just have to be very clear about that.

Matt: [08:56] But not everybody has to do the finance one, but you just have to keep it balanced. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Where did you find the most peace and calm last year? Just another way to think of ideas and I, you know, make you realize like this was a good thing so I should probably move towards that. Not Away from it. Uh, what, what advice would you have given yourself at the beginning of Twenty 16 or 20? Sorry. Twenty 18. I’m looking at a list from 2016 right now. And these, again, these are just questions I’ve picked up over the years that I thought are good reflection question.

Kia: [09:25] So they’re not specifically from any certain like these are, this is your personal list.

Matt: [09:30] Yeah. And you know, like one year I did the passion planner, so probably from, there’s a couple from probably that, but it’s a compilation of a bunch of different things or you know, I went to a networking meeting or something and whatever. Uh, what do you want to do less of this next year? Again, just about like balancing the positive and negative of what I need to move towards and what I need to move away from. Yeah. What important relationships do you want to improve next year? What do you want to be? I’m most thankful for in a year from now. So that’s just very forward thinking. What do you want to become an expert in next year? So again, that’s forward thinking and what are you excited? What are you most excited about for next year? So those are some of the questions that Kinda just helped me bubble up ideas of where I was last year and where I need to go.

Kia: [10:23] Okay. So, so you, you make your big list. Yup. And then you put those in the categories and then you ask yourself these questions next.

Matt: [10:36] Yeah. Okay. And these questions I just went over, they take awhile. It’s not like this. I just do this afternoon. Yeah.

Kia: [10:43] Like do you do it over a certain number of days or.

Matt: [10:46] Yeah, typically I normally put one good day and again get most of the way through it and then I let it sit for a couple of days and I’ll be like laying in bed or watching tv or something like that and something will bubble up and I’m like, Oh, I’m really grateful for that. Or that was really funny and I can add to the list a little bit but I don’t want to, you know, it’s all about reflection. So sometimes you just can’t reflect on everything in a year, like in a matter of 10 minutes, you know.

Kia: [11:12] Now, do you do this all by yourself or do you like view dialogue? Will Azure doing it?

Matt: [11:18] Um, I typically do it by myself.

Kia: [11:20] Yeah. See I’m such a verbal processor that I think I would have to do like a lot of it talking.

Matt: [11:26] Yeah. And I’m a verbal processor to boat with this stuff. I mean, occasionally I’ll ask my wife, you know, like, you know, maybe like how did I manage my stress last year? And sometimes she can give me some real talk that um, helps, but I don’t know for the most part it’s, it’s pretty. I’m pretty

Kia: [11:45] by myself. You want to, do you want to see what you really think? Like you want to

Matt: [11:50] measure yourself? Yeah. Okay, cool. So then I have to actually turn them into goals, you know, I have to start turning them into smart goals. And so what I do as I go through a whole process where I have all this stuff written down and stuff starts to get clarified. So some of those words that I wrote down on the five minute timer deal, get clarified in some of these questions or whatever. And so then I start really prioritizing and cutting down this list of stuff that you know, I want to accomplish until I end up with some very clear goals of like, this is what I, this is what I want to do. You know, I want to, you know, grow my business. Maybe where I start. And then I actually realized like, what I actually want to do is go from this many seniors to this many seniors, you know, so I can start to get more clear about how I want to grow my business. So one year that we did this was really good. We said we wanted to grow our business. That’s where we started. By the time I was done with this exercise, I realized that what I really wanted to do was add head shots to our business. So I didn’t necessarily want more seniors, more weddings or anything like that. I wanted a whole new product line. And so we’re able to do that. And when I was super clear about it than I could that I knew that’s what I wanted to do.

Kia: [13:08] So do you take this and compare it to allison or are you the one who kind of comes up with the ideas and then you guys and then she’s like, oh, I like that. Let’s do that together.

Matt: [13:18] Yeah. And so like when it comes to the business, yeah, I mean I’ll talk to everybody and say, here’s what I think. What do you guys think? And I’m a little bit more reflective than they are about it, but then yeah, I have to get buy in and stuff like that and. Right. And that’s kind of my next step after I do this in terms of turning it into an action plan, but the point I want to make with this is that you got to get really clear about your goals and then narrow it down to just the ones that you really want to, that you think, you know, our, our smart goals in a sense. So are, are they very specific? Can you measure them, you know, are they actually attainable? Are they realistic or relevant to what you’re trying to do now? And are they trackable or timebound and some goals won’t qualify for that because you don’t necessarily know how to track it or it won’t be time bound and so you just have to get rid of those. So I normally end up with like three to five goals that I really want to work on.

Kia: [14:12] Okay. So here’s my question for you on it. Have we gone through all the, like the process that you do?

Matt: [14:19] There’s just one last part where I turn it into an action step, but I can, I can get to that in a second. Go ahead.

Kia: [14:24] Well here’s what I want is like, tell me like an example of like how like a goal from the like, you know, like the first kind of, you know, like five minute thing to like the answer to a question like, you know, what was the funniest thing or who was it? Who did I have so much fun with you? Like how you actually turn it into an action step.

Matt: [14:45] Okay. So this is a good one. If it has nothing to do with my business. So I apologize that I don’t think it’s good but photographers are going to be bored with that. But. So there was this, I brainstormed and came up with this idea that I needed to like take care of myself more or I needed to stop self-identifying...