Episode 1: Seven Steps to Starting the New Year on the Right Foot
Today, I'm gonna talk to you about how to complete the old, create the new. How to get of rid of one year and take all the goodness that it had and then get started on a new year, like so fresh, so ready, so complete. Seven steps, you can do 'em all in one day or you can do 'em over the course of a week. Here we go.
Number one, you're gonna look back on all your wins. Go through your social media, your calendar, your memory, your photos, and look at all of the really awesome things that happened to you, the things that you did that were awesome. And bask. Just sit back, bask. You are awesome, right?
Number two, not as fun, initially. You're going to go through all of that stuff, the photos, the social media, the calendar, the memory, all that stuff, and look at all the bad stuff. Yeah. You have to, you have to look at the bad stuff or you're doomed to repeat it. And I've gotta tell you, where there's poop there's a pony. This is my experience. Look at the bad stuff. Find out what the learning is in there. Was it a mistake, was it failure, was it something that just happened to you? Bleech! How did you respond? What did you get out of it? Don't miss any of the wisdom or fate has a funny way of bringing that lesson back to you. And we don't want that to be repeated. So, take some time to go through, check out all your L's. Figure out why they happened, figure out what there is to learn from 'em. All right, so I've looked at the good stuff, we looked back at the bad stuff.
Number three, now we're gonna get started on looking forward. And we're gonna make some goals. And I would say, don't make too many. I would really be conservative. I would even say just start with three. Pick one from three different sections of your life. So, we're gonna just talk about one goal for now. And, for example, you want to be debt-free or reduce your debt. We'll call it debt-free, why not, right? All right, goal is debt-free, great. So what's the first three steps? We looked back in the good and the bad, now we set a goal.
Number 4, now for that goal, we're gonna make three priorities. We are gonna break this thing down until it's so easy to do. It's just gonna break it down and break it down and break it down so that when we're done with this process it's just gonna be, you will see the steps. And it will bring you right to that goal. It's so much fun. All right, so the three priorities that you might use for getting debt-free would be, let's see, organization would be one, saving, and earning. All right, three good things to focus on if you're trying to get debt-free. Great, wonderful, now we've broken that down. Let's break it down again. So those three, organization, saving, and earning, we're gonna bust those down into five different things. And I'm gonna focus just on one, I'm gonna just head down one branch for now. And we'll go down organization.
Number 5: So with the priority of organization, what are some strategies under organization that you could employ that would help move you closer to your goal of becoming debt-free? For example, one of them might be get all my financial passwords in one place. Another one would be download a financial organization app like Mint, find out what my credit score is, get a file box and folders for saving all my paper financial records, and the fifth one could be, make a recurring appointment in your phone for yourself to pay your bills and review your statements. Those are five strategies. Getting easier, isn't it? Like be debt-free is like, owwwwwh! Thinking about organization, wrhhhh, kinda cringey. But then when you're like, all right, all I have to do is just get all my password in one place, find out what my credit score is? I could do those things. And the more we break this down, the more like real and doable this thing becomes.
Number 6: Alright, the next step is you're gonna take one of those strategies, for example, let's see, take the get all my financial passwords in one place. Okay, yes, that is not a big project, but if you're anything like me you can get a little distracted. Going in there, and getting all your, you've gotta go into banks, you've gotta into credit cards, you've gotta go into Venmo, you've gotta go into PayPal, like you can really get off-track going and looking for your passwords. Like it sounds like an easy thing but it can be really kinda crazy. So we're gonna get a task that goes with getting your financial passwords in one place. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna set a little timer on our phone for 15 minutes and when that time goes off, you stop, because that will get you back on track. So if you do kinda go down a little rabbit hole, and you're like, "Oh, I should rearrange my, "or I gotta change my profile picture on Mint," or whatever. Bleech, don't! All we're doing is looking is passwords, but if you set your timer for 15 minutes it will, boom, get you back into reality and keep you focused which is probably why you're in this place in the beginning. Anyway, so we've got goals, we've got strategies, priorities, we've got strategies, and now we've got tasks. You can break these tasks down as tiny as you want. There's like literally be like get a piece of paper and a pen out, like that can be the task that you get out. You gotta break these tasks down as small as you possibly can, well, as small as you need to in order to actually do them. Because these are all building off of that one big goal, you know that even the tiniest task of getting that pen out is moving you closer to your goal of being debt-free. I believe in you. You can do this.
Number 7: The very last step of this whole thing after you get your goals and your tasks and your blah blah blah blah, you've gotta act. Okay, some of us really love to organize. We love to plan. It looks so great and you're feeling really hopeful and you're kinda psyched, you think you can do this. But it doesn't work unless you work it. And actually the opposite of that is every plan works if you work the plan. So you have to make time to take action! And if you struggle with taking action, I'm gonna give three books that I think are awesome that you can listen to while you're off multi-tasking doing something else.
"The 5 Second Rule" by Mel Robbins.
"Free to Focus" by Michael Hyatt.
"The Miracle Morning" by Hal Elrod
If you have trouble getting off the dime, these books will help you. All right, I hope that this was helpful and it helps you wrap up this past 2019 and get you onto a 2020 that's full of hope and promise.