Entre-Talk: WILD Goals

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Entre-Talk: WILD Goals.

This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.

Alright my friends, I am excited to talk to you about this topic today. I recently got to speak at Funnel Hacking Live. Maybe you’ve heard me talk about this. I’ve been talking about a lot because it was such a phenomenal experience to get to speak to 5,000 entrepreneurs at the event that the team of ClickFunnels puts on. I love that team, by the way. One of the things that I talked about in my talk is the concept that I want to teach you today. And it’s what I call a wild goal.

I am a big fan of you as an entrepreneur, setting wild goals. And I’m going to tell you why, but I want to back up first and talk to you about why I view wild goals as kind of the opposite of a smart goal. I did not make up the term, smart goal. I’m sure you have heard it before. You maybe even have been taught it like I was in the past. In fact, when I was a corporate trainer, I used to teach it to other people to set smart goals. And I don’t think that smart goals are wrong or bad. I just think that they’re not going to help you achieve what’s possible for you as an entrepreneur.

So if you were not taught about smart goals, they are goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. There are different versions of it. Sometimes people change the R to relevant or things like that. But either way it doesn’t matter. Smart goals are designed to prevent you from failing. To take you just one step beyond where you’re at right now, achievable and realistic being the main focus.

How do we know what’s achievable? Well, we look at what other people have done in the world. That’s what’s achievable according to the way most people think about smart goals. Somebody else did this, so we know it’s achievable so that could be a goal I could set. And realistic, what would be realistic for me? Well, according to the logic of a smart goal typically, what’s realistic is just one step beyond where I am or maybe a couple steps, but not too far beyond. We don’t want to get unrealistic.

And the purpose again of a smart goal is to be able to help you make incremental progress and feel some small wins towards your goals. I am a fan of that in certain areas of your life. For me, those kinds of goals help me improve my own habits, for example. If I want to get more in the habit of exercising or eating better or drinking more water or going to bed earlier or reading more or scrolling Instagram less or something like that. If I’m trying to develop a good habit or counteract a bad habit. Then a smart goal is one way to do it that I like actually.

I like using those kind of incremental baby step types of goals. But in my business I like to set wild goals when it comes to the things I’m trying to do here. And so let me tell you why and let me and let me tell you what a wild goal is. So the W in wild stands for being willing to suck at it. Now, this is something that, again, my teacher Brooke Castillo taught me. She said, “You’ve got to be willing to suck at things.” And I like that way of thinking about it as opposed to willing to fail because on the one hand, sometimes failure is part of sucking at it.

You do have to also be willing to fail. But to me, being willing to suck at it goes even a step beyond that. It means as I’m trying to get to the goal, which I may or may not get to. As I’m trying to get to it, a lot of the things that I do along the way, I’m not going to be good at. I’m even going to be terrible at them. I’m going to make some videos that are going to be cringey. They’re going to look dumb. I’m going to sound dumb. I’m certainly going to think that about them, maybe even a lot of other people are going to think that too.

Maybe people are going to judge it. They’re going to think, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about or she’s wrong or she shouldn’t have said that. Okay, what if I was willing to be bad at it? Again, I’m not trying to be bad at it. I’m just willing to be bad at it. If I go try to do something and I put what feels like the appropriate amount of effort in, maybe that’s my best or maybe it’s just this is the appropriate amount and it’s not very good. Then okay, so what, now what? Maybe we’d go back and do it again now that we know what we didn’t know before.

Maybe we keep practicing it so that we get better at it over time or maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s something that can be done at a not so extraordinary level and still help people the way we’re trying to help people or make the impact we’re trying to make and help achieve our goals along the way. So I coach a lot of entrepreneurs, like I said, videos are probably the number one thing.

And when I say video, it might mean posting some video on social media. It might be putting up YouTube videos. It might be a podcast. It might be speaking somewhere. Putting yourself out there in that kind of a way is tough to do until you get enough practice that it becomes more natural. You find your own style, you gain some skills and you get better at it. But before you’re good at it, you have to be not good at it. And a lot of people want to stay behind the curtain and hide and practice.

And I would much rather you go out on stage in front of the curtain and practice in front of everyone because the feedback you’ll get will be so useful. Even if it’s criticism, it’s good to know that that’s a topic that triggers people in a certain way or that draws the kind of negative attention you’re not trying to get. Okay, good to know. If you don’t get any feedback, by feedback, I mean attention, people subscribing, people commenting, people sharing, people liking.

If you get kind of crickets, you probably aren’t saying anything that’s as interesting and new as what you need to be saying. You’re saying the same thing everyone else has said, or you’re not talking to a specific enough person or a specific enough audience. And so that’s good to know. Do you see why putting it out in front of people in whatever platform or whatever way you choose to do that, and being willing to suck at it along the way is a double win? Because you’re getting better at it naturally, just the more you do something, the better you get at it.

And you’re getting some feedback one way or another as you do that. So that’s the first part of a wild goal. You’ve got to be willing to suck at it.

Let’s talk about the I. The I stands for impossible. Notice how this is the opposite of a smart goal, the vowel in the second letter, the A and the R stand for achievable and realistic. And the vowel in our goal stands for impossible. It’s the opposite of achievable and realistic. Do you know why? When you just label your goal impossible and you decide to go for it anyway. Then it’s a different conversation that happens in your head. People say to me, “Why would I try to achieve a goal if I know it’s impossible?”

And I say, “Great question, let’s answer it. Why would you? You tell me.” What would be the benefit to trying to achieve a goal that is impossible? Now, impossible means you’ve never done it before, usually in most cases that’s what impossible means. So anything that I’ve never done that requires a great deal of skill and effort is impossible until I achieve it and then it’s possible. And in fact, things that nobody in the world has done before are impossible until somebody does them. We’ve all heard stories about this.

Who’s the gentleman? I’m sorry, I don’t have his name in front of me, that first ran the four minute mile. And before then they thought it was impossible to run a four minute mile. And then once he did, all these people started running four minute miles because somebody showed us it was possible. So before it’s possible, of course, it’s impossible and we’re just going to go for it anyway, you know why? We want to aim high. We want to aim big. We’re not trying to stay safe and prevent failure.

We’re trying to test our capacity. We’re trying to test what’s possible. We’re trying to grow exponentially. And by growth, I don’t just mean your business. It could be that your business grows exponentially, but maybe you just want to grow exponentially as a person. That’s what I want to do. I want transformation as an entrepreneur, as a coach, as an online business owner, as a marketer, as a podcaster. I want exponential development of myself. So we just label it impossible.

And then when you’re trying to achieve it, this is what I love about calling a goal impossible, is you can stop doing math, you can stop doing math. Aren’t you glad? You don’t have to have a business plan. If you have a business plan then it’s not impossible. It’s possible you’ve got it mapped out right there on paper, if you follow A, B, C, D and E, F, G and H happens then you end up eventually at Z. That’s called possible. If it’s impossible, you won’t have a business plan because you won’t know the way.

You can’t do math to figure out impossible goals. You can’t go, “If I have this many clients and I charge this amount.” I remember trying to do this in the beginning of building my business. I was like, “Okay, let me do the math.” If I’m trying to get from 30K to 100K then I’ve got, this is what I charge for my program per client. So I would need this many clients. and to get that many clients I’d need this many consultations or mini sessions. And in the end my brain was just like, “Well, that’s not going to happen. That’s impossible.” That’s so far beyond anything you’ve ever done before. It’s not possible.

And so I would just throw that piece of paper in the garbage where I just did that math. And I would just go, “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but this sounds interesting to try. This is compelling and pulling me towards it for some reason.” And you go towards what you feel pulled to but not the pull that you feel to sit on the couch and watch TV and do nothing. I mean the pull toward the thing that’s kind of big and kind of scary and is going to stretch you. And some of those seeds that you’re planting will produce crop in a way you hadn’t even imagined. Some of them won’t, but some of them will. So let it be impossible.

Alright, so we’ve got W willing to suck at it. I impossible. L let it be easy. Let it be easier than what you’re thinking. Because here’s what people tell me. They say, “I don’t want to set big goals because I don’t want to work any harder than I already am. I’m already working so hard and if I’m going to 10x everything then I’m going to have to work even harder. Or they’ll say, “I’m not working that hard and I like not working that hard. And if I set a big giant goal, I’m going to have to work a lot harder.”

Now listen, I am a fan of hard work. I do think that it’s beneficial to be willing to do some hard things. And there might be some hard things that you need to do along the way. But a lot of times what I see is people just trying to turn the dial up on what they’re already doing. And that will make it all harder. That will mean that you have to work a lot harder. And that’s not what I’m talking about. With a wild goal, you’re going to do things in a completely different way that you aren’t doing at all right now that you maybe hadn’t even considered.

So let me give an example. When I was scaling my business up to the $1 million mark, one of the things that I knew was working well in my business was my podcast, this very podcast that you’re listening to. I got lots of positive feedback about the podcast, I still do. People share it. People tell each other about it. It makes an impact for people. And it was converting pretty well into my coaching program in terms of the numbers of people that listened that went on and wanted more help from me.

So I thought, how am I going to grow my podcast? How do you grow a podcast, you guys, do you know? Well, what most people will teach is, first of all through SEO, which is search engine optimization. Meaning you need to find out what key terms people are searching on Google and use those Google keywords in your podcast titles so that people can find them when they’re searching for help online. Not a bad strategy. The other thing is consistently publishing, consistently putting out episodes and content.

So I was already doing some keyword stuff, but researching Google keywords is not my favorite thing to do. For some of you it is. Great, go all in on that. But for me it’s kind of drudgery. It doesn’t really line up with my zone of expertise and what I love. Trying to work those into my titles felt challenging. And then I was like, “Well, what, should I publish an episode every day?” That felt really hard and exhausting. So do you see how if I just take what I’m already doing and I try to notch it up, it’s going to feel exhausting?

But instead of that I just opened myself up to there’s a way that I haven’t even considered yet. And that’s when I found online, Dr. Jennifer Finlayson Fife, who I started listening to. You guys know Jennifer Finlayson-Fife. She’s been on the podcast a couple of times. She’s amazing and brilliant and she’s an LDS sex therapist and relationship coach. And I started listening to what she taught and I loved it. It was amazing and life changing and I kept thinking, why has no one been talking about this before now?

But anyway, then I noticed that at the time she didn’t have her own podcast. She would go on other people’s podcasts and then she would share them with her audience. And I thought, maybe I could get her to come on my podcast. And the week that we published her episode, my podcast downloads doubled, you guys, in that one week and then they continued to climb.

It was so much easier because for a moment there at least I let myself open up to a wild goal, to the possibility, to the capacity of what’s available. Now, I still have much more room to keep doing that. But that was just a tiny example for me of I was like, “That was so easy.” That was so easy. There are some things that are going to be that almost feel too good to be true, too easy, that will get you closer to your wild goal.

And then the last, well, before I tell you what it stands for, it has to do with your reason. Your reason for setting this huge goal. That is way beyond anything that you’re currently doing. What is your reason? Because this is the other thing people say, “I’m just afraid. I’m afraid to set a wild goal, a big exponential goal.” And I’ll say, “Why?” And they say, “What if it doesn’t work. What if I don’t get there? What if I fail?” And I say, “Yeah, what if?” Now, this is an indicator to me that oftentimes their reason needs some examining.

So why are you trying to do this? And tell yourself the truth. You have to own what’s true for you? It’s okay wherever you’re at. We just want to examine it so that we can choose it more intentionally. So if you ask yourself, why do I want to do this? And you notice that you’re just hoping that your dad will be proud of you finally. Then I’m going to tell you something. Your dad might never get over his baggage and it’s his baggage, trust me.

And some of you are like, “I just want to impress that girl from college that broke my heart.” OK, so if that’s you, buddy, listen up. I’m going to tell you something. She’s not paying attention. She is too busy yelling at her kids. So you don’t need to impress anyone from your past. They don’t care. They’re not paying attention. Even if they are, who cares? We don’t know what they will think as you try to achieve your goal. These are very heavy reasons. You see what I’m saying?

The other thing people tell me is, “Well, I just want to prove to myself that I can do it. I just need to show myself what’s possible.” And I’m like, “Why do you have to prove it to yourself? Did you know that this isn’t a court of law? You’re not like, “I think I can do it”, and then your judge self says, “Really? Let’s see some proof.”” No, you’re allowed to just believe that you can do it. And I recommend that you do.

So if we’re not going to prove it to yourself, we’re not going to prove it to anyone else in your life or in your family or in your past or out in the world in general, then why set a gigantic wild goal? The D stands for do it for fun. Just do it for fun. Do it because it would be fun. I talked a little bit about this last week, when I talked about the conversation I had with my coach, Brooke Castillo recently. She really did teach me this. And it’s one of my favorite things you guys know to focus on is just doing it for fun because you’re alive on planet Earth.

And you have access to all these resources and you have a brain that is super capable beyond what you even have considered. And why not just have some fun? Why not play the game? You’re at the game right now. You can sit on the bench. You can get in there and play. Put me in, coach, I want to play. Just do it for fun. So I hope that you will join me in setting some wild goals this year. Are you in?

Alright, take care, everybody. Thanks for joining me for Entre-Talk. I will see you next time. Bye bye.

If you are a coach, healer or expert who is not yet making six figures, or not sure you’re set up properly to grow to seven figures and beyond, go take my free training. It’s at jodysfree-training.com. I’ll see you there.