Greater Than Business Podcast – Episode 009
This is episode nine of the greater than business podcast. And today we are going to be talking about setting up life goals and then using your business to fuel them. So instead of the usual building your business and hitting business goals, what I want you to do is kind of flip it because obviously your life has to be greater than your business. And that is the whole theme of this podcast. And the biggest thing that I want you to take away from this episode today is that you should be building your business in order to fuel your life goals. So most people, your life goals could be something like being debt free, having financial freedom, being able to travel whenever you want, wherever you want, building your dream house, living in your dream location, um, not living anywhere, being able to move on the fly, live in the airbnb lifestyle where you just float from temporary home to temporary home, wherever it does not matter.
What I want to teach you though, is that you should create your business to evolve around those life goals. You shouldn't change your life in order to hit your business goals. So it's kind of a chicken and the egg scenario because obviously you have to sacrifice a little bit of your life in order for your business to thrive if you have really, really high expectations and goals. But I also want you to realize that you don't need to become so stressed out in your business by hitting those goals. So firstly, what I want you to do is sit down and think of your why, once again, why you started your business, why you wanted to build this business. And there is no wrong answer here. Obviously for myself, I started my business because I wanted to be able to be at home. I wanted to have freedom and I still wanted to make a decent amount of money while doing so.
Obviously there is always a, a motive behind why you started your business. And it's okay if that motivation doesn't necessarily look good on paper. A lot of people started their business because they wanted to make $1 million. Awesome. That's fine. That can be your why. That's a great why. But why did you want $1 million? I want you to really deep on this. So did you want $1 million for the financial freedom? Then maybe your bigger, why is financial freedom? If you wanted $1 million so that you could retire your husband or your wife or whoever set up a college fund for your kids, then that is your greater why you're using that. Why and fueling your business to provide for that why? So I want you to dig, dig deeper if your goal is a financial goal, but I want you to also keep in mind that there is no wrong answer here, but I want you to take whatever answer you get and dig a little bit more behind that why.
Then I want you to really look at the goals for, or the goals in which you wanted to achieve in your business. So what if your goal was to make $1 million? Okay? So why you wanted to make $1 million so that you could buy your dream house. Okay? Why did you want to build your dream house? Because you wanted to move away from the city that you're currently living in. Okay, great. Now why do you want to move away? So keep asking why. Keep digging deeper and then you're going to figure out exactly what your life goals are as to why you started your business. So think about everything that you hoped to accomplish when you started your business and really think about why you started and think about how your business is going to help you get there. So obviously these goals, no one starts a business in order to fulfill business goals, but most people then basically changed their life to satisfy their business goals.
I want you to not do that. I want you to look at why you started your business. Look at the life goals that are specific, and then how you can use your business to hit those goals. Not to then create a whole bunch of business related goals. We want to focus on those life goals. So I want to make sure that all of these goals that you're writing down are in alignment with the overall business that you're trying to create. So if your goal once again is to make $1 million, but then you've stripped it down and you realized that the reason why you want to create $1 million is so that you can provide a life for your child that you never got to have. Okay? There you go. That's a good life goal. So you want to provide for your child and give them the life that you always have wanted.
Now I want you to really dig deep here and once again, if you are creating your business to fuel your life goal of allowing your child to be more financially set than you were, I also want you to think about your own childhood. And even though you may have struggled as a child and you want to provide a better life for your child, did you have a happy and healthy childhood regardless of finances? Did you always have time with your parents? One, both one or the other? It doesn't matter. But you also have to maintain and keep in mind that you don't want to sacrifice other areas of your life in order to provide something more for your child. So you need to also provide the time and the space with your child because you had that hypothetically, if this was your goal, you did have that with your parents, but you didn't have any money.
Whereas if your parents back in the day, if they had been able to provide for you financially in the way that you wish they could have, would that have then meant that they were never home or they're for you. So you always have to make sure that even if you're trying to provide something better for your children, that you're also taking into consideration that you're not then sacrificing something else and replacing it with a different goal. So this one was kind of an easy example to give because obviously something would have to give in this scenario where you would have to structure your business in a way where you can make substantially more financially but also not sacrifice your time because you do want still be able to deliver that time to your children. But you also need to take into consideration that you want to provide more for them financially.
So that is where this whole, um, setting your life goals up and allowing your business to fuel them comes in where you still want to live your life, but you want that additional thing that your business can provide for you. A lot of times people start online businesses because they want more time and more freedom. But the problem is, is that they become so overwhelmed with the financial goals that they lose sight of everything else and then they end up losing their freedom, losing not their families, but losing that time with their families. And that is what I want you to always be conscious of is that even if you're trying to hit a goal, always remember that it has to benefit the greater life goal. So if there is a business goal such as making $1 million, you have to to not sacrifice your life in order to fuel that goal.
So I feel like I'm kind of talking in circles right now because it's so hard to kind of be able to verbalize this feeling. But I hope you're following me. If you're not, please email me flow@flowautomationinc.com and maybe I can try and explain it to you through email better. But I really want you to make sure that your goals are always in alignment with your life, regardless of what it is. And then I want you to make sure that your life goal is the number one priority and that the only thing that you're doing in your business, the only goals that you have in your business are to further accelerate your life goals. So obviously money is a big thing because money doesn't buy you happiness, but money can definitely help you with a lot of things that you may be struggling with.
So although rich people do have problems, but rich people can also afford to solve those problems with a little bit more ease. So there's always, it's always kind of that resource that most things will fall back to a monetary goal. Like if you want to go on a vacation, why aren't you going on vacation? Well, nine times out of 10 it's because you don't have the time or the money to go on the vacation. And if you really dig deeper into that, you don't have the time to go on vacation because you can't afford to take the time off of your business to go on that vacation. So it all kind of always relates back to monetary things. So that's why money is going to be a big topic in this podcast. So rewinding back now, I want to talk about finances. So you've created your goals for your life.
You want to use your business to fuel them, which honestly becomes a monetary thing. You want to make sure that you are keeping everything in alignment. So if your goals in your business and your goals in your life are not aligned, then you're not going to get anywhere. You need to always make sure that you're prioritizing your life goals over your business goals. But yet sometimes you need to hit those business goals in order to fuel your life goals correctly. And where that kind of crosses over is in the financial department. So I want you to always make sure that you are obviously always keeping finances in the forefront. They're not a, it's not a dirty topic that you can't talk about. You obviously need, in order to have a business, you need to be able to pay your expenses. You need to be financially responsible with your purchases and with your plans.
If your goal is to buy a million dollar house, then that's fantastic. But you need to make sure that it's realistic and that it's something that you can actually obtain with your current business structure. And if you can't, then what you need to do is create a plan to get there. Obviously, if your goal is to buy this million dollar house, you're not going to be able to do it in a year. If you're only making $100,000 you need to set up realistic expectations on when you can hit the goal based upon your financial situation. So get really, really clear on what your life goals are. Get really, really clear on what your business goals are that relate to your life goals, and then set clear expectations on those things. If you don't have realistic goals, then you won't be able to achieve them. And that goes down to basic goal setting one oh one you have to make sure that whatever it is that you're striving for is realistic. You can't, like I could create a goal of wanting to fly to Jupiter. That's never going to happen. I could say it's a goal I want, but it's not realistic. It's not something I'm ever going to be able to achieve in my lifetime. It's not something that I want to achieve in my lifetime. Sure it'd be cool. But no, it's not realistic. You have to come up with small baby step goals that you know that you can eventually achieve. And all of those can build towards your bigger life goal.
So the reason that you are building your business, if you take nothing else away from this episode, I want this to really, really sink in. But the reason that you were building your business is to cater to your life because then you can actually achieve the freedom that you want. So I'm gonna say this one more time. Building your business needs to cater to your life. So your life has to be the number one priority in your business building. So everything that you do in your business will better your life. The biggest mistake that I have made in the past and that I have seen people make in the past is by sacrificing their life in order to build their business. And honestly, it is the most depressing thing that you can allow to happen because when it all comes down to it, you should be building your business to revolve around your life, not sacrificing your life to revolve around your business.
And that is the whole reason I started this podcast. That is the biggest thing that I'm seeing across all of my clients, past, present, future, all of my friends in the online world, everybody start sacrificing their life in order to build a bigger business. And I want to flip that. I'm, I'm tired of watching people with amazing businesses crumble because they burn out because they've stopped prioritizing their life and they've started allowing their business to become a greedy monster in their life. And that's, that's not cool. So I want to make sure that you are always keeping your life in front of your business. It should always be a higher priority and I really, really want you to take that away from this episode. So yes, goals are amazing. Planning goals. Really, really striving for goals that you think are impossible is fantastic, but as long as you're not pushing yourself to the brink of burning out in order to achieve those goals, and I really want you to understand that if you don't achieve a really big goal, that's fine.
As long as you aren't pushing yourself so hard to try and achieve a goal that is so big that you start sacrificing your quality of life in order to achieve it. So if you want to hit $1 million this year and right now it's just not something that you think you can get to, then maybe scale back your goal. Do you really need to make $1 million this year or is it that you want to make $1 million this year? At what price would you want to make that million dollars? Is it worth sacrificing your health, your wellbeing time with your family, a vacation? I really, really want you to get serious on this and think, why did I start my business? What am I doing with my life right now that is a non negotiable? What are the goals that I want in my life and how can I use my business to achieve those goals?
That is what I want you to focus on. So if you need help with goal planning on the show notes, I am going to have a goal planning worksheet available for you. I want you to go download that now. If you go to greater than business.com forward slash zero zero nine I will have the resource there for you as well as any other links that I've mentioned and any other resources that I should stumble upon. Everything will be located there for you in the show notes, but I want you to use the goal planning worksheet and really think about how you can structure your life goals and set them up so that they can be achieved and then ways that you can use your business to achieve them. So we're not talking about business goals here. We're not talking about building $1 million business. We're talking about what you can do in your business to make your life better and not sacrifice all of that. The joyous moments in your life because you want to hit these crazy business goals. That's not what we're trying to do here, so hopefully this episode has helped you out. If you do want to continue the conversation, you can always head over to the greater than business community on Facebook. I will link to that in the show notes and I hope that you are having a fantastic week and I will see you again next week.
Greater Than Business Podcast – Episode 009
