What are your goals for 2023?
It’s well known that New Year’s resolutions tend to fall by the wayside at the first hint of adversity. But is there anything we can do to make our new habits stick?
In this episode, I want to share a mindset shift that has changed the game for me when it comes to setting and achieving my goals. This is something that’s very effective because it addresses the perfectionism holding many of us back.
What I’m talking about is giving ourselves permission to make mistakes along the way. It’s important to realize that one missed day, one mishap, or a single error likely won’t compromise our progress. But the key for me is not making the same mistake twice. So at the very least, I try not to make the same mistake twice in a row.
Listen in on today’s session to learn how I’ve incorporated this attitude into my work and personal life. In fact, you’ll hear all about the very public mistake that inspired this episode and how I managed to stop wasting time and energy worrying. Enjoy!
SPI 644: Permission, Please.
Announcer: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he believes in leading with empathy, not retaliation. Pat Flynn.
Pat Flynn: Hey, happy Friday and a very happy New Year to you and your family. We just had a really good episode a couple days ago with Eric Siu.
And I highly recommend you listen to that. But today I, instead of talking about marketing and sort of a follow up to that episode, since we’re here at the beginning of the year, I wanted to just give you some permission. I wanted to give you permission to make mistakes. At this time of the year, we are often looking ahead and trying our best to put things together for an amazing year, right?
Whether that’s something related to your business, something related to your physical fitness and diet, like all those kinds of things. And usually at this time of year, we start off pretty well, right? I know that this is the case with me and physical fitness and diet and those sorts of things. And for the longest time, for years, I would start off the year very, very well and then all of a sudden I might have, you know, a day where I was supposed to work out and I didn’t, or I would cut my run a little short and realize that, well, I didn’t do what I said I was gonna do. Like I’ve, I’m fallen off the rails. I, I made a mistake and all of a sudden I realize like I’m in a bag of chips at midnight. Right? Like, that’s how it happens. It doesn’t happen like that day. It just, you know, slowly gets there without you even knowing it.
And the same thing can happen with our businesses too. And I think one thing that I’ve learned over the years, Is to give myself permission just to make mistakes, and that if you do make a mistake, just try not to make the same mistake twice or at least twice in a row. The reason this comes to mind right now is not just the time of the year, but I was actually just in the middle of editing or actually sending the audio files to my editor for my other show, AskPat.
If you haven’t subscribed to that, you should. We’re on a huge run of, Where Are They Now? episodes. These are episodes where we bring people who have coached on the show back to talk about how things are going and what went well, what didn’t go well, and most of the first episodes of, of the first quarter of this year are that. So make sure you subscribe to AskPat.
Anyway, I had a batch recording session for my podcast a couple weeks ago, and I went in to listen to those files today to send them over. There were four in total, and when I played the first one, I realized that the microphone that I was supposed to be speaking into, the one that I’m speaking to into right now was actually this microphone right here.
As you can tell, I am much further away, and that’s because the microphone’s further away. Okay, I’m back. I just recorded the entire even interviews, first of all, I was like, why didn’t anybody tell me? I think they just thought maybe I was recording on a better mic elsewhere. And what was being used for the interview or the coaching session or the catch up was a different microphone or the, the MacBook Pro microphone.
That microphone was across the room. It’s like a shotgun mic to my other Pokemon station way over there. So that’s why it sounded really far away. And I listened to that. I was like, oh man. And I, I knew that. You know, especially as a podcaster who’s been doing this for a while, that, you know, I have a high bar or high standard that I set for the quality of the stuff that we have here.
But you know what I also said, you know what? I think let’s just run with it. Let’s go with it. And then, yes, I addressed them in the episodes. And you’ll hear those episodes at the beginning of this year. Some point, I don’t know exactly which dates, but I guess you’ll have to subscribe to find out. I’m gonna leave him in there, right?
So I do the intro with this microphone, and then I say, you know what? I made a mistake and I’m gonna leave it in there because hopefully it shows you, and this is the lesson for you today, that we’re all human and we all make mistakes and that it’s okay, and I’m just not even worrying about it. You know, I’ve, I, I’ve wasted so much time and energy and calories and sometimes tears related to the mistakes that I’ve made in the past.
And at this age, 40 now, I’m like, you know what? It’s okay. Like let’s just go with it. It doesn’t take away from ultimately the value of the episodes and it just shows that sometimes I make mistakes too, and I mean, you’re getting a small glimpse of the amount of mistakes that I make all the time, so I just wanted to share that with you.
It happens and give you permission to not have to be perfect. I know a lot of you, especially at the start of your business journey, you’re worried about public perception and how others will think about you, especially if you’re a brand new podcaster or especially first timer on YouTube. I know a lot of you are headed to YouTube and have gotten into our course YouTube From Scratch, or are working through YouTube and SPI Pro, and a lot of you are suffering from that imposter syndrome.
A lot of you are suffering from perfectionism, but a, that’s just natural. I mean, you obviously aren’t going to, if you’ve never done this before, get super excited about it. The fact that you’re gonna be on camera and thousands, if not, maybe millions of people might watch it one day. That is scary. But at the same time, there might be thousands if not millions of people watching you one day, and that is amazing because if you are there to provide value, even though you might make mistakes, even though you might use the wrong camera lens, or in my case, the wrong microphone.
You know what? It’s okay. People subscribe, not because you have an amazing video camera, they don’t subscribe because you have amazing audio quality. Yes, those are great things to have and yes, having them definitely helps, but it’s not the deal breaker. I’ve listened to crap audio for hours because it was content that was really helpful.
I’ve watched very poor old videos about things that changed my life way back when, and so again, I’m giving you permission to make mistake. But if you happen to make a mistake, a, don’t beat yourself up over it. B, if it is a mistake that does involve or affect other people, like this microphone thing is more of like a, oh, did you hear the episodes where Pat was recording on the wrong microphone?
Like, yeah, he’s human too. Like it doesn’t really affect anybody’s life. But there are mistakes that we might make that do affect other people’s lives that do matter in that regard. And in that case, you definitely want to, if you do make a mistake, you want to own it. It’s really important to do that. And we do that at SPI all the time when we make mistakes.
It’s better for you to own those mistakes and just be upfront about what you had done in incorrectly and empathize with those who are affected by it. And. Let people know what you’re going to do about it or what’s being done about it. That’s mostly just what people want and it’s much better to do that than to wait and have people make up their own stories about what is happening. Right? And hopefully you never need to get to a point where you’re gonna create a ‘YouTube apology video”. I mean, there are people who study those things because there’s just so many of them. But in many cases, they’re there because people were late with a response or they just weren’t upfront about something.
And they’re trying to, they’re trying to publicly share that they’re getting better. And that’s, that’s a good thing. But you know, some of these public apologies on YouTube, they’re just really interesting because they often mask an underlying, you know, deeper thing that might still be happening. And sometimes it’s just a facade or, or almost fake.
So anyway, enough about mistakes. I wanna talk about really quick here in the final two minutes what’s coming up, because we are now in the new year, we’re here in the first quarter. I don’t know specifically what your goals are, but hopefully when I ask you this question, you’ll have an answer and that is, well, what’s your goal for this first quarter?
Right? You might have a goal for the whole year, but it’s really important to break it down and go to town, break it down, and go to town. I don’t know, I’m just trying to make up something catchy and see making you can make mistakes on the fly and that’s okay. Although I think that was pretty good. Go to town, break it down and go to town. Get around. That doesn’t sound good. Don’t do that.
But what I’m saying is these bigger goals that we have, especially for the whole year, for the end of 2023, hopefully you have measurable, attainable, right? You have smart goals. We have specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based goals. So on December 31st, you know, finishing something or getting to a certain point, or having a certain habit in place by a certain date.
But breaking it down ski so that you can measure and understand how you’re doing, how well you are on track for that thing. And you can get back on track if you’re off of it. Speaking of on track, I wanna keep you on track with our newsletter, if you haven’t joined our newsletter yet, SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck.
It was probably one of the best things that I worked on last year. I mean, there were a lot of things from the All-Access Pass to our summit with Circle, and of course the Pokemon stuff. I mean, there were so many good things, but as far as like me getting back into my roots of writing and part of the reason why I went really hard on the newsletter and the team and I worked together to make it great for you is many of you know I’m writing a book this year, and I know that if you are already in the rhythm of writing, you are more ready to write well for a book.
And so I’m there. I’m ready to go. Thanks to the Unstuck newsletter, and it’s some of my best writing in a very long time. It’s been really great to have a platform for people to expect that kind of content from me again, like it was back in the day.
So if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck, You’ll see where you can quickly subscribe to that. And it’s a free newsletter, comes out every single week. And in it includes one simple story with a call to action for you with some sort of lesson to help you get unstuck no matter where you’re at.
These lessons are universal, and they’re from my own personal history or understanding of things that are happening out there in the world. And again, that’s SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck. Get unstuck if you will. Thank you so much for your time today. Permission to make mistakes granted, and I’m saying that to myself as well.
And together we’ll rock and roll here in 2023. Thank you so much. Big shout out to all of the brand new All Access Pass members who are already ready to go through one of the accelerators. That Ashley’s gonna help lead you on and some of the workshops that are coming up, if you wanna check that out, SmartPassiveIncome.com/allaccess.
And we’ll see you there, here, there everywhere. Cheers. We’re here for you. Peace out. Have a good one.
Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is David Grabowski. Our series producer is Paul Grigoras, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.
