This episode runs 32 min.
It’s 2019 so David and Josh ask each other 10 questions to set 10 goals for the year. This episode is part one of two.
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Mentioned in This Episode 134: Goals, Part 1
From Jinny Ditzler’s book, Your Best Year Yet
- What did I accomplish this year? (looking back through your 2018 calendar helps)
- What were my biggest disappointments (acknowledge, and look at what caused them, then move forward)
- What did I learn during the year? (look at accomplishments and ask how did I do that? look at disappointments and ask what would I do differently?)
- How do I limit myself..and how can I stop? (what story am I telling myself to explain these limitations? Pick one, and shift it into a positive affirmation)
- What are my personal values?
- What roles do I play? (i.e. husband, boss, designer, podcaster, dad, etc. List them all, be sure one role is to take care of yourself)
- Which role is my focus for the upcoming year (which role would make the biggest difference if you had a breakthrough performance?)
- What are my goals for each role? (list as many as you like but at least one per role)
- What are my top 10 goals for next year? (not discarding ones from #8, just creating a manageable, focused list. Aim for balance. Make a one page summary including guidlines from #3, new paradigm from #4, major focus #7, top 10 goals #9. Keep this summary where you can see it, share it.)
- How can I make sure I achieve my goals? (accountability partner, coach, friend check-in. Review summary while weekly planning)
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Announcer: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing podcast. It’s insight applied.
David: Hello, and welcome PSM Show, the podcast for AEC marketers. I’m David Lecours, and I’ve got Josh Miles here with me. How are you doing today, Josh?
Josh: You know what, I am doing well, sir. It has been all winter without winter here in Indiana, but we are expecting seven inches of snow tomorrow and I can’t say I’m excited about it. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of winter.
David: You’re not gonna pull out your sled and your saucer?
Josh: I’m probably gonna pull out my shovel for sure.
David: Oh yeah.
Josh: Fireplace and wish I were in sunny San Diego with you.
David: Yeah, I hear you. Well I just got back from Portland, it wasn’t so sunny there, so I am glad to be back home.
David: well, hey, it’s 2019 and I thought it’d be great for us to talk about goals, and we can unpack what that means in a minute, but first I want to point out we’re so happy and proud to have our underwriting production sponsor, SMPS, who reminds us that business is transformed through marketing leadership.
David: If you want to find out more about SMPS, go to SMPS.org.
Announcer: This is PSM, it’s incite applied.
David: Alright Josh, let’s talk a little bit about goals and maybe we should sort of set this up in terms of why we thought this was relevant and how this can sort of be for SMPS marketers to establish some personal goals and also some professional goals, does that sound good?
Josh: Sounds good, this is like the time of the year that every other influencer on Instagram or YouTube or Twitter or whatever is talking about their own particular life hacks and all the ways of setting goals and all that good stuff, so it’s good timing.
David: Yeah, and I think setting goals can happen anytime of the year, so if you already have something in place, maybe this can be a framework that you can add to or maybe you change it up going forward.
David: And so, what Josh and I are gonna do is we’re gonna go through these ten questions, sort of a top ten and it’s a process that kind of builds on the previous question, and by the end, you end up with your top ten goals of the year, and I think it’s a great way to kind of reflect on where you’ve been, take stock of where you are now, and then really consider where you want to go in the future.
David: So let’s start off with question number one, and that is what did I accomplish this year? And one of the great ways that I’ve found to sort of go through this task is literally go back through my calendar, I use a digital calendar through the Mac, and just sort of look at all the different things I did and that sort of helps jog my memory ’cause I can’t remember everything I did all year. Certainly the highlights are gonna stand out organically.
David: But it’s a really amazing exercise, ’cause my experience in doing this, and I’ve done this same sort of ten questions for the last 10 or 15 years, is that you really forget how much you’ve accomplished in a calendar year, and all those sort of great things that you’ve done. It’s real to sort of get sucked into negativity bias and think about maybe things that you didn’t accomplish, but this is a really great sort of self esteem booster and just memory booster to remember what you did that year.
Josh: Yeah, I think it’s helpful, too, in addition to the calendar thing, however you’re producing content to kind of go back and look through that, whether that’s your Twitter feed or blog posts that you’ve written or YouTube videos or even just a notebook.
David: Instagram, yeah.
Josh: There’s so many ways to just be like, “oh yeah, I kind of forgot we went on that trip or did that thing or learned that new skill,” so I think in addition to the calendar, maybe look back through your social and otherwise publishing and just recall all the things that you did knock out that year.
David: Right, and also look at the sort of projects that you completed or maybe sort of review all the proposals that you put out as a way to jog your memory. Hopefully those will be positive memories, but yeah.
Josh: As a side point, there is a designer that worked for me a few years back and every year that we would do his annual performance review, he would always hand me a print out of here’s every project I worked on in the last year. So he just did a great job of cataloging all the things that he did and just as a side point, as an employee I think that’s both a great way to talk to your supervisor about your performance, but also to handle this, number one, to remember all the things that you’ve accomplished.
David: Right, so our plan for this episode is to, of course, share these really intriguing ten questions, but we want to let you, our audience, sort of get to know Josh and I a little bit better, and we want to share our answers to these questions because this has been a great exercise for us and it’ll be a great way for you to get to know us a little bit better.
David: So Josh, why don’t you start us off and maybe highlight the top three to five things that you accomplished this year?
Josh: Yeah, well I went through some pretty major changes this past year, so selling my portion of the business and taking a new job at SMPS, now the chief marketing officer, so that was very exciting.
Josh: One of the maybe less significant things, but was exciting to me was sitting for and passing the EFAA drone license exam, so that was a pretty exciting thing so I can officially-
David: You’re now a pilot!
Josh: … I’m a pilot, a very small pilot, but yeah.
David: That’s super cool.
Josh: Yeah, so those were some of my chief highlights, of course. How about you?
David: Yeah, I think one was a personal highlight which was my wife, Holly, and I traveled to Africa for the very first time, back in July, and I’ve always said, oh Africa, that’s a trip of a lifetime, and now that I’ve been and had such an amazing experience, I don’t want it to be the trip of a lifetime, I want it to be one of many trips to Africa because it was so incredible. The wildlife that we saw and just the topography and the people, just the whole experience was so positive and so amazing and it just reminds me of how much travel opens you up to new ideas and new cultures and I just think it makes me a more tolerant, more global citizen and it also kind of rekindled my love for photography.
David: It’s really hard to take a bad picture in Africa, the light is terrific, the subject matter is phenomenal. So I got some really great shots of wildlife and so that was unbelievable.
David: Probably the second big highlight was the national conference at SMPS, and the national conference just happened to be in San Diego this year, which is of course my hometown and I had a nice role at the conference where I got to MC the Max talks, and if our audience has never been to a national billed business conference, you should. It’s gonna be in Washington D.C. next year.
David: We have these things called Max talks which are sort of like short talks similar to a TED talk where members and professionals get up and share sort of more personal stories and more, less sort of educational content and more inspirational content. Is that a safe way to sort of describe the Max?
Josh: Yeah. Yeah I think that’s great.
David: Okay, yeah. So at that conference I got to MC and then my firm, along with our client won three national awards. Won the best website, best rebrand, and best print recruiting piece and so as someone who hasn’t entered a lot of awards contests, and if you’re interested in learning more about awards, we’ve got a previous show that was all about awards. Episode number 129, but of course it’s fun to win awards.
David: And then the third thing is, and it’s still sort of in soft launch, but for the last two years I’ve been trying to launch a new website for Lecoursdesign.com, my firm, and it’s sort of been a case of the cobbler’s kids not having shoes, which if you’re trying to sell website services and your website isn’t outstanding, there’s a bit of a disconnect, and that disconnect has been painful for me, but finally we’ve soft launched and still kind of tweaking things, but I’m proud of this new site we launched.
Josh: Yeah, very exciting and you guys kind of swept the awards show, that was pretty impressive, so congrats again on that.
David: Thank you. All right, so those are some accomplishments, and again we think it’s great to sort of list as many as you can, and I think you’ll be surprised by how long that list can be.
David: So of course it’s probably, you can imagine what’s coming next, which are what were your biggest disappointments of that year? And I think it’s important to acknowledge those, maybe look what caused them and then maybe how to move forward and avoid or pivot and learn from those. ‘Cause, you know, not all disappointments are bad, a lot of times it’s just information and it can help learn and pivot.
Josh: Yeah, I think maybe along the lines of your Africa trip I had big hopes early in the year to do a European trip and that just didn’t work out in the schedule, couldn’t’ get everybody’s calendars to align for that, so that was a bummer, maybe we’ll work that in this year.
Josh: But one of the things I wanted to get done that just keeps kicking the can down the road is doing the audio version of my book, of Bold Brand 2.0, so actually the whole impetus for writing the second version of the book was I got halfway through recording the audio book for the first version and realized I had some things that I wanted to update and rewrite and I thought, you know what? I’ll just take the time and do version two of the book first, which I did, but now I’m still stuck on getting this audio book done, so I just need to lock myself in the studio for a couple of hours and go read the book to myself.
David: Yeah, yeah. That’s good. Yeah, in terms of disappointments I had a couple pursuits that we did not win, that we really had no business going after, and it was just kind of a reminder of making sure that you have a really go, no go, and you kind of stick to your values there.
David: And not sort of overinvest in a sale, and I think people don’t like to hire somebody that’s real needy, I think that maybe we over invested in the sale, like flew to the clients location and did a bunch of presentations, and we didn’t do free work for them on spec, which we absolutely don’t do, but just over invested in the sale, so I’m gonna try to not do that going forward.
David: Another thing that kind of happened at the last part of the year was I seemed to get into arguments, but offend or upset, it happened, like I offended four people within a period of about two weeks via email communication and it was just a further reminder to me that email is just a terrible way to communicate anything sort of sensitive, you should definitely pick up the phone or try to meet in person because you just lose all tone and you just can’t control the environment in which somebody reads an email, and usually that environment is not great because you don’t know what email came before yours and it could have put the person in a bad mood, so that was kind of a heads up.
David: And then finally, I had set some pretty high revenue goals for our firm, and we did not hit those, and it kind of forced me to sort of think about what my role in the organization is gonna be and I’m probably trying to do too many things because I like the design, I like to bring in business, I like to project manage, but I’m really world class at any of those things, and in order to become world class I think I need to narrow my focus a little bit and hire other people that are really great at some of those other roles.
David: Alright so that’s kind of-
Josh: I think you might be cutting yourself a little bit short, having won three of the biggest awards in the industry this year, so maybe, maybe.
David: … so any other thoughts about the disappointments or should we move on?
Josh: I would just love to say this time next year I won’t have the same disappointments on my list.
David: I love it, right.
Josh: So I need to make sure I chalk those up to get those knocked out this year.
David: Yeah, you’re now making yourself accountable because everybody that listens to this is gonna check in on you, “hey Josh, have you recorded that audio book?”
Josh: Exactly.
David: Yeah, I like that and I think that’s an important part of goal setting is making yourself accountable, putting it out there, like literally putting it in writing, and we’ll talk about that later as we go through our list.
David: So question number three is what did I learn during the year? And I think probably the best way to do that is look at all your accomplishments, look at all your disappointments, and say for the accomplishments, hey, how did I do that? Don’t just take it for granted that it happened, there were certainly decisions and steps that you made to make that happen, and then the second part is of the disappointments, what would I do differently? Or what are some things that could be better?
Josh: So I think looking at, as far as learnings go from the year, I guess I could have included this in accomplishments, but one of the things that I had mentioned so many times the previous year and early last year that I just wanted to try to figure out this YouTube thing as a marketer, looking at video on the whole and thinking, I don’t really know enough about that. I don’t know, I had never tried to optimize a post on YouTube, I had never tried to get views, I’d never really done the product piece of filming and adding audio, and how do you do transitions and so I kind of jumped into that with both feet towards the end of February last year and looking back on some of the videos that I made early on in the year, they’re a little bit more cringey than others, but towards the end of the year, I felt pretty good about it so I was excited that I feel like I figured out kind of camera basics, frame rates and sound, and all that good stuff.
Josh: So I was very excited about what I learned in the world of video to the point of like, now I’m kind of addicted to it, so already looking, maybe I need to upgrade my lighting or maybe I need a different microphone. So I’m sort of becoming a video gear head, but that was something I definitely jumped into and I feel like that’s probably an area that I grew the most last year.
David: Yeah, no, I think that’s super cool and I think one of the things I’ve always admired about you, Josh, is that if you want to do something you just kind of jump in, and you’re kind of fearless about sort of taking it on, I think sometimes I, “oh I gotta like do this in private and figure it all out before I take it out into the world,” but there’s something about sort of having the pressure of starting to just do it and you have learned this whole new skill that, yeah, if you want to learn something new, and I this is a take away for our audience, just start doing it.
David: There are so many resources out there, one of which is YouTube, you can pretty much find out how to do anything, and there are so many coaches out there and resources for figuring out how to do stuff. I firmly believe as marketers, we gotta always be uping our arsenal of tools and as technology changes, we gotta try new stuff.
David: So one of the accomplishments that I didn’t mention, but that I am the proud of is the fact that you and I put out 25 episodes of PSM Show last year, and I guess, yeah, go us.
David: And I think the sort of take away there is to just kind of say yes. You had asked me to cohost with you and I was like, oh I don’t know, I don’t know to do that, got a lot on my plate, but I said yes, and I kind of learned somethings along the way, so yeah. Just the same sort of theme as your video, just sort of jump in and start to learn how to do things.
David: I think another sort of important thing I learned or just reconfirmed is like how important it is to make connections offline. There’s this real ease, I sort of think of social media sometimes as junk food, right? It’s sort of gives you an instant hit, but about 30 minutes later you bonk and bonk meaning like you hit a low blood sugar and it’s not really very nourishing.
David: And I think sometimes we can mistake likes or people reaching out to say happy birthday on social media as like a real connection, and I don’t think, at least for me, and I’m not gonna proselytize here, but for me, man, getting together with people in real life is so much more validating and just get a lot more out of that.
Josh: Yeah, that’s good stuff. Anything else you want to include in your learnings or you want to move onto number four?
David: I think that’s it, yeah, let’s move on to number four, and so number four is how do I limit myself and how can I stop? And sometimes this means, like what stories are you telling yourself?
David: So we all have these internal dialogues and often it takes the form of I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, that kind of thing. But I think it’s critical to acknowledge what’s going on in your head and ways that you may be limiting yourself and then pick one of those and sort of shift it into maybe a more positive affirmation or to turn the corner on it and change it around, because a lot of times these things are just in our head, they’re not actually real.
David: I heard this acronym once about fear standing for false evidence appearing real, and a lot of times we’re scared to do new things or try new stuff and it often, once we start doing it, we’re like “oh, that was ridiculous, I can’t believe I was so scared to do that,” it was false evidence that appeared real until we started doing it.
David: So were there any ways that you thought about that you limited yourself in the last year?
Josh: This might sound like an oxymoron to this answer, but I think the way that I limit myself is that I tend to feel like once I start doing something, I have to keep doing it, and so I end doing quote, unquote “all the things” and I think that that’s a good example of why I don’t have an audiobook recorded because I’m doing 20 other things that are also, they feel like the right things, so sometimes it’s hard for me, when there’s so many shiny things to choose which three shiny things really are the most important or the most valuable, so it probably limits my ability to go really deep in any of them because I kind of dabble a little bit or kind of chase them all at once. If that makes sense.
David: So let me see if I understand you, so the idea that you start something and you feel like you got to just continue it no matter what rather than maybe cutting your loses and focusing in on fewer things?
Josh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think we’ve done a really great with this show in that we weren’t overly ambitious to begin with so we’re not trying to do a daily or weekly show, we publish about twice a month, and we were really good at doing that consistently, so it was a very sustainable pace, but other things that I’ve done maybe are less sustainable, so cramming them all into the day and then you feel like you can’t go, for instance, maybe I wouldn’t have time to do more PSM show if I wanted to, but maybe we should do more, I don’t know.
David: I think we’ve had a great sort of format in that, well, it’s just having a partnership. It doesn’t all fall on you or it doesn’t all fall on me, and so we do these individual interviews and we’ve alternated episodes between the two of us and then also episodes of interviewing people and so that helps kind of break it up and allows to us to get more episodes done and yeah, have to sort of cram it in.
Josh: Yeah, and I guess to just let people a little further behind the curtain, even when we do our episodes together, we frequently, not always, but frequently try to record two in a row so it’s even a single time commitment as opposed to multiple times a month.
David: Yeah, ’cause just the scheduling of it takes time and energy and so yeah, if we can just bang out a couple at a time while we’re together, we’re focused, we’re sort of already warmed up and we can just sort of flow from there.
Josh: Yeah. How do you see that one or do you find yourself limiting in certain areas?
David: Yeah, for sure, I really kind of had this epiphany and it’s such a constant problem that I find myself in and I have to remind myself of being reactionary in terms or planning my day, my week, it’s so easy to get sucked into those sort of dopamine hit of answering an email as it comes in, thinking in your head, “oh I’m a hero, I just answered that,” or a text or a slack message or whatever.
David: And it’s so counter productive, because I’m somebody that needs to have long periods of time to do deep work, and think about things and I need it to be quiet and so if I get distracted by a bing or a beep or a whatever, the email or text, it just throws me out of my rhythm and I have to ramp back up and so that is really a microcosm, but really the idea of planning my week and letting others maybe dictate my priorities and what I’ve reminded myself is what I need to do is Sunday nights or Monday mornings, real early, is plan the entire week and literally put in the calendar, I’m gonna have deep creative work for these five hours and break it up, I like 90 minute increments.
David: And be proactive, rather than reactive, and man at the end of the week I just feel so much more productive and like I did something that nourished my soul, and got stuff done rather than just being quote, unquote “busy” for the sake of being busy.
Josh: You know, that’s a really great point, I just did a little story on one of my recent YouTube videos about, similarly, how valuable that first hour in the day is for me. If I let email or whatever other pings or dings or whatever dictate what I’m doing in that first hour, then that just starts your day off on the hamster wheel.
David: Yeah.
Josh: If you start your day with an hour of writing or an hour of thinking or an hour of really deep design work or strategy and it’s focused time. The rest of the day you just feel like you’re three inches taller. Wow, I just killed it all morning and then you get into all the busy work and maybe the urgency of the moment, but not letting those things drive your day I think is huge.
David: I love that you said that, and one of the things that I do is I’m not allowed to look at email until noon and the idea of starting your day with something that is creative or maybe contemplative or reflective and that’s you sort of controlling your destiny and you’re setting a tone, and it seems like so much of this is about momentum.
David: If you set the tone at the first part of your day, you’re less tolerant of distractions or things that are gonna deviate you from your goal, and I recognize that our audience, there’s other people who have priorities and they have kids and they other things, but man, if you can just set boundaries to give yourself permission to start your day, start small, like 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Whether it’s like meditation or writing or journaling or something to help you maybe plan the rest of your day, I think you’re gonna find that to be incredibly effective.
Josh: So maybe we should move onto number five?
David: Yeah, let’s do number five and so number five is identifying what your personal values are and I think we all sort of know what values are, but the things that you hold dear and you’re passionate about so that it can help you make decisions.
Josh: You want to go first on this one?
David: Sure, yeah. Yeah, I think I’ll list most of these ’cause it’ll go pretty quick.
David: So one of my personal values is creativity and I sort of make an equation that creative input equals creative output, so I’ve got to feed myself with creative inspiration if I’m expecting to pull out creative work.
David: The other one is winning, I’ve come to realize that I’m a competitive person, I like the pursuit of winning, don’t always win, but the pursuit pushes me to elevate my game. I’m a competitive pickle ball player, and I also like the new business process.
David: I alluded to this earlier, but personal connection is a value, so my affirmation there is I reach out to friends for connect and laughter.
David: Another one is renewal, I practice yoga, I try to sleep well. One of the things I haven’t done in a while is take a quarterly retreat or take a personal day where it’s just me or maybe it’s a weekend where I go away and do some sort of long range planning or writing or thinking.
David: Travel and adventure is a big value, I love going to new places and learning new things, tasting new food, experiencing new culture.
David: And let’s see, my marriage is a value, I try to continually invest in our relationship, and then maybe the final one is design. I love marrying beauty and strategy to communicate the soul of a brand.
David: I feel kind of naked, just sharing all that stuff, but-
Josh: Wow.
David: … It’s fun.
Josh: Well maybe I can help you, I would just say yes to all of yours.
David: Okay, yeah, me too.
Josh: Yeah, me too. I think with the nuance of really putting family first is something that I have talked about often and have actually been able to live out here recently so that feels good to have that as well as health and fitness had not really been a thing for me for most of my adult life and the last few years they’ve been really important parts of being very aware of what I’m eating and maybe more importantly of what I’m not eating.
David: Yeah.
Josh: And just taking care of myself, actually using that gym membership instead of just paying for it, which I used to be really good at sending in the check, but not so good at sending myself in.
Josh: And then, I heard a quote the other day that was that the entrepreneurial types impact is their drug of choice and I’ve thought, man, that hits home. That’s been my pet word for such a long time is that with all of these things, impact is the thing that I’m always kind of hungry for, to make sure that where you’re spending your time and where you’re putting your effort is actually moving the needle and making a difference so, if I could accomplish that in everything that I touch, then that always feels more valuable.
David: Yeah, no, for sure. All right, well, I value your values. I think those were solid and inspiring. So we’re half way through the list Josh, and I think we’re gonna wrap up today, and then do the second half of the list, so we did one through five, we’ll do six through ten in our next episode, that’s gonna come out a week from today, so if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future shows or guests that you think we should interview, pop on over to our website, we are at PSM.show, and if you scroll down there’s just a simple contact form, and you can tell us what you think, we love feedback. Of course we love ratings on iTunes, we’d love referrals of this show to other people.
David: We’re also very thankful for our sponsor, SMPS, you can find out more about them at SMPS.org, so that’s it for this episode of PSM Show. David Lecours, who’s me, and Josh Miles we’ll see you next time.