You Can! Inspiring Women In Business
Yearly Planning: How To Set Goals, Find Clarity & Stay Focused.
Fri, 10 Jan 2025
Struggling to set clear goals for the new year? Discover how yearly planning can transform your focus, align your priorities, and set you up for success in 2025. In this episode, I share my personal experience with yearly planning — including why it left me with more questions than answers and how that became my biggest breakthrough. Learn proven strategies for effective yearly goal setting, how to align your ambitions with reality, and tips for staying on track throughout the year. Whether you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, or goal-getter, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you make 2025 your most intentional and productive year yet.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/you-can-inspiring-women-in-business/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Chapter 1: What is yearly planning and why is it important?
Hello, and welcome to the You Can Podcast, where we dive into strategies and stories to help you start, grow, and scale your business. I'm Sarah Jolly Jarvis, I'm your host, and today we're gonna be talking around something that can feel both inspiring and overwhelming all at the same time, and that is yearly planning. So this year's yearly planning session for me didn't go quite as expected.
Chapter 2: What challenges did Sarah face during her yearly planning?
Instead of clarity, I ended up with an awful lot more questions than answers. But you know what, that turned out to be a really good thing, and that's what I'm gonna be talking around today. Let's talk about, first of all, why yearly planning is so important. Well, planning forces you to get real.
It gets you to really think about what you want to achieve, how much time you've got to achieve it, and what sort of time that achieving will... For me, this year's session was a real eye-opener. I realised I was trying to take on way too much. And honestly, that realisation was invaluable.
It saved me from trying to buy all those bits off all at once and to get partway through the year and realise that I hadn't made as much ground as I'd hoped to. I hadn't made as much progress.
And that's the thing here is when you water yourself down too much, you end up feeling like, you know what, I'm not achieving anything because your energies and your efforts are just diluted so much that you're not able to make a really strong impact.
So instead of creating a neat list of goals and then calling it a day at that and feeling really chuffed with myself and just having a bit of lunch, I had to face that misalignment between my ambitions and the reality of the time that reality was going to take, that time those ambitions were going to take and how long I really had to work on these various projects.
It wasn't just about making a roadmap for the year. It was about confronting what wasn't working. So a lot less clean, a lot less enjoyable. But let's be clear, planning doesn't mean everything will go smoothly. It just means that you'll start that year with clarity, with that intention. and that process will feel less messy. You'll have a better understanding of what's going to go on.
It does not mean there aren't going to be bumps in the way and there's always unforeseen stuff. Whenever I look at my plans, there's always stuff that I never anticipated happening and priorities switch and change. I tend to get clients, and I'll come onto this in a little bit, but I tend to get them to
have um two or three key projects that they're working on alongside their day-to-day within their business because at the end of the day your plan is about working on your business not in it and so the day-to-day carries on as normal and it's these extra bits that you put in to make things happen and to make those changes so
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Chapter 3: How can you avoid overcommitting in your goals?
You know, the surprising benefits of facing those tough questions this year, actually taking the time to answer them meant that what would have been a one-day session spilled in two weeks. Why? Because those questions that I had to wrestle with, that I had to get my head around, were much more bigger than usual, much bigger than usual.
I hate to say it, but these questions have probably been there before if I was to sense check some of my plans and some of the things that I wanted to get done. I think that I regularly, I'm one of those people who thinks that like a task will take like 10 minutes and actually it takes four hours. which always infuriates Martin.
But you're ambitious, you want to do all these things, you have all these ideas. And I think this has always been there, but this is the first time I thought, you know what, realistically, I need to be more sensible here. And there's a number of reasons for that. My commitments outside of work are growing as my family get older and I have different demands on them.
um we've got quite a lot of neurodiversity within our family which comes with its own struggles it comes with some major plus points but there are also struggles to fit around um what goes on in normal education systems etc and so there's that going on as well but i've realized i cannot over commit so
Those bigger questions that I had to wrestle with were around, you know, am I focusing on the right things?
Which is really hard because for those of you running your own business or wanting to run your own business, you are so passionate around your business and what you do that you're like, I couldn't possibly, you know, it'd be like, I don't know, putting not quite one of your kids, but probably one of your pets up for adoption. You know, am I trying to do too much here? You
Is what I'm working on really aligned with my long-term goals? And for me, that final question was the one that sort of grappled with me the most. You know, it's that head and heart scenario where I love what I do. I love all the bits of what I do. I love supporting women in business. I love the projects that I've got on the side that I've been sort of
in some cases um waiting for some time to have some focus and tending to um for others you know they've sort of been taken along but have so much more potential if you've ever spread yourself too thin or you've been worried about slow progress and why that's happening or if you're unsure you've been unsure over if you're heading in the right direction then you know how important these questions are yes they are really uncomfortable but when you do dig that deep then you do get clarity
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Chapter 4: What tough questions should you ask during planning?
After digging that deep, it has meant some pretty big changes for 2025 for me. I'll share more of those as we go along within the podcast, but for now. Just know that it's okay for your planning sessions not to end nice and cleanly on that one day you allocated. To not be able to answer those questions straight away.
I think I'm one of those people who people ask me a question, I feel like I should just know it. And sometimes just mulling it over, just having it in the back of your mind and getting on with this other stuff is the way forward. Sometimes answering those questions, focusing on those questions, grappling with them is the point of the whole thing.
Over and above having a lovely, nice printed out A4 plan with all the bells and whistles. So I've talked a little bit about my yearly planning session, but how can you make your own yearly planning session effective? I base mine on a mix of ideas from two frameworks, which is best year yet and traction. And here's how you can get started using my framework as I talk you through it.
If you want the resource for this, if you want the recordings from my workshops, they are things that I am making available now for free. So please do drop me an email, sarah at youcan.online and I will send you a link to a dashboard that will be set up in your name and you can access those resources from there using our lovely Go High Level platform. So how can you get started?
First of all, first and foremost, you have to reflect, you know, what has worked, what didn't work, what lessons can you take? How do you wanna do things differently? Unfortunately, sometimes you do have to look backwards. I'm not a fan of looking back too much.
You definitely don't wanna live in the past, but you do wanna take that into consideration because it can teach you an awful lot and it can save you from making the same mistakes again. So reflecting on that past year or past years, So you know what you want to take forwards.
I regularly, when I used to run the workshops, I used to get people to note down two or three things that they wanted their future self to remember on a post-it note. And then you can have it up in your office or work area. Because at the end of the day, we sometimes learn things and then we end up getting into the same habit and repeating the same thing.
And then before you know it, you're in the same situation again. And so it's really good to remind yourself what not to do as well as what to do. The next step is to set clear priorities for the new year. So I tend to go with two to three goals. I think that that is sufficient.
If you've got things around sort of the same outcome, but different elements of it, for example, you know, efficiencies within the business, which means a certain amount of revenue, then you could do up to five goals. But what you want to do is sort of actionable things that you are going to be working on and projects you're going to be working on. You don't want to overburden yourself.
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Chapter 5: How can you make your yearly planning session effective?
What are you willing to do? What are you not willing to do? This doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be a starting foundation. Okay, if you've never done a yearly plan before, as I said before, I've run workshops on this. And while I'm not hosting one this year, I am more than happy to share recordings and resources for you from past sessions.
Even if you're listening to this mid-year way through, you can still be putting a plan in place either nice and tidily to the end of that year, that calendar year, or however it works for you. Some people still do their plans based on their financial years. So, you know, do feel free to get in touch whenever it may be that you are listening to this. It's sarah at youcan.online.com.
And I'm more than happy to share those resources with you for free. So I want to leave you with this. Yearly planning isn't just about setting the goals. It's about setting yourself up for success. OK, that nice little document, if you file it away, if you do nothing with it, then it was a bit of a pointless exercise. It was a bit of a pointless use of your time.
Even when it feels messy, even when it raises more questions than answers. The act of planning, it forces you to think intentionally about your time, your energy, your focus. And that is the key thing here. So if you're feeling overwhelmed or unsure about the year ahead, prioritise this process, prioritise the process I've just gone through.
It might just be the most important thing that you do for your business and your life this year. Let's make 2025 intentional, focused and aligned. Thanks for tuning in to the You Can podcast. If you found this episode helpful, I'd love it if you'd share it with friends or leave a review.
And if you want those planning resources I mentioned, then head over to your email and email me at sarah at youcan.online, S-A-R-A-H at youcan.online to grab them. So here's to a powerful and purposeful 2025. Until next time, take care and keep going because you can. You can.
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