As we kick off a new quarter, a lot of people are talking about quarterly planning, and strategic planning is actually one of my favorite topics. But after working with hundreds of businesses to plan how they will reach their goals, I realized there's a step that traditional strategic planning skips. A typical strategic plan looks at where you are now, where you want to be and then how you're going to get there.

But before you decide how, I want to encourage you to focus on who.

Who do you need to become to accomplish your goals? You see, the rate in which your business grows is dependent on your personal growth. Said another way, before your business can grow, you must grow. I wanna give you three different exercises that I've used with my clients today to help you explore who you need to become in order for your business to grow. First, it's an exercise that I call $1,000,000 you. I want you to think about your next revenue milestone. Many of my clients are focused on hitting their first million, so I'm gonna use that as an example here. And if your name were Molly, I'd ask you to consider who the $1,000,000 Molly would need to be, what characteristics does she have? What does she spend her time thinking about? What does she do? How does she make decisions? Where do you need to grow to develop into $1,000,000 Molly, or fill in your name there. What does the $1,000,000 version of you look like, sound like, think about.

When I work with my clients, oftentimes, there are a few key areas
where mindset really holds them back. So whether that's something like money and mindset, or people pleasing, or trying to stay intentional and focused, or showing up confidently and calmly. I want you to think about who you need to become in order to be that $1,000,000 version of you.

Now the second exercise is called the hat exercise. I want you to imagine different hats that you could wear, all the different kinds of hats, things like a firefighter hat, a detective, a surgeon, party hat, etcetera, etcetera.

I want you to think about 1 hat that you should keep wearing, one hat that you should stop wearing and one hat that you should start wearing in order to reach your goals. So maybe you need to keep wearing that party hat. Maybe you need to keep focusing on having fun in your business and making sure that everything isn't too serious, making sure you're not putting too much pressure on yourself.

Maybe you need to stop wearing that firefighter hat, running around, focusing on the urgent tasks and putting out all the fires. And maybe you need to start wearing a detective hat. Maybe you need to dig into your marketing, get more comfortable with looking at the numbers, and figure out where you can optimize, where you can tweak to get better results.

Now, the third exercise is one that I call the self-concept exercise. For this, I want you to think of a mentor or an influencer or a successful business owner, someone who you look up to, who's achieved what you would like to achieve.

And I want you to imagine that they had the same goal as you. Think about some of the things that you want to do this quarter. It could be anything, launching a mastermind, writing a book, doubling your monthly revenue or literally anything else, and choose 1 thing you want to accomplish, and I want you to have 1 specific person in mind. Now I want you to imagine that that person that you just thought of
had the same goal as you, and I want you to notice your thoughts.

Notice your thoughts about them trying to accomplish what it is that you want to accomplish. For example, you might think to yourself, well, it would be easy for her. She would sell out in a day. And then I want you to examine your thoughts about you achieving that goal.

Does it feel different for you? How so?

Why do you doubt? Why do you think differently about what's possible for you when you imagine you achieving the goal versus someone else.

It all comes back to your self-concept, your thoughts about you. So
who do you need to be to make it easy for you to accomplish those goals. Ultimately, your personal growth is the key to executing well, following through on the how and scaling your business. So while I hope you have some clear goals for the quarter, and I hope you have a strategic plan, don't forget to look at who, in addition to the how.

See you next week.