Steph Crowder (0:00)

Foreign welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hello CNC listeners. Welcome to the podcast. This is episode number 113. Let's talk about 2025. I'm going to talk about my plans and what I'm focusing on next year. So if you like a little behind the scenes, a little what's to come crystal ball moment, I'm going to be sharing that. And with that I also, I know that it's valuable and interesting to hear, especially for you nosy folks. I'm pretty nosy myself for people's podcasts that I like to listen to. So I wanted to share this for fun and to be able to look back and see how it went. But in addition to that, I want to share how I got here, how I got to the goals that I'm going to share with you. This is going to be just a little teeny tiny morsel from my Year on the Wall training. So if you were there, you already went through this with me. You probably already even have your specific goals for yourself because we spent a lot of time in that training really helping you get to the heart of the matter in terms of understanding where you're even trying to go next year. What is important to you as an individual? What's your definition of success? What kind of year are you trying to have next year? Is it a stretch year or is it a bit more of a status quo year? I shared this in my Year on the Wall training. But there's absolutely no shame in a status quo year. I've had them before, especially I shared when I had a new baby at home and a toddler in a pandemic. That was not a year that I was trying to stretch. I was really trying to maintain. And I was sharing that cause I had a few people in my audience on Year on the Wall day who had like new babies and were just like in the upside down moment of trying to acclimate to that. And so there will be years where you stretch and there will be years where you maintain both are 100% acceptable and amazing. It really just depends what you have going on in your life. Um, but we're going to kind of share. I'm going to share the process of how I arrived at these goals. A little exercise you can do that's from Year on the Wall to kind of help you help guide this conversation for yourself around writing down some goals. I really want to encourage you to have the courage to write your goals down. In my last episode, I talked about 2024, my 2024 year in review. I literally read off my goals that I had written down for myself. And I told you how it went. And I'm so glad that I did that. In fact, I'm so glad I did it that I'm doing it again. Because I was able to celebrate myself throughout the year. I'm celebrate myself at the end of the year. And it. I truly believe that by writing those goals down and by even calling them into my consciousness, certain things, certain opportunities, certain, you know, trips, certain things just fell into my lap or came my way or became doors that I could open that I didn't even know were there. And I think those are doors that I would have missed altogether if I hadn't been looking for them. And the thing that made me look for them was writing them down, putting them front and center. Even when. And especially when I didn't know how I was going to do them. I think that that's how you know that you've got a good goal. If you're like, I don't know how I'll do that or what I'm going to do, or, like, what? Why am I even writing this? Like, that's crazy. I think that is an excellent goal because it's going to push you, and when it happens, it's going to be that much sweeter because you're going to think to yourself, my goodness. I. When I wrote this down, I had no idea how this goal was going to come together. And it'll blow your mind that much more. So before I get into my goals, which I literally am going to share them verbatim with what I'm writing down on my phone, I want to talk about this concept from Year on the Wall. And again, if you're new here and you don't know about Year on the Wall or you aren't new here, but you just missed the training or you weren't sure if we should take it, or whatever the case may be, you, you can still take advantage of this training. It is action packed. The feedback was amazing this year and you will receive your copy when you go to yearonthewall.com and you purchase your ticket. It's just $47. The replay will be automatically delivered to your inbox. You can log into our course platform, you'll get the workbook, and you can take the program on your own time. It's a three hour training. You can speed it up if you want to hear me talk really fast, you can rewind it, fast forward, revisit it as many times as you need. But just know that this exercise is just a teeny tiny taste of that training. But I wanted to bring it here because it really is so powerful. So the concept I'm going to talk about is what I call my life bucket system. So I mentioned this on a previous episode, but life buckets are. They come from imagining your life like a department store. So if you think about your average department store, your Macy's, JCPenney, whatever it is, you have these different or even like Target, right? You have these different sections, these different areas. You have, you know, women's clothing, men's clothing, sports, cleaning products, right? Like these different departments, your life is no different. And so in my training with my clients, I encourage them to divide their life up into the main departments. And my advice is to shoot for eight to ten life buckets, okay? So you don't want to make them so granular that you have like 25, but you don't want to have like three, okay? Because you really want to make sure that you are tending to each department. I think that's really the value and the beauty of using this life bucket system is it allows you to just kind of make sure that you're giving enough attention to each area of your life. You may have seen, you know, just over time on the Internet or wherever. The this concept called the wheel of life. And in the wheel of life, it literally looks like a pie. And there's like these different sections of your life. So you could look up the wheel of life if you want some ideas of, like, what your departments or your life buckets could be. But people, sometimes coaches will use a wheel of life to help their clients kind of rate how they perceive they are doing in the different main areas of your life from like a scale of 1 to 10. That's not what we're going to do here today, but that is A way of kind of like looking at your life is like, if it's a pie, what are the different slices? The slices are probably work, marriage, friendships, money, family, hobbies, spirituality, health and fitness. Something like that. Right. I probably missed a couple. I'm just going off the top of my head, but you can kind of think about what those main slices or departments are in your life. And so once you have those. And I actually, I shared this in my year on the wall training and show you if you're really nosy, you can see my example. There is a picture of my notebook in my workbook. I like to do this as a mind map. So with my mind map, I'll just write 2025 in the middle. And then each of my life departments. My life buckets is its own bubble that's branching off from 2025. And I just start brainstorming and asking myself the question, what do I want to create in this area next year? Right. What do I want to create in this area next year? And I try to be as specific and literal and granular as I can possibly be. So, you know, if my life bucket is like, kids, that's one of mine is. Is my kids. Right? I'm literally gonna think about, like, what are the things I want to do with my daughter this year? How do I want to show up for my daughter this year? Well, she's a competitive cheerleader, and we're gonna go on competitions together, and we're gonna travel. So, like, how do I want to show up and be there for her in her sport? What do I want our relationship to be like? Well, one of the things that we've started doing is passing back and forth this, like, mom and me journal. I really want to keep that going through 2025. What are the other things in my relationship with her that I want to foster and tend to over the next year? So those would all be little branches, like, coming off my bubble would be for her. And then same thing with my son. Like, what am I doing with him this year? He's five years old, so, like, you know, he's going to be going to kindergarten, so how do I want to support him through that? What are. What's like, a special, like, he's getting old enough to do, like, a mom and son trip. What. What should we do for that if we have a little special time together? He has some different needs as far as, like, occupational therapy and things like that. So how can I tend to him and make sure that he's supported all of These types of things go into the mind map. That's just one example. Kids are just one of my, you know, 10 life buckets. And one thing that is really helpful when you're doing a life buckets exercise. And I talk about this in the Year on the Wall training is how to discover your word for the year. So there's a lot of different ways to arrive at a word for the year. I, in my training, show you some ideas I have for how you can discover your word, your guiding light. I think of it truly as your North Star for the year. So I have my Year on the wall clients do this writing exercise to help them visualize what life will be like at the end of 2025. And from that free write and from their mind map, we distill and reduce that big vision down into one word. Or it could be a phrase, but very small phrase. Typically, it's one word that really becomes like a totem or a symbol for your year ahead. Okay. And I've had different, obviously different words for different years. Different years have different personalities. And I shared in my training that my word in 2025 is ownership. I am someone I. I've always identified as somebody who takes a lot of ownership. Call it the oldest daughter syndrome. I'm not sure, but something about 2025 is asking me to even go to the next level of. Of ownership. Like, I've always done a pretty good job at this, but I'm thinking, like, if I wanted to have a phrase, it would be radical ownership, radical ownership over my life. Because it's really sinking in for me. Maybe it's my age. I'm turning 37 next week, so maybe it's that. Actually, I guess by the time this podcast comes out, I'll already be 37. But it's really landing for me that, like, no one else is coming to take ownership over my life. Like, this is it. This is it. You know, we're kind of getting to the halfway point here, and it's really time to step up to the plate in a radical way. That word radical is kind of important to me as well. And so when I think about, like, what is radical ownership look like in my parenting? What does radical ownership look like in my business? I mean, think about being a CEO and truly taking ownership over my client experience, over my business operations, um, ownership in my home life, ownership my body and my health. Like, just taking all of that to the next level. And so we do this thing in Year on the Wall called the Life Bucket Equation, where we Take your word and we multiply it. Can you tell? My daughter's learning multiplication in third grade? I have multiplication on the brain. But we take your word and we multiply it by each life bucket. And what you get is sort of a definition or a product, an answer to the question, what am I trying to create in that area of my life next year? So if you're listening to this, I'd love for you to do this exercise. If you're not a year on the wall, homie, and you haven't done that yet, you can just go ahead and take this exercise and do it, and your whole life will change. I promise you that. So take your word and multiply it by the life bucket and be as specific as you possibly can and see what comes out. Okay. And do that for every area of your life. Once we do that, I'm opening up my notebook because what we do from there is try to distill. At that point, you've probably written, like, I think for that stage for me, I wrote down, like, a couple sentences. For every life bucket, you're going to distill it down into the most measurable, succinct goal that you possibly can in order to have that. Like, again, this is what's going in the iPhone note. So if you listened to my last episode where I shared my 2024 iPhone notes, this is how I get to this point, is I take everything that I just wrote and I look at it and I say, what am I committing to? Like, what's the measurable result? That's really the question is what's the measurable result? That tells me that I got there okay. And so if you really want to be extra like me, I have a different color for my different life buckets. I use an iPad, and I just change the color of the pen. You could do this with markers or pencils or whatever. But looking at my 2025 goals, I'm going to transfer these into my iPhone so that I can keep track of them through the year, just like I talked about in my last episode, and celebrate them as they unfold. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about what I'm. What I've got going on. A lot of these are business. Some of them are not. But if you know me, you know that I am such a big believer that business feeds our personal life, and our personal life feeds our business. There's, you know, as a solopreneur, an entrepreneur, an online business owner, I keep saying there is no, like, nobody Grows the way that entrepreneurs grow personally. There's no self. There's no self development quite like entrepreneurship. It will push you to the next level. And I love that. I love just. Again, back to being messy. I talked about messiness in the messy middle in my last episode. And, you know, letting, letting your. Letting the mess of your life be part of your goals. You don't need to have this tidy separation of like, I'm Steph Crowder the person and then Steph Crowder the business owner. It's like, no, like these things all blend into each other. They feed into each other and they comprise the whole person that is me, Steph Crowder, taking radical ownership in 2025. All right, so without further ado, let's talk about it. Let's talk about what I'm, what I'm creating and what we'll see how I do. We'll see how I come out. So starting from the top with business, my revenue goal for 2025 is 500k. So I shared in my last episode. If you want to hear about how 2024 went, you can go listen to the previous episode to hear where I landed. But this is going to be my goal for 2025. I want to do 500k in the business and I want to do it sustainably. I want to do it without feeling like a total chicken with my head cut off. I want to do it in a way that makes me feel like I'm scaling peacefully. Okay. I want to set myself up to ultimately, and I shared more about this in the last episode. I want to ultimately, and when I'm ready and not a moment before, have my first million dollar year just to push my own capacity, become who I need to become in order to be that person who has that in their business. Right. And experience that. And I want this year to be the year that sets me up for that. Like maybe 20, 2026 is the year that I go for the million. I don't, I don't know, but I know that 2025, I want to focus on reaching that half million mark and I want to focus on bringing in the leads and the attention and the audience that's going to be required for me to scale past that point. So that's the first goal. How am I gonna do it? I love this next goal. I shared this in my year on the wall training. I broke down. I teach you if you are wondering, like, how do people reach reach revenue goals like this? I don't know how other people do it, but the Way that I do it, and I've been doing it for years, is by reverse engineering it. And I teach my clients to do it. I'll show you exactly how when you go to yearonthewall.com but I can tell you that for me, 500k in revenue sounds massive and huge and scary until you start to make it real by looking at your offers. And so I have done that work and what I can tell you is that for me to reach 500k with a very simple plan that looks like 100 clients in my foundational program, Same Day Sales. Same Day sales is my year long training program that teaches the skill of sales and the skill of getting 24 hours or getting a sale in 24 hours anytime you want one. 100 of those clients and then 40 clients in my mastermind. This is for the whole year, 40 mastermind clients. And so I think it ended up being. I wrote down 40 here. I think, I think I changed it to 44 to be more precise. So Ford, let's call it 44. 44 mastermind clients. So that's 144 new clients in 2025. And so I shared this in my training, but I ordered, I went on just to be extra. I went because I'm so visual and I know a lot of you are as well. I went to Etsy and I found these posters that realtors use. They're made for realtors and they help them track houses, how many houses they sell in a year. They're really cute. They have like revenue tracker. I think if you search like revenue tracker poster or something, it should come up. Lots of options come up. And so I reached out to a couple of these creators, these makers and I said, hey, this is really cool. I'm not a realtor, I'm a business coach. Can you. Because it's really cute the way they have it. They have the tracker are like these little house icons and you can just like check them off as you sell houses through the year. I don't sell houses, okay. I sell coaching. And so I was like, can you turn the houses into just like a box? And can you write my company name at the top and can you write at the bottom number of new clients and total revenue? And they're like, yeah. And I ordered it and it's here and I love it and I need to hang it up. And essentially every time I get a new client in 2025, I'm going to write that client's initials in the box so I can visually through the Year watch my goals being completed. It reminds me of those, like, church fundraisers where they have like, the thermometer and they color it in as you are raising funds. It's like the same thing. It's like a visual representation of the achievement of your goals. So which goal would you rather work towards? $500,000. Okay. It's like, how am I going to do that? Or 144 new clients, right? Like, in my mind, it's like, so freeing to be like, okay, I just need to go find 144 people, right? And some of them will come in a launch, Some of them will come from speaking opportunities, some of them will come from referrals, some of them will come from conversations, right? Like, it just opens up the possibility of. It doesn't matter how or where or when or why I find them. I just have to line them up and knock them down, right? Like, I just have to line them up and call them in one by one. And every time I write a client's initials in a box, I get to, like, celebrate that, that person's life, that I get to help impact, that I get to share my expertise with, that I get to push and help them grow. So it's the ultimate celebration of the achievement as the year is unfolding. So I'm really excited about that. Okay. Those are two work goals. I have a health and fitness goal. So this is related to my fitness goals and I'm going to keep that one to myself. It's a little. It's a little personal and I know that kind of thing can be triggering. But for me, I'm working on some body composition goals. I am working on increasing muscle and decreasing fat in the body. I've been on that journey for years. So I have some. Just a quick side note, for anybody who has goals along those lines, I highly recommend getting in body scans. Do you all know what an in body scan is? It's more than just a scale. My gym has it. I do it once a month. So that's actually part of the achievement process at this goal is it's about so much more than a number on us on the scale. Although I do have a number. But I am. I go and I stand on this machine once a month and they tell me what, how much of my total weight is muscle and how much is fat. And so if the scale is not moving, which for many of us it isn't, when we're building muscle, you can see, like, oh, the scale didn't move, but, like, my muscle increased and my fat percentage decreased. So I'm going to be staying on that game through 2025, and I know what I need to do to make that happen. Okay. Other big news for 2025, and I if you want to hear more about this, there will be more to come. But I shared the most, like, recent crazy story having to do with this next one in my year on the wall training. So let me tell you, this is the part where I'm going to tell y'all, okay? Be careful what you write down. If you are sure you want it, don't write it down, okay? Because it just might come true. I wrote this down. I wish I knew what date, but it was a few weeks ago. And here's what I wrote down. New cozy home with yard. Okay, I know I just told y'all in last episode that we built this house three and a half years ago. It was the perfect home for us in that moment. We got a hell of a deal in the pandemic. It was the right thing for us. It's a great experience. But my family's needs have changed pretty dramatically in the past three years with the way my. My children are growing. And we're not going far, but we're looking at this neighborhood that has a very different vibe. It's across the street, but it's a very different vibe than my current neighborhood. My current neighborhood does not have any yard space whatsoever. My kids are big, outdoor kids. They're very regulated in nature. They need more space, and I need more space, if we're being honest. I mean, of course, who doesn't find nature soothing? And also, the home that we built is very, like, open concept, and I am just, like, over the open concept movement. I am very excited to go to a more traditional home that has some rooms. I think all of us are doing a little bit better when we have a little bit more separation and designated space versus, like, the whole house feeling like one big open room. No shade, if that's your vibe. But it's been. I've lived in homes like that for about, oh, my gosh, I guess, like seven years or something. And I'm just kind of ready to do something different. So I wrote down new cozy home with yard. And just a couple of weeks later, the morning of the year on the wall training, I'm standing inside a house with the most incredible yard. I can't wait to show. As soon as we know that it's all official, I'll be showing it. We're under contract now. It was year on the wall day. And we were putting in an offer during my. During this training. I mean, guys, this was a matter of weeks of me just having this thought. My husband and I both being like, I think. And there's a. Other few. Like, there's some financial stuff involved as well. It's like a really incredible financial move for us. The area that we're in has appreciated like crazy. And we're. We're doing what you call a trade down, which is like, huge for us for a lot of different. A lot of different reasons. We're moving to an older home to really make it our own. Like, we have a lot of experience in home ownership now and we are ready to kind of cuss, like, find a home that we see the potential in and make it our own. Right? So literally we have this idea and then a couple of weeks later, I'm making an offer on a house that's popped onto the market. So be careful, Be careful. If you don't want it to happen, maybe don't write it down. Okay. This stuff is powerful. This stuff is so powerful. Okay. Other things I wrote down, this is a big year, big rebuilding year for my friendships. I've changed, I've grown. The way I socialize is completely different than it used to be. And so a goal that I wrote down is find my true village. I want to find my. My village, my people, my support in terms of the people that I raise my kids with and that I travel with and just feel like I have that. And I think moving to a new community as well is like really finding that in our new home. On the business, back to a business goal. 2025 is going to be the year that I start working on ads and funnels. Not too much, because if you know me as a coach, I'm not the biggest fan of like overcomplicating. But remember, I'm 10 years in to my journey and I have an, like two offers that are working. So I do want to experiment with reaching more people through ads and using some evergreen funnels to sell my foundational program, same day sales. Because now that we've helped a lot of clients in that program and we understand how it works, I think it would be really great to experiment with reaching more people through that offer. I wrote Travel Abroad, don't know when, don't know where. Just putting that out there to see what opportunities might come my way. I wrote this one down, pay for a whole house organizer. So I know in my last episode I shared hiring an interior designer and that was an amazing experience. I would really love y'all watch the home edit and these shows where they just go crazy, like, really making these systems for people to make their lives run more efficiently. That is my dream. That is my dream to have a home for everything in the house. And that is definitely not my strength. So I would love to have somebody help me with that. I wrote down again, this is just putting it out there. Don't know when, don't know how. But get paid for a speaker gig with travel. I would love to get paid to go travel and have a speaking engagement and just have that experience. I've done it before, but it's been. I really haven't done that since the pandemic, and I think it would be really fun to do that again. And then I have kind of a fun relationship goal. So when I did my free write for my marriage life bucket, I wrote. I think I wrote about just, like, spending more intentional time together because we have two kids with two different schedules, and my husband and I are amazing partners. Maybe a little bit too good because sometimes we get, like, majorly into the divide and conquer, you know, mindset. And so this year in 2024, I started playing mahjong. I don't know if any of you all have played this game before, but it's really fun. I play with some mom friends, and I wrote play mahjong together. I want to teach my husband how to play. It's a really fun game with these tiles, and I think it would be really fun to, like, teach him how to play and get good at. It's like a strategy game, and it's something that we could do together when our kids are sleeping, if we don't want to have a babysitter and just, like, stay home and hang out. So again, the specificity, I could have written spend more time with John, but instead of writing that, I came up with, like, a specific thing I want to try and do with him and see if it sticks. And so. Oh, and then I had a money goal as well to max out my retirement again this year. I shared in my last episode that I was able to do that in 2024, so I want to be able to do that again. So Those are my 2025 goals, and I'm sharing them here for accountability so we can look back on what happened. I'm writing them down in my phone. So these were all written in my iPad. I'm going to move them over to a checklist on my phone. And I really encourage you like think about the power of not just leaving your goals in your head. Right. The power of actually writing them down, of having the courage to claim them. This is where I'm going to be focusing in 2025. And I know I shared personal and I shared business. I personally think it's fun to hear a little bit about both. But I am just so excited about the value I'm going to create. There's. There's other things that flow into this as well. So I have a lot of curriculum updates, a lot of curriculum updates that goes into my like 500000 a year goal. Like this is that sustainable? Like building, building year. Right. Like I want to redo my mastermind curriculum. It. The curriculum in there is amazing, but it hasn't had a refresh, like a full refresh in a long time. And so we're going to do that this year so that when next year comes, when 2026 comes, it's really going to be about scaling. So you can really hear the intention that I'm setting. Like I know exactly what kind of year I'm trying to have. I'm trying to have a laying foundation kind of year that I can build upon. Right. And we're still going to be stretching this year. It's not really a maintained year, it's a stretch year. But I have this feeling that what the groundwork that I lay this year is really going to set me up. I think 2026 is going to be like a banner year for the business. And so that's how far out, I mean, I think if you're savvy about it, that's how far out you have to be thinking in order to grow sustainably. So that is how I'm approaching it. I hope it's been helpful to just hear this little peek behind the curtain in terms of what I plan on working on. I thought it'd be fun for this episode to come out, you know, while you are all are hopefully taking some time over the holidays. I know I am so in the little in between moments when you're not with family and when you're just kind of have some time to yourself, play around with your goals and if you need more, you can go to yearonthewall.com I will walk you through all of this in great, great detail and I would love to support you in that way. Friends, 2025 is going to be an amazing year. I can't wait to take you along for the journey. You know, I'm an open book and I'LL share everything as we go. And I can't wait to see you there. Until then, I am wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.