How to Believe Harder in Your Goal

You’re listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen Episode 87.

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I’m your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic underearner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach. And then, on to multiple six figures as a full-time money and business coach. I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth, using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let’s dive in to today’s show.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. It is July, and it is hot here in Israel. I love heat. I love the summer. I don’t enjoy the cold in the winter. But if I don’t get out early in the morning to take my morning walk, by about eight thirty or nine o’clock, it is scorching outside and I just don’t get my walk in. And that actually happened to me earlier this week. And I felt it the entire day.

And as I’m thinking about this, it makes a lot of sense that this is on my mind because today we are going to be talking about your goals. We’re now in the second half of 2023. I don’t know if you are on track to meet your income goal this year or the clients or whatever else you wanted to achieve in your business.

But one thing that we have to do when we’re setting our goals is look at what’s working, what’s not working, why that happened, and what do we want to do differently. So, certainly, the other day when I didn’t get out early enough, it was because maybe I was dawdling around at home or procrastinating. I was tired, I just didn’t want to.

I actually thought on that day, that I would do better not to push myself and rush myself out the door and go on the walk. And I would be okay, if I just didn’t have my walk that day. I learned something, and that is my body needs to move. Especially in this heat, where going out in the midday is also a challenge. Although I’ve done it, I can walk to the post office or to the mini-market or something like that, that’s near my home.

But if I really want to go out for an hour walk, and sweat and push myself, doing it mid-day is not a good idea. I learned that I need to maybe push myself a little bit harder. Otherwise, there will be consequences for me to pay, obviously not huge consequences. That’s important for you to realize, as you move towards your goal.

So, today, we will be speaking about how to believe harder in your goal. The first thing that I want to bring to your attention is the critical importance, as an entrepreneur, of having an income goal. So many entrepreneurs do not set goals, income goals for themselves. They don’t review their goal regularly.

Because there’s this sneaky, underlying thought, “Well, if I don’t meet my goal, that means something about me. I’m not good enough. I’m unworthy. I’m never going to meet my goal. I should be further along right now. It’s not working.” But really, the goal for your business, the income goal for your business, and I love money goals, because a business exists to make money.

Of course, your business exists to serve your clients. And the money that you earn, that you take in, is a reflection of the service that you provide to your clients or the product, if you are selling products. But we measure, in the material world, the financial success of our business. I’m not talking about all of the people that you’ve impacted.

There are thousands of people that I impact by recording this podcast, who may never pay me a dime. And my business is still having an impact through the podcast. That is one thing that I can evaluate in my business, is it financially worthwhile for me to continue producing the podcast if my business has X income or Y income, and my outflows on my business are exceeding my income?

That’s something that you can evaluate as a business owner. But still, in the material world we want to see if our business has sustainability and viability, by looking at the numbers. You want to see that over time, the income for your business is growing and the profitability of your business is growing.

Of course, there are years when your profit margin can increase or it can collapse a little bit, for various reasons. Maybe you are making an investment in your business, like a new website. Or you’re recording a podcast, and you need to bring a podcast company on. Or you’re doing something new, you’re bringing a new member onto your team. That requires a financial investment before you see the return on investment.

But again, if you’re not looking at your numbers, and setting goals and expectations, it’s hard to measure, almost impossible, I would say, to measure the financial success and viability of your company as a company. So, if you have not yet set an income goal for your business, for 2023, I recommend that you press pause and set a financial goal for your business.

It’s actually interesting, because recently, I spoke with a potential client who turned out not to really, really want to grow her business that much. She did not even know how much money she was making in her business. And again, it’s hard to set goals for growth when you don’t know how much you’re earning at the moment. So, that’s number one: Set an income goal.

If you do not yet know your numbers for the first half of 2023, again, you can press pause, you can go back and you can look at your books, you can do your calculations, or wait till the end and make a commitment to do your books and your numbers at the end of this recording.

So, let’s talk about goals. Do you have a stretch goal? Are you one of those people, like me, who likes audacious goals? For me, it really helps my brain get creative and it gets my juices flowing. I start thinking outside the box when I set an audacious goal. For me, it doesn’t shut me down. But I have had clients who had very huge stretch goals, and their goal made them numb.

I love to tell the story of my client who had, on her vision board, $1 million as her income goal for her business. But she just didn’t relate to it. She couldn’t stretch herself that far. And so, rather than picking a goal like $100,000 in her business, she had these beautiful visions imagining that money was dropping down from the heavens like mana in the desert. But it didn’t compel her and motivate her and excite her to move forward because it was just so far out of reach.

So, you do you. You get to know where you are. Do you want to increase your income goal over 2023 by 10%, 20%? Do you want to double your income goal? However you want to do it that’s great for you, but set an income goal.

Now, you have to go about taking the steps to meet your goal. This is where, in so many conversations in the last month, I can really see from those conversations and feel from the conversations that I’ve had with people who really believes in their goal and who doesn’t.

Because I was traveling in June, I was speaking with family members; it was a mixture of family and business. I spoke with colleagues who are also growing businesses. I’ve had a number of sales conversations with people who say that they want to grow their business.

I can really tell who believes in their goal and will take the steps to go after their goal, and who is just setting a goal, maybe wants to grow something, and is paying lip service to the potential growth of their company. In fact, let me give you an example. I have a friend, a very, very dear friend. She’s my best friend I would say, who 16 years ago, if I’m not mistaken, maybe 18 years ago, had a goal to create a charity organization here in Israel.

It’s called Likrat Kallah and it’s an organization that has been designed specifically to help needy brides in Israel. My friend has done all of the legwork. And when I say legwork, I mean, really legwork.

Knocking on doors, getting people to help, getting people to donate gifts that she gives away and distributes at an auction that we have once a year. She does the fundraising event. Finds the speakers for it. I mean, she really, really believes so hard in her goal that she will stay in action, do uncomfortable things, and continue year after year after year to go after her goal and feel uncomfortable and feel exhausted.

So many of us believe that we don’t have to work hard and get tired going after our goals. That is what I can see when I speak with people. Are you willing to commit to your goal, believe that it is possible, and do the hard work in order to make your dream a reality? You have to believe that it’s possible. You have to believe ahead of time that it’s possible.

I can believe in you. When I have conversations with people, I mean, I’m a big visionary. I can listen to you. I can hear about your company. I can see your vision for your company. I can already, in my mind, see the strategy that will bring your financial dream and your business dream to reality.

I had a client last year, we were having a conversation, and my vision really, really went big for her in her business. It was that vision that sold her, as it was, on working with me. Now, for some people, I will explain to them where I see their business going. And again, like that $1 million income goal that one of my clients had a few years ago, that vision will numb them out.

Because they’ll be like, “Oh, my gosh, it’s too overwhelming,” and they can’t see the steps to getting there. Or they think it’s just going to be too hard. And so, they’re not willing to feel uncomfortable going after their goal step by step by step. So, that’s how I can tell if you really believe in your goal, is that you can have a vision.

When I get on a sales call with my potential clients, or even when I am working with my current clients, I can see where you are. I can see where you want to go. There is a step-by-step process for getting you from A to B, to C, to D to wherever you want to go with your business. It’s like stepping on stepping stones, or walking across a bridge, there is a path to getting you from where you are now to where you want to go.

For most people, that path includes marketing. Meaning, going out into the world and talking about what you do. It’s figuring out exactly how to connect with your best fit clients, or what we call your ideal client avatar. By talking about it over and over and over again, and refining your messaging over time. Refining the way you speak so that through practice, through trial and error, your clients come to you and they feel called to you.

But so many people don’t want to do the legwork. They want to get a hole-in-one. They want to hit a bull’s eye straight out of the gate. They want it to work the first time, rather than testing it out and practicing and tweaking it. And again, that’s how I can tell who really believes in their goal. If you believe in your goal, the way to believe harder is through hard work.

And I don’t mean physically, like pushing a boulder up the hill kind of work. But I mean being focused and taking the necessary steps. Meaning. you have to be willing to go out into the world and meet people and talk to them.

Sometimes that can happen on social media. You can have a social media platform where you show up and talk about what you do. Sometimes that means going to networking events where you’re talking to people. I don’t mean going to networking events looking to find clients. I mean, go to a networking event so that you can talk about who you are, what you do.

Just the talking, helps you to gain confidence in who you are and what you do. It helps refine your messaging in your brain. You also get feedback from people, because they will either look at you cross-eyed or they’ll look at you with a confused look on their face. You’ll have to refine your message and talk about it better.

Or if you just say, “Oh yeah, I’m a business coach. I help people grow their businesses.” They’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, great, that’s fine.” But I haven’t said anything different from 100 other business coaches out there in the world.

So, when I go to a networking event, for example, I will say that I help people create consistent $5,000 – $20,000 of income monthly in their business, working on money mindset and sales strategies. Because that is my unique gift and contribution for how I help people to grow their businesses.

Other people might work on your social media strategy. Other people might work on Facebook ads. There are many different ways to grow your business, but I can get specific and talk about my skill set, my unique genius in the world. That’s where marketing is so important for you. You want to be able to go out, try things, test them, and see if the way you are talking about your business is going to draw people to you.

The next step about creating your business is having sales conversations. So many people say they hate sales, they feel sleazy, they feel manipulative. We have visions in our mind of that greasy used car salesman who just tries to sell us a lemon. So, we don’t want to do sales. “Why can’t people just come to me?” I’ll tell you why people can’t just come to you, because people don’t believe in their vision.

So, for you to have that sales conversation, is you helping them believe harder that they can have their dream, that they can have their goal, that they can make their vision a reality.

The second step of believing harder in your business and your business growth is your willingness to refine your sales conversation. I know that I’ve been speaking in the last few podcast episodes about my free training, and it is still in process. I believe hard in my goal, the timing is a little bit longer than I expected, which is fine, we can change the date of our goals. But I don’t give up on my goals.

One of the things that I do is I talk about it. It gives me accountability. Can you imagine that I kept talking about it and then one day I just went radio silent and didn’t keep talking about my free sales training that I’m putting out? You would stop believing me.

So, this is my accountability to myself. I tell you about it. You’re thinking about it, I hope. You will go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/newsletter, and you will get on my email list so that as soon as my free sales training is ready… As soon as I finish this podcast, I’m going to go work on it some more. But I will keep believing in my goal that I can create something, and you will believe in my goal that I can keep creating something.

Going back to you and your business, refining your sales conversations and learning from the process. This is something that I work on with my clients, is helping them to evaluate their sales conversations and finding those little nuances in the conversation where they lost their client.

Now, sometimes, their client also doesn’t believe in their goal and doesn’t believe that it’s possible. Whether that’s a business goal, whether that is a health or weight loss goal, whether that is doing anything else in their business. My clients who are life coaches, they also want to help people to feel more confident, not burn out, have better relationship with their families, better relationship with their partners.

Wherever you are in your business, your job is to learn how to sell better so that you can close more clients, more quickly, and really make the impact in the world that you want to make. In order to believe harder in your business, you have to be willing to get good at marketing, and you have to be willing to get good at sales.

Those are two foundational pieces of your business. And the third foundational piece of your business is getting good at money. A business has to manage money. You have to be willing to look at your numbers. You have to be willing to make decisions for setting goals; how much money are you going to spend in your business this year?

We’ve talked about, in the past, I am 100% neutral on borrowing money in order to grow your business. That is a leveraged investment in your business. Where you borrow, let’s say $10,000 in order to create $100,000 in your business. Or you borrow $5,000 in order to create $20,000. Whatever it is, borrowing money is 100% okay, as long as you believe in your vision and in your goal, and you will take the necessary steps to meeting your goal.

So, we have marketing, we have sales, we have money. Really, one of the most important pieces in your business is the way you manage your mind. This underlies everything. People talk about mindset, but let’s hone in for a moment on what that really means. Your mindset is, you continue getting up in the morning, day after day after day, and believing that your goal is possible. That is maybe the power of positive thinking. But it’s not just positive thinking.

Because you can believe that your $100,000 business is possible. You can believe that your $200,000,  $500,000, million-dollar business is possible. Every single day, when your brain wants to spin out on you and tell you, “There’s too much to do, it’s all going wrong. I should be further ahead right now,” is that you check in with your brain and you tell your brain that these thoughts are not helpful.

You’re going to look at where you are today and measure yourself against where you are yesterday. Did I add three or four lines to that sales script that I am writing? Yes, I did. Another thing that I have been working on, and we talked about this last week in the podcast, where we talked about your inner child work, is I have been going back into some of my generational inherited trauma in my family and my family of origin.

I have been clearing that and excavating that, and doing some forgiveness work. That’s a topic for a different podcast, but that’s really what has been slowing me down, is spending a little bit more time than I anticipated doing my inner work.

So, when it comes back to my mindset, it’s not beating myself up because I have not yet released this free sales training. It’s realizing that the priorities that I set for June were a little bit off, because I had other priorities that needed to take precedence. One of my clients once told me, you can only have one priority. You can’t put two things at the top, there’s only room for one. I hear that now.

I didn’t realize that, at the beginning of June, was that the inner work that I needed to do, which is a foundational piece of my business. It’s like putting down those rebars before you build a big skyscraper, right? You have to dig down into the ground, put those big steel rebars into the ground, so that you can build up taller. That is what I realized that I needed to do. I only realized it after the fact, after I set my goals at the beginning of June. But I don’t make it a problem.

So, I get up in the morning, and I’m like, “Oh, this is what needed to happen in June. Now I see that. That was the work. That’s where I was. I am going to now, in July, continue going after my goal.” I’m not going to say that I’m going to close the door on the healing that I needed to do, because it’s still ongoing.

But some of the deep work that really wanted to be taken care of, is pretty much out of the way because I did that. Now, I can go back to the more practical steps, in a more focused way, that I need to take in my business. Again, it wasn’t even an either/or, it was just maybe 80% of my time in one area and 20% of my time in my other area, rather than the flip side. Which would have been maybe 80% of the practical steps going forward, and only 20% in the more deeper emotional work.

But managing your mind every day, and helping yourself believe that A- your goal is still possible. B- not letting those really negative thoughts in, bashing yourself and beating yourself up because you should be further along. No, you should not be further along. You should be exactly where you are right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be further along. So, let’s stop arguing with the fact of what is really happening. You are exactly where you should be.

Your willingness to feel uncomfortable when you have not yet met your goal. Your willingness to feel uncomfortable when you had a sales conversation and you did not sign that client. Now, the most uncomfortable thing is going back and evaluating that conversation. Because we just want to close the door and move on to the next.

There was so much gold when you look at exactly what you said, exactly what she said, what he said, and where you could have asked better questions. Next week, I want to record for the podcast how to ask better questions, because this is so important to challenge your mind. But we’ll get there.

Making sure that your brain is clicked on. I’m not saying you have to wake up every morning excited, enthusiastic, and motivated. All that bubbly effervescence is just going to dissipate. It’s like you leave your glass of soda water out on the counter and after a few hours there’s no more bubbly left in it. That’s the same thing with expecting a bubbly, effervescent, motivated, inspired, mindset at the beginning of your day to carry you through.

No, the mindset that you need as a business owner is not to have to feel excited and motivated every day in your personal body emotion. But to realize that that goal that you’ve set, that income goal, that impact goal, is possible. And you are going to go ahead step by step by step, you’re going to stay in action, in massive action, every single day towards meeting your goal.

You’re not going to let your brain get the better of you and tell you negative things like, it’s not happening faster and you should be further along. That, my friends, is the way that you believe harder in your goal. I’m going to close up with a story.

Last week, I met with one of my friends who is in Israel. She was in Israel, and now she’s gone. But she has a big business, a beautiful business. It is a very visionary business. We sat down, and we had a two-and-a-half-hour conversation, where we really looked at her business and her business goals.

Let me just tell you, that the work that my friend has put into her business, the legwork, the hard work, the time that she has put into it… she showed me her graphs, it’s all there on her computer. Which again shows that she is committed to her business. We looked at her numbers, and I could see her beautiful bar chart showing me how everything is growing.

She really has money drama from her family. This isn’t easy for her to look at her numbers, and she is doing it anyway. But we really looked at her grand vision, which is extraordinary for her business, and her willingness to do the work and to believe in her goal. I will add one more piece to this conversation, I even asked her at some point, “What if you burned it all down?”

Because she has such a huge vision for her business, I like to play devil’s advocate sometimes. I said, “What if we burned it all down and we rebuilt it from scratch, what would you do differently?” She’s so in love with her business, she’s like, “Why would I do that?” It’s her baby.

Now, sometimes it is a good idea to burn things down from your business and start over. But I was really trying to see where she could do things differently. But she loves the website that she’s built. She’s put so much time and effort into it, and it works beautifully for her business.

There are some personnel issues in her business that need to be tweaked. But again, for the long term of her business, she is committed to figuring out the strategy and taking the steps. That’s what we did. We looked step by step by step for about the next five years. What are the things and what is the order that the different pieces of her business need to be put in place?

That is what I want for you. Is to really be willing to look at your business. What are the pieces that need to be put in place in order for you to meet your goals? Because those are obstacles, and when you know what the obstacle is that is in your way, you can figure out the strategy that needs to happen in order for you to work around that obstacle.

Again, if the obstacle is your marketing, that there are not enough people who are hearing about you, then you have to go and make sure your message is spread more broadly in the world. If the obstacle is your sales, then you have to work on your skill as a sales person who is talking to people and helping them believe that their vision is possible.

If you’re not working on your money, you’re not setting goals, you’re not looking at your numbers on a regular basis, that is an obstacle that is going to get in your way. How willing are you to feel uncomfortable and manage your mind around your goal?

That, my friends, is how you can believe harder in your goal. It is the second half of 2023. It is July. It is the beginning of the next six months of your business, of your life. It’s a little bit cliché, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” but it really, really is. When you believe harder in your goal, you will take the necessary steps day by day by day to meet your goal.

That, my friend, is what I have for you today. I hope you got value out of this podcast episode today. I want to remind you that I am, I still am… I know, this is getting dragged out, but I believe hard in my goal. I am creating a free four-day sales training, The Art of Ethical Sales. It’s a four-step process to non-sleazy sales conversations.

If you are not yet on my email list, please go to DebbieSassen.com/newsletter and sign up for my newsletter, so that you will be the first to know when the sales training is available. I really do hope that I get it done by the end of July, because I don’t want it to drag on any longer for me and for you.

If you have any questions about your goal, if you have any question about sales, if you have anything that you would love to hear on the podcast, please reach out to me because I would love to help you grow your business, make more money and have a bigger impact in the world.

Thank you so much for being here. I will see you next week. Bye.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth.

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.