Believing Ahead of Time

You’re listening to the Mastering Money in Midlife podcast with Debbie Sassen, episode seven.

Welcome to Mastering Money in Midlife, a podcast for midlife women in business to overcome financial anxiety and make more money without burning out or sacrificing their families. Join certified life and money coach Debbie Sassen, as she shares practical business strategies and mindset shifts, that help you dissolve the money blocks that keep you stuck in a cycle of underearning and under-saving, sabotage the growth of your business, and prevent you from building the wealth that you desire.

Hello, my friend. I am thrilled to share with you that I am a new grandmother. Actually, I’m an old, new grandmother. My oldest grandson is about eight and a half years old, and we have a new little addition to our family. My little granddaughter was born to my son and daughter-in-law a few days ago. We’re so blessed because they’re living in our house while my granddaughter recovers. I am helping them out with cooking, minding my two-year-old grandson, their oldest child. Actually, if you looked around my office, he was playing here just a little while ago. It’s strewn with cars and trucks and little train cars. They’re all over the floor. They’re on my desk, and it’s kind of fun to be back in the day again when I was a mom of littles. It’s really a pleasure and a joy to have them. When I think about 2021, it has been a blessed and abundant year for our family as a whole.

We welcomed four new grandchildren. The first one was born on January 1, 2021. That was a little girly. Then, we had a little grandson, another little granddaughter, and now a third granddaughter for the year. So, I really sing a song of thanks and praise and gratitude to God, to the All-Mighty that everyone in our family is healthy, growing, and thriving. We did have a little bout of corona in our family this year. One of our daughters and her family were sick with corona, but they weren’t really sick. I mean, there was a little bit of headaches and flu kind of feelings with my daughter and her husband. But for the kids, it was pretty much a non-event, and that’s also something to be tremendously grateful for.

I also wanted to share with you that I took a full day off of work out of the office a few days ago. Now, it might not sound like such an unusual event. Still, what I did was I invited my assistant to a local spa. We went to spoil ourselves with a massage and sauna and a real self-care day and also took the time to dig in and review 2021. I dug into my business. She reviewed her business, and then we planned out the next few years of my business together, and I think she also did some planning for her business. And as we wrap up 2021, I invite you to do that as well. We get so much valuable information by looking backward. Not to beat ourselves over the head and say, oh, you did this wrong, and that didn’t work, and what happened, but always get the information and the learning that we can use to apply for the next year and two years and three years out. What emerged and kind of revealed itself to me from that day as I plan my business and look forward is that over the next three years, my goal is to grow my business to two million dollars in 2024 without burnout.

And from that day in the spa, I think the title of this podcast was born, which is, believing ahead of time. And so, in this episode, I’m going to share with you why it’s important for you to set goals for your money and for your business the necessity of believing ahead of time why your brain gets freaked out by the thought of believing ahead of time. Then I am going to use a little child-centered metaphor because I have a lot of children and grandchildren in my life, especially right now; I’m going to give you that metaphor that you can use when your brain goes into freak out mode. Then finally, I am going to wrap up this episode with a story that illustrates my point.

So, let’s start with the importance of setting goals. You’ve probably heard about the importance of doing that and why you’re more than likely to achieve what you want in life, in business, in money, whatever you want. If you set a goal, you’re much more likely to become the person you want to be. You could probably go onto Amazon and Google goal setting and get, I don’t know, hundreds, maybe even thousands of book suggestions about the best way to set your goals and you might even learn about SMART goals and setting things that you can do in order to set and meet your goals.

But what the research shows is that less than 4% of people actually write down their goals. And less than 1% of people actually review their goals on an ongoing basis. So, here we are at the end of 2021, at the portal of 2022. Suppose you have some, maybe even fuzzy goals. In that case, you’re thinking about the future, I want to encourage you to set a goal, and in this podcast episode, we’re going to talk about audacious goals. So, I am going to encourage you to stretch yourself beyond what your mind believes is possible and write it down and come back to it over and over again. I don’t necessarily mean every day or even every week, but come back to your goal every couple of months and recommit to your goal.

Here’s what I would like you to do, I want you to imagine for a moment that you’re a pilot sitting on the tarmac in New York, maybe at Kennedy Airport. You know that you’re supposed to fly somewhere because that is why you’re in the cockpit after all, right? But you don’t know if you’re supposed to fly west to Las Angeles or east to London. So, you’re going to sit on the tarmac. Maybe you’re going to like, drive around like the plane in circles. You’re going to go from gate to gate trying to figure out where you’re supposed to go, or maybe you’ll actually get up into the air. Then, you’re going to circle over New York City, Manhattan, maybe even the Atlantic Ocean, because you don’t know if you’re supposed to head east or west or maybe even north or south.

So, your goal is like the coordinates that the pilot plugs into the navigator. Your goal gives you direction for your business, just like the goal or coordinates the pilot plugs into the navigator gives them direction for the plane. Should we fly east to London? Okay, plug that in, and away we go. And of course, you might hit headwinds, or there might be a storm you might have to adjust your flight path a little bit, right, you might have to course-correct along the way, and that’s part of the process. But if you’re sitting in that cockpit and you don’t know where you’re going to go, then you’re probably not going to go much of anywhere.

Now, I want you to take your imagination just a little farther back. I want you to imagine that you’re sitting in the cockpit of an airplane about a hundred years ago or so. You’re Orville or Wilbur Wright they were pioneers in aviation you have probably heard of them. The inventors and builders of the world’s first successful motorized airplane. You might be wondering now that you’re already sitting in the airplane, how did Wilbur and Orville invent an airplane? How did they do that? And that’s what our brain is always going to ask us when we set a goal. Like, how am I going to do that? And our logical mind, what I like to call the logician inside of us, wants to know the how. And there had been an idea circulating around for hundreds of years when it came to the airplane. Leonardo Da Vinci had already made drawings for the airplane back in the 1500s. But how did we go from drawings to something that was successfully airborne, right?

There had to be some inventions along the way, some hot air balloons and blimps, and the industrial revolution brought us the motorized engine. And Wilbur and Orville Wright, before they even figured out how, just decided to believe ahead of time that they could figure it out, and they got to work experimenting. I bet, I don’t know I haven’t read their autobiography. Still, I bet they experimented with one type of airplane. It failed and experimented with another one and it crashed and fell. They did this over and over again always trying something, experimenting, tweaking, failing, adjusting their process, and ultimately, they created a motorized airplane that was airborne.

But what always comes first is that seed of the idea that it’s possible, and you have to believe ahead of time. The seed of the idea gets planted, it takes roots, it sprouts, it grows, and eventually, what you envision in your mind is created in reality. And it’s the same process that Henry Ford went through with the motor car. It’s the same process that Thomas Edison also went through with the light bulb, and it’s the same process for you and me and the growth of our business and the goals for our businesses. We have to believe ahead of time that our goals are 100% possible in the land of possibility.

Here’s what happens to a lot of people either they don’t set goals or don’t write them down, as we’ve already discussed, and a lot of times it’s because they’re afraid to set an audacious income goal for their business because they’re worried, they won’t make it. That they’re going to fail, and that’s going to mean something about them. So, rather than setting the goal, getting to work figuring it out, they reject the goal ahead of time. They’re actually kind of rejecting themselves and their goals and all of that possibility in the process. Or they look to their past to determine what’s possible for them in the future. And I talked about this a little in episode four how our brains look for information, right? We want data points; our brain wants to make sense of what it already knows to write the story of our future.

Also, our brain believes that growth happens linearly and sequentially. After all, that’s how we’ve been educated, right? From school, right, you went from third grade to fourth grade from elementary school to high school and then to college, maybe you graduated from college. You got your first job, and you started on the bottom rung of the ladder, and then you had to work your way up. So, when you come back to your business, and you set a big income goal for your business, and the data points that you already have in your mind and in your past don’t pan out like they don’t make sense, right? Your brain has a little freakout. It wants to keep you safe, and it wants to spare you from failure.

So, it doesn’t even allow you to play in that playground of possibility. So, here’s what I’d like to offer you instead, whatever you think is impossible for you right now, it’s only temporary. And I want you to go back in time for the third time. We’re going to use our imagination once again. And as the mother of many children and a grandmother of many more, I’m going to invite you to come with me back in time to when you were a little infant. And that infant inside of you thought crawling was impossible until it wasn’t anymore, and then you were a toddler. And that toddler thought that walking was impossible until it wasn’t anymore. And then you were running, climbing trees, riding a two-wheel bicycle, probably with no hands at some point, right? And everything was impossible until it wasn’t impossible anymore.

And here’s the thing about our younger selves, our younger selves wanted to grow and explore and do new things, break down the barriers, and conquer the world. Our younger selves believed ahead of time that anything was possible and that we could figure it out. And most of the time, we did figure it out. Of course, you might have fallen down, skinned your knees, bruised your elbows, right? Hopefully, you didn’t break any bones. Although a lot of kids do break their bones figuring it out. But we’re always in the place of believing it was possible, like, kids believe they can fly, right? They have dreams, and they have plays and skits, and they’re always in that world of dreaming, envisioning, and possibility. And that’s the message that I want you to take with you into 2022.

I invite you to set big income goals for your business. I invite you to believe ahead of time that your goal is 100% possible. It’s available to you. And just like your younger self, as I said, she failed, messed up, did experimentation, sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn’t work out, but she figured it out. And whatever you want for you and your business, that big beautiful, wildly successful, and profitable business is available to you. It’s possible. The biggest thing you have to do is believe ahead of time and get to work.

Now, to close up this episode of the podcast, I want to share with you the story of a young man who set an audacious goal for his career. He had to believe ahead of time that success was possible for him. It’s the story of Nick or Nicholas Brownlee. He’s an opera singer with a gorgeous, deep, bass-baritone voice. Recently Nick performed the role of Colline in Puccini’s La Boheme in New York City at the Metropolitan Opera. But Nick’s story didn’t start at the Met. In fact, Nick grew up in Alabama, and he sang as a child in his church choir, and he always enjoyed singing. Obviously, he’s very talented. Because we know the end, he recently sang on stage at the Met.

But he never had the possibility or the thought of singing on stage at the Met until, as he grew and developed, somebody recognized his talent. If I am not mistaken in the story, it was his professor when he was at Rice University. Anyway, Nick is a friend of our family. Nick moved from Rice University, there were a few stops along the way, he ended up in Las Angeles as a young artist with the LA Opera. And my parents hosted him for two weeks before he found more permanent accommodations. And from his humble beginnings in Alabama, Nick’s career took off.

Once he developed that love of opera and he threw himself all in into developing his skills and his voice and his performing ability and really believed ahead of time that it was possible, Nick was able to take himself from his church choir in Alabama to New York City singing with the Metropolitan Opera. My husband and I actually entertained Nick and his wife, Jen four or five years ago because Nick also sang the same role of Colline in La Boheme with the Israeli Opera. They sang in Tel Aviv, and because there’s a family connection, Nick and his wife Jen and their daughter joined us for dinner one night, and we got to know him, and they’re lovely people. I just want to reinforce the idea that he had no business, you know, believing that he could sing on stage at the Met as a child growing up in Alabama.

But once that possibility sort of opened up to him, he had to keep believing ahead of time that he could achieve his dream. And in fact, he did, and I’m sure he’s still young, and he’s going to continue to grow and thrive. That seed that was planted so many years ago the roots had gone into the ground. They’re very firm and solid, and that little sprout, that seed of an idea grew into a tree with a thick base, very strong, and very stable. That tree just continues to grow taller with lots of leaves, and it’s a beautiful flourishing career that Nick Brownlee has ahead of him. And that’s what I offer you and your business and your growth in 2022 and beyond.

Now, to celebrate the launch of this podcast, I’m going to be giving away five popular business and money books, including my book, The 1K Investor, simple, smart steps to start investing with $1000 or less. I’m going to announce the winner on my next podcast. It’s going to be the first podcast in 2022. So, I invite you to go right now and review the show. It doesn’t have to be a five-star review, although I sure hope you love the show. But I want your honest feedback so I can create an awesome podcast that provides tons of value. Please go to masteringmoneyinmidlife.com/podcast launch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. Because I’ll be announcing the winner on the next episode of the show. Thank you very much for joining me today. Bye for now. I will see you in the next episode. Happy New Year.

Thanks for listening to Mastering Money in Midlife. If you want more information on Debbie Sassen or the resources from the podcast, visit masteringmoneyinmidlife.com.