242 | 2026 (FUN Non-soul-sucking-boring) GOAL SETTING!

BusinessPodcastMarketing

Jan 22

Written By Melissa Klug

**Goal setting doesn’t have to feel overwhelming—or soul-sucking.**

In this episode, we share a powerful goal-setting workshop from inside the Inspired Organizer community, led by Cabri. Together, they walk through how to reflect on last year, set goals that actually fit *your* life and business, and create a plan you’ll stick with—without burnout, guilt, or arbitrary pressure.

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You can listen right here by pressing play, or you can read the full transcript below!

Goal setting… but make it actually doable (and not a shame spiral). 🙃

In this episode, Melissa shares a behind-the-scenes goal setting workshop led by Cabri from the Inspired Organizer community—because if you’ve ever hit January and thought, “Cool… now what?” this one is for you.

Cabri walks everyone through a super practical (and surprisingly emotional) way to reflect on last year, set goals that fit your brain, and map out a plan you can actually follow—without getting derailed by shiny objects, burnout, or perfectionism.

You’ll hear about:

A “review last year” exercise that starts with the hard stuff and highlights what actually lit you up
Why goals should be built around your definition of success (not just revenue)
“Less good” goals vs. “good” goals (aka vague feelings vs. measurable progress)
Finding your personal risk tolerance: safe goals, stretch goals, or “shoot for the stars” goals
Breaking big goals into quarterly → monthly → weekly action (so you don’t freeze)
Tracking methods that work for real humans: planners, spreadsheets, sticky notes, Monday, checklists… whatever sticks
The secret sauce: a vision board that creates emotion (because checklists don’t motivate anyone when payroll hits)
Tiny hacks that keep your goals in your face: password goals + monthly “goal dates”
Why sharing your goals = instant accountability + community momentum
Bonus: using ChatGPT to turn your giant brain dump into a realistic plan (and a “do not do” list 👏)

If you’re overwhelmed by annual goals, allergic to SMART goals, or tired of moving the goalpost every time you make progress… you’re going to feel very seen.

Follow along with the slides

Slides mentioned in this workshop are available HERE

If you enjoyed this episode…

Follow/subscribe, and share it with an organizer friend who needs a gentle push (and a plan) to make 2026 their year. 🎧✨

Connect with Melissa and Pro Organizer Studio: CLICK HERE
We have a whole library of podcasts here, our YouTube channel, and you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Pro Organizer Studio.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hey, pro organizers. It’s Melissa and I just want to say I got so many messages and emails and all the things about my conversation last week. It was three different podcast episodes, so if you missed it, I want to make sure that you knew that there were three whole episodes up.

I had a conversation with my friend, fellow organizer, Kim Snodgrass. This is my annual check-in with her of what her year was like. And she had so many amazing things to say. So I’m just putting a little plug in if you haven’t listened to it yet. I just have gotten so so much feedback on it and it sounds like it has helped people.

It definitely helped me to have a conversation. I hope that you will listen and that it may be able to help you too.

But one of the things that obviously the beginning of the year brings, although I will say just. Quick today. I’m recording this on January 20th, and it already feels the holidays didn’t even happen like I am into the year, but it is technically still the beginning of the year.

And so one of the things that obviously a lot of people are working at the beginning of the year is goal setting and what the year is gonna look like and how to get off to the races and make their businesses as successful as possible. It, by the way, again, that definition of success is very much up to you. It’s not about money. It’s about how your business fits in your life.

And so one of the things that we did in our inspired organizer group is we had a goal setting workshop. And listen, I am not great at goal setting. It is a definite flat spot for me. I should ironically probably have a goal to do better goal setting, but I digress.

But cabri ran this. Conversation with a bunch of the people in our inspired organizer community and usually we keep those things internal to our group. But this one I decided I wanted to share because there are some really good thought starters there and if you are a kind of struggling at the beginning of the year to get your thoughts together. Cabri has some interesting ways that she does it that I really like, and Cabri’s really good at pushing me in great ways.

So I thought it would be nice for you guys to hear and to be able to hear a few of the people in our community and what they’re working on. And hope that it gives some inspiration to you as well. I have taken a bunch out because it is private and personal to our group, but there’s a lot of really good stuff here.

So anyway. I want to introduce you to the goal setting workshop.

And then also if you want to follow along, the slides are going to be at proorganizerstudio.com/links, so you can look through and follow along to the slides and be able to see things like Cabri’s Vision boards from the past for this year, all that kind of stuff.

But I tried to make this as listenable as possible given that it was originally on a Zoom.

Okay. I have Yakked for way too long. Let’s get into goal setting and I’ll talk to you next week.

Have a great day, organizers.

I want you to enter into this very open-minded but we’re gonna start off with probably the hard part first. We’re gonna review last year.

I wanna walk you through a pretty simple and short visualization exercise. It is one that a mentor that I have worked with, has used in the past. The last time I did it, I, it nearly brought me to tears. And it really. Opened my eyes to the things I wanted to accomplish in life, in business, all of the above.

I think for me, like I’m a very numbers oriented person and it’s really easy to get caught in numbers. But there’s things other than numbers that are also important. And so we’re gonna walk through that.

We will map out some strategies for the goals that you have set for this year. If you don’t have goals set, that’s okay. The point of it is to set goals or maybe tweak the goals that you set at Christmas time, that already two weeks in are like, you’re looking at them saying, Nope, not interested. This isn’t gonna work.

I’m gonna give you my tips for crafting a vision in goal board.

I love goal boards. They’re my favorite. I updated it and it’s a new version this year, y’all get to join in my A DHD. Let’s try new things.

But then I also this is also super important as far as accountability goes. I want y’all to take this find out, figure out, set your goals. But then I also want you to share ’em because I think that’s where some of the magic happens and some of the power of community that we have happens.

By seeing other people who have similar goals, seeing people who maybe are struggling through similar goals. Maybe you just see something in somebody that you’re like, I just wanna love you, help you, encourage you hype you up, whatever that looks like. That’s what you should expect.

If you have ever wondered what the inside of my brain looks like, that is probably a very close description. It’s a lot in different directions and things are spinning and circling, and it’s never, ever quiet up there.

But this is also why I have to set goals because I am notorious for being in my head and I’m like, Ooh, shiny new thing. A DHD. And so I will change my goals or I will continue to move the goalpost.

And that’s not also, that’s not always the best thing because then it can always feel like you’re never accomplishing anything or never maybe always failing. ’Cause I’m also real bad at that.

I’ve shared these in the group before. These are my like OG goal boards. I was anti vision board for a while there. Mostly because vision boards have feelings. They have emotions when you look at them, things.

I didn’t want that. I did not want to feel, I did not want emotions. I did not want anything of the sort. I wanted tasks, I wanted facts. I wanted things that I could. Feel accomplished by walking to it and checking it off.

And so this is what what that looked like. 2019 was my first full year in business. And so there’s a lot of stuff there that I’m looking at this now and I’m like, oh my God, like 2019. And there’s a star that says raise prices. And I’m like, look at here. This is magic.

For all my people who I’m telling y’all to raise prices, I promise. I’ve lived it. I’ve done it. I understand how hard it is.

So yeah, this is just like a quick, this was a walk down memory lane for me. I showed this to Melissa and she was like, oh my God, that takes me back to another time. And I was like, me too.

I’ve switched from poster board and Sharpies to creating stuff on Canva. But again, like these are my, I look at them and I feel things.

I want to be consistent. I want to start a podcast. That was a goal at one point. I wanna read books. I am a little dude in the bear suit, like he is my nephew. And probably one of the biggest reasons I do half the crap I do. Lisa, that I can go to the park and spend afternoons with him and not have to work in clients’ homes anymore.

We’ll get into some of those underlying why your goals are what they are, but, okay, so to know where we’re going, we must know where we have been.

I wanna run you through a visualization exercise. If you wanna get in the zone, close your eyes. If you wanna grab a notebook or a piece of paper and kind of jot things down as they come up, please do.

But we’re going to review last year. You may look at your calendar, you may look through some of your photos, or you can maybe just sit, close your eyes, and think as I tell you some of these prompts—some of the stuff that comes up that feels important.

We’re gonna start with maybe the bad stuff or the negative stuff.

I want you to think about where things failed this past year in 2025. Where did things fail? Where did you feel not good enough, not smart enough. Maybe not even worthy enough. That’s a big that’s tattoo I have, that’s a big one for me.

Things in your life that you hated? Things in your business that you hated? Did you have clients that, thinking back, you’re like, never again. I do not wanna work with that person.

Did you have moments of maybe potential burnout whenever you were sitting there and you said, this ain’t worth it. I’m, I don’t wanna be a business owner anymore. This is not it. This is not the vibe.

Did you have moments where things just felt like you were drowning, overwhelmed, not sure where to go. Not sure what to do.

If you have any of those types of things—and I’m, that’s a very broad generic negativeness—write them down.

I’ll tell you, I had one client who she keeps coming back. She keeps coming back. It doesn’t matter how many times I fire her. And 2026 is the year that she’s done, because I walked through this exercise and I said, I can’t do anymore. My, my brain, my body, my nervous system. Can’t do it anymore.

So bad things, write ’em down.

I don’t wanna dwell on all the bad things forever, so also, let’s talk about what went really well.

This is for me, if you have specific instances and moments of things that went well, write them down. But this for me was where some of my photos—just a quick, go through all my photos this year—I found little moments. I found big moments. I found inbetweens of that was a highlight of the year.

One of them was going on a bear hunt with my nephew, and it was a random afternoon and I drew bear prints on the sidewalk and he died. Like we came inside and cut up apples so that we could go feed the bears. But that was such a simple thing, but very important in one of the highlights.

Think about the things that you’re most proud of. Whether that was a project that you did, a project your team did, giving raises to your team, taking a vacation for the first time as a business owner maybe, and not worrying about and stressing about your business.

What was the moment that you felt on top of the world, like it did not matter. It, not a single thing in the world could have brought you from the high that you were experiencing.

And then what things were life-giving? It doesn’t matter if they were stressful or hard or after a long day, it body ached and your muscles were sore, but you walked away with a glint in your eye and a smile on your face, and you’re like, this is it. This right here. This is why this is the moment.

Write it down. Type it out. Think about it.

I want you to take each of those moments, both good and bad, and we’re gonna use it to map out our goals. Because I think a lot of times we see numbers, we see other people. Oh, but they’re doing this over here. And it’s no. We don’t need to be paying attention to what they’re doing.

We want to create goals. We want to build a life, we wanna build a business. It’s gonna work for us each individually. And by knowing what worked really well and by knowing what worked really badly, you can help create that essentially.

Let’s start with the destination.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I do not get in my car and wander around aimlessly, just hoping that I find whatever I’m looking for, right? I’m gonna get in my car, I’m gonna turn on the radio, I’m gonna make sure my seat warmers are on. I’m gonna put in my address to GPS, make sure I’m headed in the right direction.

And that’s essentially what we’re gonna do with goals. I’m gonna start where you want to be.

So fast forward. What does 12 months from now look like? If you were to forecast and say you are standing on New Year’s Eve, December 31st, 2026, what do you want to be proud of? What do you want to think about? What do you want to have said? I accomplished this. Write it down. Write it all down.

You’re standing there and you are thinking, this is what I accomplished in 2026. What do you want those things to be? What do you wanna be proud of? What do you wanna say? I did it. What does that look like?

And as you’re writing out goals and what that could look like, I want you to think about what I call less good and good goals.

For me, a less good goal is one that is very vague. It doesn’t have maybe a correct answer. It leaves you feeling more confused than it does confident.

But it also, for me, like a less good goal is something I base my emotions on. So for me, I can have a absolute shit day and every single thing go right. You make thousands of dollars, your team does great, you finish a project, whatever—you can have every single thing go right, and based on my emotions alone, it can be a terrible day.

And so I don’t wanna set goals based on my emotions. I wanna set goals on something else.

And so emotions for me. Little hard to do if you have self-care goals. Again, if you can set it off something more task oriented—maybe it’s not like I wanna eat right a hundred percent of the time. Maybe it’s like I wanna eat 80% of the time. But we’ll track that in a way that we can actually measure that 80%.

Because if you’re just like, I wanna feel good 80% of the time, I have no idea what good is and it’s gonna change each day, depending on hormones. Less good.

A good goal would be something that is actually measurable. That can be yes, no checks, that can be anything. Numbers based, financials, revenue percentages.

I even like the battery and the thermometer. I like goals where I can see the thermometer slowly. I think of like fundraisers, like elementary school fundraisers of PTAs. Oh, we’ve raised 50% of our goal. That’s what goes on in my brain 99% of the time.

And having goals that actually you can see progress, see forward movement—it’s very yes or no. Did you make it 80% or did you not? Did you make a hundred thousand dollars or not? Did you do the thing or no? That’s a much better option for a goal.

So if you can take the goals that you have, the things that you’re mapping out, the things that you’re writing down and put them into this type of format—yes, no progress, numbers, percentages, et cetera—I think that’s key thing here.

I hear people talk about all the time, I have a goal, self care. Self care is the one that always gets me. ’Cause I’m like, I just, I don’t get it. My brain doesn’t do that. And so I try really hard. I can be a good self-care person like 80% of the time.

Now there’s one other thing that I think is super, super important to mention. When it comes to goals internally, we all have our own risk tolerance.

I can say to one person, Hey, go make $500,000. And they’re gonna the challenge. They’re gonna, they’re gonna spark, they’re gonna feel exhilarated.

They’re gonna say, “Okay, you bet. Let’s go.” That’s me.

You’re gonna have somebody else on the opposite side that you say, “Hey, go make $500,000,” and they are going to feel like the weight of the world is crushing on their shoulders. They are going to feel like a failure. They’re going to feel panicked, overwhelmed.

And so you have to find your tolerance level.

We’ll start with someone—this is someone who likes safe goals. You avoid goals that maybe—you maybe avoid goals altogether just because you don’t like the idea of possibly failing. This is also someone who feels like the goals weigh heavy.

If you are someone that—I don’t want you to raise your hand or anything. I think this should be very internal—but if this is you, don’t set crazy big goals. Set safe goals. Set goals that encourage you, but don’t feel overwhelming. We don’t wanna walk into the beginning of the year feeling like we’re drowning almost instantaneously.

Maybe you’re someone in the middle who likes some stretch goals. This is—you know what you want. You don’t wanna feel overwhelmed, but you’re also feeling, thinking, knowing that maybe there’s more. Maybe you’re capable of more. Maybe you just need a little push. Maybe not like a full dive-in, head-first kind of thing.

Third, you like uncomfortable goals. You set very big goals. You’re okay if they fail. You don’t care. You would rather shoot for the stars and land somewhere among the moon than to maybe temper your own goals just in your head.

And so does anybody wanna share like where you fall in this tolerance level?

“I am in the uncomfortable goals. Set goals so big that I will fail, and I shoot for the stars. I love it. I did that last year and I made it. I love it.”

“A star. I love it.”

“I was gonna say I’m the same. And I was laughing ’cause I didn’t know that there was a category for that, but as soon as you said it, I was like, oh, that’s me. I did the same thing—set a goal that I thought was absolutely bonkers ridiculous last year, and then I also hit it. So I just wrote down one that I think is for sure absolutely bonkers. So we’ll see.”

“I’m a safe goal person. I rarely set goals. I’m a perfectionist.”

I think that’s okay. And I think this is where, like, we have to accept that we all operate differently, and it’s okay to like safe goals. It’s okay to like uncomfortable goals. It’s just whatever works for you.

But there’s a lot of people, I feel like, that talk about goals and they don’t account for this. And I’m like, if I told—literally if I told someone to set a very big goal, it could crush them. It could be the thing that is debilitating to them, that could essentially wreck their whole plans.

And so I don’t wanna be that person, but I do feel like as you set goals, you have to figure out which one of these people you are, what your tolerance level is, how much risk you’re willing to take, and then set goals based on that.

Okay. So now that we know where we’ve been, we kinda know what made us happy. We know what made us very angry or sad or we didn’t like. We know our tolerance level. We know how to set good goals.

Now we can actually do that—but that’s only part of the equation.

Okay, so now we have our destination. We have our goals. Y’all have already been writing and mapping out rough draft goals.

Would anybody care to share some of their goals? Maybe just one. Maybe the one that, like, stands out—this one is the one that has sparkles around it for me or whatever.

“My goal is to have more project management taken by the lead organizers.”

How are you gonna do that and track it and make it manageable as far as like that goal with taking over more or letting them take over more from you?

“We are implementing Basecamp this year, so it’s more autonomy but also more accountability. Instead of me following up—have you done this, have you done this—it’s more of like me being able to just log in and see that they have done that. So I am hoping that program is gonna help us with that, and I’m pretty excited about it right now. We’ve been using a combination of things and we—I was hearing feedback—we don’t like checklists. We don’t need checklists. I need them to have checklists so I can see. So I think that’s really gonna be helpful.”

I like it.

“I really wanna try to get on like a news segment. To do a little segment on the news—like a local news, something like that. Like a couple minutes kind of thing?”

Yeah. Yeah. Nothing crazy.

’Cause I like doing public speaking, but I think that will really put me outside of my comfort zone with lights and camera action.

Let me tell you—you’re saying these words and in the back of my head I’m like, you should also be doing this. And I’m like, it gives me anxiety. I love it. It’s a great goal.

“My goal for 2026 is to launch in a new city. So I’ll be relocating, and the goal is to do it without skipping a beat. Take on the same amount of clients that I have now, which I’m a part-time girly. But launching on the East Coast is gonna be huge, and that’s like by the end of the year I wanna be fully up and running. So I got, like, six months before transitioning, so putting everything into piece, all the pieces of the puzzle together. So it’s a big goal, but we shall see. I’m gonna get—I’m gonna do it. We’re gonna do it. Nothing to do it but to do it.”

I love it. Stretch, girly. Stretch, girl, girly.

Y’all not talking like in the middle. I’m in the middle. Yeah.

Thank y’all for sharing those with me. I think I like hearing y’all’s goals more than I like talking about mine, honestly.

Okay. This is what I call mapping the path. Because of course, like, we’re standing here, we’re looking forward to December 31st, 2026, and we know where we’re at. We know where we wanna be.

But how do we actually get there?

And I like to map the path. It’s hard to say it ten times real fast, and it—it gets worse.

The one thing—there’s a couple things here that I feel like is very important. If you listened to the podcast that Melissa and I did, like December 10th, I hinted at it ever so slightly.

But this is what my path looked like for 2025. I had a very clear vision in my brain. I knew what I was gonna do. I knew what I wanted to accomplish. And we hit every roadblock, flat tire, stop sign, pothole in the middle of the road, a tree fell—like we hit it all. We hit every single possible thing.

And so my hope for you is to be flexible, because this is where things can create magic.

I also recommend leaving room for magic.

This is the part I talked about on the podcast a little bit, but I had a very strict goal. I wanted to do this every single month. I wanted to make this much money every single month.

And guess what? Last year I actually failed on some of my goals. Strategically. I failed strategically.

Now let me tell you—I had the opportunity to buy into Pro Organizer Studio, and when Melissa asked me about it, I don’t even think I thought about it. Like I just—I was just like, yeah, done. Hello. Yes. No question, right?

That wasn’t even on my goals for 2025. I didn’t think it was gonna be a thing for another five years. I just didn’t expect it.

And so this is where, one, we have to be flexible, because sometimes we’ll have a detour and we have to take a different path. But then that path may be a better option.

But then we have to leave room for magic, because we may have things that we’re saying, “Oh, December 31st, 2026, we want to make this happen.” But you may have something better come along. You may have something completely different that just pops up and happens out of nowhere that you never even saw coming. That also is powerful and maybe something that you want to accomplish.

How do we actually take action?

If you can sing the Shania Twain song—“Let’s go, girls”—this is where we go now.

A lot of people, a lot of people break down on the path because we know where we’re at, we know where we wanna go, and then it’s, “But wait, what do we do? What do we actually do?”

So I have a couple different pieces.

We’re gonna take action, but no different—I’m sure that y’all have each told this to a client at one point or another—when they’re standing in the middle of their closet and there’s clothes everywhere and there’s things unfolded and there’s hangers and then there’s trash bags and donation bags.

And they’re like, “Wait, what do we do? What do we—”

And you’re like, whoa. You just tell me if you want that shirt on the hanger. That’s it. You don’t have to make any other decisions. Just tell me if you want that shirt.

That’s essentially what we’re doing with our goals.

So for us specifically, we’re taking that big goal that we’re looking forward to, and we’re gonna split it into quarterly goals. And then we’re gonna bring it into monthly goals. And then we’re gonna look at it from a weekly goal point.

This is where I feel like the check boxes, the progress, the battery levels, the percentages—this is where the magic happens.

Because it’s easy to say, “Oh, I’m gonna do that thing,” and you can fully believe it with your full chest. And if you don’t take action towards it, it’s not gonna happen.

So we wanna make sure that we’re taking action. We wanna make sure we’re actually moving in the right direction. We’re still being flexible and leaving room for magic, but taking action.

But what does that actually look like?

Because let me tell you, I am a self-proclaimed, like, planner girly. I used to be, like, true paper planner. That no longer works for me. Then I went to spreadsheets. Then I went to whiteboards.

So we know our goals. We’re gonna be flexible getting there, but how do we actually take action on what we’re trying to accomplish? And this is where tracking comes into play.

We have to track. We have to be able to check yes or no, know where we’re at, progress when it comes towards our goals. But seeing things on a checklist—regardless if they’re lose 40 pounds, make a hundred thousand dollars, max out retirement, whatever that is—that does not create emotion in us. That feels like work. It feels like something that we need to do. It doesn’t actually excite us.

And so I would recommend making a vision board.

Now, I said earlier I’ve never been a big vision board person. I haven’t been. I’ve developed this over time.

I highly recommend—there are templates on Pinterest, there are templates on Canva. If you are remotely adequate on Canva, you can make your own vision board.

But the reason is whenever we’re sitting there and bills are due and payroll is due, and that one client forgot to pay their invoice, and we’re worried about that client, that the move may or may not happen next week. Whenever we’re thinking about all of that, a checklist of “are you gonna make a hundred thousand dollars?” It’s not gonna help you. It’s not gonna encourage you. It’s not gonna feel good.

You’re gonna look at it and think, “Oh great. Another thing I have to do.”

We want to create something that is actually going to create emotion within us. Emotion that pushes us forward, emotion that reminds us why we’re doing what we’re doing. Emotion that, going back to your list of “these are the things that went really well”—those are the types of things that we want to fill.

So again, these are just some examples on Pinterest, but if your goal is to make $500,000 a year so that you can go to Italy and stay, drink wine, do whatever—great. Put it on your vision board.

When you are thinking about all the tasks that you have to do in your business to actually achieve your goals, looking at a checklist—absolutely not gonna do it. But envisioning yourself sitting in that first-class seat on the airplane, drinking a glass of wine with those cute new shoes you bought and that cute new purse you bought for your trip—that is going to encourage you, that’s gonna make you feel good, and that’s gonna say, “Okay, we’re gonna get to work.”

We’re gonna get to work, we’re gonna do the things we want to accomplish.

Maybe you want slower lifestyle. I should probably take a little bit slower lifestyle. That may look like slow mornings, that may look like farmer’s markets. That may look like sitting in a really comfy chair reading a book. Put it on your vision board.

I want your vision board to reflect the things that are going to encourage you throughout the year, even when things go off the rails, even when things are maybe behind schedule, even whenever it doesn’t look like the goals are gonna get accomplished or they’re gonna get done in the right timeframe.

I want you to come back to the vision board to remind you why you set those goals in the first place.

So I’m about to do something really vulnerable. I’m about to share with you my vision board. Actually, there may be one more slide of vision boards, but I’m gonna share with you my vision board.

But it’s super vulnerable, but it is. It’s all a reminder of why I’m doing what I’m doing, what I’m hoping to accomplish.

Here’s two more examples from Pinterest.

Okay, let’s do the thing. Okay, boom. Here we go.

Made this in Canva. Super simple. Put it together. I have some stuff from Pinterest.

I—so a couple of big things. Like, one of the biggest things for me this year is to really remove myself from the day-to-day of the business. I’ve been removed, I don’t know, two years now, but I still do a ton on the backend. And it’s time—just like Lisa said—it’s time to delegate, it’s time to outsource some of that.

But when I sit and think about making process and procedures and SOPs, that doesn’t do it for me, but thinking about all the other things that I wanna accomplish this year and preparing myself for the future version of myself—that’s what gets me excited.

When I say, “Oh, I need to make SOPs because I’m gonna delegate things”—no, absolutely not. Doesn’t do it for me.

When I say, “I need to make SOPs so that other people can carry on and take care of stuff when I am ideally on maternity leave”—that gets me excited. That makes me enjoy it. That’s the whole purpose.

So highly recommend creating a vision board. Ton of templates. You can make it whatever you want. You can put words, you can put photos, you can put anything that draws emotion.

Don’t ask me about the cheetah eight ball. Okay. It’s just cute. I just like it.

There’s another cheetah star in the corner over here that also I had to put: “intuition knows her ish.” Bet. Yep. That was a—that. Yeah, that was a one. That was one for me right here.

My sister did ask, she was like, “What’s the neon, like martini glass? Are you just gonna drink the whole time?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I just like it.”

So it doesn’t have to make sense, y’all. It does not have to make sense.

I also want to mention I have a few key people here that are pivotal in my life. So I’ve got my sister, I’ve got my right hand, Laura—some of y’all have met her. I’ve got my husband, I’ve got Melissa. Important people because I also know that they are the people that are gonna keep me sane whenever all hell breaks loose and I’m still trying to reach my goals.

So who’s here going to make a vision board after this call? Please, everybody.

The goal of this is to feel something. It’s to feel good. It is to find your reason why and remember why.

All of these things—they tie into my bigger goals. That’s the vision board.

Let’s move on to finding out what works and when it comes to tracking your goals.

Like I said, I used to be paper planner type person. I, over the years, have switched. I went like full digital notebook at some point, but then that wasn’t really working for me. I’ve always been a spreadsheet girl.

Now we’re moving into everything is managed and automated through Monday, and so I put—I put my goals in Monday.

But there’s one key piece missing here.

So like I have my goals. I look at this every single week. I definitely think that whatever your goals are for the end of 2026, you should be looking at them weekly. You don’t wanna forget. You don’t wanna get lost. You wanna keep your focus on those goals, but you also wanna make sure that you’re not moving the goalpost like I am.

I am the worst, y’all. I am the literal worst. I’m like, “Oh, we reached 300,000. Let’s go for 315. Oh, we did that. Let’s track 325.”

Don’t do it. Just enjoy achieving your goals. Okay?

Just—this is how I am doing that. I’m not touching this. It is locked. I can literally go in and change the status to say, “Oh, we’ve accomplished it,” or “we’re making progress,” or “we’re not,” but I can’t change it. I can’t delete things. I can’t add things.

What is here? It’s here. It’s done. Okay.

But this is not enough for me because yes, while these are fabulous things, when I am designing my week, when I’m time blocking my tasks, when I’m looking over the quarter to figure out what’s gonna work—this isn’t it for me.

Now let me also preface: I have a lot of things I have my hands in. Okay? So I have what I call quarterly planning sheets.

After the How-To Summit this past year, I came home, I had too many ideas. I needed big paper. I needed to write ’em all out. This piece of paper lives right above my desk over here that I can easily glance at. I can easily look at it. And this is my life for the next three months.

So the top section is my “now” things. The second section is January—third is February—and then the bottom section is March. And so I plan out the whole quarter at one time. And the reason I do this is I want to be able to make progress on my goals, but I don’t want to get overwhelmed.

And so while I’m checking my goals once a week, I actually have to take action in a different way. And so this is gonna help me take action. I dunno, if you can see where it says “rm,” there’s some things underneath it that are highlighted. And so January 12th, right? Let’s say—yeah, January 12th—we have already accomplished 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 goals for this quarter, which to me feels amazing.

So I didn’t—I don’t know if this works for other people. I think that there may be a little bit of trial and error when it comes to stuff like this to figure out what works for you. This is what’s working for me right now. Maybe a year from now it might not.

But if you are someone who gets lost in “this is what it says on the piece of paper, but I don’t know how to break it down into smaller chunks,” but I also don’t wanna get lost, I don’t wanna change my goals—this is a possibility for something that may work for you.

How do we feel about this so far? Is there anybody who sets up anything like this, especially quarterly? ’Cause that is always—like my brain works in quarters.

But the other thing that I feel like is worth mentioning with this… so, say you wanna make— we’re gonna go round, easy, divisible numbers—say you wanna make $120,000 this year. My brain automatically just says, “Okay, 12 months in a year, that’s 10 grand a month.”

When in reality—and this is a hard thing, and this is really hard for my brain to get past—when in reality there may be months that you only make two grand, but you’re putting in the work to build the systems and to build the business so that three months down the road you could be making 20 grand.

And so this also helps me map out what that sliding scale looks like. ’Cause it’s not always gonna be just, “Oh, everything’s divided by 12.” That’s—here’s your yearly goal, this is what the month should look like. So keep that in mind, too.

There are certain things on this list and I’m like, they’re stretch goals. They’re outside of my comfort zone. They don’t work logistically. I think for March, for Minimize and Organize, I put $50,000. For that month, that doesn’t work. Our team, our leads, the amount of leads that are converting right now—it doesn’t work like that. That goal is not possible right now.

But what is possible is me starting to build out what that could look like. Making sure that our team is trained up. Making sure that our leads actually have the resources, checklists, all the things that they need so that maybe by March that is a possibility.

Okay, here’s a couple tips.

We’ve talked about goals. We’ve talked about where you wanna end 2026. We’ve talked about staying flexible and leaving some room for magic. We’ve talked about tracking. I’m showing my tracking—like that’s what I essentially have showed y’all thus far.

You can do something totally different. If it is sticky notes on a wall—I knew somebody who did that. I loved it. I hated coming to her house in December because all her sticky notes were gone ’cause she just was a badass and cleared everything out.

If that works for you, do that. If it’s a huge whiteboard on your wall, do that. If it is a spreadsheet that is very beautifully color-coded and everything is organized and aligned and makes sense, do that. You have to find out what works for you.

If it’s a bullet journal, please know I’m highly jealous of you. I wish I could do it. My brain doesn’t work that way though. But if that’s what works, do that.

So when it comes to staying focused on your goals, there’s some little teeny hacks.

Set your passwords as your big goal. So pick one—pick the one that I’m calling it, the one that’s glittery and shiny. The one that’s scary, but you’re like, “That’s the one. If I don’t accomplish anything else, I wanna accomplish that one.” Set it as your password.

Melissa and I were making a joke about $1 million. She’s like, “I’m gonna set all my passwords to 1million2026.” And I’m like, “That’s a very lengthy password.” But yeah, go for it. I love it. Whatever you’re feeling is your goal—set it as your password. That way every single time you log into a bank account, log into do payroll, log into check your email, you’re reminded of that goal. It’s almost like a subconscious life hack.

This one’s my favorite. So I started doing this probably in the middle of last year, and it was equal parts like go get a pedicure or go get a massage and enjoy yourself, but also check in on your goals.

And so schedule monthly goal dates. It can be sitting at a coffee shop by yourself. It can be a pedicure. It can be a brunch. It can be something with a friend. If you have another organizer local to you and y’all want to do group goal dates—I love… I’m jealous that I don’t have anybody in IO that’s local to me.

But the goal is to stay consistent. No different than you would go on a date—your spouse, date other people—date your goals. Spend time with them. Make time for them. Give them energy. Give them focus. That’s the way that it’s going to grow, progress, etcetera.

Okay. So this is where the magic I feel like happens.

We’ve set our goals. We’ve talked about what works, what doesn’t, what didn’t work last year. You have a path that is flexible. We’re not gonna harp on ourselves. We’re not gonna get down on ourselves if things go off the path. But we are still going to keep going. We’re gonna track it. We’re going to date our goals, essentially, to make sure that we stay on track with it and that we don’t move the goalpost.

But this is where sharing and encouraging others can be a complete game changer when it comes to actually accomplishing your goals.

So after tonight—it can be later on this week, it can be two weeks from now—depending on where you feel like you’re at with setting your goals, I want you to share ’em. It can be in the Facebook group. It can be with an accountability partner. It can be with a local organizer that you know. It can be whoever, wherever.

But I want you to share ’em because within that, I’m hearing goals that y’all have now told me that over the next year I’m gonna say, “Hey Jess, how are we doing on the second location? What’s happening there?” Or I’m gonna reach out to Lisa and I’m gonna say, “Hey, how’s delegating? How’s that going? I’m struggling. Is there something that’s worked really good for you?” Vice versa—what does that look like?

Maybe I call Natalie and I’m like, “Hey, I just booked—this isn’t gonna happen. It might happen—but I just booked a news segment. Tell me your best tips and tricks. What’d you talk about? How did you keep yourself from sweating?” Like all the things.

Okay. That is where magic happens.

Each of us have our own skillset. We have an innate ability to encourage others, to love on others, to pick up the burden when things fall, when things fail, when things are heavy. And so I want that to be this in a bigger space.

I fully believe that when a rising tide lifts, all ships lift as well. And so be a rising tide to someone else.

I also wanna support you, whether that is: “I don’t know what my goals are—help me figure out what they could be.” Maybe it’s: “I have this really big, audacious, crazy goal. How do I accomplish it?”

Maybe it’s something along the lines of—I heard this one the other day—“Hey, I have this really good idea. Do you think Pro Organizer Studio would be into it? Do you think Melissa would be into it?” And I was listening to it going, “Yeah, we need that. We need that. There is something inside of you to share. We wanna hear about it. I wanna support it. I wanna love on it. I wanna encourage it.”

I also—I heard someone else’s goals the other day and I’m like, “Oh, here’s more things that Pro Organizer Studio needs.”

Participant: “I have a question.”

Hit me.

Participant: “I really like the idea of the quarterly goals because I get overwhelmed with annual goals and I start to feel really overwhelmed ’cause they feel too big and then I just don’t do anything and I keep meddling through. Do you have an overall—like for a quarter goal—do you just focus on quarter by quarter, or do you have a year thing to get you started, a framework for the year?”

So I set yearly goals and then break them down. Okay. So that’s the only way—so it goes back to me moving the goalpost. If I just set quarterly goals, I would constantly change the goalpost. Yeah. New things pop up and be shiny objects for me to look at. If things were hard, I would suddenly say, “Oh, I can’t hit that big goal.”

My goal is to not let myself move, shift, refocus. My goal is to set the goal at the beginning of the year.

And so this is the other thing that I don’t think I mentioned: we have some pretty big revenue goals, essentially, but when it comes to actually creating them, I don’t have anything set in stone.

So like some people would map out their launch schedule of different things. Some people would map out their launch schedule and say, “Okay, launch quarter one, we’re expected to make $50,000. Launch two, we’re expected to make $75,000.” My brain does not do that. My brain sees conversations with clients. It sees industry trends, stuff like that.

And so like for Q1, we’re actually launching more paper and photo organizing type stuff. If that completely fails, I don’t know. We may do something totally different.

In December of last year we did our gift certificate drive—it wasn’t a drive, it was promotion. We did that and it was wildly successful. We made $22,000 in seven days. And I wasn’t prepared for that. I wasn’t expecting that. And so that’s where I say: be flexible. Let the magic happen.

Set the big goal that you’re comfortable with, that’s within your level of risk tolerance. But then also you can try new things. If something doesn’t work, you can try something different. If something works really well, you can do it again in three months.

So like we set goals—personally, me and my husband set goals to max out our retirement. We could essentially pay the $7,000, max out our IRAs, and mark that off for the year. That would actually absolutely suck for our cash flow. So we’re not gonna do that, but we could.

And so goals can be something that happens—has to happen every single month. It could be something that has to happen quarterly. It could happen one time. It does not have to be something every single month. If you don’t want it to, you can set monthly goals. If that works better for you, do that.

Participant: “Okay. So I see what you’re saying now. Like my Basecamp setup is an annual goal, but I’m really doing it in quarter one.”

Yes. And I’m really doing it in January. Yes. And so then I check it off and I have other goals.

Participant: “Okay. I get it.”

The other part too—specifically with that one—you are gonna have heavy front-loaded time investment, yeah, in getting that set up. But no doubt you will have time every single month from there on forward that you have to go in and audit and update and change, etcetera.

And so maybe that’s the goal: yes, month one is to launch this and use this, but then month two through 12 is, “I need to be committing, I don’t know, eight hours a month to making sure that the processes and the plans that we have in Basecamp are actually working for our team.”

Participant: “Yeah. That’s great. Thank you. That’s super helpful.”

Participant: “Cabri, I have a question. How much do you share with your team?”

That’s a great question. This year I’ve shared a lot more than I probably have in the past. One of my goals—and she actually, I did, I updated one goal—my lead organizer, she said she wanted to make a hundred thousand dollars this year, and I said, “Great. We’re gonna make it happen. I don’t know how, but we’re gonna make it happen.”

And so her goal became my goal. And so that’s also why I feel like sharing is important.

And so with that then came: okay, you wanna make a hundred thousand dollars this year? I want the business to make $500,000 in revenue. How do we make that happen? And so she became more involved with that piece of the puzzle.

And I’ve already seen the shift. I’ve already seen the change because she’s going on more consults, she’s doing more proposals, they’re closing more. Don’t ask me the energetics behind that, but she’s literally closing more of her consults already.

So yes, I say share it with them. If it’s too personal, then you don’t have to. But I do think that as a business owner, casting vision for what the business, what work-life balance, the culture of the business is supposed to look like—that all plays into these goals.

And every single thing that I have on my goal list is stuff that they are inadvertently involved in. And so why not involve them now from the beginning?

The worst—the worst that can happen—okay, listen. Listen here. The worst that can happen is they absolutely go banana bonkers and I have to pay out an each ton of money in bonuses. Guess what? If they win and that happens, I’m also winning. The profit margins may look different. The bottom line may look different. The payments may look a little different. Everybody’s still winning though.

Was this helpful? I know that I am like raccoon slash squirrel with ADHD, but I want this to be beneficial, especially if you’re someone who struggles with goals, struggles with getting lost in the day-to-day, not having a ton of direction.

That’s just my very granular, tactical way to approach things, because that’s the other part too: some of the goals that I have on there, they’re like—as far as like a one-time goal—it’s not something that I’m gonna do every single month. Some of them may be once and done, checked off.

And so as long as I’m revisiting this once a week, if I have—say I have something on here that’s gonna take me an hour to actually just get done—if I have that hour and other things aren’t pressing, I may forego the other stuff and do this instead. So it just keeps it at the forefront of my mind.

Especially for me with ADHD, I definitely fall into that outta sight, outta mind. And they’re taped with painter’s tape on the wall. My husband has to walk by them and look at them every day. He probably absolutely hates it, but it is literally the only way that I’m not going to forget or get lost or, three months, six months down the road, I’m like, “Oh hey. Yeah, that was a goal. Fabulous. Haven’t done anything towards that.”

Okay. I expect everybody to be sharing some goals. A person, a friend, a business acquaintance, an accountability partner, in the Facebook group—if you have a local business group that you meet with and talk with—I want everybody to be sharing their goals.

You have other people in your communities that also want to help you achieve your goals. But they won’t know how to help you do that, and they can’t help you do that unless you talk to them about it.

Kristen—yes—said keep SMART in mind. I had to drop my SMART goals because I got hung up on the measured and the time and that’s where I lost some of my magic. And so I’ve switched gears just a little bit, so I’m glad to hear you say that about SMART goals. I just find it really overwhelming and it’s like too many different aspects of it and I get bogged down into—instead of being able to do it my way and the way my brain works—it’s, I don’t know. So it’s validating to hear it doesn’t work for someone else.

Does anybody set output goals versus outcome goals? Like back in my corporate life, I did strategic planning, but I feel like my business is at such a fundamental level right now. Like I’m really working on getting that digital foundation set up.

So tasks like: I need to go to X number of networking events. I need to get my business in front of these people. I need to do, like, actions I can do—setting actions as goals versus something—’cause right now I’m trying stuff, right? But I don’t know what’s going to work yet. I didn’t know if anybody has put those kind of goals into place.

Participant: “So one thing that might help you is—and I talked about this, we have a little solo group going—is I do a bingo card. But I do one for personal, for my daughter, and then for business. And it’s more—for me—it’s those things that I procrastinate, like blog posts, newsletter, like doing two, doing four, doing six—those things that are quantifiable.”

Yes.

Participant: “Okay, so mine says attend one event, one speaking engagement. You could do 20, but I start with one. And so even just trying to do that throughout the year—something that you can check off—but instead of money-related… ’cause that’s where a lot of our brains go, I think, with goals, right? And sometimes we need to make the goal about how we get there.”

Participant: “Kind of the opposite. Like you were talking about your road, Cabri. I listened to most of everything so far. Like last year I set a goal—I wanted to be able to pay for summer camp. My kid goes to a really extensive camp, and I did it. But I really couldn’t tie it—it was dumb luck, I think. Like I had a Google ad, I was doing something, but it just… I couldn’t. Okay, I wanna be able to pay for camp again, but how do I know I’m doing the right things that are gonna get me there? So I like the idea of having a bingo card of actions to take.”

Participant: “Having something like—back in 2019, 2020—what you’re talking about is exactly what I did. So consistent with social media hashtags, read two books. This chart right here was my consults, ’cause I knew if I did 10 consults a month, I could convert 70% of them, and if every single one of them averaged a thousand dollars a month, I was making $7,000 that month. Does that make sense?”

Yeah.

You can create some of your goals based on the current data that you have to reverse-engineer them, or you can set them. This was weekly videos. This was email newsletters. Yep. There’s different ways to do it.

And I don’t think either way is wrong. I think for me right now, I have reverse-engineered it so much that this is almost built in to the stuff that I’m doing on a weekly basis. Okay?

But if you wanna map it out, I think that is totally doable. If you know what’s going to work, if you know that the action is going to create some sort of forward momentum, as long as you do the action, it doesn’t matter necessarily what is on the other side of it. That’s where some of the magic happens.

Like you could go to the networking event and say, “Yes, check it off the list, I went to the networking event,” but you could meet the realtor who’s gonna funnel $50,000 worth of projects your way. So for sure keep doing the action.

But I love Allie’s idea of the bingo card.

Participant: “One thing that worked for me—and it was a couple years ago—is I chose—again, quarterly works really well for me—but I decided to get really focused on one needle mover for the year. So I just had this one goal, and at that point I’d already been in business for a couple of years, so I knew where the cracks in the dam were.”

Participant: “And so I just wanted to focus on what is one thing that I really felt was going to create forward mobility. Obviously there’s a thousand things, right? And we as business owners can get so bogged in on marketing and the this and the that and the whatever… there’s just so many categories. But I was like, I’m just gonna get hyper-focused on this one thing.”

Participant: “And that one thing would cover other bases naturally. So that year it was my website. Now with that, that was multiple things. It meant I’m going to get new branding photos taken, I’m going to connect my contact form to my HoneyBook, and then it’s also gonna trigger this workflow. There were just different things in it.”

Participant: “I’m gonna do the SEO module and really hyper-execute those lessons into my website. And then I just broke that down by quarter.”

Participant: “So just really to give myself a little grace, it was like, okay, first quarter I’m going to get the photos taken. If that is the one thing I do, great. If I do more than that, wonderful. But that is the only thing I’m putting on my shoulders.”

Participant: “The next quarter it would be whatever the next thing was. I don’t remember what order I did things in. But by doing that, I was able to at least accomplish one thing instead of putting my hands in a hundred different things and never really feeling like I got anything done.”

Participant: “Now I did other things that year too, but I accomplished that. And then I found last year—which was a really hard year for me—and I barely did anything.”

Participant: “All of the stuff I’d done the year before—because I knew they were things that would shore up some of the breaks in the dam—like it kept my business running and I still doubled my profit when I was literally doing nothing else.”

Participant: “So I think picking that one thing that you feel would be a good needle mover and breaking it up into actionable steps—and then, yeah, maybe a bingo card for some other things for fun—but just taking some of the pressure off.”

Participant: “And if you can really, in good detail, accomplish one big thing for your business, then it naturally will accomplish a lot of other things on its own.”

Participant: “And then another thing I do—I do four personal goals and I break these up quarterly as well, and they’re really silly things. But it’s the four Bs: beauty, body, brains, and business.”

Participant: “And they’re really small things. So every quarter it’ll be one thing that makes me feel good about myself—whether it’s get a pedicure once a month, get my hair finally, or find a new hairdresser—just that one little thing.”

Participant: “One goal for the quarter, nothing big. Something for my health. So for my body: really small—like go for a long walk once a week. Something for my brain: read one book a month—again, really achievable.”

Participant: “And then the next quarter, maybe build on that a bit or maybe change them up altogether.”

Participant: “But I think… what’s that saying? Something in motion stays in motion. So it’s just about progress.”

Participant: “So I believe—rather than big goals—forward momentum is what works for me. Doing things that move me forward and then building on that is more successful. So that’s what worked for me.”

I love it.

Did anybody have a goal that popped up for them that they’re like, “This scares the living crap outta me,” but it came up and I wrote it down?

Participant: “The second location. It’s a big one.”

Yeah. I don’t envy people who want to launch second locations. It’s crossed my mind a couple times. We’ve even had people ask if we were willing to franchise, and every time I like nearly break out in hives and start hyperventilating. And I’m doing my third location in a year. It’s hard. It gives me anxiety.

Now for you doing an evaluation of time—I brain dumped all of my goals, and I’m like: these are all the blogs that I need to write about. This is catch up. This would be ideal. This is how many newsletters I wanna write. These are all of our training goals for our team because I separate things out into: what drives the business is marketing; what keeps the business going is operations and training and things like that.

And I put all of the goals into ChatGPT and I said, “I have 129 days to run my business. How can I best utilize my time? And if I’m only working eight-hour days, what do I actually need to do?”

And it wrote out an entire schedule for me, like breaking it out into quarterly focuses. It broke it out into monthly and weekly focuses, and even hourly—like this is how much time you need to spend on checking in on your team. And it even gave me a list of what not to do. “Don’t focus on that. That is not gonna drive…”

I listened to all of your AI podcast with Melissa, and I was like, “Let me just try this. Let me see if it’s gonna actually…” And I’ve been working it for two weeks and it’s been really nice just to have a focus.

I’m so excited for you. We didn’t even talk about AI at all, but yes, every single person could take all of their goals and just say, “What does this look like for the year?”

And ChatGPT is really good for me, ’cause like I said, I break everything up just, “Oh, this is the monthly expectation,” but ChatGPT’s, “Oh, but if you’re only making this much, you need to figure out a way to make it more profitable. Or you need to figure out a way to scale it so that it can make this much down the road.”

My brain does not function like that. It’s almost like compound interest in tasks. My brain doesn’t do that. And so AI could definitely help on that front for sure. That’s a really good tidbit. I didn’t even mention anything about it, so I’m glad you brought it up. Could be some good magic happen in there.

I really hope this was helpful and not just me like ADHD and everywhere.

Okay. Y’all have a fabulous evening and I will chat with you soon.

Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Once again, if you would like these slides in your inbox, you can go to proorganizerstudio.com/links and they will be in your inbox almost instantly.

Have a great day.