You’ve probably seen a flood of “New Year, New You” messages encouraging you to dream big and set lofty goals. This year, Avram and Rachel are taking a different approach—no big, trendy goals, no flashy resolutions. In this episode of Babies and Business, they dive into why alignment with your values and small, intentional steps are more sustainable (and less stressful!) for building the life you want. Whether it’s managing a business, raising kids, or just finding joy everyday, this episode offers a refreshingly honest take on starting the year with purpose.

 

Mentioned Episodes:

Babies and Business Podcast Episode 24 – Not the Same Boring Goal Setting Conversation

Babies and Business Podcast Episode 31 – The Hidden Time Hijaker: Simple Systems to Get Back Lost Time

Babies and Business Podcast Episode 44 – Prioritizing Family: Lessons from the 93% Statistic

Episode Transcription

Avram: Happy New Year! Today’s Rachel’s birthday. Happy birthday, Rachel. Yay!

It’s not airing on your birthday, but we’re still recording and we’re in our happy place.

Rachel: That’s correct.

Avram: How does it feel to be a year older?

Rachel: Same.

Avram: The same, which is kind of similar to how we’re feeling about today’s topic, which is around goal setting and more importantly, What goals?

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: We’re kind of making fun of it this year. If you remember last year and you were a listener, then episode 24, we had a episode called not the same old boring goal setting conversation, which was also different than the standard, which is also a lot like today.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: What made us choose this topic?

Rachel: Just because we have had quite a number of years having goals and we just have our goals aligned. So when we’re going in the direction we want to go and that’s why we would set a goal, you kind of don’t have to create new things. It’s just in support of that thing, that goal, those things that you’re doing.

So, that’s why we’re kind of making fun of it because we don’t need to create goals. We don’t need to come up with them. We just need to decide how we’re going to be better this year than we were last year, because we are doing what we want to do.

Avram: And I think that’s the key piece, right? If you’re headed in the right direction where you want to be and things are moving in that direction, you don’t have to invent something new to accomplish.

Rachel: No. And I mean, there’s these trendy goals, these, you know, it’s a brand new year. You’re getting marketed to because why not start something new? And, you know, if you’re failing in one aspect that maybe you feel you’re failing in one aspect of your life. Maybe you are falling prey to all these marketing ploys coming out right about this time or the last two weeks, you know

Avram: We’re just getting caught up with everybody else choosing their goals. It’s all part of that conversation that’s, that’s happening.

I remember last year around this time, I was toying with the idea of, do you remember this? I was like, what if I made it a goal to make sure that I walked or ran three miles a day for the entire year?

That would

Rachel: And you wanted to track it on your garment

Avram: Right. Cause I’d just gotten it. I was very excited about it. And after toying with that idea for a couple of days, it was like, that is a dumb goal.

Rachel: Yeah, well, it takes you from not doing that on a regular basis, going around the neighborhood or whatever that was going to be for you, and taking it from nothing to a lot of something all at once.

Avram: All at once.

Rachel: That’s a kind of an unreasonable goal. Not even kind of, it is an  unreasonable goal

Avram: It is. Yeah, going from nothing and trying to zoom to infinity all at one time. Never gonna work. That’s why you hear people failing and falling off within two to three weeks of all their new goals.

Rachel: exactly. Well, and also, those goals I think those things that have in common are, you go from nothing to something, and a lot of something. Or, you are doing something that actually doesn’t mean anything to you. You have no reason to accomplish that. Other than, keeping up with the Joneses maybe?

So, I think that we just have to go back to the root of why we’re wanting these goals. And then, go from there. That’s why in the last time that we talked about goals, we talked about, you know, if this goal has been on your list of things to do for the past quarter and it’s not done and there’s no motion in getting it done, no, no forward motion or momentum, cut it,

It’s the it mercilessly. It’s the wrong goal. So I think that that yet again, we go back to what is the origin of that goal. And instead of beating yourself up about not having accomplished it, just ask the question, whose goal was this? And why was this my goal? Why did I make it my goal? Adopting someone else’s goal, thinking that you could do it, going from zero to zero to a hundred all at once, you know, what is that?

Avram: Yeah, and I think that like one of the cool things that we’ve experienced this year and the new year coming around and not, we didn’t have like a big powwow about how our goals were gonna change.

Rachel: No, he has, we’re just so in alignment with where we want to go. We’ve been, we talk about our goals all the time. We also check in kind of monthly. We have financial stuff that we’re talking about monthly. We have financial stuff that we talk about quarterly. We’re talking about those things, but that really does fuel What we do and the trajectory that we have a lot of the time and with our kids and the goals that we want to accomplish that way financially as well as personally, you know, so we have regular conversations.

Avram: Yeah, and like the one that we’ve been having recently as well, what is this really, you know, small shift that we have to make this year in order to accomplish our short term goal of, of hiring somebody to replace you in the client facing seat that you’re taking right now at Digital Harvest. And so it’s like, well, the trajectory is already set to be going in that direction.

Now all we’re doing is we’re just keeping that in our focus because that’s what’s important to us

Rachel: And that’s really the next hire. That’s the next thing that we’re going to do, but it’s not the last hire. You know, it’s just the next thing. And the next thing I think about, you know, like with goals and the reason why we’re making fun of goals right now is because we’re already. Set to meet the goals that we have, and we
make these minor adjustments along the way.

Monthly, sometimes weekly, it depends on, you know, we, we keep a, a beat on where we are in accomplishing what we want to do. And I think of this story that I heard one time, I don’t even remember where it was, but it was like, you know, if you fly an airplane and you went around the world, and you were one degree off, how many degrees would you be off?

Avram: miles would you be off from your destination

Rachel: Yeah, exactly. Right. But if you thought about it in degrees, like the miles, it magnifies the further down the line you go, not redirecting. So I find it very valuable. To make those small adjustments to our maybe it’s our frame of mind. It’s what we’re doing with our money It’s the goals. Do we need another bucket for this?

Do we need another bank account for the business those kinds of things so that at the end of the year, we’ll just maybe liken that to going around the globe. At the end of the year, we would be really, really off if we didn’t visit that goal again throughout the year. At the end of the year, we’d find ourselves being like, Whoa, what, what happened to that goal?

So, I just find that for us, you know, we just, we have this conversation a lot. And that’s why it’s not a big thing.

Avram: That’s just not a thing. I think that, you know, if your business made a million dollars this year, why would you set a goal for five million next year?

Rachel: Right. Well, yes. I mean, if you were setting that goal, what are you going to do differently? Not only in how much money you’re going to make, so you want to make 5 million, you said,

Avram: Mm hmm.

Rachel: how are your processes going to change? How many people are you going to hire? How are you not going to break your business growing that quickly overnight?

You know, and also not have a ton of stress,

Avram: Well, and so

Rachel: but also it’s like, what kind of goal would be reasonable?

Avram: Well, and with that kind of a goal in line with this topic, we’re talking about not doing something completely new and inventing something from scratch. To do that kind of a transformation, you would be basically scrapping what you have done. There’s no building on top of what you have done really.

Rachel: Right. Because it’s so different

Avram: It’s gonna be so

Rachel: vastly different.

Avram: Different. So what would you do instead? Well, you would look at what if I could do 1.2? What if I could do 1.5? That would be a huge stretch.

Rachel: And how would my business, how would I change my systems, bolster, grow all these different things and look at what that growth would do to your business. If nothing changed about your operations to, and you only just up to your revenue or your gross, then what would need to change to support that? If everything stayed the same, would you have a broken business

Avram: one of the, one of the mantras we’ve been living by this last year, I think is slow, is smooth. And like, we’re just not in a hurry to grow the business to, um, you know, like I’m not in a hurry to go from where I’m at right now to running a marathon. I’ve like toyed with this idea for a little while now.

And it’s just, I don’t think it’s going to be in the cards for this year, maybe next year. Not in a hurry for that. I don’t have to do that. Why do I feel like I need to do that? It is all ego,

Rachel: Right.

Avram: all for a sense

Rachel: Other people doing it.

Avram: Or it’s all for a certain sense of accomplishment that I’m chasing and that I want to be at, right?

But it’s not critical to me and what my actual wellness goals are. What are they? What are they? I want to have the energy to be present all day. Until the end of the day, or we crash and burn into bed and we do it all over again.

Rachel: Right?

Avram: And so, right now the current fitness routine works for that. I don’t have to add this other thing.

Rachel: and right now, you’ve mentioned, you know, you might want to do a marathon, but then you’re like, well, but I don’t want to get injured. I’ve heard about a lot of people getting injured and then what would that do to my actual fitness goals. Well, you could be out a month or two from the gym, like your regular fitness routine that you’re doing.

And so you’re thinking about that. And how could you make sure that this thing that you want to accomplish doesn’t actually derail your actual goals, this event, this one time thing, that kind of thing. So, you know, putting that back to the focus of goals, you know, what is that thing that you want to accomplish?

And how are you going to make it happen? You know.

Avram: And I think a funny question to kind of play with too is like, Are you sure you really want that? Because the things that you ask for show up in all kinds of different ways. And like our friend Mike, Mike Schlichte, he’s been on the podcast before. He said the other day, he said something in a presentation he gave.

He said that, uh, you know, One of his like mission statements involves having a life full of adventure And he’s like, well, you gotta be gotta be aware like adventure shows up in a lot of different ways And so I think when you ask for the bigger business or you ask for the new relationship where you ask for

Rachel: Right, whatever that

Avram: Whatever that is you’re you’re preparing for a different life than you have right now Are you sure you want it?

And are you ready for how it could show up?

Rachel: Sure, because you’re not actually the decider of how it shows up.

Avram: No, no. So these are just some of the funny thoughts that we’re playing with around this topic, which is goal setting, which I think can get really serious sometimes. And I think if you’re on it as an entrepreneur and you are reviewing things on a quarterly basis, there is no massive goal setting session where you have to really think it through.

Are there seasons where businesses go through massive growth and have to plan and be very tactical and there’s a timeline? Yeah. But I think most of the folks listening to this podcast, we are not on that kind of a timeline. We are not trying to send rockets to Mars, right? We’re just trying to build a business, raise our family, do something for the community.

We like a simple life.

Rachel: Yeah. Yep. And we just want to, we want to do better than we did. This year. That’s kind of what we want to be. We want to be better at our fitness stuff. We want to be better at the Whatever financial goals we have we’ll want to reach those things, you know What is that small little bit that you’re gonna do different this year to meet and beat yourself from last year?

Avram: It’s just you versus you. And when it comes to life, you’ve got a lot of years that you can stack to do incredible things. And we don’t have to be in a hurry and create goals that don’t make sense or.

Rachel: Are not our own. I think that also that applies to parenting, you know, you can look at you have so many opportunities in life to look at other people and how they parent and what they’re doing and make a lot of judgments. You can judge yourself like, whoa, they’re really good parents and I, I don’t even compare or I’m better than them.

There’s so many things that we can do, but you know, I, I heard this quote and I will never forget it. It is comparison is the thief of joy. It’s so true. So. Let’s stop comparing our business, our goals, our life to other people, and rob ourselves of the joy that we could be possessing rig
ht now. Where we stand.

Don’t have to do anything. We can be happy right where we are. We can have joy right where we are. So I think that that’s really where it starts, is finding that joy and that happiness of where you are, and then just looking at what you want to do differently. To become more and different and better in that little fraction of a, of a bit, you know, you don’t have to be all that much better next year.

It could just be one facet

Avram: Yeah, man, good stuff. If you go check out the website, babies and biz.com/66. That’s this episode number. We’ve got the show notes. We’ve got links to past episodes. We mentioned the episode 24 about goal setting. That’s going to be in there along with a couple other resources that we filmed and recorded about nine months ago around strategy and creating new goals and creating processes that support them. So if you are doing some bigger things this year and you feel like that support’s necessary, maybe you didn’t have enough structure around it last year, those are going to be some great resources for you.

So again, babiesandbiz.com/66. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will also find our community question. This week we’re wanting to hear from you. What is a goal that you made last year? That you’re trying to improve upon this year. Where did you land? Where are you trying to go?

We’d love to hear from you. Put that in the comment section at babiesandbiz. com/66 for this episode. We got one more thing we want to share with you.

Rachel: convention center. And we would love to have you come out. We’re going to have a really fun game competition to do. We have some really, really awesome prices that you can win, um, being the best in time, one, two, or three or a raffle. So come out and support us, meet some new businesses here locally, Make some connections, but come out and support us, please.

We’d love to see you there on the 15th of January.

Avram: Our goal is to have a hundred or more meaningful conversations that day. We’d love for one of them to be you. We know that meaningful conversations are the beginning point of every inspiring and incredible story and every friendship too. So we know that that’s important and we’d love to see you there.

So I think that’s all we’ve got for now

Rachel: Yep, absolutely. Yep. We’re really excited to see you there and, uh, happy new year again.

Avram: Yeah, and happy birthday, Rachel! Today’s the 2nd of January, and she’s gonna be my old lady for just 8 more months till I turn whatever age we are now

Rachel: I’m rolling my eyes over here. I’m his old lady, eight months older.

Avram: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, so, thanks for listening, and uh, if you haven’t already, rate us on Apple and Spotify, give us those 5 stars. Other people look at that before they decide to watch the show.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: That’s it! See ya!

Rachel: bye for now.