Goal Setting Tactics You Can Actually Implement

Dan Austin: [0:00] Hey, Welcome back to another episode of the Collecting Keys Friday Focus. You have me as your host today, Dan Austin. And as we're rounding out the year, this episode will be dropping on December 15. We've got a couple weeks left, and I wanna be talking about goal setting. This is what's consuming my brainpower right now. What did I accomplish in 2023? What did I miss? What did I not accomplish? And really reflecting why I didn't accomplish those things, but more importantly, looking forward to 2024 and beyond, what I wanna do next year. And I'm taking a really much more tactical approach to this as I have in the past. I know at the end of last year, I also did a Friday focus similar to this, talking about goal setting, and so this year is going to be an expanded version of that, and you'll get all the pieces that I didn't know then, that I have learned, and that I'm focusing on going into 2024. We have an episode with a good friend of mine from GoBundance, Brandon Baker, who will be dropping here in the next two or three weeks on one of our Monday shows. I interviewed him, and he he goes over and touches on his portfolio and how he's built that, and I was able to observe how he built that using the goal setting mechanisms he's helping me put in place right now, and he also talks about some of those goal setting mechanisms. Brennan's a great guy, so definitely go and reach out to him from his socials, it's at b baker is his Instagram handle, and so definitely go and hit him up there. I know he's going to start doing a lot more on social media, so yes, go find him, listen anything he has to say because he is helping me set my goals.

Dan Austin: [1:31] Let's dive into it. Where I'm starting at, and where I've actually been working for the last couple of weeks, is my vivid vision. There is a book out there, we can put the link to the title in the show notes. But really the concept of the vivid vision is to write in long form, what you look like, what your life looks like, in detailed description in three years from now. So that's what I've been doing, I've been looking at the different pillars in my life, my different values that I want to subscribe to, and really diving into those. I'm describing them in long form, and then as I describe them, for example, horizontal income is one of those categories that I am using to describe what I look like, and what my life feels like, and what my life is like in three years. Horizontal income, I mean passive income. Cash flow from rental properties, and other passive sources. So not only am I describing what that looks like, and how much money I have, what it feels like, how many hours a week I have to put in to get that recurring income, but I'm also putting in there ideas for measurable things, things that I can measure that will lead me to getting that. What are the leading indicators to hitting this target?

Dan Austin: [2:36] Because at the end of the day, I could just say, hey, I want $20,000 a month in passive income, and that's great, and I could describe what that feels like, how light that feels, and how great it feels, but I need to know how to get there. I need to know what measures beyond the money per month that I collect. If I'm going to, you know, increase my real estate cash flow, how many properties I'm gonna have to analyze? How many lead sources? Am I gonna have to contribute financially to my lead generation system? How many realtors, brokers am gonna have to talk to? Property managers? How many people, right? What are these measurable leading indicators that should, from my experience, lead me to buying real estate? And I'm really just describing that and describing those. And so that is where I start vivid vision three years out. And then for this purposes, I'm really tailoring that down from three years to one year. What do I look like? What do I feel like? What do I have in these different pillars of my life in December 31, this time next year, 01/01/2025. So the next twelve months. So compressing that three years into what that first year of the three years looks like. They're really just describing that. I'm kinda sitting in it. I'm playing around with it, I'm chewing on it, and really trying to spend enough time in it that I believe it, and it's truly what I want.

Dan Austin: [3:49] One of the mistakes I've made in the past is, I haven't given myself enough time to really sit on the goal. I might just set a goal, and I've changed my mind on what those goals are. I've changed strategy on those goals, because I just they're really not they weren't goals that actually either were achievable, or that I really truly wanted at the end of the day. So now I'm just exploring that this year, spending the time, and I really recommend doing that. If you can, take time away, take a full day away from the family, away from work, away from stresses, and just sit there in a comfortable state wherever that is, if that's for you to sit under the woods, do that. If it's for you to go to your favorite coffee shop, put your headphones in and just think, do it, ideally a couple days, but you know, or if you have to break it up into a few hour sessions, do it just to get your your time and get into that head space. And then once you do that, sit on it for a bit, think about it, and then come back to it, and shape it and form it, and just really, like I said, soak in it. From there, that three year vision, the one year of the three year vision, I should say rather, described and you have some measurable lead indicators, and hopefully some measurable outcomes, right? So if you're looking to say, I want to own more real estate. Why do you wanna own more real estate?

Dan Austin: [5:01] What does that feel like to you? Is it because it's passive? Okay. How passive is it? How much time a week do you spend doing that? What does your real estate portfolio look like? How much cash flow does it give you? Why do you want that cash flow? Because that will help describe this whole life, the whole vision for you. Really dive that deep into it. What amount of cash flows? Is it 5,000 a month from these properties? Is it $10,000 a month? What is that? How does that money come in? How do you feel about that money? Really dive into that, and then back to the leading indicators. What are the leading indicators that are going to help you find those? Then that will take you to what I'm going to be filling out, which is from traction, this is borrow tool, I talked about this last year as well. The vision traction organizer. And in here, what I would recommend, you can go to, what is it like, eosworldwide.com, put in your email address, give them your name, you can unsubscribe from the email list after you do it, and they'll give you either a PDF or a doc x version. Download the doc x, because then you can adjust and change it. I'm not recommending or saying you need to follow exactly what the EOS plan is, what traction is. But if you're not familiar, EOS is the entrepreneur operating system model. Traction is a book, and you can go, there's a ton of different like, series, the Traction books, the series of this idea, and just different ways that it's explained.

Dan Austin: [6:20] I've read a couple of them, I'm looking back at my thing, I have the book by Gina Wickman, Traction, and I have a couple others that are spin offs of that, that help you really explain it. But within that entrepreneur operating system, we use it, we use a light version of it, and do like the level 10 meetings in our business, Mike and I do that, and so there's all sorts of stuff from a business standpoint that and this is what it's set up for as really business, but I use it, and I'm going to use it for my personal goal setting this year to really formulate a good plan. So what what do we have on the vision track record, as you'll see on page two, which is where I really like to focus is like the one year plan, and it'll have the goals for the year. Right? So maybe a goal is to buy properties. Right? So is your goal cash flow? So it's maybe by the end of the year, I wanna have an additional $2,000 in cash, passive income for real estate. Okay? That's better than saying you want a number of doors, because I I personally don't think a number of doors matters, unless you're really just doing the math, and like, well, I want $200 per door, so I need 10 doors, and you say 10 doors, but just be explicit as you can.

Dan Austin: [7:21] Like, if you want $2 in cash, get $2 in cash, put that down on your goal. And whatever other goals you have for the year, that's your high level, one year plan. Then you have these rocks. The rocks, you hear about this if you've heard anything about EOS, they're basically your major high level items. So what is your rock for quarter one related to getting 2,000 in passive income? Well, that rock is probably going to include, maybe you need to buy three houses. Your goal in q one is three houses. And you can scale it, you can say, well, I'm really not gonna be able to buy that many in q one, so it's gonna be one, but then in the later quarters, I'm going to have a larger rock. Doesn't matter. However you wanna do it, just do it that way. So your your goal, your rock, your goal is to buy $2,000 worth of passive income by the end of the year, and you need a your first quarterly rock for that is going to be to buy three houses. Well, now you need to get really tactical. So now you know, you need to buy three houses, and this is where those leading indicators come in. And this is really what I'm talking about, is diving deep into those leading indicators and doing the things that are going to lead to that. If you wanna buy properties, you need a lead flow.

Dan Austin: [8:31] You can analyze them. The MLS and Zillow, that's one source. Okay? You might find that you have to analyze 500 properties and it's not sustainable for you, or or maybe you won't have to analyze that many. Either way, that's one lead source. You can also do direct to seller marketing. You can send mail, you can cold call, you can text, you can do SEO and and online, all that sort of stuff, Google PPC. Those are all different lead sources. You could door knock, you could do driving for dollars, you can do whatever lead source you want, but you need that. And then within that lead source, you need to analyze so many deals. Now if you've never analyzed a deal, you never bought properties, you're not gonna know what that looks like, so you just need to pick a number. And I recommend talking to other people, and be like, hey, if I was looking on the MLS, how many deals would I have to buy? Or like, how often, how many leads do you get if you're doing a direct mail campaign? Go do a wholesale, like, how many leads? Is it 40 leads? Okay. 40 leads per contract. So I need to get 40 leads. Now you get now you have enough deals to analyze that you should get one deal, once you figure out how much marketing you have to do to get those 40 leads. And then look at other intangibles to that, right?

Dan Austin: [9:33] Like brokers as a lead source, property managers as a lead source. You might need to talk to property managers anyways, because you will have to put your properties under management. There's all these different things, and then just a networking thing. Right? And so there might be some tactical things that you need to do from a network exam. I'm gonna go to 12 monthly meetups, local meetups, I'm go to 24, I'm gonna go to two different meetups every month, whatever. Write all those out. Those are the tactical leading indicators that are gonna lead to the quarterly rock. And essentially, the idea is, is that if you do what you say you're going to do in q one, to buy three houses, and you do all of those things, you should be able to buy three houses. What if you don't? Well, it's just a feedback loop, just reflect back on what you did. If you did everything you said you're gonna do, then you need to do something different or you need to adjust. You may need to add more lead flow. You may need to analyze more deals. You may have had deals that went through the cracks because you didn't have funding, so you need to adjust. Because here's the whole thing with goal setting, especially when you're inexperienced and you're trying to set goals into a new, in a new channel within your life, you don't get to choose the outcome, the outputs are somewhat unknown to you. But the inputs are the things you can change. So picking the right inputs are what make people more successful, and make them more successful faster. It's okay to give inputs, and not get the outputs. That's called education, that's called learning.

Dan Austin: [10:57] So never forget that, you really do need to put some time and effort into reflecting back on your inputs, to understand what you can do. Because maybe the inputs you put in there, only got you one deal. And you're like, okay, I'm just gonna adjust my goal. I guess it's one deal every three months. Well, you could do that, or you could say, well, I need to scale, and do three times what I just did. Okay, what does three times look like? Do three times of that. If it doesn't scale to three properties, then you need to adjust what your inputs are, not just scale your inputs. So really, this is just this iterative process and this concept of reflecting back on your inputs to ensure that they are getting tighter and tighter, so you get the outputs much quicker. So that's the idea with the vision tracker. So we started macro level, taking the time to write out your vivid vision. And then I I'm talking about the vision tracker, in particularly this concept of writing at your goals that are like the tangible SMART goals. If you don't know what SMART goals are, Google SMART goals, s m a r t, SMART goals. Get those out for that whatever part of your vision you're trying to track, using this VTO, and then you will be able to put those rocks. What are the quarterly things you need to do to reach those goals by the end of the year?

Dan Austin: [12:15] Below those goals, what are the tasks you're going to do? And then use a tracking sheet for those tasks. So there is a tracking sheet, I can't remember the name of it, I will pull it up here, but I will be using a tracking sheet that of course, my friend, Brandon shared with me, and he got it for somebody else. And so you can see here, nobody needs to create anything crazy. It's all out there. There's a ton of coaches talking about it. It's just a matter of actually doing this stuff. Anyways, let's see, it's called the official get out of your way goal tracking sheet. I'll put a link to this in the show notes as well. And essentially what this is, really is just a way to track those measurable items. So say it was to you're to work back on the topic of trying to get 2,000 of passive income, and we need to buy x amount of properties to do that per quarter, and the tasks below that might be, how many leads am I getting? Okay, well how do you get those leads? Okay, I'm marketing, I'm sending out four batches of mail for example. Did you do that? Go into this spreadsheet, track it and say you did it. And then, what else are you doing? There's a whole list of of things you can do to get to those goals, and you can track basically, your percentage of of completion towards your goals, right? Because if you know you need to get 40 leads, and you have to send out four batches of mail, and this many quantities, you can now start measuring that, and you can say, okay, my goal essentially was to send out 5,000 letters in order to get 40 leads. As you're doing that, you do it, and as you get 40 leads, you fill up your your basically pie chart that grows as you do more. And the idea is is this is a way to hold yourself accountable, and it's a way to visually see where you're going.

Dan Austin: [14:01] And looking at goals is one of the things that I have found to be the most valuable, and keeping them top of mind, and actually doing what you say you're going to do. If your ideas and concepts are misguided as you set your goals, that's when you need to reflect back and adjust. We have a whole year here to adjust things. If you have no education in this real estate, or whatever you're trying to do, that's okay. It's better to try something and fail, and then readjust or reflect back, than it is to try to get like, become an expert without actually doing. You have to do things to to become an expert and to gain expertise. So this would be the official get out of your own way goal tracking sheet. Again, this is kind of the most granular level of how to do this. And there's other stuff you can do, I've put it out there and I'll I'll try to link in the show notes as well, which is a habit tracker, which is essentially just like what habits you want to ingrain, like health is always a good one to track, like, what habits do you want? I want a habit of drinking x amount of water per day and eating under 2,000 calories per day, and working out every whatever day. Those are three things. So you put those on the on the first column, you build out those rows, and then you have one through 30 for the columns, which are basically the days of the month, And it's one month habit tracker. And so then every day that you do the thing that you wanna create a habit with, maybe it's meditation, maybe it's drinking water, whatever, you put in text in that box. And the idea is is the visualization of you missing these and getting the satisfaction of checking those off, is what helps build the habit. And you have to do something 60 something times before it becomes a habit.

Dan Austin: [15:35] Can't remember that, you can Google it, there's a quote out there, that's what the habit tracker is ideally for, that's why it was created. So for those more granular habits that you wanna create, that lead up to a goal, you can also throw that in there, or you can just use the official get out of your way tracking sheet. But fundamentally, that's what I'm doing this year, that's the focus I'm taking, and it's really a tactical approach. I used a lot of these elements last year, however, this year, I have focused much more on the vivid vision and understanding why I want, what my goals say I want, and what that feels like, and really sitting in that. So I really recommend doing that. Again, just to summarize this, write out of vivid vision, pair it down to what one year of that vivid vision needs to be, use some sort of tracking sheet that tracks the actual SMART goals, and then the quarterly goals or quarterly rocks that roll up into your actual annual goal, and then use a tracking sheet like this official get out of your own way sheet to take all the little leading indicators that are going to help you meet your quarterly rocks, and then ultimately your annual goals. It's as simple as that, it's a very tactical approach. Some people may not like that. I for me, it seems more logical, and I'm I'm super excited to go into 2024 with this approach, and this renewed approach. Another thing I am doing, and this was a recommendation from my guy, Brandon, is using a Phoenix tracker.

Dan Austin: [16:57] I've never used a journal, I am not a I'm not much of a journaler, never have been, I'm not really woo woo in anything, but he found this as one of his most favorite trackers, so I'm gonna try it this year, hit me up in a few months and let me know how I like it and I can recommend it. I I bought it, I can't remember what it cost, it looks pretty robust, but it basically helps, it's basically a template for like your twelve week vision, which aligns perfectly with your quarterly rocks, right? Because one quarter is twelve weeks and there's a lot of stuff in here and just check boxes and things, I'm just looking at one one of the page of the template, know, it's got like my ideal day, it has, you know, key actions, outcomes, your focuses, what you're grateful for, some notes, today's victories, how it'll all improve. So a lot of there's a little bit of woo woo stuff in here, but it's really most things about for me, it's just about tracking and doing this daily and giving myself space to understand what I'm not doing, and why I'm not doing it, and what I am doing, and what's working. That's gonna be the biggest for me. So I will stop here. I hope this episode is valuable to you all. I found it valuable, hopefully, if you're not already planning your goals for 2024, maybe this will spark that. Again, if you want to know more, or if you like what I said, hit me up in the DMs, investor man dan at Instagram is where I'm most active, but I'm also on all the socials and those messages will get back to me.

Dan Austin: [18:18] If you want to know more about what other folks in our group are doing, we have the Instant Investor, which we're actually going through a rebrand right now. Here going forward, we'll actually be talking about that, but right now, it's the Instant Investor group, and this is, you know, a great community, is really what it is, there's not much of a group, it's more of a community, it's a collective of like minded individuals focused in a similar area of business, with similar goals, and what we found out of Keyz Con, is there's a certain level of accountability when you're part of a group like this, and camaraderie, and compassion for each other. And so if you wanna learn more about that, go to collectingkeys.com. Also, if you wanna know about sub two deals, if you, Mike and I just are going to be dropping an episode about due on sale clauses that happened to us, that episode will be dropping next week. We literally got a loan called, that we took over sub two, two days after we took it over, it got called, and we were given thirty days to pay this loan off. So we talk about that in next Wednesday's episode, but we also have, it's funny because before this, literally the week before that happened to us, we launched our sub two course. Go to collectingkeys.com/subtwo, It's free until January 1, so go download it now, and if you go put your email in and download it, we're going to append to that course, the outcome of what happened to our due on sale clause on our deal, so it's gonna be really exciting, because you're gonna get real stuff, and the reason why we dropped that course for free, we wanna get out there, is we've seen too many people out there talking about sub two right now, and they don't say that there's any risks. And we really wanted to basically go over what the actual risks are, and how to mitigate those as best as you can, and then of course, with this new situation we're having, we're able to show you within that course how to overcome it if the risks actually do exist, hit you like a bank calling your low due because it changed names, because the title changed names. So that is collectingkeys.com/subtwo. Go get it there before January 1.

Dan Austin: [20:13] Other than that, I hope you have a great weekend, and hopefully, you're having a happy holiday season and a Merry Christmas out there.