010 Goal setting is dead: Why auditing your goals is the key to 2025

In this episode, we’re diving into an essential topic for the start of the year: goal setting. Or my preferred term: goal auditing!

Join the Goal Audit Workshop: https://www.emilykim.co/goalauditworkshop

New Year’s resolutions are often ambitious, but are they truly your goals, or are they borrowed from the people and media around you? Join me as I share my personal journey of learning to audit goals and a three-step process to ensure your ambitions align with your vision and values.

Here’s what we cover in this episode:

• The Trap of Borrowed Goals: How I mistakenly pursued goals like becoming a traveling brand photographer and starting an agency, and why auditing your goals matters.
• Step 1: Review and Audit: A detailed breakdown of my "Five Pillars of Profit" framework for reviewing your business actions and outcomes across your craft, offers, community, marketing, and systems.
• Step 2: Set Intentions: Why focusing on actions over outcomes is the key to success—and how to shift your mindset to control what you can.
• Step 3: Make a Plan: How to prioritize non-negotiables, schedule rest, and map out your business actions for the year using a yearly view calendar.

Plus:

• A personal reflection on lessons from 2024 and how intentional goal setting is helping me in 2025.
• Why everything is data and how to use this process to iterate and grow.

If you’re ready to take your goal setting to the next level and build a plan that aligns with your vision, this episode is for you.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 intro
00:35 The trap of borrowed goals
04:25 Step 1 - review & audit
11:10 Step 2 - set intentions
13:00 Step 3 - make a plan
14:45 Get accountability with my Goal Audit Workshop

✨ Join the Goal Audit Workshop
Want hands-on support to implement this process? In my Goal Audit Workshop, we’ll work through the full goal auditing process together with a detailed workbook that includes every metric, analytic, and time investment I’ve been tracking since 2018.

🗓 Live Workshop Date: January 8, 2025
If you’re catching this after the live workshop, the replay and workbook will still be available!

Join the Goal Audit Workshop: https://www.emilykim.co/goalauditworkshop

Let’s start the year off right and make 2025 your most aligned and intentional year yet.

Thanks for listening!

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Website: https://profitablecreatives.com/
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Chapters

• 1:15 The trap of borrowed goals
• 5:05 Step 1 - Review & Audit
• 11:50 Step 2 - Set Intentions
• 13:40 Step 3 - Make a Plan
• 15:25 Get accountability with my Goal Audit Workshop

Transcript

0:40

When new years rolls around too often, do we go in and just blindly set these lofty ambitious new year's resolutions. Now I am all for being lofty and ambitious ambition is a really important in business, but when it comes to goal setting specifically, I want you to ask are your goals YOUR goals or are they someone else's? I say this because this happens a lot to me, especially around this time of year, many a time have I fallen into the trap of, um, yes. I absolutely want to be a traveling brand photographer. That seems like a good goal. Or yes, I absolutely want to start in a brand photography agency. That seems like something that makes sense for me. And if you listened to. I think it was episode one or two. Of this podcast. Um, I talked about how I accidentally fell into that anyway. What I'm saying is sometimes. We absorb the goals of the people around us or the media that we consume. I saw a lot of people traveling for photography. I saw traveling wedding photographers, traveling brand photographers. And I said, that seems amazing. Traveling for work. Yeah. I want to do that. I want to get paid to travel. No. What I've realized over time is that yes, I do travel for brand photography and for speaking, but I don't really love it that much. I do it when I need to, if it's a good opportunity, but it's not something I want to do all the time, because your girl hates being on a plane. I hate being in an airport. It's just like, I don't want to do that. And it's kind of stressful to travel for work. And then when it comes to building an agency, I was like, oh, well, all these other people are building agencies. Like that seems like the next step for me. If I want to grow my income or do something like that. But. I don't. I was absorbing the goals of people around me, but sometimes we do have to pursue these goals just enough to realize that maybe it's not for us. The path that I took was meant to be, I had to try to become a traveling brand photographer. I had to try to start an agency to realize that it wasn't for me, but that's why it's so important for us to audit our goals. So, what do I mean by that? When I say audit, I mean, Do the thing, dream big, write down everything that you want to do everything and anything that you want to do. And after you've done that, let's take a step back. Let's look at each one and ask yourself, okay, do I really want this? Or do I just think that I want this. Being in the stage of business that I'm in right now, I feel really, really strongly about auditing your goals. Now, I am still photographing brand sessions, but not nearly at the volume that I used to. And that is intentional. I decided that it was going to be this way. Because at my core, I'm an educator. That's why I started this podcast. So I suppose you could say I'm creeping into the quote unquote online business space. But in this space, in the online business space, it is full of absolute craziness. I see ads every day of like, oh, here's how to sell your course on evergreen and on autopilot. So you can make money while drinking margaritas on the beach. You know what I'm talking about; I'm sure you've seen ads like this. So it's really, really important that I keep myself in check so that I don't fall for marketing that strikes my emotions. Marketing is always going to strike your emotions, but it's important to then look at it and feel the thing and step back and say, okay. Is this something I really want or not? So now being in the space that I'm in now, it's more important than ever for me to audit my goals. And I have a three step process for doing this. In this episode, we are going to go through each step one by one. So step one. What I want you to do is review your business. Your life. And then. Audit it. So what do I mean by that? What I want you to do in this first step is to look at all of the actions that you took this year. And then look at the outcome of those actions. For this, we want to look at every area of your business. And when I say. Quote, unquote, every area. What I mean is the five pillars of profit. You may have heard me talk about this before on a previous masterclass, but the five pillars of profit, you can basically compare to the wheel of life. If you're familiar with that exercise, you know, Different. Um, the wheel has all these prongs of like health. Uh, mindfulness spirituality. Work friends, relationships, that kind of stuff. Anyway, this is my business version of that. And there are five prongs or pillars to it. It's all of the areas that make up your business. So number one. Is your craft. Number two is your offers. Number three is your community, or a lot of people call this your audience, but we all know I hate that word. So your community. Number four is your message. AKA your marketing and number five is your systems. So what do I mean by this? How do we look at. The actions that we took and then audit them. So your craft is where we, as creatives tend to spend most of our time thinking like, oh, this is where I should be spending most of my time, improving my skills, doing the things. So as a photographer is taking photos as a copywriter, it's writing graphic designer, designing, et cetera, et cetera. I want to be really clear here. You should take pride in your craft, you should always be working to improve your craft. However, that doesn't mean you should spend, you know, 90% of your time and money investing in improving your craft because you need all of these things in the wheel to build a profitable business, right? With the wheel of life, you can't have like a hundred percent job. You have to have family. You have to have a wellness, all the other things. I wish I pulled one up so I could look at it, but I'm not gonna do that now. So while your craft is important, we also need to be spending our time in other areas. When we look at taking action to your craft, I want you to list out. All of the education that you took. Um, time thinking about time that you spent, if you're a photographer, maybe doing styled shoots, doing creative projects, things to spark your creativity. Write down all those things and then ask yourself, did this yield a result. Did you learn a skill? Did you see a return on that time or money investment? Then we want to do that same exercise for every area of your business. So your offers. If you offer several different packages and look at how many people booked, what package, and then we want to look at like how much money did you make per package? When it comes to your community or your audience? Where did you get the most clients? Like where have you been hanging out where you spending your time versus where are the clients coming from? And when I first did this exercise. Not first. Uh, when I had the last time I had a really bigger revelation about this was probably 20. 22, it was 20, 22. I realized like, oh, I'm spending all of my time. Marketing myself on Instagram. But if I look at the data, my clients are actually coming from Google. That's when I went all in on my blog and working on my SEO because I saw, okay, well, If this is what's bringing me clients, why am I spending all this time on Instagram? So that's what I mean by this. Right? We want to see if where you're allocating your time actually makes sense. Based on the results that are happening. Then when it comes to your message or your marketing, we want to look at any marketing campaigns or pushes events that you hosted. Did they yield the outcomes that you were expecting? And I want to be clear here. We're not doing this to shame ourselves into looking at like, oh, this didn't work for me. Oh, I'm not good at business. Like, no, no, no. Everything is data. Remember everything is data and you have to do these things. You have to try and. Quote-unquote fail to know what works for you and what doesn't. And it's going to be different for everyone. So it's really important that you do these actions. As long as you reflect back and look at what worked the way you wanted it to versus what didn't. And then with that information, we can decide, what are we going to tweak? And then the last pillar of profit are your systems. A lot of this involves looking at your time. Did you find yourself doing a lot of repetitive tasks? Is there anything on the backend of your business that needs. Tweaking adjustment automation, that kind of stuff. So that's what I mean by reviewing and auditing. And then of course, your numbers. We want to look at your profit and loss. I've mentioned this before your educational investments, your time investment marketing investments. What did they yield? This is not necessarily all a monetary thing, right. We also want to look at your time investment, and then when we're looking at your time investment, This is a hard one because it's everything we do in business is so emotionally tied to the result, right? Like, oh, I did this thing. Did it make money? Yes or no? Something else to think about, is it, was this a short-term investment or a long-term investment? So, like I said in 2021 is when I realized, my blog was paying off more than Instagram, but I started blogging in 2018. So that took what three ish, three or more years to see that. Flip that return on investment because previously my clients were coming from Instagram. So blogging from 2018 through 2021 was a longterm investment for me. I define long-term as anything as a year or more. We want to review and audit everything in your business and also life too. I don't want to get too much into this because I mean, everybody's lives are different, but, um, how are you spending your time outside of work? Did you maybe find yourself doing lots of like chores doing lots of groceries. One thing that I think is an easy example. I for a time would have my groceries delivered versus going out to the store. I'm not doing that currently only very rarely will I have groceries delivered now, because at this point in time, It makes more sense for me to go to the grocery store myself, but there was a period in my life. Especially while I was working my full-time job and running my photography business on the side, I would get my groceries delivered because that hour that I would spend going to the grocery store, I could be answering emails in my business or working on my business So look at things outside of work as well, but you know, me, my focus is the business. So that is. Step one of our three step process to audit our goals. Now for step two of our three step goal auditing process. We're going to set our intentions. After you've completed. Step one, you've done your audit. Ask yourself. Does anything surprise you? Did you find yourself spending a lot of time doing something that you don't like doing? Or did you find yourself spending time doing something that didn't yield the results you expected or did everything go as planned? What happened? Whether the things went as planned or they didn't, again, this is not a time to beat yourself up. Everything is data we're iterating. In this phase and setting intentions, I want to place a lot of emphasis on actions over outcomes. This is something that I am still learning my self because coming from the background that I did in corporate working for apple, and my old personality in college was based on results, outcomes. How do I get that thing? But really. Where we should be placing our focus is on the action because we can't control the outcome. Uh, we can control the actions. That's why have us do this audit process. So this year I found myself. Focusing a lot on results and on outcomes, but not actions and surprise what happened as a result of that. I didn't see the results that I wanted to because I would end the month. I look at my profit and loss and be like, oh no, like I didn't hit the number that I wanted to. Well, yeah. You know why? Because. I didn't really make a plan for the actions. There are lots of reasons why I didn't hit the revenue goals that I wanted to in 2024, it was a year of building. I started my YouTube channel. I started this podcast. Lots of things happened. But I need to put more emphasis on the actions on the things that I can control because there is really no use crying over spilled milk. And in this case, the spilled milk would be the results that you have no control over. Now step three, after you have decided the actions. That you were going to take your intentions, your actions. I'm kind of using those interchangeably a little bit. Now we want to make a plan. How are we going to do these actions? Do you have the time and the space for it? So the way I like to do this is to start by listing out my non-negotiables. A couple of them are, I need to walk Rosie every day and I need to eat lunch every day. Believe it or not, that was not a priority for me for a really long time and shocking to no one. It is very helpful when I eat at a regular time every day. Then after that we want to schedule in rest time, especially for my workaholics out there. I struggle with this a lot. Schedule in your rest time first, when are you going to go on vacation? When are you taking a break? Do not allow yourself to schedule in work around that. Because what used to happen to me would be I wouldn't schedule my vacations. And then someone would say, oh, can I book a shoot for this date? And I would say yes, of course. And then I look at my calendar and surprise. There is no time for me to take a break, to go on vacation, to do anything. So. That's why we start with your good non-negotiables then schedule in your rest time. Only after you've done those two things, do I recommend scheduling in your business actions. I like to look at a yearly view calendar. And that's how I schedule in my big business projects and rest time, vacations, that kind of stuff. So I kind of a year at a glance situation. That's what works best for me. You can even do this just in like a spreadsheet to make it easy for you or on paper. So that's what I recommend doing. Those are my three steps to auditing your goals. Number one. Review and audit. Number two set your intentions and your actions. And number three, make a plan to do those actions. Now, if this sounded like a lot, I do have something for you. So every year inside of my membership, the profitable creatives club, I offer my goal audit workshop. It is about a three hour workshop because this is implementation time. We sit down and we go through my workbook. Together to go through each of these steps. And that gives you a time to ask questions about looking at your numbers. Ah, how to track something, where to get numbers on something. If you're looking for that. And this year I have opened up tickets to non-members. So I will leave the link to save your spot in the show notes. If you were interested in attending live. And if you are listening to this live it's happening on January 8th, 2025. If you are listening to this after that, you will still be able to grab the workbook and, or the workshop replay if it makes sense, but I will update to the show notes to reflect either one. The workbook walks you through what to look at step-by-step like every single number that I look at, every single, uh, metric analytics time. All of the aspects that I've mentioned here, I break it down in detail on this guide. This is what I've been using for myself since about 2018 or 2019. And every year I refine it with the new things that I'm looking at and just tweak it to make it a little bit better every year. So as always everything's in the show notes and I would love to see you there.