Jasmine Star 00:00:00  I think you should only do things that play to your strengths. And we were playing to ours. We chose to use our restraints to play to our powers, our strengths. Welcome back to The Jasmine Star Show, a place where we discuss, oh, a lot of things like business, go to market strategy and today, how to have a better next year. Can I get an amen? But first, you know the drill. I want to read some kind words of a friend who listens to the show because you right now who's who's listening? You're my friend. So is Dee Schumacher, who rated the show with five stars and said, concise, packed with value. I will have to listen again and take notes. Thank you. Okay, Dee, thank you for listening and I am so proud of you for going back through and taking some notes. This is exactly what I do to learn how to sink in. So in this episode, I am taking you through five mindset shifts that I am bringing with me into next year, starting with Mindset Shift number one.

Jasmine Star 00:00:54  And that is to prioritize the important over the urgent. Now, this past year, I spent a lot of time cutting out noise, like, you know, like the noise, the things that clamor for most of our attention, that email, that slack response, that client call, that preschool PTA meeting deadline. This urgent noise jumps in front of your mind, and you begin to only focus on the noise. Instead of focusing on your North Star. What is most important? What are the things that the business needs overall, not just what does the business need right now? A few months ago, we were building out a launch runway for an upcoming launch with one of our most successful courses, and it's called Your biggest Launch ever. Now, we had content meetings, we had strategic planning, and we had a rollout plan, but ultimately I was the person to approve it. I had tasked to review key details that the team was waiting on and waiting on and waiting on. They wanted to get started on their tasks and their objectives, and they were waiting on me.

Jasmine Star 00:01:51  Their messages were urgent, which I totally get and I totally respect. But it wasn't important at the time. It was urgent. It wasn't important. I had key initiatives and growth plans that needed to get my full attention at that time, and taking care of their urgent request would have come at the cost of our important goals. And I communicated to the team that, yeah, they were important. And yes, I'm going to get to those questions, but I need to complete the most important tasks first. I needed all of my attention on what was the most important. Now we are launching this massive live course experience in January, but we began planning for it last August. I moved all of my tasks for this launch from August to the end of September. Now, I told the team I wasn't even going to pay any attention to what appeared urgent because the important was my priority. The important was my North Star. Was that hard to hear? Yeah, maybe. But it's my responsibility to steer my attention and lead the company toward our big, important Northstar goals.

Jasmine Star 00:03:05  Not just what do we need to do right now? So what does this mean? This means focusing on tasks that are necessary for your long term goals and your objectives, instead of those that seem really pressing or time sensitive. So I want to break these two concepts down because I know I'm going to get a lot of pushback. Urgent tasks require immediate attention or action. They usually feel loud and demanding, and a lot of the time they're recurring events like meetings you feel that you need to go to and you can't get out of. Now, what I want to talk about right now is important tasks. These are things that contribute to your long term goals and your long term objectives. They may not be immediately pressing, but they are essential for your success. And these are tasks like strategic planning, relationship building, and personal development. By prioritizing the important over the urgent, you can avoid getting caught up in those like the day to day hustle and then instead, I want you to focus on tasks that have a bigger impact on your goals.

Jasmine Star 00:04:02  Okay, so now let's move to mindset shift number two, which is to embrace the power of constraints. Now this might seem counterintuitive, but limitations can actually be a good thing. Limitations reduce friction. Limitations force you to be resourceful and use what you have. And a lot of the time they lead to more creative solutions. But I think maybe, perhaps my favorite thing about constraints is that they reduce analysis paralysis. Fewer options lead to quicker decisions, and once you make this mindset shift, you're going to start getting excited about the opportunity to create within those boundaries. So back in July of 2023, we began strategic list building efforts. Now, this means that we wanted to grow our newsletter by creating free resources that provided a ton of value. Now, I firmly believe that the best companies are constantly building their newsletter lists to cultivate, not like just future customers, but to cultivate future fans and evangelists. But here's the tricky part. We had a lot going on in July. We had just finished a social curator launch in late June, and then the team was focused on adding new content for your biggest launch ever course launch, and the team was also planning six content days and four podcast batching days in Newport Beach, Hollywood and Austin.

Jasmine Star 00:05:23  Our Customer Success team had created its own custom personalization White Glove video demo walkthrough for Social Security numbers. And I'm telling you, this list can go on. But all of us were firing on all cylinders. We knew we wanted to launch a new resource in July, August, and October list building resources. So in order for us to launch a new resource in July, we needed to identify our constraints. And I'm going to list them here right now. So we're all on the same page. Our first constraint one, we needed to create the entire resource in three weeks. Yes, I know this sounds crazy, but our team is legit gangsters. Content is our power play. Two we couldn't do a design PDF because we outsource our design, and our designer needs at least one week for design, one week for revisions, and that didn't give us enough time. The third constraint was we needed to start promotions in one and a half weeks. So here again, this is gnarly. But our marketing team that is another power play.

Jasmine Star 00:06:22  Marketing is our power play. It is a strength. Now, I wouldn't at all suggest working with these constraints, as I think you should only do things that play to your strengths. And we were playing to ours. We chose to use our restraints to play to our powers, our strengths. Oh, I want to go back and say that like again, because it rhymed. We chose to use our restraints to play to our straights. It didn't rhyme as good the second time. I'm just gonna roll with it. So we had three major restraints, but by using them, we decided to host a three part live video series. We hosted it on zoom. Right? What is the easiest path? What is the greatest path to. Yes. So we hosted a zoom and we called it Scaling Accelerator for seven figure entrepreneurs. Now once we decided that I would teach it live, we immediately created promotional material, and he started sharing on social media and inviting people on my newsletter list. Then the content team and I outlined all three classes and they created the graphics for each presentation.

Jasmine Star 00:07:20  I couldn't be more proud because literally just a couple of weeks, thousands of people signed up. We didn't pitch a single thing. It was just a give back. We want to build our brand. We want to continue creating community. And the feedback that we got was incredible. Now, when I look back at this, it's one of the highlights of my professional year. So if you would like to watch the replays, you can get them for free at Jasmine Starcom Forward Slash Scaling. I'm going to link them in the show notes so that you can experience the entire experience for yourself. And you could scale your business strategically, but we're not going to go there. We're talking about the mindset shifts, right? Like we're talking about like playing to restraints means that we could also play to our strengths. And as a result of that, in July of last year, we did something that proved all of ourselves what we were capable of. Now, the third mindset shift I'm bringing into next year is a future first mentality.

Jasmine Star 00:08:10  This goes hand in hand with the concept of prioritizing the important over the urgent. In business, it's easy to just focus on your task decisions or strategies for just that day or even that week without really fully considering how they affect other areas. But the truth is, every action and decision and strategy is not just interlinked, but has a ripple effect throughout the entire organization and your business. For example, if you need to put out an existing short term offer, but you're pivoting into an entirely different direction with your business, it's important to consider how that offer aligns as you rebrand and as you build out the next iteration of your business. While the short term offer, it might bring in immediate revenue, if it doesn't align with the new direction, it could potentially confuse your audience. Or it could dilute your messaging and that could have a long term effect. Now, you could tweak the offer to better reflect where your business is headed. Yeah, absolutely. But it's still important to always take in consideration.

Jasmine Star 00:09:10  Is this the best reflection of where I want my business to go? Is this aligned with my long term vision and the brand I'm building? I want to share a personal example. In September, we opened the doors to hosting my very own mastermind. It was exclusive for seven figure entrepreneurs, which is the first time I curated a group of that caliber solely focused on scaling scaling to eight figures. Now, for many years, I served a wide variety of entrepreneurs, and I loved it. Like truly and deep in my bones, I loved it. But I've gone through massive growth spurts and I've honed my efforts on who I think I am uniquely qualified to serve. I've had the honor of consulting with incredible clients and being invited to sit as an advisor for really incredible businesses. Through these processes, I knew I wanted to sit with incredible people, a group of seven figure entrepreneurs for eight months to see how they could scale their growth. If this was my focus and it was, I needed to create content and send newsletters and offer resources just for that person.

Jasmine Star 00:10:13  If I offered a product or service for a six figure entrepreneur, it would be out of alignment in attracting the seven figure entrepreneur. I made decisions that aligned with my future first mentality, and I'm telling you right now, I couldn't be happier and I'm carrying it into next year. So let's recap right now. The first mindset shift is bringing into the next years. I'm going to be prioritizing the important over the urgent. The second shift is embracing the power of constraints. And the third mindset is a future first thinking. Now let's move on to number four and that is celebrating continuous improvement. We love to celebrate big wins and milestones, right? Like oh yes, okay, rightfully so. But to get even more results in your business, start celebrating the smaller improvements and winds. I was actually just reading about this philosophy of celebrating continuous improvement. And it's also known as the Kaizen mindset, which is a Japanese concept. This mindset shift is the belief that small, incremental changes often lead to major progress over time.

Jasmine Star 00:11:15  This improves consistency and persistence, which we know it leads to success. Here's an example. Pretend you're a freelance copywriter, but you only measure success by completing big projects or landing high profile clients. But what about the small wins that changed your business from the inside out? You'd begin to celebrate things that weren't just monetary, like writing faster, improving the application of brand voice, and learning new techniques. This shift in mindset will boost your confidence and efficiency, making your clients satisfied and really excited to keep you on as a contractor. Now, by celebrating continuous improvement, you improve your reputation as a copywriter and then as a byproduct, you increase your revenue. If you're not sure what this looks like in your business, here's a few ideas. Because I want you celebrating as you go into the new Year, you could celebrate positive feedback and reviews from clients, how you handled a tough situation, or a conversation. You could celebrate improvements with your workflow, your systems, or your operations. You could celebrate successful teamwork or collaboration.

Jasmine Star 00:12:21  New creative ideas. So I created a win board in my office that includes small highlights, like maybe things I would just normally gloss over, right? For example, on this win board, I wrote down that a win was having a conversation with a company that I wanted to partner with. Now nothing happened from that conversation. Now, we still had a ton of follow up calls and contracts and confirmation that we could actually partner together. But the win at the time was simply that that call happened. I was celebrating the start of a conversation as well as at the time, hopefully celebrating the end of that conversation, too, which is what we're going to pause here, because I wrote that at the beginning of the year. This win was that, hey, I just had the conversation. Hey, we just opened up the dialogue. We ended up partnering them with the course, your Biggest Launch ever, which radically changed the way that people were showing up easily with their business and achieving huge launch goals.

Jasmine Star 00:13:20  It started off as like a win just for the celebration. Then it became a win that we inked contracts and then it became a win that people got so much success. Celebrating small wins leads the big ones. The fifth and final mindset shift that I have for you is to embrace non dualistic thinking. Now we often feel like we need to categorize people, things, situations, ideas like good or bad, hero or villain, right or wrong. This is called a binary mindset. A binary mindset is when you see only things in black and white with no like middle ground or shades of gray. And this can lead to small thinking, and it could limit your ability to make informed decisions. So how do you not do this? By embracing non dualistic thinking. Non dualistic thinking is the ability to see interconnectedness and shades of grey in all aspects of your life and business. This can lead to more empathy, more open mindedness and a deeper understanding of really complex issues. So do you remember that company that I wanted to partner with, the one that I had just mentioned where I celebrated this small win? Well, before we thought of a partnership, we were using a binary mindset.

Jasmine Star 00:14:29  Now, I'm not going to get too much into the details, but we were literally going to create our own video tutorials on how to use different platforms for your businesses. Like, let me repeat that again, we were going to make a handbook on how to use another product. Why? Because up until this point, we'd never seen this company do such a massive partnership and then create unique tutorials for our needs. This was a classic black and white perspective because they had and in the past. We believed they would never in the future. But when we embraced non dualistic thinking, we literally mapped out everything we needed. It was like literally a dream list of how we could partner with this company. And then we pitch them. And guess what? ConvertKit agreed to every request. And here's where it gets better. They gave us ideas on how we can improve the offer. So this isn't black and white. It was 50 Shades of Grey. Hey, is that an old joke? Is it a mom joke? Is it a desperate joke? Listen, we're at the end of the episode, and it doesn't really matter because you made it here.

Jasmine Star 00:15:36  And as long as you are inspired, as long as you're smiling, as long as you're ready to change the mindset as you go into the new year, I'm here to say thank you. Thank you for being a part of the Jasmin Star Show. Thank you. For those of you who left a review, if you haven't already, it's the new year. What's stopping you? New year, new you? Let's do it! I would love to read it on a future episode. I hope you're having a beautiful day and a beautiful start of the year.