#113 The 6 Step Sequence for Funding ANY goal

Mastering Financial Goals: Terry Condon's Six-Step Sequence

In this episode, Terry shares his six-step sequence for funding any financial goal. This framework provides clear direction and an actionable plan for achieving financial objectives. Terry emphasizes the importance of setting clear targets, breaking goals into manageable milestones, celebrating progress, cutting out unproductive behaviors and relationships, strategically finding and raising money, and anticipating potential failures. He also shares personal examples and success stories, and directs listeners to a downloadable worksheet to apply the sequence to their own goals.

00:00 Introduction and Purpose
01:45 The Six-Step Sequence Overview
02:34 Step 1: Set Your Sights
03:16 Step 2: Make the Mountain Smaller
07:12 Step 3: Lose the Deadwood
10:01 Step 4: Plot Your Path
19:18 Step 5: Travel in Tribes
21:44 Step 6: Foreshadow Failure
24:55 Conclusion and Next Steps

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Transcript

0:29

G'day Legend, it's Terry Condon here. And in this episode, I want to take you through my six step sequence for funding any goal. Now, I shared this framework for the first time at the beginning of the year with our members. When we do this annual planning session, to be able to give ourselves some direction and a bit of an action plan for accomplishment. And I wanted to put this episode out now because it's the middle of the year. It's a great time to review that plan. If you've already done it, if you're a member and you're listening. And if you haven't done this plan, Now, it's a good time to learn it and put it into action for the rest of the year. And it's front of mind for me as well because Elisa and I have used this plan to fund our current trip on the East Coast. And, uh, I'm about to take off on this trip this morning. Actually, as soon as I finish recording this episode, I will be jumping in the caravan and we'll be driving up the east coast up to Byron to spend a bit of time with the family and see some, uh, see a little bit of warm up weather, get out of the Victorian cold. And the other reason I wanted to share this framework with you now is because the cost of living is biting pretty hard right now. And we're hearing that in conversations with folks who ordinarily wouldn't be discussing it. And I also want to normalize that for you too because it is pretty widespread right now. This is probably one of the, uh, tightest times in the last 15 to 20 years in terms of economic policy. And that just means that everybody's finding things harder as we go. So please don't personalize it. If you feel like that, we're all dealing with it in some capacity and some of us are dealing with it more so than others. But, I wanted to make sure that there was something you could use to be able to move your way through this and actually have a plan Because anxiety only exists in the absence of action. But as soon as you start getting into action, you can alleviate some of that anxiety. And we've absolutely had to use this for our trip up the East Coast as well. Things got a little bit tighter than we wanted in the last month or two. So we came back to this plan and used a couple of parts of this framework to be able to fund this trip without any stress. So in this episode, I'm going to take you through this six part sequence and how you can use it to find any goal. I'll share with you exactly how Elise and I have used it so that you can start using it as well. And I'm also going to point you to a free tool that you can use to apply this sequence for yourself. And if you do put this tool into practice, it will work. I shared it with one of our members about three months ago. He wasn't yet in the program. He wasn't in a position to be able to invest in the program. Never really had much savings. And I talked him through this framework to be able to fund the goal. And within a six week period, he'd built a 16, 000 buffer. He's now moving through the mentorship, learning the money mapping method, and moving from strength to strength. So this can absolutely give you direction for your efforts, help you generate very quick early momentum, boost that motivation, and just accelerate whatever you want to achieve when it comes to funding a financial goal. The first part of this framework is to be able to set your sights. You want to create a very clear target. It's not about saving some money. You want to define how much you want to save and by when. Now I usually talk about having a vision and making sure that it's compelling and that sort of thing. But once you've got a vision, sort of within that, you really do need something that's clear to be able to shoot for. So that you can say we either achieved it or we haven't. I'm either there or I'm not there. And so you want to put a dollar figure on that amount. And so for us with our holiday, we're like, we want to make sure that we have at least three, three and a half thousand dollars for the actual holiday. And we want to achieve that by today, which is the 30th of June, which is the day before we actually go on the holidays. And once you have that clear target, what you need to do is you need to move to step two in this sequence, which is to make the mountains smaller. Now, three and a half thousand is not a huge target, but you can break it down. And I always encourage folks to break it down into more manageable milestones. And I think increments of 10 is quite good. So for us, you break it down into 350 dollar increments and you say for every 350 dollar increments, we're moving 10 percent along the way. And you want a visual container for progress. So you want to be able to look at something and be able to color off each of those 10 percent increments as you go. Now, if the goal is a little bit bigger, let's say it's 100, 000, 000 is still quite a big increment. So you may want to break it down into 20ths and that would help you break it down into more like 5, 000 increments. Really what you want is you want to be able to achieve some sort of win state within a, I guess like a three to six week period if possible, where you can kind of sprint for it and then you can color off progress. Because there's something called the goal gradient principle and that is your efforts increase as you move closer towards the end of achieving something. And so if you break it down into smaller, more manageable milestones, your efforts will increase when you get closer to the end of one of those milestones. And that just drags you from one step to the next. It's like pebbles, right? You you just walk from one pebble to the next, and if you just keep walking across the pebbles, you find that you get across the pond. exactly what you want for goals. So definitely break it down, make the mountain smaller by breaking it down into tenths or break it down into twentieths, depending on how long each of those increments will take you. The next part of this, it's within this step as well. It's not just about breaking it down so they make mountains smaller. It's also about defining how you're going to celebrate success and progress along the way. So what you want to do is you want to decide when you achieve each milestone, how are you going to symbolize that? It doesn't have to be something big, it could be something really, really small. to give you an example of this, when Ryan and I started the Cashflow Co, any little milestone we achieved along the way, we set out a few little ones, we would play a little victory song. We would have a bit of a song and dance and we'd be like, yes, here we go, we're getting, we're getting there, we're moving, we're going in the right direction. You need this, you need this. And particularly if the goal is a long way away, you want to make sure that you've got little win states along the way. Remember the episode with BJ Fogg, and we talked about how, you know, We don't change by feeling bad, we change by feeling good. And it's actually encoding success, encoding that feeling of feeling good, which helps us keep moving. Feeling like you're getting somewhere is the way to get somewhere. And if you don't stop to smell the roses, when you are achieving these manageable milestones, it'll feel like a bit of a grind. So that's the first thing you need to do once you've made the mountain smaller is Define how you're going to celebrate little wins along the way. And the second thing you need to do as well is then define what you're going to do when you actually get there. What will you actually do? So for us it's really easy with this one, right? Because what we're going to do when we get there is we're going to take the trip, which is happening this morning. So you want to kind of go, well, what's the actual ceremony that I'm going to go through? What's the thing that's going to symbolize that we've actually gotten there? you need to do that, absolutely. And you want to make it as personal or as idiosyncratic as possible. It's just got to be meaningful for you. It might look silly to others. Who gives a shit? Do it for yourselves. Do it in a way that makes sense for you. and in a way that's, you know, you've got something to look forward to. and this, I think this is really important for financial goals actually. If it's a goal that you're funding the future and you're pushing something off into the future, you're not really going to sense the benefit of achieving, you know, a 10, 000 parcel of savings to be able to put toward a shared portfolio or something like that. You're not going to be able to feel much in that moment. So you really need to stop and make sure that you do, Actually symbolize and have a bit of a ceremony for what is actually happening because you are looking after your future self in that moment. If that's what you're actually doing to fund that goal, you are looking after your future self. You're buying that future self choices and you want to be able to stop and really think through that as well. So that's the second step. You want to make the mountain small by breaking it down into 10ths or 20ths, then you want to figure out how you're going to celebrate little wins along the way, and also what you're going to do when you get there to symbolize success too. The third step is you want to lose the deadwood. So you've got to think about the things that you're going to stop doing, things that may be in the way, things that might make your success and progress harder, and you want to actually write down what those things are. So maybe you're spending a lot of time doing things that. aren't conducive to this savings goal or just, distract you and take your time and attention away from being productive in certain ways, you want to define what they are. So is it, that we're going to go out less? we're willing to be bad at knowing what's happening with the news because it doesn't really help us at all, kind of drags our attention away from what we're trying to focus on, and we're not going to be the most social folks. We're willing to be bad at being, in the know and a part of that conversation and that sort of situation. So, lose the deadwood when it comes to behaviours that may or may not be conducive to you. The other part of losing the Deadwood is you need to think about who you're going to detach from. So there are some people who, it's not that they don't want you to succeed, it's just that there's nothing in it for them for you to succeed. And you've got to be really careful about who you are hanging around. Watch the language patterns, watch the things they talk about. Generally the people that are talking about other people, spending more time and attention on You know, things that aren't constructive, aren't productive. People that are talking about their goals, people that are talking about what they want to accomplish. You want to be around these type of folks because they're going to be celebrating you and your success. They're going to be just as happy for you to succeed. Whereas the other folks, they'll be more yeah, that's good for you, but And these kind of language patterns, this kind of interaction doesn't really help you accomplish what you want to accomplish. And it doesn't make your life any better. So, if you can, detach from folks who are in those kind of conversations and be really careful about who you spend your time with. Like I said before, some people, there's nothing in it for them if you succeed. you want to be around people who actually, Couldn't care less if you succeed. And generally these are people who are above you, people who are, you know, further along the path who if you move upwards, it doesn't really impact them at all. and I think that's really important to consider, right? Cause we are social beings. We feel this stuff. We absolutely feel it. And you will limit yourself to stay in step or in harmony with a group. So my suggestion is that you audit who you're hanging around, and maybe just spend a little bit less time, just don't go out of your way to be around some of these folks whilst you're focusing on this goal. It's not to say that you don't care about these people. It's just to say that you care about your goals, and you want to be the best version of yourself, and you would hope that they want that for you. And if that's not always the case, then you owe it to yourself, and yourselves, and yourselves. to be able to move toward a direction that you want in your life. So that's the third step, losing the dead wood. And that's all about removing the bad behaviors, removing the bad actors who may or may not be in it for you. Step number four is to plot your path. Now, there is four ways to fund any goal. You can find money, you can raise money, you can earn money, or you can make money. And this is where I think a lot of us get confused. We set these kind of goals and we kind of don't know what to do from there. So we have this vacuum, this gap, and we're like, what are we doing? What are we going to do? it helps to kind of get a little bit more tactical and a little bit more strategic about the way you're aligning your efforts to achieve that goal. So I'll talk you through each of these four strategies now. And the first two, finding money and raising money, this is more about financial defense. It's about, you know, not losing money in a certain way. And these are higher certainty, but they're more capped. It's harder for you to make big leaps and gains in this space. So what you want to do is you want to spend as much time as you need in this space, but absolutely no more. Defense is important. You can win championships from a defense, but you also need to have a really good offense as well. But let's go into the first one. So the first strategy here is finding money. And what this is, is eliminating waste. You want to think through. all the different parts of your life where you are spending money where it doesn't necessarily help you. And so for us it's really actually quite simple because we have tech that shows us exactly where our money's going and you can sort of align it to your goals or not and you can look at where the big spends are. And for myself looking through this what I realized was health and medical expenses has been one that's kind of been blowing out for us a lot. And so we looked at a few areas where we're like, is there any way that we can contain some of these costs? Some of them we can't really control because they're linked to our son, Smith, who's got, you know, a special condition we have to keep on top of. But some of those other costs that we could, we could contain a little bit. And that was one area because we sort of looked at. The other one we've been watching really closely is groceries. And earlier on in the year, it kind of blew out a little bit. We weren't, we weren't watching it that much. And then over the last three months, we managed to tighten that right up just by making it a focus and being able to track that. we've talked about it before, but the Hawthorne effect is where, you know, you optimize what you observe. And if you are able to observe and get a clear line of sight between something and you feel like there is a little bit of waste, there's a little bit of mindless spending happening, it's really useful to be able to do that. There's three main areas that I focus on when it comes to finding money. It's housing, transport, and food. If you just focus on those three, you will probably have the 80 20 sorted when it comes to finding money. So keep an eye on those three most of the time, and you'll contain your costs. I don't recommend getting very hung up in trying to pinch every single penny, because it's not the most productive use of your time. We'll get to what that is later on. there's only so far that you can cut, and If you cut too hard and you cut too far, it kind of goes against you and you start pushing back the other way. The pendulum starts to swing and you start to overspend and you start to be a little bit more aimless and you kind of go, yeah, I kind of give up. So don't cut too far. Just keep an eye on housing, transport, food, and anything else that you've seen that's a bit more variable. Definitely want to be using tech to be able to help you find and look at waste. And there's heaps of different tools you can use. We've got our own tool that we use in the program. But Use what's available to you to be able to surface that information and use it to be able to find money. So that's the first strategy. The second one is raising money. Now this is a little bit different. And so this could be calling in debts. Maybe somebody owes you some money for something. Or it could be selling things around your house. I love Facebook Marketplace. This is, this is essentially what Elise and I did. We were about 1, 300 short. And so what we did was three weekends ago, we just went around our house, went through the garage, went through the house and kind of went, well, what are we not using? What haven't we used for a long period of time? And this can be hard for folks because you want to hoard things. You want to, you've got this kind of, uh, ownership bias, right? You really value what you own. The way that I make it okay. And the way that I sort of reconcile that is I say to myself, look, if I haven't used this for a long period of time, But I do still value it and I'm not sure I want to sell it. Could I buy it back or could I buy something back similar in the future? The answer is always yes. And once I sort of thought about it like that, it's easier to let go of things because you know, you can just buy them again later on, but you know that it's really easy to be able to get them back in your life later on. And that would show you whether you actually cared about something. It was missing. And then you can go back and make sure that you have it. So the real question is, I haven't used it for six months. Do I care about having it lie around more than I care about funding this goal right now? And if the answer is no, I don't care about having lying around, then it's easy to sell. So these are the two ways that you can raise money. Call in debts that you might not have claimed in the past, or look around your house, sell stuff, convert it back into cash that you can use to get a quick boost and be able to generate that momentum really quickly. This is, I think, one of the best things you can do. I talked about productive uses of time. You know. Stressing over these small spends all the time is nowhere near as productive as looking around and actually going, what can I convert back into cash? What debts can I call in to be able to raise money fast? This creates a real boost in motivation, gets your momentum going really, really quickly. And for us, we raised 1, 400 in one week doing this, closed the gap completely, and then sort of overfunded the trip, which, which just kind of made the whole thing a lot more fun. So this is the second strategy, which is to raise money. Definitely use Facebook marketplace. If you aren't already aware of it, it's the fastest, easiest way for you to get something and convert it back into cash. It's also a great way for you to learn a few skills like copywriting, negotiation, sales, this sort of thing. It's actually a great way for you to get started, to get introduced to some of these money making skills, which are really, really important. So that's the second strategy, which is raising money. The third one is earning money. So earning and making money are not the same thing. We've talked about it in the past but earning money is where you get a very clear output for a very clear input. So a way to earn money could be take on a second job that you know gets paid by the hour or take on like Uber and you know roughly what you're going to be earning per sort of mile or whatever it is. That's earning money. Those two things are very linked. The advantage with figuring out ways to earn money is that. Generally, it's easier and faster to get going, but again, it's more capped because time and money are more closely linked. It is more financial offense, so you can trade more time for money, but you're trading that time. So you've got to ask yourself, do I have more time to trade right now, or am I willing to trade more time right now, or can I make my time work harder? So that's really the two ways to earn money. Trade more time, or charge more for the time that you're trading. And if you haven't already listened to it, and even if you have listened to it, I would highly recommend going back to episode 56 on this podcast and listening to the conversation I had with Chris Voss, where we talked about how to earn what you're worth by nailing the negotiation conversation. Super actionable, very tactical episode where he gets into actual language patterns you can use and even how to lay out that conversation so that it goes your way more of the time. I won't go over that now because I just want to give you a bit more of a direction, but these are the two ways that you can earn more money. You can trade more time for money or you can negotiate a higher rate for your time. The last strategy here within this plotting your path part of this is to make more money. And this is different because What you're going to do here is you're going to find a problem, figure out how to solve it, and then put a value on that problem. The thing about this is it could be a bit slower, but if you're smart and you can find good opportunities, you can actually get it quite quick as well. so it comes down to, I guess, your acumen, your ability to sort of spot and find opportunities in the marketplace. And if you're good at that, you can actually make a lot of money really, really quickly. But you'll be investing time to be able to find that thing and then be able to create a solution, then be able to bring that through into market. So, it requires a high level of skill. But also, if you're not in a rush, I think it's always a great idea to be able to master this strategy, because it gives you transferable skills you can learn later. I talked about selling and negotiating, copywriting, those kind of things with selling stuff on Facebook. That's kind of like an easy intro. I But if you really like that process, and you like the journey of doing that, then think about how can I solve problems for people and actually put a dollar amount on those problems. Because there is no cap on this last strategy. There is no cap to how much money that you can make. That's the difference. Earning money is very capped. It's very clear what you are going to be getting for what you're doing when it comes to making money It's not clear at all what you'll be getting for what you're doing But that's also the opportunity if you do the right things and you do them in the right way You can make as much as you like And if you go way back to episode five in this podcast, how to maximize your earning potential in that episode, I give you a couple of formulas to be able to work your way through to think about how can I improve my ability to make money and earn more money in this space. So if you want to get better at financial offense, go there and you'll actually look at the social capital, human capital parts of this. And I also talk through this profitable problem formula that we use to be able to start this business, make money through building this business. definitely go back and check out episode 5 if you want some thinking tools to make making money a little bit easier. So, Quick recap, we've gone through the first four steps here. We've gone through setting your sights with a clear target. We've talked about making the mountain smaller, celebrating the small wins and what you'll do when you get there. We talked about step three, which is losing the dead wood, behaviors, bad actors. Number four, we just talked about plotting your path, which is financial defense, finding money and raising money, and financial offense, which is earning money and making money. Step number five is the travel in tribes. I talked before about losing the dead wood and some people you don't want to be around, or you want to limit your exposure to. The inverse of that is getting around the right people. We've talked before in the past about memetic desire. We've talked about how there's a sense of, there's a kind of social gravity where you get pulled in the direction of what you want. And if you find the right groups, people who want what you want, people who are accomplishing and achieving things you want to accomplish, and they're ahead of you or at the same stage, what's going to happen is your behavior is going to harmonize and resonate with theirs, and it's going to be easier and easier for you to normalize these new behaviors and accomplish what you want. So you want to think about. Two kind of tribes. You want to join interest groups that are discussing these things. This can be in the real world or in the digital world. In the digital world it's easier than ever. The only downside of the digital world is you don't really develop those relationships in the same way. It's still a little bit superficial. The second one is community of practice. Community of practice is a bunch of people doing the same thing using similar tools and supporting each other with those tools. Teaching each other how they're using those tools and how to do it the right way and how things work and this is essentially what we've built with the mentorship. It's a community of practice. We teach people a method, we give them the tools and there's a whole space here called the members lounge and we have these meetups every single month where we're talking through how to use these tools and as the tools develop, we're updating our knowledge, updating the knowledge base, sharing this out with more and more people. So you want to make sure that you're traveling in tribes and you're joining communities of practice. And more importantly, don't just join these communities, participate in them, get actively engaged, start building relationships, start reaching out to folks, and learning from them, sharing ideas, and sharing your progress as well. Probably one of the hardest things in Australia is that we've got this tall poppy syndrome where it's like, oh, I don't want to talk about my success or my progress or anything like that. And we work really hard to be able to combat that. I won't say we always win, but we try really hard. There's a whole section in our members lounge where people can share their wins. We've just got that up and going and we're hoping to see more of that happening. So if you are a member and you're a part of our program, take this as a little. to be able to share a recent win because it's not just for you. It's to inspire the people around you. You're not being egotistical when you're doing this. You are actually inspiring the people around you. And if the people around you aren't inspired, guess what? Those are the wrong people. So this is number five, traveling tribes, join interest groups, get into communities of practice, actively participate in those groups. Let's talk about the last step. Step six, foreshadow failure. So. This is all about thinking about why this will fail. We've talked about what you can do to succeed. We want to think about the opposite because we're probably going to do things that predictably get in our own way. And you want to think through those things so that when you see them, when you observe them in yourself, and when you can start to see the markers that these things are happening or might happen. You know what to do about it. So the way to do this is to go, if I was to work really hard and achieve absolutely nothing and end up a complete failure on this challenge, what would I do? And then make a list of the things that come into your mind when you ask yourself that question, make a list. There should be like three to five. top level things that are really obvious to you probably because you've seen yourself do this stuff in the past and probably because some of these things have happened in the past. So list those things and then you want to create three different columns. The first one is prevent, the second one is repair and the third one is recover. go through one example of how this might work. I might say, This will fail because we get too busy. We don't spend any time actually talking about this goal. We have no scoreboard to help us track this goal. And we let other priorities take precedence and become completely reactionary. So the next thing we need to ask ourselves is, How do we prevent that from happening? Well, Let's make sure that our progress is really clear. Let's make sure we're talking about this on a weekly basis. Let's make sure that when we do our income map every single month, we refer back to this particular goal. And you can start to sort of think about what you can do to inoculate yourself against that failure. But that doesn't guarantee that you will. So you've got to ask yourself, what would you do to repair the situation if you noticed that it was going the wrong way, how would you surface that? How would you interact around that? And what would you do to get back on track? Come up with a few ideas on that. And it might be, we kind of have a bit of a time out. Maybe we're going to pay for a babysitter, go out for a night, we're going to spend a little bit of money to actually come back to the center of this and remind ourselves why we're doing this and why this goal is important to us. And then reset, look at our sort of targets, look at whether it's realistic enough, maybe change the timeline if we have to, and then also support mechanisms and any obstacles, see if we can remove those obstacles. The third one is recover. If you did fail, and if it didn't work, what would you do to recover? How would you get back up and make sure that you didn't consider yourselves a failure along the way? You want to define that as well. And if you do that for each item on that list, what you're going to have is a really good sense of how to win. Because how to win is frequently not to make silly mistakes, not to let those mistakes stack up and stop you from accomplishing what you want to accomplish. So these are the six steps to the sequence. Number one, you've got to set your sights, have that clear target. Number two, make the mountain smaller, break it down into manageable milestones. Number three, lose the dead wood, Share the behaviours that aren't helping you, and share the bad actors that aren't helping you. Number four, plot your path. Figure out ways to find money, raise money, earn money, make money. Number five, travel in tribes, get into interest groups, get into communities of practice and actively participate in those groups. And number six, foreshadow failure. List out the things that could go wrong and then figure out how to prevent, repair, and recover from those things if they were to occur. If you take this six step sequence and you actually use it and map out each of those six steps, you're going to find that you have a lot more motivation, inspiration, and you will be taking action because you've broken things down in a way that it's clear. You will start at the place that makes the most sense with you and so long as you use that whole framework, you'll be able to use this to accomplish any goal. And as I said at the start, it's the middle of the year. So if you're a part of our mentorship and use this at the start of the year, go back to that plan. And see if it's still relevant and set a new one if it's not. A lot of things have changed in the last six months. Maybe some of those conditions, maybe your context has changed a lot. Come back to this plan and use it to be able to set the next part of the year to make sure that you either get back on track or continue to succeed and make progress along the way. If you've never heard of this sequence before, you can use this sequence to be able to make sure that from this point in the year to the end of the year, you really start to win. You start to tick some boxes when it comes to some of your financial goals. Now, I talked about a tool at the start of the episode for how you could start to apply this. We've put this into a really simple worksheet that you can download and if you want to download that worksheet and work your way through this episode as I explained it, it'll be really simple and obvious for you to do so. If you want that worksheet, just click down into the episode description of this episode. You'll see a link that says worksheet and click on that link. You'll be able to access that for free. So we've gone through the six step sequence. I've talked you through each, every single part. I've given you a tool. I really hope that you use this. And if you do use it and you find it helpful, I would love to know as well. There's comments that you can leave on these episodes. You can also participate in our community if you're a part of that. And I wish you the best of luck. Download that worksheet if you want it. Otherwise, see you in the next episode.