Episode 422: What do your next 10 years look like?
In this episode, Fiona dives into the importance of life and business planning over the next decade. She also talks about how to align personal goals with professional aspirations. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Importance of aligning business with life goals
Reflecting on future business growth
Forward planning
Balancing business growth with personal well-being
Strategies for avoiding burnout
The role of family, friends, and personal relationships in shaping life and business
Financial planning and its integration with life goals
Long-term personal and professional vision crafting
Planning for significant life milestones
Financial planning and budgeting
Creating a 10-year business plan aligned with life goals
Breaking down business plans into yearly, quarterly, and monthly tasks
Balancing life and business priorities
Steps to ensure business goals support life aspirations
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This is something that a lot of business owners look forward to, where do I want to grow my business? What am I doing? Who's the next hire? I don't know if it's genuinely aligned with their life. It's not like they're looking at their life. Where does my life want to go and then rearrange or reverse engineer their business to match their life? I think so often not I know, I'm just going to claim it. I know because I've been working with thousands of small business owners over the last almost 10 years many will focus on their business and then when you stop and ask them questions about their life and what that looks like, it's like I hadn't thought about that.
Welcome to episode 422 of the My Daily Business Podcast. Today is a good one. If you have the means, I would grab a notebook or open something on your computer. If you're driving or you're at the gym or somewhere else, then just listen and you can come back to the show notes anytime for any of our podcast episodes at mydailybusiness.com/podcast. For this one, it's 422, but you'll see it if you're looking around about when it came out because it'll be right at the top of the podcast page. Just a warning, get a pen and paper if you can or something digital because you'll want to take notes.
Before we get stuck into this big coaching episode, I want to acknowledge where I'm coming from and acknowledge the beautiful land and the custodians and traditional owners of that land, which in my part of the world is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that we get messages all the time about this podcast, which is so nice. Thank you so much. But I want to remind people that if you are looking for a template, a course, freebies and all of that, we have so much stuff on the My Daily Business website. You can just go to mydailybusiness.com along the top navigation. You can look at shops, courses, coaching packages, templates, eBooks, real books, and a whole bunch of free stuff under the free stuff navigation. Jump on over there. Always message us as well because we'll link things to you directly. But if you're ever looking for anything outside of this podcast like help, whether it's paid or free stuff that we offer, you can do that. We also have a Sunday email that you can subscribe to and we have thousands of small business owners that get that every single Sunday Australian time. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
I genuinely think that what I'm going to go through today can be one of the biggest wake-up calls in business and life. My Daily Business is about enjoying your business and your life on the daily. This is something that a lot of business owners look forward to, where do I want to grow my business? What am I doing? Who's the next hire? I don't know if it's genuinely aligned with their life. It's not like they're looking at their life. Where does my life want to go and then rearrange or reverse engineer their business to match their life? I think so often not, I think I know, I'm just going to claim it. I know because I've been working with thousands of small business owners over the last almost 10 years many will focus on their business and then when you stop and ask them questions about their life and what that looks like, it's like I hadn't thought about that.
You hadn't thought about it. But we are in such a capitalist society that so much of what we focus on is where I'm going. And even if you don't have a business, if you're in a career in an employed role, it's like where's my next step? Where's my next promotion? Where do I want to end up? Do I want my boss's job or my boss's boss's job? We're constantly looking at that and then where am I and how does my identity work when I become this or that or when I get my business to this many millions or there's so much caught up in it and yet I don't think that we spend enough time thinking about who am I and where is my identity in terms of my life?
What does that look like? How am I going to become the best mom? I can be the best partner, I can be the best daughter, I can be the best whoever for the people around me because that is genuinely the legacy that you're going to leave. Yes, we all have brands that we fall in love with and we have brands that have changed our lives, but the majority of the time if we think about getting to the end of our life, who will have changed it the most? It's the people around us. Our good friends, if you're lucky, good family members as well. It could be another parent from school that came into your life when your kid was in year seven and now your kids are grown and you're at each other's kids' weddings and it's that stuff that genuinely matters.
But you are listening to a business podcast, I'm bringing it back. Where am I going with this? What I want you to think about today is what the next 10 years look like. And not just from a business perspective though, we will get to that, but one of the questions that I go through with a lot of my clients is forward planning. Some of them are forward planning into an exit strategy, into somebody buying their business or buying into their business. Some of them are looking to expand that business and potentially license it globally. Some want to just stay in the business that they're in and make it work for them in a bit more of an efficient way or even scale right back. They know that in 10 years they want to be working less, they want to have fewer staff to manage.
We work on all of that together. But when I start looking at that, one of the biggest questions I ask is, where is your life in 10 years? Like what is happening in your life in 10 years? I recently had a wonderful client I've been working with for a while and we’re talking about strategy. They've got this, incredible innovative business and they started the call by saying, I need us to work on the strategic way forward, the path forward for this business in the next X amount of years. I work with people on strategy all the time and one of the things that we'll start with is looking at the etymology of the word. If you look at the etymology of the word strategy, it comes from the Greek word Stratos, which is like an army.
If you look at the whole word, it translates I guess to leading the army forward. If you think about your strategy in business and you think about where are the gaps or where is the biggest need for this army? I get that we have wars left, right and centre all over the world. I'm just using this as an example of what the word means. But if you think about where in my business does the army need to be pushed and start working on things? And what often happens is when I have this discussion with people they can easily bring out, its marketing or the profit or the systems or whatever. But if we keep going and I talk to them about where is your life? If you took that word strategy and looked at it as your life, what would be the biggest focus?
Where does the army need to set up camp and start infiltrating? Often it comes back to time, it comes back to I am exhausted, I am overworked, I don't have time, I don't have time to think, I don't have time to be with my family. I haven't taken a holiday in X amount of years. We look at that first because there's no point increasing all these other things in your business like, let's ramp up your marketing so you get even more leads so that even more people are coming to your business and you've got even more clients and things to deal with. If that is not the aim, the aim is to maybe in this case increase their systems and their triaging of clients and leads to make sure they're the right ones. Also to remove the amount of escalation that comes up to, in this case, the CEO of the company.
Just by starting with that first question or the first two questions, which is let's look at the etymology of the word strategy. Looking at your current business and where you want it to go. Where are the pain points? Where are the parts that you would attack first I guess with this army and you would lead the army too? And then the second point is, let's put your business to the side for one second. Let's look at your life for the next 10 years. Again using that word strategy, if you were to look at a strategic pathway for your life, where are the things that need attention most? Where are you sending in the army to work to infiltrate, investigate, analyse, get strategic, have a plan, all of that? Where are the parts of your life that need that?
In this case, when I was talking to the CEO, we then looked at that and then changed their strategy from what initially they had said when we talked about the word strategy and let's look at attacking the business to something completely different that is more in line with where they want their life to go. Because so often with business it is just pummeled into us to grow. And you only need to look at YouTube influencers that were huge recently coming out to say that they've taken a lot a year off or they've done something else because it was all too much. Or they built their business to multiple seven figures and yet their profit was crap because when they were building it they were also scaling it with more staff, more systems, more subscriptions, more everything.
Their life didn't improve. Yes, they financially from an outside perspective looked like they were killing it but inside they weren't very happy. That life question always has to go hand in hand as far as I'm concerned with your business, where is your life going and then what does that look like for the business? It might mean that we are not going to necessarily scale to the financial level that you had thought because currently, we've got a good profit margin and what if we did this or what if we changed out that person or what if we hired that other person or what if you fully stepped back and had more of an almost like a silent director role and you had this other person, then the business needs to bring in enough to cater for that and to still have profit and to still be giving you directors fees that will help you have the life that you want to have.
But too often people get focused just on business and not looking at life and you see it. I mean the number of people that have these like burnouts and then come back later and said even though I was out there publicly saying this and this behind the scenes it was all crap. I mean that is a story that you hear consistently. What I help and try and help people with and what I've done in my own business is to create a business that serves my life. I don't have to take a year or two years off. I've been burnt out. I've not burnt out because I have enough space, time and freedom in my life. Yes, certain parts of life and business get hectic and writing a second book on top of everything else.
Yes there were a a couple of months of very hard work and extra hours that we needed to put in, but that's not like I can hand on heart say that it's not the norm in my business. I am probably too chilled in my business in some regard, but I have so much time, I have so much time to myself and that is something that I've worked on ensuring happens in my business because I don't just run this business to at some point at 60 be able to have a life. I want to have a life right now. I want to live as I'm alive as JBJ says. Let's come back to you and your notes. The first thing I would love you to think about is in 10 years, one, will you have this business? If the thought of running your business for the next 10 years makes you feel physically sick or drained or exhausted, that is telling you a whole lot that is telling you, something's not working here or I'm not happy.
Or maybe you're just genuinely not that passionate or curious about what you do as a business and that's fine. Maybe you started the business when you were a lot younger or maybe you started the business when your life looked a lot different. Maybe you didn't have children, maybe you lived in a different place, maybe you had a lot more support, maybe it is time to think about, what's the next step or how does this business evolve if you want to still be a business owner or how do I sell this business or how do I exit it? Or maybe you want to go and get a job again and there's nothing wrong with that. The first thing is to ask yourself, will I still have this business in 10 years and how do I feel about that? And then you'd do a bit of time journaling on that.
The next thing, and I'm going through this quickly because it's a podcast, we've got a limited amount of time. But the next thing is to map out who is in your life in the next 10 years, where you live, and what life looks like. What does an average week look like? Importantly, things like ages. How old will you be in 10 years? How old if you have children, will they be if you have parents, how old are they If you have other family members that are important to you, how old are they If even things like dogs, and cats, trying to visualise and imagine what your life looks like in 10 years. I've done this with so many clients and I was just doing it the other day in my own life I tend to do this exercise for myself around my birthday and my birthday is in June, so it is around about this time that I do it.
I was looking I've got a son who's 11 at the moment and I was like in 10 years he's going to be 21. Who knows where he'll be living? When I was 21, I lived in London, I got a one-way ticket much to my mother's dismay when I was 20 and just packed my bags and I was like, I'm going to go live in London, I'm going to take over that place because I've got an arts degree. Anyway, came back after a couple of years but I have no idea where he's going to be at 21, but I know that in the next 10 years, I'm going to have to be parenting. I've already been parenting for the last 11 years, but this next 10 years is going to be hard. He's going to be a teenager, he's going to be going through more difficult times at school in terms of education, stress and pressure.
If he wants to continue with the sport that he's interested in, then that will bring in other things that we haven't had to deal with yet. Lots is happening. And then my other beautiful little son is starting school next year. In the next 10 years, he's going to become a teenager too and he's going to have to go through all of the school like he's at an age now, he's four, he doesn't read or write. He can write his name and a couple of things, but he's going to have that entire big learning and friendship issues and all the things that we've gone through already with our other son. Thinking about, these next 10 years, this is big my children will be both at high school, well one of them at 21, let's hope he's not still at high school then, but he may be at uni.
They're going to be like carving out who they are as people and becoming that and the friendships that they have in those teen years and early twenties will be massively impacting them. I mean I do think primary school friendships impact you as well, but that is important. As a parent, I am going to be heavily involved in the next 10 years when they're 21 to 31, maybe the parenting is not as heavily involved because they're off travelling the world or renting for the first time or maybe getting married or doing whatever. Yes, you're still involved but not in the same way as when they live under your roof. There's that part for me to think about in the next 10 years. I will be in my fifties. That is so scary. Honestly, I feel like I'm still in my twenties.
In 10 years, I'll be in my early fifties and that is scary because my dad had his first heart attack at 52. He continued to live until like, I think he was 83 when he passed away, but he had his first heart attack at 52. Physically I need to think about stuff like I've got heart disease on both sides. I've got cancer on my dad's side, I have lots of different health issues that came up for my parents and my uncles and other people in my family in their fifties. It's not like I can think I'm in my twenties, I've got to be looking after my health. I've talked about that a lot and I'm definitely in that zone at the moment for sure and have been for the last few years.
But that is something, even things like skin, I've been looking at my skin recently, and I'd be like it needs some work. If anyone's out there who likes work in that skin space, please get in touch with your tips. I'm like, I just look old. It's that. It's keeping up my fitness, it's keeping up my walks in 10 years, the beautiful dog that I take, one of the dogs that I take for walks, she's 14 and a half, she's not going to be here in 10 years. What does that look like? There's lots to think about but get excited about as well. I'm also looking at my marriage, in 10 years we'll have been together almost 30 years which is huge as well.
What does retirement look like for us and what do we do, where do we want to be and do we want to go and live overseas again? Like all of these things. It's looking at that also in our financial position in 10 years, do we want to have paid the house off? Do we want to have invested a lot more? Like what does that look like? That first part is to get clear and no one has a crystal ball. We don't know whether we're going to be in 10 years, but think about where would I like to be in 10 years. Where is my life going in 10 years? Also things like friendships. I know and a lot of people talk about this, that when you're in that time, whether you have children or whether you're just lots of your friends have children when they have young children.
I'm in that zone at the moment. It is harder to have those friendships, like to have time to meet friends and catch up with friends. And even if you do catch up sometimes it's hard to have just a conversation that keeps going without being interrupted all the time by children. In 10 years I'll be a teenager and an early 20 something maybe my friendships will be, I'll see a lot more people then maybe I'll be in more clubs and more like hobbies or like my mom was a great golfer. She was the president of the local golf club and she was obsessed with golf she had her golfing friends, she also had her Irish club friends and she had all these different groups. She'd gone back to uni, changed her career and became a social worker after working as a midwife and a psychiatric nurse for a long time in her forties she went back to uni and had four teenagers as well.
I don’t know how she did it. But anyway, then she had her social work group and she had like all these friendship groups and she put a lot of effort into her friends. We also are immigrants to this country. She didn't have any family here besides us, her immediate family. That might look different. Looking at your age, your finances, your lifestyle, your social, your economic, your friendships, all of that. What does that look like in 10 years? That's your life part. And you want to think about that and put some time and effort into it because then you're going to look at your business, how is your business going to support that life? For example, if I were to map out my children's lives, I might go, this year and this year my eldest is going to be in years 11 and 12, so do I want to be working less by that time?
Do I want to be doing a different offering in my business by that time that allows me to have a bit more space and time for his last two years of school so that I can be as supportive as I possibly can? It's looking at all of that. And not to say that you have to plan out every single part, but also things like making it exciting and fun. I was talking in my Group Coaching call recently about finances and talking about budgeting and our budget and I went into detail about things like our shares and a lot of stuff that I don't think people talk about openly enough as well. And this is the stuff that we do have conversations about in Group Coaching. If you've ever thought about getting into group coaching, we are opening it again very soon in July.
If you want to apply and get on the waitlist, you can go to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. But we were in Group Coaching, we were talking about this and one of the things I brought up was that my husband and I stayed in this incredible cave house in the Greek islands 20 years ago almost. We stayed there, we always said, because it was very romantic, it was very lovely. And then his parents decided to come with us at the last minute, which was lovely. Not as romantic as I thought it was going to be. But we always said when we hit 20 years married, we are going go back there, we'll take the kids with us and be this epic reminder of like, remember all of these things. We have always planned that.
We will be married for 20 years in a couple of years we want to go to Europe, we want to show the kids, the eldest was born in London, and we want to show him where he was born. We want to do the whole thing, go and eat pizza in Italy, like do the whole big European tour. We need to save for that. Yes, we may get to that year and decide, we've got enough money in the bank, we can just do it. But I would like to be proactive and be like, in that year we're going to do this big European tour. When in the year are we going to do it? We also want to go and travel a bit more of Australia. Which year are we going to do that? Next year I think we want to go to Sri Lanka with some friends.
It's like, when are we going to do that? And looking at our budgeting to make sure that that stuff happens. It doesn't just become this pipe dream of like remember we said we'd do this. I have all these different places in the world that I want to see. When are we going to do that? All of these things and putting them together can be exciting. You start looking at this and it gets you excited about what is possible. And then in terms of finances, which I'll get to in a second in terms of business as well, but with finances, there are so many incredible calculators out there that are exciting to look at. Like in Group Coaching, we went through one of them in compound interest and looked at things like shares and share portfolios and how much you can start with and then add every year.
If you did this for the next 16 years or the next six years or the next 20 years, what would you end up with? And just the genuine feedback from everyone in the group was like, I've not seen this before and now I'm excited. We have people in that group from their twenties to late forties and I think somebody in there is in their fifties, I don't know. That's exciting for people to look at and go, what's possible? But if you don't have these conversations, you don't start planning. Not that you have to plan everything, but to just get excited about the future. We don't do that enough in life. We do not. Whenever I look at my clients and we talk about these things, I would say the majority of them have not sat down and done that ever.
Maybe when they were in their twenties and they did a vision board or maybe now they still do a vision board, but they don't, the vision board is often for the business, it's how much money we're going to make or it's how what the event's going to look like or I'm going to get asked to speak at this thing or I'm going to write a book. It's all business-related, it's not life-related. That's the first part and that's an important part, the life stuff. Then once that you have more of a solid foundation through which to build the 10-year plan for your business. Then the business part. Coming back to that very first question, do you want to be in business in 10 years? If you do, how do you feel about that? That is going to dictate things.
If you were, as I said at the start, when you think about that, no way, then potentially you're not going to be in business in 10 years or your business is going to look very different. You want to figure out the life stuff first. What does the life stuff look like? Then the second half is, we're going to look at the business and we're going to look at it for the next 10 years. Now you're not going to look straight to year 10, you're going to divide up a page into 10 columns or 10 boxes and think about, in this next year what needs to happen in the next two years? What needs to happen? For example, when I was talking to the CEO, we were talking about potentially changing up some of the structure of their business. I had originally thought that that would happen within three to five years.
When we talked about it, they were like, “Nah, I'd need that to happen in the next two years.” I was like, “Okay, awesome. Let's push everything forward, what we've just talked about.” They have now a 12-month task to get certain things done in their business in the next 12 months. But they were so relieved about that, they're like, it doesn't have to be done tomorrow. But now once they have that 12-month deadline, then they can reverse engineer it to quarterly deadlines and then monthly deadlines and then weekly deadlines. That's the first starting point. But when you have those columns in 10 years, there might be huge events for you. Maybe your business is coming up to its 20th anniversary. That happens sometime in the next 10 years. That needs to be marked in other things like maybe you are going to expand, maybe you're licensing your business to different states or different countries.
That needs to be put in. Maybe you've got a shop and you are going to buy the shop next door or even buy the shop that you're in and stop renting it. And maybe you're like, my lease is up in five years and by that time. I'd like to be in a position to buy this property so that I don't have to lease it. Maybe you've got other plans, half of the shop is going to be turned into a cafe or something else. Putting those things into that plan is, important. But if you're finding it difficult to even know where to start, what I would do is each year of the business for the next 10 years, you would mark out, so you have 10 columns and if you were doing this in Excel sheet, which is how my brain works a lot of the time, you would have in the first column you would have what I'm about to say and then you would have the next 10 columns over.
In the first column, one of the things that can make this easier is to write out the five areas of business. For pretty much every business, whether your service, product, or experience, you can put these categories in. The categories are marketing, product, people, operations and finance. I've got those again, marketing product people, operations and finance. You would put those things in column A and then you would have, let's say if you're doing it this year, you would have 2025, 2026, 2027 up to 2034. Underneath each then you'll be like, marketing, what, we are going to launch a podcast and we're going to do it, but we're not going to do it this year. It's going to come out in 2025. When in 2025 is it going to come out? You might put that under marketing.
You might also decide that, what, we've been working with an agency for this amount of years, but within two years I'd love to have somebody full-time in the business who's taking over that work from the agency. Or equally, you may have somebody in marketing and you're like, the succession plan is that they would move up to more of a head of marketing role and we would get an agency in, so the agency will come in in 2026, this person who's currently a marketing specialist is going to move up. They need some training they need to upskill so they can get into that head of marketing role in two years. What do they need? Under each of these, as I've just talked about under marketing, you would be putting in your ideas. You may not have an idea for every single year, but it's giving you a roadmap, a bit more of an idea of like, where is this going?
Let's say in your life examination you had decided that, my child is starting school in 2027, let's say. You might decide, that I need to get to a point where the business is running pretty much without me so that I can be present in their first year of school. Not that you need to not be working, of course, you can work and your children go to school, the majority of people live like that. But you might decide at the moment, one of the biggest pain points or one of the times sucks in your business is that you are doing all the marketing. You might want to employ somebody in 2026 and then by 2027 you've completely stepped back from the marketing. You'll be thinking about what in my life came up for the 10 years and is there anything that I need to then map into the business because of that?
For example, let's say you want to take a sabbatical you might put that in, in two years from now, I want to take six months and I'm going to take a full sabbatical. What happens between now and that time is X, Y, Z. You might put under the people category, these people need to be hired under the marketing category, this stuff needs to be automated under the finance category, this amount of profit we need to be building up to this profit percentage in the business so that I can take that break. Maybe we need to restructure some of the HR or some of the people and the succession plan for people so that I can take that six months off. Looking at the next 10 years from a perspective of firstly, most importantly, what I want my life to look like in that 10 years.
Then mapping out those 10 years at a high level using the categories of marketing, product people, ops and finance. Ops is operations I should have said that. Your marketing can be all parts of your marketing. When I say marketing, I never mean just social media. If that's not clear enough already, all the parts of your marketing people is your HR, your succession planning, your hiring, your KPIs, all of those things. Your product can be your product, your service or both or experiences or whatever it is that you sell. Your operations are your logistics and it's your operations, it's your systems, your processes, and all of the resources that are required from say a tech perspective or a warehousing perspective or whatever it is that creates the smooth operations of the business. And then you've got your finances.
Your finance might be, I would love for the business to be turning over such a profit that my director's fees or my wage or whatever way that you pay yourself is going to increase or that I can retire my partner and they come into the business or your parents or whatever it is. Putting all of those things in, maybe you are thinking, well my child is a teenager now, so I would love them to work part-time in the business and learn this and this because maybe they have expressed an interest in potentially taking over your business at some point. Or even just having them in the business so that they can learn a lot more about business. If that's an opportunity for them to know that having a business might be a path forward for them in life rather than always having to go corporate or get stuck into a nine-to-five.
Not that there's anything wrong with nine to five, but for some people, a business is where they should be when they want to start their working career. Other people need to be in the career path and employed for other people to learn things. But you might decide in that finance or people category, you've got a child that is amazing at what they do and you'd love to bring them in and start putting them on the payroll. That is it for today, thinking about what the next 10 years look like in your life and then how your business reflects those life goals. I see way too many people put all the priority in their life on their business and not on their life, the relationships that they're building with their family, on who they are as a person who's their identity outside of having a business.
It's hard because all we're ever asked, whenever you meet people, what do you do? What do you do for a living as if that's all we are? It's not. Even as somebody who loves my business, I love what I do. I'm incredibly lucky to have this business. I've worked hard for this business as well, but I love what I do. I could do this 24/7, I could work all weekend, I could work every evening. I'm interested in what I do, I'm curious. I watch a lot of videos and documentaries, I read a lot of books. But I also equally read a bunch of other books that have nothing to do with business. I watch a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with business. I talk to lots of friends who don't have businesses. You have to have a balance in life.
I think that for me a huge influence on that mindset is losing my parents early. Also one of my best friends died when I was 21 in a car accident. Losing both of my parents in my thirties has driven me home that you can have all the money at the end of your life. What's it worth if you don't have your health or you can work your a** off? What's it worth if you don't have a great relationship with your parents or family? I've seen people regret not talking to their parents before their parents passed away. I've seen people go through huge life issues later in life. Some people need to get divorced for sure there's no award for staying in a marriage that you shouldn't be staying in. But in other cases, some people have put their business so far forward that they've neglected relationships like their spouse in their life.
I have talked to people who have been crying on coaching calls because they know that they've put their business above every single other thing in their life and it's impacted them negatively because that wasn't how they wanted their life to go. This idea of like, where do you want your life to be in the next 10 years and then how do you get your business to help support that journey is so important. In this world where it seems to be so much about how much money you are going to make how quickly you can make it and how big your following can get and work. Here are 27 ways to get 50 reels done tomorrow. We are not those people, we're not machines. In life I think that being good people has a good impact on the world, leaving it a better place than you found it, but also have incredible relationships, deep, beautiful relationships that when you do pass on and we all will, that you've left some legacy with people that you've had the time to listen to them and be present.
That is it. Thanks for coming to the podcast. If you want to go through this in text format if you weren't able to write notes or take anything yourself, you can see a full transcript at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/422 and it's the middle of the year. This is a perfect time to do this. As I said, this is roundabout my birthday time. I do this every year around my birthday. I have my old 10-year plans and it's lovely because sometimes I look through them and I'm like tick that one off, tick that one off, tick that off. It's awesome to look back and be like, wow. And also sometimes I look back and think that was something that I thought was important and it's not that important to me now.
We grow, we evolve, we change. These are not locked in a set in concrete and that's why you revisit them every year. But it's also something to keep in mind and be like, where do I want to go? Where do I want to see in the world? What do I want to do? What do I want to be? How do I want to enjoy my life? Whilst you can, and whilst you're at the age potentially where you have better health than when you are getting older. I will leave it there for now. I would love to know what you are going to do about what you've learned today. What stood out for you? Maybe you've done this thing before. What is it brought up for you? I started my whole business because I did a workshop in which they did not what the next 10 years look like, but just what the next year look like.
I remember I put everything in there and it wasn't that fancy. I just wanted that life so badly. I remember the woman who ran the workshop said to me, “No one's standing in your way, except you.” I was shocked as they said, and I just was like, “You are so right. Nobody is standing in the way except me.” The things I wanted were not crazy out-there goals. That's what I did. I took a workbook from that workshop and I think we went to Bali like a week later for a holiday. I spent a lot of time mapping out, I want this life and I'm here right now, what's the bridge to get from where I am to where I want to be? I took six months of planning that out, meeting with people, figuring out what my business would do, and figuring out how much money I could make, like locking contracts in doing it all.
And then I left and I haven't looked back and when did I leave? I left at the very end of 2015 and I started this business then and locked in my first client before I left because I needed money to come in from the minute I started. I didn't have some trust fund or some five investment properties to keep me going. I had to earn money from the day I left the other job. This stuff does help, it does work and it's important. That is it for today's podcast episode. If you found this useful, if it's given you something to think about, I would love it so much if you could leave a review. It helps other people find this podcast and find this particular episode. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time. Bye.
