Setting Lofty Goals While Making Sustainable Changes

Whether you're part of big business, a small, locally-owned business, or an individual setting and striving for your resolutions, the threshold of passing from one year to the next sparks a lot of latent energy for most people.

Businesses often use the start of the new year to look forward to setting lofty goals, although the year often cycles around the financial calendar and need not be based on January 1. It's in the sustainable little changes that we see our greatest goals accomplished.

Colleen Hunt gets into this on the FlowCast this week. With her business partner at Naturally Nested, she has lofty goals for her young business but is focussed on what she can do at the macro scale to keep moving forward.

She first had a vision for what the future held for herself and her business last year when she dreamed up the idea to hold an exhibition where people could go to meet the business owners providing different wellness opportunities in the city, supporting not only her own business but the whole health and wellness community in Peterborough. Step by step, Colleen gathered the sponsors and support of other businesses to make it happen at the start of March of this year for the inaugural Peterborough Wellness Expo.

The bigger goals and the steps to get there will be unclear to you in the beginning. It takes practice and experience to figure out how you're going to accomplish what you've dreamed up. But the more that you can look at what sustainable changes you can make right now, the better you'll be at doing things that stick long-term.

As Colleen says, picture it like this: if you look at making the smallest, sustainable change once per week, you can build up many new habits over the course of the year but it will feel vastly different than the overwhelm of trying to do it all at once.

52 new changes or habits essentially makes you a new person in a year.

It's the same when looking to be 1% better. Strive to be just one percent better each day or each week and you'll 100% different before you know it.

We all envision this perfect future life and the simplest way of achieving the perfect future life is to start with a perfect day, and then a perfect week, a perfect month, and so on.

To get to the perfect day you just have to start by making your day 1% better.

So get in the routine of reflecting on your day before you go to sleep and ask yourself how you can be 1% better tomorrow?

Passion Over Profits

Profits are essential to running a business long-term but if you base your model off of profit first, you're going to have a hard go of it when things become messy.

I am fortunate to get to speak to many different people at different stages on the business journey through the FlowCast and in having started Flow Spa this year. One thing that stands out across the board is where people as it relates to passion versus profits.

Particularly if you're starting a business from the ground up, passion is crucial in my opinion. You certainly can build a business solely around profits in the monetary sense but be prepared for the grind to feel that much harder. This is a topic that Si Grobler and I got into on the FlowCast this week.

Si is working on his MBA and teaches a university course in social enterprise; a different way of operating revenue-generating businesses.

Public companies over the last forty years have been all about maximizing shareholder value. Pumping up the stock prices superseded virtually everything else so that the shareholders were kept happy.

Times are changing though.

Consumers are demanding more out of the companies that they support and this has led to a new lean towards maximizing stakeholder value. There's a lot of greed at the top in big business so it's going to be a long road to see this shift actually come into place.

Fortunately, more entrepreneurs are getting started with a passion-first perspective and as the businesses of the past decade or two continue to grow and spread their own newfound wisdom, more businesses will be inclined to follow suit.

So if you're looking to get into business and see it as something to be passionate about, there's plenty of help to be found in your local communities.

Listen to this week's episode of the FlowCast for a deeper discussion of passion and community with businesses.

Be Content, Not Complacent

Envy is a pernicious emotion.

It’s harmful to your sense of well-being, your reputation, your business, and your flow, which is why we’re talking about it on this week’s episode of the FlowCast.

Much like comparison, most of us realize that we should work on feeling envy less often and less intensely as an emotion.

Listen in as we discuss the negative repercussions of envy on flow in this week’s podcast.

There were a few key takeaways that you can work on implementing right away to eliminate envy:

• Create before Consume.

  • Box off your creative work at a time where it won’t be influenced as much by outside sources.

• Know what you actually want for yourself.

  • Is that shiny thing your friend has going to make you happier?

• Find contentment in the present moment but don’t get complacent.

  • Mindfulness and flow will help you to overcome a lot of negative emotions including envy.

Find out more about these tips and other strategies by tuning in to the FlowCast.

The Power of Success

“Did you know that Tony Robbins burns 11,000 calories a day when on stage?”

It’s hard to imagine, so I knew I had to see this kind of performance for myself.

Bob told me that if I ever get the chance to see Tony Robbins live, it’s well worth the cost of admission.

Last week I had the chance to make this long-term goal a reality as Tony Robbins was the keynote speaker at the Power of Success seminar in Toronto. If you’re at all familiar with Tony, his stage presence is exactly what you have seen, whether from a seminar clip online or the Netflix documentary I Am Not Your Guru.

I had a great experience and felt energized for the entirety of the 14-hour day and some of the most valuable lessons that I learned from Tony are the topic of this week’s FlowCast.

Give it a listen, there are many great lessons to learn from it around the topic of success and peak performance.

This Fighter Used His Emotional Mastery To Beat An Opponent At His Own Game

I recently sat down to talk to my friend Mike Doherty on the FlowCast about his recent wins in muay thai, including an IKF World’s title.

This is a powerful and inspiring interview and I hope you give it a listen and enjoy!