2022 is over as far as I am concerned, but before we fully leave it in the dust, here is a journaling exercise about 2023 to bridge the gap. If you answer each of these questions (as briefly or fully as you would like), you will enter 2023 with more clarity, direction, and, most importantly, perspective.

If you are running an online business, I am willing to bet that you have had at least one launch fail. We all have. You tease it on your insta weeks in advance. You offer value and freebies in advance of your big offer. Then, with gifs of confetti in tow, you open wide the doors to your membership/course/program/app AAANNNNDDDDD….

There are two types of people, or rather, people can be put into one of two categories. In one group, there are the people who primarily believe that things happen to them, that their fate is inherently out of their control, that luck, circumstance, and the actions of others dictate the way their life is going to play out. In contrast, an individual with an internal locus of control believes that they have the agency, that it is their actions and decisions that change their life. Essentially, those with an internal locus of control believe that they have the power to drive their own destiny. We all exist on a spectrum of how much weight we put on each perspective.

Nearly every person I talk to “hates sales.” There is this icky sticky feeling in the pit of your stomach when you actually have to ask someone to pay you for the product you worked so hard to develop. You need to stop feeling like a sleazebag whenever you start to head towards the selling part of the equation. Really, you do. Your business cannot flourish until you get over your sales aversion. You are, literally, preventing yourself from helping the people you have chosen to serve. 

You spent all day on a Tuesday schlepping yourself from a mediocre-coffee-place to a slightly-too-cold-conference-room to your 7th favorite casual happy hour spot and back home. You now have 23 new business cards and 10 pages of notes on all the “great” connections you made. A day of networking well done, and yet three days later you still have heard from absolutely no one. No referrals, no “let’s get coffee,” and certainly no “I’m interested in working with you.” Before you get angry at all those people who didn’t reach out to you, let’s take a look at what mistakes you might be making.

Some days The List is longer than the day.

We all have our moments (or months) when our to-do list gets too long, too big, too scary we begin to take on the qualities of a squirrel halfway across the street. Frozen in the headlights halfway in between two tasks (or 4 you are trying to multitask) is not the way to be productive. Screw productivity, it’s no way to be happy.

I have a signature piece of marriage advice that I give when my friends get married. "Remember that you are in love. Remember that you are in love and act like it." Too often people get married and then stop acting like they are in love. They stop holding doors, flirting, staring lovingly, dating, and sometimes even being nice to each other. No wonder people fall out of love when they stopped acting like they were in love a long time ago. I am not sharing this for the marriage advice though, but rather because this is also great advice when you own your own business.

With my clients and my own business, I work hard to intentionally create a rhythm to the year that incorporates the key elements of prep, push, and replenish. Just like the intentional rhythm that my members experience in the Full Focus Entrepreneur membership, this rhythm is designed to prevent the pitfalls that we all fall into when we let our time go without the guidance of intentional design and planning. Right now my clients are getting ready for our mid-year goal check-in. We do a goal review at the end of each quarter, but the halfway point of the year is particularly important. I created these intentional check-ins because I know (first hand) that a year left to its own devices can be really ineffective, disheartening, and, honestly, not enjoyable. So without further ado, may I present the shape of a shitty year.

I will be the first to admit that business coaches are a dime a dozen. Poke your head into any business Facebook group or networking event and you are bound to find at least one. As soon as Google and Facebook figure out that you have a business, you’ll be constantly plagued with “buy my online program” popups. Not only are they everywhere, but coaches are also largely unregulated. Even certification programs are basically a rubber stamp that puts out cookie-cutter business advice out there (which clearly doesn’t work or there would be a much lower business failure rate). I have to admit to being highly skeptical of my own industry. So many of my clients and potential clients come to me with a bad coaching experience under their belts and leaving a bad taste in their mouths. One bad coaching experience can leave you with Bad Business Coach Baggage.

In 2019, I founded Full Focus Entrepreneur with a simple vision: to build a program and a place for mission-driven entrepreneurs and visionaries to overcome their chaos. A place to coach my clients away from the distractions of Facebook, free from the “ticker-tape” of neverending to-dos that rob entrepreneurs of their agency, and rooted in empowering mission-driven entrepreneurs to be the business owner they wanted to be and build the empire they were out to create. The Full Focus Entrepreneur Membership program is both turnkey and tailor-made and here are the five ways you can use it.

Every time NASA sends up a ship, satellite, or probe, its a launch, not just their first launch back in 1958. Now sure generally the news only gets really excited when they are sending people up or headed way far out, but nevertheless, NASA is launching all the time. As business owners, we think of the very FIRST launch as our only launch but businesses are launching all the time.

Creating your own podcast is the happy medium that a lot of people are looking for, more engaging than a blog post, less production than a video, podcasts deliver on every front. The major advantage of podcasting is that despite the feeling that there are tons of podcasts out there, the playing field is WAY less crowded than blogging or youtube.