Transcription
Waiting 12 whole months to achieve your goal is now a thing of the past. You can completely destroy your old identity in 12 weeks and become unrecognizable after you use the tactics and concepts I'm going to discuss in this video today. You're going to be able to get more done in the next 90 days than people do the entire year. So if you're ready for that, let's get into the video. But before that, I'm Tabia Wagan. Thank you so much for watching this video. Now let's jump right in.
So I know on YouTube right now, everyone that's doing goal-set videos and self-development videos are talking about a 12-week year versus a 12-month year, and it is for a good reason. So where this concept is coming from? It's coming from the book, *The 12-Week Year*, and I'll put a picture on the screen so you know which book I'm talking about and links in the description where you can get it. So I read the book, and this is not going to be a summary of the book. So if you thought this was going to be a summary, it is not a summary by any means, but I do need to tell you guys some key points from the book so that as we progress through this video, you can understand like why I'm doing things the way I'm doing it. Okay.
So the long and short of it is this: when people do annual planning, they perceive that they have this abundance of time. So from January looking to December, it looks like, "Oh my gosh, I have 12 whole months to achieve just four goals or three goals." So people tend to take the entire year to achieve goals that could have been done in a week, that could have been done in 3 months, 2 months, etc. So the idea of having a 12-month goal, to the authors, is too much of a time stretch for people because they let the goal take up the entire year, and it could have been achieved sooner, and more could have gotten done in the year.
So the issue with annualized planning also is that it comes with a lot of procrastination. So someone in January, they were supposed to do something; they say, "Well, I have February, March, and so forth to do this thing." Then those times pass, and they say, "Well, I still have 6 months," and then they get into the 6 months, and then the goal keeps pushing back, back, until putting it off and "I'll do it later" turns into you end up doing it never. Success loves speed. So when you plan for the year, that urgency is not there. And then when it gets to the last three months of the year, it is known statistically that companies break records; people get the most they've ever done from October to December than the entire year. Why? Because they know that time to track their progress and see if they've accomplished anything for the year is coming shortly. People get this burst of energy, it seems, because it's coming down to the deadline that they usually do their reflection and do their scoreboard keeping. So when you plan for the year, this reflection is so far away. By the time you start feeling urgency, by the time you're ready to start applying pressure, the year is already finished. So that is the issue with annualized planning: you have too much time to think you need to do anything now; you push everything later, later, later, like I said, until it turns into never, because of this perceived abundance of time.
So the solution the authors came up with in the book, *The 12-Week Year*, is to have 12-week years where you treat every 12 weeks like it's a new year. So what that does is, instead of thinking you have an entire year to achieve each goal, you know that you have only 12 weeks to get it done. So now you have this sense of urgency, 'cause you have 90 days to basically accomplish things that you probably would have even put over a year. Now I'm going to get into something later, 'cause not all goals can be achieved in 12 weeks versus a year. I'm going to show you how to handle such situations, but for now, let's just focus on the core concept of annualized thinking versus 12-week planning and goal setting.
Now, the other reason why the 12-week year is more effective than annualized planning is that the time for self-reflection comes way quicker. So instead of the end of the year in December when it's too late to do anything about the lack of results, you're doing it in 12 weeks. So each week you have to score yourself based on your level of productivity based on the task that you said you were going to do; if you had gotten it done, yes or no. So each week you're giving yourself a score. I'm going to pop something on the screen and show you what mine looks like, 'cause I do it in Notion, so it's digitalized; I don't have to calculate anything, but you personally can work out the percentages yourself and do it on paper, but I did it in Notion because it's easier for me. So every week you have to score yourself based on what you had gotten done. So every single week you're basically reflecting: "Am I dropping the ball? Am I actually doing what I said I was going to do? Am I actually being productive?" So while they're scoring themselves at the end of the year, you're doing that every week. If someone is monitoring and tracking their progress weekly versus yearly, who is going to do better? Because you have more opportunity to see that you're not doing what you're supposed to do and you're not achieving anything week by week versus at the end of the year. So if you want a good 12-week score overall, you have to have a high score every single week, and in order to have a high score every single week, you have to get a high score every single day.
Now, this is something that a lot of people miss when it comes to the 12-week year that I personally picked up on is that the author wasn't necessarily trying to get people to focus on mastering 12 weeks; what he was trying to tell people is to master the moments and to master the day. His emphasis was really on people should be mastering the day; that's why you have a weekly score versus just one 12-week score. Every week he allows you to score yourself because what he's trying to do is to get you to master the day so that at the end of the week you have a productive week. And the recommended score he says that people need in order to achieve their goals, based on his clients and other people that he pulled his statistics from, is that you need at least a score of 80% if by the end of the 12 weeks you're going to hit your goal. So every week you need an 80% score if you're going to achieve your goals. I was a bit worried, to be honest, if that little summary of the book in a nutshell would be too long before we get into like what I really want to say in this video, but hopefully you guys understand the concept of a 12-week year versus an annualized year and what are the benefits and why you want to have a 12-week year versus a 12-month year.
Now it's time for us to move on with the video. If you are sold on the concept of a 12-week year, now you need some 12-week goals. Now this is how you're going to set your 12-week goals in three easy steps. I'm going to put some visual aids on the screen while I talk so that you guys can understand the process as I'm describing it. From my head, I want you to do a little imagination activity for me. I want you to go to the end of the year—yes, I mean the end of the year—and I want you to envision the version of yourself that you wanted to meet at the end of the year. Now this person, I want you to ask her or him, "What have you accomplished this year?" Whatever you want the accomplishments to be this year, I want you to write them down, all of them, for now.
So I intentionally said to ask your future self what he or she had accomplished and not to envision what your dream life looks like at the end of the year because a lot of people, they tend to get carried away with this whole envisioning your dream life. Because a lot of people dream—like, in all honesty and being very serious—their dream life is to wake up at 12:00 in the afternoon, anywhere between 12:00 and 3:00, after they partied all night before that and got drunk, and they wake up in the afternoon and they eat pizza and go on the road to go do shopping, like spend like 10 grand in Louis Vuitton, and then come back home and watch Netflix all day and eat ice cream, and then, you know, spend some time with their family and laugh and be happy and check their bank account and there's a million dollars. Like, that is the dream life of a lot of people. And even though it might sound ridiculous when I said it out loud, that is what a lot of people would envision for themselves—themselves shopping, going on vacation, all these highs. I didn't ask you about those things; those things are byproducts of doing certain things and of being a certain type of person. So I'm not asking you about byproducts, 'cause when people tell you to envision your dream life, that's what you do: you envision yourself in all these mentally stimulating situations that excite you, but at the same time, how much proper context does that give you for a goal? So I ask you to go to the end of the year and look at your achievements and come back. So we're not looking for dreams; we're looking for actual goals, things that you want to say, "I've done this this year; I accomplished this this year." Okay, whether that's to buy a house, buy a car, enroll in school; whether that's to get a certain average in school or have a certain GPA; whether that's to get your own apartment; we want something tangible, okay? Whether it's to save an amount of money, whether it's to pay off a certain amount of debt, okay? Whether it's to grow to a certain amount of subscribers or to post a certain amount of content if you're a content creator. So we need goals, actionable goals, things that you can look at and say, "Did you achieve it? Yes or no." Not lifestyle; lifestyle is a byproduct of achieving your actual goals. So yeah, once you have done that and you have written all of them out, now I want you to do something for me.
So for each and every one of these goals, I want you to categorize each and every one of them. So the first thing I want you to do is to say whether it's a high-priority goal, medium-priority goal, or a low-priority goal. After you have put beside each of them whether it's high, low, medium priority, then I also want you to state if it's an ongoing goal or if it's a one-time achievement goal. The ongoing goal would be something that it's not a standalone goal that you can achieve in just 12 weeks; it is something that you have to split across more than one 12 weeks in order for it to be done realistically. So, for example, if you said that you're going to post 52 YouTube videos in a year, 52 YouTube videos cannot be posted in 12 weeks, or else you plan to not sleep, eat, or do anything else, right? So one-time achievement goals are things that you can only do once or you only need to do it once. So something that's a one-time achievement goal would be something like enroll into Cosmetology School; you only need to enroll once. If you want to purchase a car, buying the car is a one-time achievement; you're not going to keep buying the car, do you understand? So another example of an ongoing goal could be, "I want to save $122,000 the entire year." So you would say, "Okay, $3,000 is what I need to focus on for the next 12 weeks."
So now that your goals are properly categorized, I want you now to select what's going to go into your first 12 weeks. In a year, there are four 12-week cycles, but for now, you want to pick out the goals that are high impact, which would be your high-priority goals that are also a one-time achievement, and your ongoing goals are high priority. If it's that you end up with a lot of high-priority goals, what I want you to do is take the highest of the high-priority goals and put them between the first 12-week cycle and the second 12-week cycle, right? So the point is you want to keep moving the high-impact goals higher up. So let's say this year one of your goals was to buy a piano; that is low priority for you and it is a one-time achievement; you would push that to maybe the last quarter. You want to put your least important goals until the last quarter or the last 4-week cycle. Can you imagine if within the first 12 weeks of this year you have already achieved your most impactful goals? Like, you don't got to wait until the end of the year to hurry and try to get some stuff done to say you did something; that is the point of us doing this, guys. We want to take out our high-impact goals, put them in the first 12 weeks, the closest ones to when you're watching this video, 'cause not everyone's going to watch this video at the same time; some of you are going to watch this by the second quarter, and that would be your first 12 weeks.
So now that you know which goals you're going to be working on in the next 12 weeks, if one of your high-priority goals is to grow to 10K followers on Instagram in the next 12 weeks, then what you could do is say, "This is my strategy: one, I'll post frequently and consistently; two, I will engage my audience by going live; three, I will buy shoutouts," etc., etc., right? So you would list, "Okay, these are the strategies I will use," because whatever goal you have, you need a strategy. Okay, strategy is what lets your goals happen, and this is what I want you to understand. I want you to look at your strategy as an hypothesis. Now, probably didn't say that right, but I'll put the word on the screen. So basically, the reason why I say hypothesis is because you believe that if you do these things, you're going to get the result that you want, but that is not a fact, right? It can be proven that what you wrote down is an effective strategy and it works and it is true, and it can also, in time, prove that it's not a great strategy and you do need to change it. Now I want you to look at it this way: the goal remains the same, right? But you can change the strategy. Imagine this: you plan to go to a museum; that's the goal, but in order to get there, you planned that you were going to drive, but the morning something was wrong with your car, right? So now you need to be flexible; you need to pivot. So you could say, "Okay, this is not working; the plan is not working to have used my own car, so let me call a friend or let me call an Uber or let me take public transportation." So the museum is still the goal, but the method of you getting there, the strategy of you getting there, it had changed. So that is how you need to be when it comes to your goals; you need to be flexible with the strategy and stubborn about your goals. A lot of people, what they do is they are stubborn about their strategy but flexible with the goal. So if they had a goal of reaching 10,000 followers on Instagram, what they're going to do is they're going to say, "Well, I'm posting one time per week and I'm not getting the results, so maybe the goal was unrealistic; let me change the goal first; let me put the goal to 1,000 followers for the next 12 weeks." That is not what I'm recommending. Leave the goal where it is, being that it's realistic, being that it's attainable; you do know you have the skills and potential to do it. If you believe you may have gone a bit overboard, then you can adjust the goal, but do not adjust the goal before you adjust the strategy. This strategy that you put down, it is not concrete; it is not a fact that it will work; it is just an hypothesis; you're just saying, "After I do this, this, and this, I hope for this outcome to be true." It can be proven to be true or not true.
The other thing you want to do after you have your strategy is you need your action plan or your tactics, as the book would have called it. So you want to say, "Okay, for week one, these are the tactics to achieve this goal; week two, this is the tactics," or you could call them tasks; I like to call them tasks. In Notion, I call them tasks, and I have a task database, and so I will list out for the week this, this, and this, and this is what I want to accomplish, and based on if I have done them, that is how I score myself between 0% to 100%. You have your goals on the top of the hierarchy; then you have your strategy; from your strategy, you're going to have your tasks that you will do to bring the strategy to life. Now a lot of people like to romanticize a plan, but the plan is not what allows you to achieve the goal; it is execution. A person that is busy executing, even if they don't have a big plan and they're just learning and adapting as they go, they will do better than someone who has a plan who is not executing. So you want to make sure that you prioritize execution over planning. We believe in having a good plan; I believe in having a good strategy, but remember execution is just as important as having a good strategy. Okay. The one thing I don't want to go over your head, and I was assuming that everyone would know this, but I'm just going to say just in case someone doesn't know: you're not going to plan your entire year in 12-week batches all at once; you're only going to plan 12 weeks at a time. You can have an idea that the first 12 weeks or the first cycle, I want to achieve these things; second cycle, I want to push these things over there; the third, this. You can have a general idea, but you don't want to plan out the entire year. A lot of you, you don't even know what's going to happen in the next 24 hours, much less to know what's going to happen the entire year. So we want to stay away from planning the entire year in January, February, etc.; we want to just focus on the 12 weeks ahead of us.
Now you know what a 12-week year is; you have a sense of urgency; you have your goals, your plan, your strategy, your tactics, but there is something else that can get in the way of you achieving your goals, and that is your unbrand behavior. What is an unbrand behavior? So when we say something is unbrand, it means that it matches our reputation; it matches our identity. So that's a business term. So if I see Starbucks selling coffee, that is so on-brand. If I see Louis Vuitton selling something for $110,000, $77,000, that's on-brand. However, if you go to Starbucks one day and you see them with yellow cups and they're serving burgers and fries and their logo is now of a sun instead of a mermaid, that is off-brand; that is a rebrand. So when a person says, "I want to be unrecognizable; I want to rebrand," that means you have to change things that you used to identify as or with; your old reputation cannot serve you if you're going to effectively rebrand. So a lot of you guys, your reputation now, what is so on-brand for you is to procrastinate. What is so on-brand for you right now is to wake up very, very late. What's on-brand for you is to put things off until the last minute. What's on-brand for you is to start things and not finish. What's on-brand for you is to have big dreams and ideas, but you don't try to achieve any of them. What's on-brand for you is to write down and romanticize your goals and plans but never execute.
So what I want you to do right now is to really take a hard look at yourself and what your current brand is; what would people say about you, and what don't you like about yourself? This is the—you could write things that you like as well, 'cause it, you know, you don't want to change everything about yourself, now love, right? So you want to just take out what is relevant right now, mostly like what is your brand right now; how would you describe yourself as a person? Because how are you going to rebrand when you're not even conscious of what your now brand is? Okay. Secondly, I want you to do this little activity; like, listen, when I say to do this physically, I mean do this physically; get a pen and paper, even after this video, 'cause I know a lot of y'all are like, "Girl, if you think I'm going to go get a pen and a paper right now, you must be smoking something," but I'm not, okay? I'm telling you there is power in this. I want you to take a pen and paper, and I want you to write down every self-sabotaging way that you have in you. So how I did it was I use my journal; it's like a diary with a key; I got it on Amazon; let me show it to you, girl; let me show you; let me show you. So I got it, girl. So this is my journal; it has a key, 'cause you know people be nosy. I have this journal, and I write it in the perspective as though I'm writing it to God, because if I write coming from me, it would probably start getting a little ghetto and wild in there with the curse words, etc. Like, I'm just being real; I'm just being real. So when I write it to God, you know I got to be cutesy; I got to keep it cute, and other things I have to be honest, 'cause I write it as if I'm writing it to the Lord. I literally address him and I'm like, "Okay, this is what happened," as if he doesn't already know, but what it does for me, it makes me write it in a way where it's like I have a witness, which is God, and I have to speak the truth. So only the truth is in this because you can't lie to God, 'cause he already knows everything; it makes no sense. So I'm writing my honest feelings, etc., what's happening without it being exaggerated or downplayed, because come on, it's God. So I'm writing to God when I write in this, and one of the things that I did that was so powerful that I have to tell you guys to do it for the next 12 weeks: I wrote down all my self-sabotaging ways in a journal entry to God one of those days, and it was almost three pages of me just describing the different ways in which I sabotage myself, and it was a real eye-opener for me. Like, I've been knowing my self-sabotaging ways, but seeing it on paper and writing it bold and plain, "This is how I'm sabotaging myself," whenever I see myself doing it from that day forward, I know what it is; I said, "This is self-sabotage kicking in." So one of my self-sabotaging ways, to be transparent with you, is that I'm motivated by results. Results for me is like an energy booster; my favorite animal is me when I'm winning, okay? I can work all day; I cannot care about TV; I cannot care about nothing; I could just lock in, but that's when the results are good. When the results are bad, I tend to not want to do the thing; I don't have any energy; I tend to procrastinate; everything about it annoys me; I got to do this for it; uh, I got to, you know. So everything about the things annoys me when I'm not getting the results that I want; I procrastinate the most, like I said, when I'm not getting the results that I want. So that's one of my self-sabotaging ways: I'm motivated by results, and so the problem with that is sometimes you get results fast, sometimes you get it at a normal speed, and sometimes it's delayed or it takes a bit longer. Because something takes longer doesn't mean it's never going to happen, but if you're the type…
Of person that you're not going to give it your 100%, because you don't see the results, then you're not going to get to the point where you actually attain the results that you want. So I recognize that that is a self-sabotaging way. So whenever I do something now and I don't see the immediate results and I feel like I want to procrastinate or I don't want to take it seriously, I said, okay, that is one of my self-sabotaging ways coming up; that is one of my self-sabotaging ways right. So that is the power of doing it. But I always knew, a part of me always knew that I was sabotaging myself, but when I explained it and wrote it down—like, this is what I'm doing to sabotage myself—and I do need to read it back again, cuz it's been like a few months since I've done that, and I need to reread it again and remind myself, because I'm telling you, when you look at it and you see it and you explain it when it's happening, you have the power to stop it because you're facing it; it's no longer hiding in the back of your mind. Like you have literally took the time to say, these are the things that I do to sabotage myself, and I'm not going to do them anymore, right?
If you're a Praying girly, you pray; you say, "God, help me with this; deliver me from this," okay? And remember, God helps those who help themselves. So you don't pray and say, "God help me," and when the opportunity presents itself for you to do the self-sabotaging thing, you continue to do it, okay?
The other part to this that I want to talk about is the fact that some of you guys—we were talking about on-brand—and I said the sabotaging thing. You have to understand that in order for you to get results that you never had, you have to do some things that you never did. And in order for you to do things that you have never done, you have to make space for it; meaning you have to let go of some old habits, old way of thinking, old this, all that—you're unbrand stuff right now. You need to get rid of a lot of it in order to make space for you to do the things that you need to do in order to achieve the goals. If this version of you could achieve the goals that you have, you would have had it already. If how you have been living, operating, thinking, the level of knowledge and wisdom and experience you have—if that version of you could have done the thing, you would have done it already. The fact that you haven't attained the thing you want to attain yet, it means that there is room for growth. I'm not saying you're not capable; I'm not saying you don't have potential; I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm saying the version of you, the level that you're currently on, you have to grow, grow past that. Why am I so dramatic with my hands? Okay, you have to grow past that level. Old you, the on-brand new right now, she ain't enough, okay? The enough version is in there, but you need to transform; you need to Rebrand. So you need to assess yourself and say, "What are the limiting beliefs that I have?" Some of you, you say you want this and that, but really and truly in your mind you think you can't, and you need to work on that. And for some of you are like, have a problem with believing in myself. One thing I will say is to sometimes believe in God more than you believe in yourself; like have faith that even if you can't do it, have faith in God. Like you guys would be surprised, even to sit down and do this video, I do not have confidence that I'm going to be able to deliver a good video. So what I do instead, I cast that onto God; I'm like, "God, I'm trusting in you and your abilities cuz I can't do it; help me to execute," right?
So some of you don't believe in God; I honestly don't know what to tell you, okay? Um, I don't know what to tell you. Your confidence after you get results; you can learn to trust yourself more; that's what I would say to you. But the Bible says, "Faith comes by listening." So a lot of you guys are faithless because you're listening to the wrong people, okay? You're listening to people that don't believe in themselves; they haven't achieved anything, and they're projecting their realities onto you. Some of you, you're very young, and you have a bunch of people telling you that everything is impossible. You're around people that no matter what you say you want to do, they say it's impossible. It could be something as simple as, "Oh, I just—I want to go to college." "Oh, no, nobody in this family ever went to college," or "Who do you know that went to college?" Or "Nobody go to college is successful." They always got something negative to say; that's why you don't have any faith, because faith comes by listening. How do you think doubt comes in? By listening. What have you listened to? What have you given your ears to, right? You probably heard some stupid things like, "Oh, if you want to be rich, you got to be rich," when the statistics say 80% of millionaires are first-generation millionaires—are their first time self-made, basically; that's the word I'm looking for—they're self-made. So you have to be careful. Faith comes by listening. Follow me, so I build your faith; follow the other girles that they build your faith, right? Listen to sermons; read books; listen to people's stories on podcasts, right? So you have to change what you listen to.
If you don't believe in yourself, and I don't know how I ended up in this part of the video talking about believing in yourself and how to build confidence in yourself, cuz that was not on the menu for today. I—I'm just flowing at this point. Someone comment and told me, "Girl, you could make the videos longer if you want," and to be honest, sometimes it takes a while for me to find my natural rhythm in a video. When I first start, I'm like, "Hi guys," like a teleprompter. So let's talk about limiting beliefs, right? In this 12 weeks, there is no space for you to be doubting yourself; it's no space for you to have these limiting beliefs. Because listen, if you have limiting beliefs, a part of you is going to believe that you don't have what it takes, for whatever reason, to do the thing that you want to do. So that is a handcuff on your hands and feet while you're trying to work, because you know that, despite—despite my best effort, because of your—your—your belief system, not because it's true, you believe that despite my best effort, this is not going to happen because of X, Y. List your limiting beliefs here. So you need to get rid of those limiting beliefs; you need to Rebrand; you need to change up your belief system; you need to let the old habits go. I have videos where I talk about being a part of the top 1%, how to get ahead of everyone else, and I basically talked about habits. I have a video about laziness; you guys need to watch these videos cuz they all will help you in terms of forming better habits. And I just—just want to say this to anyone watching this video: If you don't remember anything I say, please remember this: small actions, day-to-day actions lead to very big results. If you want to eat an elephant, you have to eat it one bite at a time, day by day. That is how you eat an elephant. A lot of you guys, your goals is looking at you like an elephant right now; you got to take it day by day, piece by piece, and over time that is going to add up into a big result. Like I said in a previous video, you don't get to the end of the year and find out that you're a success or a failure; you have had to be doing things throughout the year that ensure that you'll be a failure, and you had to be doing things throughout the year to ensure that you're a success. Success is not gained in a year; it is gained day by day, which is why I encourage you guys to build good habits, get rid of your limiting beliefs, build your faith, replace your old habits, Rebrand your identity, let go of things that are unbrand for you, that is not serving you, and Rebrand into someone else through new routines, new system, new goals, new habits, and new everything, girl. So if you want to achieve new goals, you got to become a new version of you. With that being said, watch one of the other videos on my channel because they will help, and this one about the fear of failure—I really wish more people would have watched it, especially as I got towards the end of it; I was really saying some things that I really wish more people would hear. The first part is more for Content creators and people that want to be content creators, but the second and third tip in that video is for everyone. So if you have the time, check it out and see if it helps. Bye.