SPI 907: Six Steps to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet

SPI 907: Six Steps to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet

Pat Flynn: What do you want? What do you want? That is the first part out of six in this goal design podcast that you are about to listen to. This is based on a program that I once took back in 2013 all the way through 2016. And it was a program called Best Year Ever by Michael Hyatt. I wish it still existed because I would still pay for it every single year.

It is the best course that I ever took. Again, it no longer exists. Thank you to Michael Hyatt, one of my mentors, who really changed my life because of the way that this was designed. And now, I would highly recommend checking out his Full Focus Journal. If you go to FullFocusStore.com, you’ll see it there, among other things to help you with your goal setting.

But I wanted to, with the inspiration from his course that no longer exists, I wanted to lay something out in kind of my own style for those of you who are here who want to make 2026 your best year ever. I want you to take the success that you’ve had in 2025 and double it. Or if you’ve been struggling this year, if you haven’t gotten started yet, I want you to really lay down the tracks so that you can succeed next year.

Now, of course, success is defined differently by different people, which is why we need to go through this process because many people just take actions thinking that they’re going to lead to success because it’s the same successful actions other people have taken, but your path is different than my path is different than other people’s paths, so it’s really important to think about these things, and it’s, again, in six different parts, the best year ever course, my gosh, the beauty of it, and the biggest part of the inspiration from that I got that I’m passing forward to you is the idea of thinking about your goals holistically, not just about your business, which most people think about, especially if you’re an entrepreneur, you think about your business goals, but there’s so many other aspects of your life that deserve and need your time and attention and the laying of these tracks so that you can measure, so that you can understand what works and what doesn’t.

And in this first part here, I want you to be selfish. I want you to think big. I want you to not worry about how you’re going to make these things happen. I want you to not have to worry about the specific numbers or anything like that. I want you to just answer the question in each of these seven different categories.

What do you want? What do you want? And as you listen to this podcast episode, I would love for you to just pause if you need time to think about these answers. I would love for you to at this moment gather the important people around you. Maybe it’s your spouse or a business partner or somebody, or maybe you just send this to them and have them listen to this as well.

But this is going to help you understand where do you want to go and how you’re going to get there and what to focus on, which is the whole goal here. And if you’re doing this with somebody else, have them do it on their own. And then compare notes, and you’re gonna find that there can be some really amazing moments where there is alignment.

Fantastic, let’s do that. And there might be a disconnect. Fantastic also, because now we can talk about those and understand each other, and then move forward. So let’s talk about part one. What do you want? What do you want? So within each of the following categories of your life, I want you to write down what you hope to one day achieve within that category.

One day. Not by the end of next year. I just want you to think big and think far into the future. You can be specific or you can be general and you can write down more than one in each of these categories or think about more than one in each of these categories as well. If you are a member of the SPI Community, you might be familiar with this exercise because we run this design workshop every single year live and in person.

We have people pause or I pause the teaching to have people spend time actually doing this. And then, having people share out and this is the benefit of community and why you should be a part of it. But even if you’re not, even if you’re just listening to this, you can participate. So within each of the following categories, think about what you hope to one day achieve within that category.

What’s interesting is if you’ve done this before you can compare notes. You can compare are the wants the same? They don’t have to be. It is what you are in right now within each of these categories, so here are the seven categories. Number one, emotionally. Where do you want to be one day? In your mind.

What is your mindset? How are you living life? Your emotions. What are you saying to yourself? What are your values when it comes to what you choose to do and why you choose to do it? That’s emotional. And yeah, we’re creating emotional goals. What do you want? Isn’t it crazy that most of us really never have thought about that?

How do we want to be emotionally? And if you’re worried because you’re wanting something that seems so far off, again, like I said earlier, don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about the how. Don’t worry about anything else other than just thinking into your mind and into your body and into your soul and asking yourself, what do you want?

Write that down. Next, intellectually. That is the absorption, the learning, the consumption of education and how much further you want to be and where do you want to go intellectually? What would mean success to you intellectually? What does that look like? That’s a tough one. Next, physically. Where do you want to be physically?

This is a big one because this is the one that had the biggest impact on me when I was going through Michael Hyatt’s course. Again, the beauty of his course was thinking holistically about my life, not just about business and money and finances, but physically. And that was something that I hadn’t thought about before, creating goals and thinking about where do I want to be?

And I remember back in 2009, my son was born. Yes, he’s turning 16. He might be 16 by the time you listen to this actually. I wasn’t thinking about my physical health. I was thinking about my business and generating revenue. And as a result, I sacrificed my health. And as a result of that, eventually that caught up to me and I wasn’t as creative, I wasn’t as energetic, I wasn’t as happy as I could have been.

That not just affected myself and my work, but that affected the people around me too. My wife, and of course my son. So by thinking about physically where I wanted to be, I could then take the right actions. I wasn’t going to become a a gym rat or anything like that. I knew that that wasn’t possible with the amount of time I had to spend on other things, including family, but I wanted to be physically fit enough to be able to keep up with my kids as they grew, to be able to stay healthy and live a long life, and to have energy, to be creative, and to stay a top performer.

These are all things that are important to me. What is important to you? Think about what do you want physically. It could be something that’s not about your body. It could be you want to run a marathon. It could be the fact that you want to do 100 pushups without stopping. You want a six pack. Be selfish.

It doesn’t matter. What do you actually want? Next, relational. This is another big one that we often don’t think about. We expect our relationships, especially with our spouses and our kids, to just kind of happen. And if you just kind of let things go and just see what happens, then you lose out on opportunities to grow and grow intentionally and intelligently as well.

Most of us, we care a lot about our business and the numbers. We look at the numbers. We look almost daily. We look at the analytics. We check out our P&Ls, our profit and losses, and our balance statements. We put meetings on calendars and we have goals and measurements and things related to our business.

And what do we do for our families? We don’t do any of that. You might have a vacation seven months down the road on the calendar, cool, but I want to ask you, what do you want when it comes to the relationships that you have? Remember, you can include many things in these. Hit pause if you need to to think about that.

Next, and finally we’re here, even though this is probably where you thought we would start, business. What do you want your business to be? Ultimately, what do you want to be doing in your business? How do you want to be perceived? What lights you up in terms of the future? Remember, don’t worry about the how yet, just what do you want?

Next, hobbies. What do you want with your hobbies? I know I want to break 80 in golf one day. That’s on my list for right now, and I’m going to start doing that. I’m going to start working toward that. Right? I haven’t golfed since the kids were born, but I’m starting to pick it up again. I’m starting to go to the range.

I’m starting to meet new friends by doing that, and I want to add that to my hobbies. It’s important that you have an avocation, a hobby, that lays on top of everything else, because this is your time to breathe. It’s your time to play. It’s your time to recharge. And for most people, if I know that they don’t have a hobby on their list that they’re focusing on, that they’re struggling, which is interesting, because you think putting time into a hobby is taking time away from these things that can help you succeed, but no, you need to have balance, you need to be well rounded, and a well rounded entrepreneur, especially, has a hobby, even just one, that they focus on, that allows them to breathe, and then come back to their work, come back to their family, even more energized.

And then finally, number seven, financial. What are your financial goals in the future? A lot of times when we get to this part of the discussion, when I’m doing this with people in person, which again, if you are in the SPI community, you’ll have heard this before, you’ll have done this before, but a lot of times entrepreneurs, especially, you just create these arbitrary numbers with finances that seemingly mean they mean success.

I want to be a seven figure entrepreneur. Okay. Do you need to be a seven figure entrepreneur? What’s your number? Now it could be a big number, which is fine, but you have to be clear on what your goals are. I know a couple people whose goal is to make 125k per year. That is a completely different business model, set of actions, a business type, than somebody who’s trying to make 10 million a year.

Everybody’s different. So what is yours? What is your want when it comes to financial? And it’s not just business, it’s retirement, it’s savings, it’s investments, what does yours look like? What do you want? This is part 1.

Part 2. For each of the aspirations that you’ve put in there, think about why that’s important to you.

What is motivating you to achieve that? And here’s a quick way to help. I want to make a million dollars, so that blank. The so that becomes the magical phrase that helps you find the why. And if you cannot find the why, why is that an aspiration? It makes you think, it makes you wonder. This is your opportunity to see what really matters to you.

And if you compare notes with somebody else, this is the very interesting part because this is where values, beliefs, reasonings, and your why comes into play against others. And again, that’s not a bad thing if you and your partner, spouse, business partner, et cetera, have different goals or different wants.

Better to find this out now and talk about it, discuss, and get in alignment with each other than later. Than later when it’s perhaps too late. So, again, for what do you want, add the, so that when it comes to adding something like let’s say you wanna finish your first marathon. Why do you wanna do that?

I wanna finish my first marathon so that I can prove that I can accomplish really hard goals that seem impossible so that I can be an example to my kids, so that I can be healthy because if I finish a marathon, I will have been able to overcome a lot of health related challenges or stamina or endurance related challenges that I normally have.

That’s an example. I want to go on date nights every week with my wife. Why? Well, so that we can continue to have time away from the kids to chat about life and other things and dream together and create moments for us to think about the future together, which at least for the first dozen years of both of our kids lives was very tough to do because they took all of our time and effort and they required so much time and energy solely, but the date nights have helped.

So that’s just an example. Why do you want those things? Again, hit pause and reflect if you need to. Also, if I didn’t say this already, if you happen to be listening to this on Christmas Eve, which I’m very grateful if you do, this is when this episode comes out, Christmas Eve 2025. However, I would highly recommend spending some time with your family now.

And maybe even if you’ve already gotten to this point, maybe you stop this podcast episode, go and hang out with your family, call somebody you know, call a friend, call a family member from afar, and just start asking them about what they want and what their goals are, what’s getting them lit up about the future.

You can always come back to this, and between now and when we all start again in January, you can hopefully digest the rest of this and create a plan for yourself. But that’s part two. Why do you want it?

All right, part three. This is where you start to make some decisions here. We’re going to create your top three goals. Out of your list of aspirations and motivations, the ones that you’ve already thought about from part one and two, choose three circle three, or think about three that stand out to you that are maybe most exciting choose from different categories, by the way, if you have three that are really exciting, but they’re all from the business category, remove two and just pick your favorite one and then save the other two for other categories. Just as a reminder, the categories from before, emotional, intellectual, physical, relational, business, hobbies, financial. So choose three from three different categories to focus on for the remaining parts here. And for each one of those, I want you to convert one of those, each one into a clearly defined SMART goal to achieve or SMART habit to form. So what is a SMART? You may have heard this before, but we’re going to go over it for the sake of this example, or for the sake of this workshop, because it’s always a good refresher.

S M A R T. This is going to be an acronym, which stands for specific. So you need a specific goal. M is measurable. You need to be able to measure it as you go. I want to be happier. Well, how do you measure that? You can’t, and you can get a feeling, but you got to get a little bit more creative and specific and something that you can measure. There are ways to do that, and you have to be creative about it, but let’s keep going.

A is achievable. You want these things to be Within the realm of possibility, I’m going to become an all star NBA player by December 26th, 2026. I mean, it’s important to shoot big, but it’s also important to know what is actually possible. I don’t want you to discount yourself, but a 43 year old, half Filipino, 5’8 man who opens Pokemon cards is probably not in the cards for an NBA contract. Let alone being an all star, but think big. Okay. Nearly impossible, but not impossible. So achievable.

R, the R stands for relevant. And by relevant, what I mean is it’s something that aligns with your broader objectives and your values, right? It kind of confirms that if you were to achieve that, it would actually help you with getting you what you want or getting you to where you want to go, right?

And the T is time bound. The time bound part of this is the force function or the voluntary force function that I talk about in my book, Lean Learning, this idea of having a date where things are to happen. And this is where you can see your progress. You can reverse engineer from that date to see certain milestones along the way. And you’re able to more easily measure with relevance to time, Your progress to go back to the M, which is measurable, something that actually has, you know, numbers and clear and specific, all these things. So again, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound.

I want you to create a clearly defined goal or habit for each one of these things, right? So if you want to become more physically fit as sort of a general goal, okay, let’s get specific about this. I want to be 160 pounds and have less than 15 percent body fat by August 31st, 2026. That fits the bill. It can help you get to where you want to go, but it’s specific.

It’s measurable. You can not just weigh yourself, but you can also go get a DEXA scan, D E X A. It’s like a very low dose x ray. It’s interesting because I have done DEXA scans now, and I’ve seen just the power of scanning and understanding how much body fat I have. It’s actually a procedure, it literally takes five minutes, you just literally sit down, and I hate saying literally all the time because that’s not the best grammar, but it’s that easy.

You just lay down, this thing goes over you, and then you get all this data. And it’s meant for bone density, it’s completely painless, and it’s very low dosage x ray, and it gives you a very accurate reading of your body fat, and exactly where that fat lives, and how much visceral fat you have, etc. So it is very, very useful, and I’ve used that time and time again.

I go and get that done every six months to see where I’m at. Sometimes I’m where I want to be, sometimes I’m not, but then I get kicked into gear when I’m not. And so again, by measuring, I’m able to define what my next actions can be and kick into high gear if I’m behind or be proud of the work I did because I’m where I need to be.

And if I’m not, hopefully I’ll be that way the next time I measure. But the time boundness of this, right? August 30th, 2026, 15 percent body fat, 160. So that is a example of a goal based thing that we’re talking about here, right? A goal. Or a habit. If you want to run a marathon, you can, instead of well, this kind of goes hand in hand, but I want to run the Boston Marathon 2027, dah, dah, dah, or whatever it might be, time bound, measure specific, et cetera.

But it might be a habit. I want to run at least one mile a day during January, 2026. I want to run at least two miles a day in February of 2026, and then all the way up to December, getting up to 12 miles a day and being ready for a marathon or half marathon by then. That’s just an example. Go ahead and do that.

With the three that you’ve selected from three different categories, I want you to think about the SMART goal. Specific, Measurable. Achievable. Relevant. And time boundness for three of them. Create a goal or habit. That’s part three. All right.

Now, part four, this is where a lot of these goal setting workshops kind of stop.

It’s like, okay, cool. You got the goals. Go do that habit. Great. But this part four is going to be very helpful for you on what to do next. Because that’s literally what you’re going to think about. What are the first steps? For each goal or habit from what you’ve just done, write down the first steps you’ll need to take from here.

And if you’re not sure, then the first step is going to be learning what the first step is. Right? Your first step is to learn what the steps are. So what might be the next best thing to do to get the ball rolling or who might you need to reach out to, to make things happen? So do that with each of the three goals and or habits that you’ve just done.

And that’s really great because then just like I talk about in Lean Learning, now you’ll just be able to focus on just that, that first step, knowing that there are resources and help coming when you achieve that step and move on to the next thing, right? This is Lean Learning in progress, but you need to know A, the direction, which we’ve just talked about the why, yes, we got that behind it too, which is this sort of fuel behind it, but then we need the first steps. Great. This is where we are. Now you can just focus on that and trust that as you move forward, there’s going to be people and or resources there, more relevant resources than if you were to find them now for that next thing.

Part five, what are the triggers? So for each goal and or habit that you wrote down, also write down a trigger, something that will activate you to continue what you need to do to make sure you keep going or are reminded to take that action.

This could be a person that checks in with you every day. It could be a tweet that you schedule ahead of time to let the public know that you’re doing something, then thus holding you accountable. If you were learning an instrument, perhaps that trigger is the fact that you’ve put that guitar in the hallway, and every time you see it, you are reminded about it, instead of having it in your closet and then having to take it out each time. It’s just right there. You can’t miss it where you’re running. Shoes are always untied with socks, ready to go for the next morning before you go to bed, this is doing something now, as I once heard it. I think I remember somebody saying, you’re almost like the butler to your future self.

You are the Butler to your future self. So you’re doing things now to set your future self up to go, man, thank you past me for doing that. Because you are your own butler for the future. So create a trigger for each of those three things.

And then finally, with each of these goals and or habits, I want you to think about a person uniquely for each of them, they can be the same person, although I recommend finding different people for each one. That way you can kind of lean on their shoulders when you need them, and call them for help, and have them hold you accountable. And you don’t want to ask too much of one single person. Although, you I know some people like my wife who would be able to do this across many of these things.

Ask yourself who will support you. Find someone you trust, who you can share your goal with, ideally a mentor, somebody who knows that thing, who’s been there before, who’s gone down that path as well. You want somebody to hold you accountable. So write down a person who comes to mind for each of the goals or habits that you have in mind.

And better yet, if you can have a method by which they can hold you accountable. Maybe they’ll text you every day or every week. Or maybe if they don’t mind, you’ll get on a call with them every single month, whatever it might be, set that up. And that is your six part goal design podcast.

So first of all, I want to wish you Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, whatever you celebrate.

I want to celebrate you being here as a listener on the podcast, over 900 episodes in. And I look forward to a couple events early next year. I will be at PodFest. If you’re going to be at PodFest in Florida, I look forward to seeing you there. I will be there the first half of the event, so please look out for me and say hello if you will be.

I also am attending some Pokemon events as well. Hawaii Pop Con in Hawaii, of course. And then an event in Vancouver in February as well called Collectopia, which should be really fun. But either way, I just want to thank you, wish you and your family well, stay warm. Stay safe, stay awesome, and if this is your first time listening to the podcast, what a great one to start on because hopefully you’ll get started on some goals for 2026 that will matter, that will be exciting, that you can get other people involved with, that align with your goals and values, of course.

And I look forward to hearing how it goes because we’re going to work together in 2026 to get it done. So thank you so much. Happy Holidays. I’ll see you right before New Year here on the podcast as well, so hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. Thank you for the follow, and I’ll see you in the next one.