Finola Howard 0:01
I'm Finola Howard, Business Growth strategist with a joyful heart and your host of the your truth shared podcast, I believe that every business has a story to tell, because that's how the market decides whether to buy or not, and your story has to resonate with who you are and with the people you want to serve, and this podcast is about helping you reach the market in a way that feels right to you. So if you're an entrepreneur with a dream you want to make real, then this is the podcast for you, because great marketing is your truth shared. You know that feeling when something you've been quietly building for years finally makes it out into the world, that's actually where I am right now. It's this nervous excitement space and deeply rewarding nervous excitement before you know. It's what they call the liminal space. It's before you know if there's a market for it, but you know, you've built it the best you could. And what I'm talking about is a small app I've built called the joyful annual planner, and it's out there now. It's the very first piece of something I've been dreaming of building for over 20 years. So this is more than a product launch. It's actually a full circle moment for me from so many different perspectives, but I will share it with you here. Back in 1999 when I first developed this process that I at the time called Get strategic, get results. It was a new way to help entrepreneurs make sense of their businesses, to connect the big picture with the everyday. I called it get strategic, get results, because that pointed to that long term thinking of get strategic, that bigger picture thinking, and also get results, meaning the everyday tactics and actions you need to do to make that bigger picture happen. And then I could see it really clearly in my mind. I knew where I wanted it to go. It was really starting to develop, but the world wasn't quite ready, and, or rather, the technology wasn't quite ready, and maybe I wasn't fully ready. And if I reflect here in this moment, you know, I'm better at this stuff than I was then. That's a reality. We grow, we evolve, we continue to upskill. So maybe I'm more ready now than I was then, and that this has more to offer now than it did then. So let's fast forward to now. So suddenly now the tools, the timing and the inner clarity have all aligned. I'm finally building what I always knew was possible, a system that simplifies strategy, right, reduces the overwhelm, yes, but most importantly, helps you see how everything connects in the business. But here's the real story. While I was building this, something in me was shifting too, and that shift led to a new belief, or rather, a more defined belief, and one that's become the heart of everything I do, and it's what I call a cardinal belief, and let me share it with you. I feel really passionate about it. It's this single sentence, the only way to build a business worth having is to follow the joy that makes you brave enough to do it your way. It's a loaded statement, and I'm going to explain it to you later. So today's episode isn't just about planning. It's about why you plan. It's about joy as a compass, courage as its echo, and what happens when you finally let yourself build what you were always meant to create. Let me come back to 1999 and that kind of first system I developed. And it was effectively a training program that I delivered in person over six weeks, three hours a week for six weeks. And it was an antidote to this way of thinking right now that we see everywhere, and it was back then as well, which was this idea that, you know, the riches are in the niches. You must find your niche. It is this narrow thing that will make you make all the money. And that really is true, the more you hone your point of difference and find that niche, with that focused target market, all of that stuff that really is the secret to the financial viability of our business and the growth of the business. But there is a flip side to that, and the flip side to that is a tendency towards fragmented thinking, because if we're only distilling into this narrow niche. Much. We're not looking at the rest of the business, and also we're not looking at ourselves, and this idea of burnout that's become more prevalent, at least we have a name for it now. So my belief, and always in all my work, it's always about defragmenting stuff, and it's about seeing how one small thing that you do here has an impact to something you do over there. And if you are conscious enough, and if you can see it all laid out on the table in front of you, and see how each you know, I used to work with worksheets. See how each worksheet, one thing that you focus in on, on worksheet, connects to something you did over here, and actually creates this synergy of effort, then growth becomes exponential. And I know this to be true even then, because when I was delivering this in person, then I saw people achieve their long term goals in three years instead of five in two and a half years instead of four, etc, etc, like I had so many examples of it, so I knew it would have an impact. Because the danger with marketing always is, there's so much that you could do, it's practically unlimited. But if we focus on the core of a business, then we get to play in that limitless, limitless space, once we know the spine of the business, the truth of the business, that red thread that weaves through it all, and that's what I wanted to build. I built it as a training program first, then I when I moved offices into Waterford city, I hired a developer to work with, and I still have the worksheets today, or the flip chart notes today of how all of these worksheets I had built connected across all of them. But I was told then that, and I remember the meeting that I was in where I was pitching this, and I was told this is going to cost way more than you believe it should, or could or will. It's going to take much longer than you think it will. We're not sure it'll work. Okay, so that's hard, because that's a dream, you know, but it never left me. It never actually left me. And so I changed direction, and I pivoted more away from that and into consulting, and, you know, more training and things like that, but mostly about growth strategy, and, you know, in different forms. So that was my big purpose. Here was to show people how everything connected. And when I when I could show people how everything connected, then they could see how their business worked, and they could understand all the moving pieces, and they got to choose which pieces they moved, which pieces they brought in, what they leaned into, and what they didn't lean into. That's the start. And that kind of brings clarity. Brought clarity to a lot of my clients over the years, because clarity doesn't come from more information. Clarity comes from connecting the dots, and that's always what I wanted to do. So present day moment, I came across a tool, and I was I spoke to someone about this few months ago. Because Isn't it funny how the world moves and how your own journey moves? I ended up working mostly with tech companies, so I started to become a really understood tech companies, also, in a previous life, had built a lot of databases. In fact, one of my jobs in when I worked in Sydney in Australia, was to build out a relational database in Microsoft Access, what you believe at the time. That ran the entire tendering system for state Rail Authority in Sydney, and that worked. So I understand boxes, databases, data, how data can connect, but I also understand the humanity of things and why that's necessary to bring that stuff in here as well. So I came across lovable, and that kind of reignited my dream of building out this system that I kind of had shelved, to be perfectly honest. But something happened in the last few months that gave me the bravery of digging into this a little bit more and and then I knew I was ready, and without actually realizing I've been preparing for this all along. That's what I would share with you, because sometimes the dream doesn't die. It might sleep a little while it just waits for you to grow into the version of yourself that can finally build it. And I truly believe that, I truly believe that this is the right time for this, and I truly believe that in your journey as an entrepreneur, you may not have done everything you wanted to do yet, but what you're doing right now is contributing to that, and I hope that as you listen to this episode, you might work a little more knowingly and with greater ease. Is because it's still possible.
Finola Howard 10:03
I got a lovely little push from the episode I did with Michael Fitzgerald from one page CRM and he said he talked he was the first person I spoken to that when he started the business, he had a vision. He really had the vision from the very beginning, and he shared that on the podcast and said I knew I was going to build it. I knew what I wanted this to look like, and I would and I never wavered in what that would look like. And we are absolutely vision led so that he brought his whole team with him to bring that to reality. And he and just so simply, he said I knew what I wanted to build, and I just stuck to it, and I really liked that in that episode of Michael Fitzgerald, he set me a deadline, or he asked me to set a deadline when I would release the joyful annual planner that I was kind of working about, working away at quietly, because he wanted it out into the world, because we need things to go out into the world, Not to stay in our hearts or in our minds. So the deadline you set was October 30. It's gone live on October 21 so thank you. Michael Fitzgerald from one page CRM, for that kick up the ass, because it made me own it. It made me step out into it. So I'd like to mark this moment as a moment of arrival, actually, for me that after after 20 years,
Finola Howard 11:33
After 20 years of carrying vision, it's finally real. I
Finola Howard 11:46
so deadlines don't just get things done. They get things out of you. Another learning for you as I get myself together, here, I listened to a workshop with James Wedmore, and it's this idea of a domino belief, and that became a bit of a catalyst for me, but a catalyst that took a bit of time to to ferment inside of me, you know, to kind of gestate, if you will, okay? And he has this great process which is to underpin a business, and it's this core purpose, this Cardinal belief of a business, that if you can anchor it and express it, it will have people nodding because you believe it so fiercely truly that you will bring your tribe and your audience with you, the right tribe and audience with you. And he really simplified it powerful. Right, one line, right, one line that sums up everything that you believe. And this one line is comprised of three things, right? One is vehicle, which is the thing you want to teach, or the thing you want to share, or this undercurrent of what you want to accomplish, that's the thing, your thing. The second part is a superlative meaning, like only best. This is you know, the you know, the greatest, or whatever. And the last thing is the transformation. And I'll just share with you an example. I later heard him interviewed, interviewed by Kate Northrup, on the podcast plenty. And it was really powerful, really stuck, struck me and stuck with me. And he said, Let's do your domino belief here, right here and now. And he said, so they she works with money, and people's challenge with money, and this is a big issue for entrepreneurs. And I do recommend that you listen to Kate and her podcast plenty. It's amazing, she's got a really good freebie on her program, the money reset, which is really a start on this money journey, which I found to be really powerful. So her belief is around that you've got to regulate your nervous system for abundance. You've got to, you know, make yourself ready and and I know this to be true, because of all the work that I've I've researched and gone through as well, even in in in my first book was about embodiment. Embody one you have to embody this next stage of you in order to pull it off. And I've been really working strongly on that. And she's tapped into this for this whole area of abundance. So her domino belief here is, regulating your nervous system around money is the only way to experience abundance in your life. And she is only our fastest I'll say it again. Regulating your nervous system around money is the only way. It to experience abundance in your life, and like for someone and so many, particularly women, have so much money issues with money, if you sit with that statement, that will already shift your perspective. And that's how powerful a domino belief can be. So I kind of tried it when I first heard it, and did the exercise, right? And to be frank, I yawned, okay, but anyway, and what I wrote was the only way to grow a sustainable finance, because I just did it intellectually and not heart centered, okay? The only way to grow a sustainable, financially successful life aligned business is by using joy as your compass, move me, and it's not going to move me, it's not going to move you. You know, sometimes the words can be right, but the energy is not right. But then I started to, you know, work on other things, because this is what happens, that we are, you know, inspired through other practices, and we come back to the things that niggle at us. And I just kept seeing this thing of working because, as you may know, one of the people, one of the key customers I have, is helping people unlock their potential, helping businesses unlock their potential to really get at the root of what they can achieve in their business, okay? And I kept going back to these two words all the time, and it's this idea of joy and courage. And courage was, this is a word that came from I always use an anchor word of the year. And when my dad was dying, the anchor word that came to me very deeply and very quite gutturally, was the word courage. And I remember crying as I realized that's the word that I needed to use for the year. And then afterwards, after he passed, and I'd gone through this grieving process, I remember that my dad would never want me to continue to have to have courage to kind of keep going. He would want it replaced with something better. He would want it replaced and I came up with the word joy. And you can see that that anger is everything that I do now, everything I do is around joy, but courage never left go. And I realized this was the shift for me. I realized that as I worked with all these entrepreneurs, and they started seeing their own potential and what they could do with their business, they'd often get scared and give up. And I think we get scared and give up because it's okay to try someone else's route and try someone else's formula or someone else's tactic or technique, because we're not that vested in it, but when we have to try our best and put our all into something that is deeply personal to us, a deep belief, a deep change we want to make in the world, and if We fail at that, the hurt can seem too hard, and I seen it happen, that I've seen people that every time they glimpse their potential, they would step back a little and rationalize it. But what I'm saying to you that joy isn't actually the opposite of bravery. It's the roof to it. It's the source to it, that if you use joy as your compass, you will get there. And this is what happened. I wrote this as I turned to the page. This is what I'm explaining to you. The only way to build a business worth having. Worth having means that you love to do it every day that fulfills your soul, your financial goals. Everything worth having is as you define it. And worth having is another way of saying success. The only way to build a business worth having is to follow the joy that makes you brave enough to do it your way. That's a shift for me, and I share that with you in the hope that it will be a shift for you. So the joyful annual planner is the first piece of a suite of tools that will make this way of planning. And I'm really passionate about planning. You can look at episode 72 and you'll understand how passionate I am about planning. I
Finola Howard 19:48
This is the first piece of a bigger story that I've sat with for a very long time. I've built a system I always dreamed of. But more than that.
Finola Howard 20:05
It, I've become the woman who's brave enough to build it. So that's where I am. I hope there is a teaching in there for you, as I stand in this moment where an old dream meets a new belief. I've built the first piece of something that's been two decades in the making, and it feels right because it's built from joy,
Finola Howard 20:37
because joy is you, Joy is what gave me the courage to follow through. That's really the message I want to leave you with today. And I kind of want to ask you a question or give you a prompt, if you plan from joy, not pressure and not shoulds what would you dare to create? Because that's where your brave business begins, and maybe that's the only kind worth building. You'll find a link to the joyful annual plan, the first in the joyful planner suite. So link to it in the show notes. It's free. I offered freely to you. It's designed to help you plan from the place of joy and courage, to keep you centered and healthy and well as part of your planning process. Thank you for listening and for walking this journey with me. I can't wait to see what you build when you follow your joy. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
