EP # 213 - Stop Playing It Safe with Your Dreams: Why 10-Year Goals Should Scare You Into Action

Are you playing it safe with your dreams? 

In this powerful episode, Maggie shares key insights from her recent 10X Expansion Retreat about why your biggest goals should make you a little nervous—and how to set timelines that push you forward without shutting you down.

Drawing from real client transformations and her own journey, Maggie breaks down the psychology behind why some of us tend to keep ourselves small and reveals the goal-setting framework that's helped clients double (and triple) their income.

What You'll Learn:

• Why dreaming big is especially crucial for women (and how to overcome the fear of disappointment)
• The 10-year to 5-year timeline strategy that tricks your brain into believing bigger goals are possible
• The "Goldilocks Rule" for setting progress goals that stretch you without breaking you
• Disney's 3-focus area strategy and why "if everything is important, nothing is"
• How to break down big visions into daily actions that create compound growth
• The fear test: How big dreams reveal limiting beliefs (and why that's actually good news)

Key Takeaways:
🎯 Your business and life cannot outgrow you—you need to grow first as the leader
🎯 Things take as long as we give ourselves—constraint breeds creativity
🎯 The right timeline feels challenging but believable: "Yes, it will be hard, but it's inevitable I'll achieve it"

Featured Success Story:
Client Spotlight: Jennifer's exponential growth journey—how she doubled her income in 2024, then doubled her first half results again in 2025 using this exact framework.

Resources Mentioned
📅 Ready to apply this framework to your business? Book a complimentary consultation with Maggie to explore how personalized coaching can accelerate your growth - https://calendly.com/maggie-s2l/discovery-call

🎧 Missed last week? Check out Episode 212 for behind-the-scenes insights from the 10X Expansion Retreat

Connect with Maggie
🌐 Website: https://stairwaytoleadership.com
📱 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-perotin-business-and-leadership-coach/
📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maggie.perotin.s2l/

Transcript

EP 213 - Goals & Timelines

Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] To Diamond Effect Podcast, episode 213 Last week, episode 212, I shared some behind the scenes and the key lessons I've learned. From organizing my first ever in-person retreat for my clients and past clients, 10 x expansion. And as I've been reflecting a lot about the retreat, the amazing conversations we had, the breakthrough in aha moments that participants had.

I'm coming up with more and more. Ideas and content that I wanna share with you here in the podcast. So for the next couple of weeks, I will, I'm picking key concepts that we either discussed or I taught during the. Retreat and just share them with you here. So this week it's [00:01:00] all about goals and timelines.

As the participants of the retreat were dreaming big, and I led them through a multitude of exercises from really. Expanding in what they think is possible for them long term and getting clarity on what they want, how they want their life look like, their business look like 10 x, and then breaking it down into actionable steps to actually achieve it.

We had a quick conversations about. Goals and timelines and the type of goals that we set and the type of timelines that are best to set for those goals. And I thought that I will share with you how I think about different types of goals, the timelines, and anything else that came to my mind as I was preparing for this episode.

So first I always talk about [00:02:00] having a long-term vision for yourself, long-term goals, and also short-term goals that are more. Specific that drive your actions and those two being connected to each other, aligned and you as the leader of your business, as a leader of your life, balancing the two as you go in your day to day.

So when we started the retreat with participants, really dreaming and setting big, hairy, audacious goal for the future I think being clear on what you want, not just in the moment, but 10 years from now, five years from now, and being courageous and daring to dream big. Is key because it gives you clarity on what you want.

It allows you to build your life with intention. It also helps you focus [00:03:00] in the current moment with your short-term goals and helps you see the right opportunities as they come up. Last week I was talking about the fact that. The 10 x expansion retreat wasn't really in my 2025 strategic plan. However, organizing the retreats and amazing events was in my long-term vision.

So when the right opportunity came in 2025, it didn't take me that long to realize. I'm going to grab this opportunity, even though I didn't really plan for it in this year, and I'm gonna go with it because it aligns with my long-term vision.

Dreaming big is also important, especially for us women, because just observing myself as I have been growing and also my clients and now the women I network with and interact with, we. Tend to keep ourselves small. Sometimes [00:04:00] we dim our dreams or we don't even dare to dream big because we don't believe we can achieve it.

And then we don't wanna be disappointed if we dream big and let's say we don't accomplish it. So I see people not dreaming because they don't wanna be as disappointed, and then rationalizing that for not dreaming that. They're happy with the life that they have. And dreaming big shouldn't definitely come from the place of you being dissatisfied with your life if you have a good life.

If you don't, definitely use that dis dissatisfaction to dream big. But if you are satisfied and happy with the life that you, have right now. Dreaming big for better, more, or bigger impact, whatever it is, does not negate you being grateful for what you have. We can do both. We can be very happy and grateful for the life that we have, [00:05:00] and at the same time want more, want different, want better, right?

Personally. I'm very happy with the life that I have. I think I'm lucky. I'm grateful for it every day because there's so much wonderful things in my life right now, but that doesn't stop me from wanting to accomplish more, from wanting to create bigger impact, help more clients, and therefore dream bigger.

And as someone once said, if you dream for the stars, at least you land on the moon. So even if we dream for the stars and we end up somewhere halfway within the timeline that we dreamed about. It will probably be still way better and way further than if we don't dream big and we keep ourselves small and just create very small goals, especially the long-term goals.[00:06:00] 

So that's why I'm a huge advocate for allowing yourself to have big vision, to be bold, to go courageously after big. Goals. Another thing that this exercise allows you. To realize is what are the limiting beliefs and fears that you already have in yourself that are stopping you from going there? Because if you don't dream big, those fears and limiting beliefs will be buried in.

You'll never know they existed, but if you push your brain too. Wanting more. Whatever that is for you, then those fears will surface and that's a good thing because then you know what type of beliefs you have to overcome the self-development work you need to do in order to achieve your goals.

I always say, your business, [00:07:00] your life cannot outgrow you. So you need to grow first as the leader of your life, as the CEO of your business in order for the business and life to catch up. And that's how you do it, right? You do it by dreaming big, the fierce and limiting beliefs, surfacing because you did that and then you working through them as you also take action to go after those big goals.

Now let's talk about the timeline of big goals. There is many schools around it, and I've adopted some sort of a blend of those schools, but also I always say you wanna keep it individual to yours. Each and every one of us is different. Each and every one of us is motivated different ways and has also different paths, different trauma that we went through.

So therefore, certain timelines might work for one person. But not work for the other. [00:08:00] But let me explain on one of the clients that I've been coaching lately, what we did first, I asked her to dream big and give herself a 10 year timeline. So imagine how much she could improve her life and what she could accomplish.

In 10 years. And why 10 years at first? It's because for most of us, our brain can stand behind big changes, big improvements because it thinks, yeah, anything is possible in 10 years. And how do we know that? Is if you look back at your own life, 10 years back, I'm sure it's changed a lot and there has been things in there that you didn't think were possible positive or negative, but they were.

So when we're dreaming big, we of course want to create positive change and we want to do it intentionally. Maybe the past 10 years of your life, a bunch of it was unintentional because [00:09:00] you never dreamt like that. But if you start dreaming like that, you can create a lot of positive changes and improvements intentionally.

So then once she did that, once she really envisioned herself 10 years from now, having pie in the sky, whatever she wanted, then I challenge her to say. To think about, okay, if you were to accomplish that in five years, half the time, what would need to happen? How would you need to think about your goals?

What would you need to do differently to what you're doing right now to make it happen? Okay, so then slashing that timeline in half also forces us to think what's most important and what isn't. It challenges us to really take a different perspective, and also a lot can happen in five years, [00:10:00] and there's this law that I don't remember the name.

Is that things take as long as we give ourselves. So if we give ourselves 10 years to accomplish something, it would take us 10 years. But if we give ourselves five years to accomplish something, it might take us half the time just because of that constraint. As human beings, we're very creative when we are constrained.

Whether it's resources like time or energy or financial resources or the circumstances we're in the best inventions and ideas happen under some sort of constraint.

The key to shortening the timeline of achieving your big vision is to keep it long enough for your brain to still believe that you can do it. What you don't wanna do is. Make it so short that for your mind it's unrealistic. And therefore [00:11:00] you'll notice that you lack motivation, that you procrastinate because of course our brain doesn't want for us to set ourselves up for failure.

So if it thinks that whatever you're trying to do is super unrealistic and it's not gonna happen, you'll self-sabotage. So that's where that. Individual knowing of yourself and understanding how you feel about the goal when you think about it 10 years from now, or five years from now, or two years from now, to know what timeline you wanna give yourself,

if you think, okay, five years from now, totally doable. Yes, it will be challenging. Yes. I don't know yet how I'm gonna achieve it, but I can stand behind. If I set my mind to it and commit, it's inevitable, I'm gonna achieve it. I know I will. That's the right timeline. If you start shorting the timeline and then your brain starts thinking, no, no, no, I [00:12:00] can't do it, it starts a bit panicky.

It starts shrinking and constraining, and you go into more of a negative emotions. That's how you know that timeline for your big goals is unrealistic and gonna. Play against you rather than for you. And I've seen that in my own journey.

If you ask me five years ago if my big audacious goal was possible at all, I wasn't really sure I had a whole glimmer of hope, but if you ask me for the timeline five years ago, I would say. Maybe in 10 years, and I'm really not sure, but as I've been growing and my business has been growing, as I've been growing as a leader and growing on myself, my mindset, my self development, then I started believing in my bigger Asia school more and more.

And then I started thinking, oh, you [00:13:00] know what, five years? It's a realistic timeline. I can see how I can accomplish in five years. If you ask me. Even like last year, I would say five to four years was realistic and I was standing behind and I'm going after it as I've been really hard working on my belief, on my limiting beliefs and overcoming them.

If you ask me now. If my, when I think my big audacious goal would be possible, I would say, you know what, even though I don't know how to do it, but I have a feeling that within a year or two it would be possible. Maximum three or four. So you yourself can adjust those timeline as you're going after your goals.

You are being courageous, you're getting yourself out of the comfort zone and your potential expense, your [00:14:00] capability expense. So should you ask yourself to constrain the timeline of your Baker issues goal through one of two years? Definitely do. But if you feel that it's not believable yet, don't push yourself to do it because you might self-sabotage.

You might close up. Allow yourself a larger time that your brain's yep, we can do it. And then as you grow and take action, you can always adjust that timeline. Okay, so this was our vision, our long-term goal, our B hacks, as they say, big hair audacious goal. Now, in order to achieve it, you now need to start breaking it down into short term goals and that interaction.

So let me walk you through that process. So now that I have my vision. I'm thinking, let's say a year ahead and say, okay, [00:15:00] what do I need to accomplish within this year to get closer to my big vision?

Now if you are thinking about your personal life overall, you can have multiple like goals. But when I think about my business, I like to challenge my clients in the short term to create a. Income goal. So a money goal. How much income do I need to generate or do I want to generate in my business in the next 12 months?

And why? Because from there it's easier to see what do I need to do or what do I need to focus on to get there? Given that I can realize through that number, how many clients do I need, how many. Services or packages or products, do I need to sell in a way? How many people can I impact and help in order to get to that income?

And then once you understand that, I always tell my clients, [00:16:00] pick. No more than three focus areas that will allow you to get there. So if you take actions in those focus area, you'll know that this will generate the clients, the sales, the revenue that you want in your business. And. Why three? It can be less than three, but no more than three.

If everything is important, nothing is. And if the CEO of Disney, a large multinational corporations with many different businesses within can have three focus areas, you can as well. So for example, for me, for this year, at least this quarter, it's visibility. Creating content for free, like this podcast for my clients, to teach them, to challenge them, to help them achieve their goals and [00:17:00] client experience.

So how my clients experience me throughout their journey, their coaching with me, and so on. Those focus areas can change year to year or even quarter to quarter. So for example, maybe. One quarter or for half a year, you have a project that you would like to implement, maybe a course you would like to create, or you are opening a new location, or you are adding a new service and you need to figure things out and you give yourself a quarter, right?

So those focus areas can definitely change, but what they do is within them then you will know. What type of actions you need to take in order to achieve the goals, and they also keep your actions constrained. So if you have actions that don't fall into one of those focus areas, maybe that's a distraction.

Maybe those actions need to be delegated or not done at all. [00:18:00] And this is where within those actions, now you're going to set. Progress goals. What progress goals are. They're like a milestone on your path to your short term goals. So let's say a money goal a year from now and. On your way towards your big vision, progress goals allow you to see whether you're still on the right path or not.

They allow you to adjust the course if you are, let's say, not achieving them, they allow you to see what you can do better, what you need to change, and so on. So progress goals could be, let's say, in my. Visibility focus area. I could set a goal for myself to say I want to have one speaking engagement per month this year.

Whether it's, being a guest on a podcast, TV interview, speaking in public somewhere, one [00:19:00] speaking engagement a month. Another progress goal in my visibility could be I want to create one. Really good strategic partnership and collaborate with that strategic partnership per quarter.

So these goals are your smart goals, they're measurable, they're achievable. They're realistic. You know exactly if you hit them or not.

How do I like to approach these goals is by using a Goldilock rule, and I think it's James Clear who talks about it in his Atomic Habits good book, saying that these goals, you want them about 20% higher to what your comfort zone is allowing. To do so you feel a little bit like, ah, I'm a bit scared, but I think I can achieve it.

So for example, if you've never had any public speaking. Engagements yet, but you would love to have it. Maybe your [00:20:00] first goal is to have, okay, four a year, one a quarter, right? One a month may be too big and too scary, but for a year, even though it feels a little bit uncomfortable, you feel like you can go after that.

So I like this role because it pushes out of the comfort zone. Forces us to grow and think differently and expand without really shutting us down. And, bringing up so much fear that we self-sabotage and don't do anything about it. And then once you have those progress goals set, now you can figure out.

What are the actions that I need to take in order to achieve those goals? For example, with the speaking engagements, if I want to, have one speaking engagement every month, maybe I need to. Pitch myself to certain podcasts. I need to [00:21:00] reach out to my network and see if there's any opportunities in person.

And what would it take to pitch myself to a podcast? I need to find the names of the podcast that I wanna be a guest on contact information. I need to send them an email or a message. I need to follow up on it, and so on and so forth. So you start breaking down your goal. Into what would need to happen into actions, and then you start taking those actions, right?

Then you determine which actions are daily, which actions are weekly, which actions are maybe monthly, and start planning them into your weeks, creating time blocks, scheduling them and doing that. One thing about the action is that you need to break. All those things down into an action that's easy for you to take, that is achievable, where your brain is like, yep, I know exactly what to do.

I know how to do it, and so on. [00:22:00] If you break down your progress goals into two generic actions, then again, you might be setting yourself up for failure because the brain is like. But I still don't know how to do it. I don't know how. And it's too big. I don't have time. It will come up with a bunch of excuses.

That's how you know the actions you're trying to take is probably too big or not specific enough.

And when you take. Those small actions step by step every day, every week, every month, every year, that's where the compound effects happens. That's where we can achieve. Crazy goals in a shorter period of time because it accumulates and it grows exponentially. Just like with the money that you save, the more consistent you are and the longer you give yourself to save, the faster it grows towards the end.

This is how. [00:23:00] My client, Jennifer, has been just exponentially growing her business in 2004. She dabbled her income from 2000. In 2024, she doubled her income from 2023, and then this year, the first half of the year is already doubled to her first half of the year in 2024. And now I'm challenging her to think 10 x and even bigger so she can start compounding that growth even faster.

So if you would like to use that method to your business and your life, and yet you're still not sure, you feel like you would need guidance, I can help you when I coach with my clients, we tailor all of this to your situation. To who you are and how you operate and your goals, and I push you to do it, and we figure it out until you can start taking action.

The first [00:24:00] step to working with me or even exploring how it would look like is to book a complimentary consultation with me. I'll leave the link to my calendar in the show notes. Have a fantastic week.