Episode 432:


Hello, and welcome to Unshakable with Human Design, everybody. I’m your host, Nicole Leno. And excuse me, I have my sexy voice. I’m a little bit under the weather, fighting off a cold, so I have my little husky voice for the holidays. Hello, honey. So bear with me here. Really what I wanted to talk to you guys about. I’m so excited to be here with you, as always. We’re coming up on the holiday season. We are winding down 2025, and I took my people in, my clients in Business by Design through a planning session for 2026. And it was so funny, the reaction that we got from that session where I walked them through the process that I take myself through every single year. 

And so many people said that they’d never done that before that they’ve been in coaching programs and no one taught them how to plan their year or how to plan their revenue and start to have some idea of predictability. And it’s funny, I hear it and I’m surprised, or I’m like, you know, wow, that’s so crazy. But I also shouldn’t be surprised because no one really taught me how to do that. We did have. I would say that I had one coach that at least taught us the value of revenue cycling and creating a predictable pattern in your business that is going to drive cash. She never taught us how to, like, plan out the year, necessarily. However, she did do it in other ways, but we didn’t sit down, have, like, a yearly planning session. She does that now with her people. 

I still follow this coach, and I see that she does that, and that is something that I do with my people. And this is one of those things where, you know, I straddle that masculine, feminine energy thing. I think planning your year. And I plan in a very flexible way. It’s not a rigid plan that we create, but it’s something that allows you to lean back more because at least you know what’s coming. So in this episode, what I’m going to break down for you is we’re going to talk about, you know, planning your year. We’re going to talk about what most entrepreneurs miss or why they end up in so much trouble and why there’s that feeling of overwhelm. And. 

And also it’s like overwhelm, but also just feeling like they have no idea how they’re going to make the money, how they’re going to hit their goals, that there’s always just this quest for more and how that really keeps people stuck. We’re talking about a little bit about the shifting landscape of the industry. 

And, you know, I’m going to show you how you can create your unstoppable year in 2026 by asking yourself some really good questions, by really focusing on just a few things and creating a flexible plan that gives you enough structure that you feel held throughout the year that you can lead your team, if you have one, or that you can lead yourself throughout the year where you feel like you know how you are going to create money in your business and create results in your business, that you have some events, some things that are planned that are going to help support you in your business. Okay, so we’re gonna break all of that down in this episode. So I hope that you love it. 

I hope that you know, take out your pens and pencils, because this is going to be one of those episodes that I think you’re gonna want to write down what we talk about. Like I said, I had clients that were like, you know, it really surprised me. Like, I sat here and I thought about it, and, you know, no coach has ever walked me through that. And that made me sad for my clients. But I’m so happy that they feel supported in our group because we teach human design. I teach alignment. I teach you how to decondition and how to shift your identity into your next level self. But we also teach you how to be profitable. 

We also teach you how to run a business so that you feel that you have a framework and you have a foundation and a business that supports you. Because if you’re not supported, if you are not profitable, it’s very difficult to feel truly aligned. You might feel better, but. But it’s going to be met with these moments of feeling like you are in total survival mode and you’re scared, and that will mess with any alignment work that you’re doing. It’s very hard to feel good and feel expanded when there’s creditors calling, you know, so we’re going to discuss all of this in this episode, but also, if you’re interested in diving into how you blend the strategy and. 

And energy of your business, how you blend human design, how you blend strategic work that actually drives sales so that you have an aligned and profitable business, if you haven’t already, please check out my secret podcast. I created a whole secret podcast just on this, on how to have an aligned and profitable business. That’s what it’s called with human design. And we lay the entire thing out for you. All you have to do to grab that is to DM me the word secret podcast on Instagram, I’m icolenofficial. Or go to nicolelaino.com secretpodcast and you can get it over there on the website. We’ll also link it all up in the show notes for you, of course. As always, we’ll hook you up down there. Okay, so let’s talk about this. So why do we plan our year? 

To download the Secret Podcast on how to Build & Scale Your Business with Human Design click here: nicolelaino.com/secretpodcast

And sometimes, you know, and I told my people, I was like, if you can’t get the whole year down today, that’s okay, but I want you at least thinking that way and plan a quarter ahead, one to two quarters ahead. So for now, do you know everything that you’re doing in the first quarter of the year and the first quarter of the year, you know that’s going to be your first big revenue driver. And if you have a great first quarter, that takes some of the pressure off of having, you know, every quarter doesn’t have to be amazing necessarily. I don’t. Some quarters are better than others. For me, we have some runaway ones that are huge successes, and then we have some that don’t perform as well. And. And that’s fine and that’s normal. 

But what I do know is that when I combine them all, and this is one of the things what I like about quarterly planning is that it keeps you from watching your revenue every single month. And if you have a down month, feeling like everything is going down. So if I have a great January and then February is not as good going into March, I might be in the energy of February, but instead I’m thinking about this. It’s like, okay, well, where am I averaging? And then what’s the number that I need to hit in March? And that helps me understand, makes me much more intentional with the actions that I take. So the actions that you take when you have a plan, when you actually go through and have a plan for what you’re going to be doing, one organization creates space. 

Don’t underestimate. And this is one of the things that entrepreneurs miss, is that don’t underestimate how much energy it takes from you, wondering what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it all the time. That feeling of uncertainty that feeling of, what am I going to do? What that causes in most people is knee jerk reactions. Now you’re making decisions from a place of lack. Oh, my God, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I got to make some money. I’ll sell this thing. I’ll. I’ll do this thing. But there’s not a lot of strategy behind this. Then that causes you. So think about it. You don’t have a plan, so you show up in January and like, I got to sell something. What am I going to do? So now you just start talking about something on social. 

You’re being present on social media, maybe, or you have a podcast to. You’re just creating episodes because you have to create an episode a week. So you’re on your content calendar, but you’re not on your sales calendar. So the content is being put out, but you’re not actually promoting anything. Then you decide to sell something, so you throw something out there, and now you’re selling something that doesn’t necessarily maybe vibe with all of the content that you’re putting out there. And the content really wasn’t designed to sell anything. So now you’re trying to sell something to sort of throwing it on top of everything else. That is why people struggle. Because if you had a plan, then if you knew what you were going to be selling, you could actually promote it. 

And everything in your business could kind of be working in concert together rather than you just doing things. You hear me talk about this a lot. And anybody who’s ever come to the Authority Accelerator Masterclass that we used to host, you’ve heard me say this, that tactics aren’t strategy. A strategy is a system that’s working underneath everything, making all the tactics work. Content is a tactic. There’s a marketing strategy underneath the content that allows it to work and drive sales. This is what marketing is. This is how we get marketing to result in conversions versus marketing to just result in you spending time on Instagram or on a podcast. We want them to monetize. We want them to drive results in your business. That’s why we’re here. Nobody’s in business just to be here. We want to support our families and we deserve to. 

And this is one of the things that drives me crazy, watching entrepreneurs kind of run in circles being busy but not productive. This is what busy and not productive is to me. It’s working without a strategy. It is working where it’s fear driving a lot of the action. And what that causes is ineffective action, fear. More Fear more overwhelm. Super busy not making money. And that sucks. All of it. Okay? So the other thing that I have people do is I have them go through and you know, it’s important to have revenue targets. Now, I know that the whole 10k month thing is like, you know, when I ask people what their goals are, they’ll tell me 15k months, 20k months, and then I’ll ask them where they’re at, and they’ll tell me they’re at 2,000amonth. 

And your first goal shouldn’t be 10,000amonth unless you have a lot of apparatus under you. I don’t want to say it shouldn’t be. Usually that’s not how we create some success. Unless you’re so energetically in alignment with the 10k month that feels easy to you. But most of the people who come to me, that’s not where they’re at. You can go from 2,000 to $20,000 a month. Like that can happen. I’m not telling you that’s not possible. Anything is possible. But that requires a certain level of energetic alignment and strategic alignment to make that happen. If you feel good about that, roll with it. Most of the people who come to me because when I ask them how they’re going to get there, they don’t know. They can’t answer that question. 

And what revenue targets do is they’re not to be these, just these, like, numbers that we throw out there, but they are goals, and they allow us to keep ourselves accountable to the actions that we’re taking. So if you want to go from a 2000 to a $10,000 month, that’s cool, that’s awesome. We can do that. But what we have to do is then look at if you’re pretty consistently doing $2,000 a month, we got to look at that $8,000 gap. And what that does is so many people are just looking to sell more. This is another one of those things that keeps entrepreneurs stuck and spinning their wheels, busy, not productive, and low on revenue is that they are always focused on making more, but they’re so unclear about what that number is. 

Like they have that 10k month, 20k month, or whatever number like that’s out there, but that’s not really real to them. And they’re not really looking at it being like, okay, well, what would I actually need to sell to hit that? Like, to me, I look at it and I’m like, okay, I know the sales that I need to bring in. I know the products that I could be selling in order to hit my revenue goals. What that does is that allows me again to be intentional about the actions that I’m taking. Well, if I need to sell these things, then I should be talking about those things, right? I should be talking about them on this show, I should be talking about them on social media. I should be emailing my list about them. 

And it allows me to understand what will move the needle in my business. We hear that all the time. What are your needle moving activities? What are the needle movers in your business? Well, that depends on what your goals are and it depends on your business. And by asking these questions and having some revenue targets, you can actually be backing into the needle moving tasks. It’s not just pulling tasks off the wall, it’s saying, well, what’s the needle? And how do I get that very specific needle to move in the direction that I want it to move in? This is what the plans help with. Now, the quarterly revenue plan, the other thing that I like about it is that it can allow you to be in some seasons, a quarterly revenue plan. 

If you don’t have a way, if you are just posting on social media, unless this is your business model, that works very well for you. I have found this to be a difficult one to make work all the time. This is a supplement to a lot of the things that I do, but it’s not my way of driving revenue. What I have found and what I teach is to be there are softer ways of selling, like selling on social media, selling on stories, selling to your email list. And then there are ways of selling in mass and selling one to many, like launches, like workshops, masterclasses, things like that. What I like about having a mix of these two things going on is one of them happens pretty immediately. You send an email, you want to buy this. They either buy or they don’t. 

So that’s something that you can be doing all the time. But unless that is working where you’re making, you’re hitting your goals by doing that on a regular basis, then you probably need something else. And this is where having some sort of conversion event on your calendar at least once a quarter can really help you. Where your revenue becomes more predictable. Okay, I’m going to do this event on this day. But it’s not just about that becoming predictable. It’s also helping you to be in different phases where you get to build your list, warm up your list and then register them for that event. And you have time to do that when you don’t plan. You can’t really. And I learned this in my early days of launching. 

So when I first learned to launch, I was either filling a launch, meaning like I was building my list. At that time we put people in Facebook groups. So it was just constantly getting people into my Facebook group and then I would nurture them in the Facebook group and then I would launch within the Facebook group. That was my whole business model when I first started out. But I felt like I was doing that all the time because I was launching every six to eight weeks. It was a lot. There was so many and that was too much. But what we found that having a quarterly cadence where you can be. There’s three phases to a funnel, there is visibility, there’s nurturing, and then there’s conversion. You should be doing that within your business all the time. And eventually you’re doing all three simultaneously. 

But in the beginning, you’re probably going to be doing one at a time until you have a system going. And when you don’t have a plan, it’s very difficult to execute on those two things. To bring new people into your world, to nurture those new people and then bring them to a sale. This is how you’re learning how to juggle. It’s very difficult to do when you don’t have a plan. How do you know what you’re nurturing people for if you don’t know where you’re driving them to? If you don’t know when you’re going to be converting them, how do you know what phase you’re in? It just. I have found that quarterly planning is a really great way to create predictable revenue for your business. 

Where you feel like, you know, you have this time where this thing is happening and then also to know what job you’re responsible for. Am I in list building mode? Am I in nurturing mode, or am I in conversion mode? That before you learn to juggle, you can handle doing each of those things one at a time. So I find this to be just the easiest way for people to have a six figure year if they’re doing this. If you plan quarterly, then if you can make $25,000 per quarter, then you have a hundred thousand dollar year. Okay, if I have a $25,000 quarter. Okay, well, how does that shake out? Let me think about that. Rather than 10k months, can you make $25,000 in a quarter? 

It feels different to me and I find that most people find it much more doable and it starts to feel more organized about what actions they need to be taking. $10,000 months feels like I just have to make more and I have to do it now and I have to do it always. And that, in my experience, leads to people feeling overwhelmed to taxed, and usually pretty defeated, because when they don’t hit it every month, it just feels like I failed. I failed, I failed. So I hope that this helped. This is something that has shifted my whole business. This is something that I’ve seen shift the businesses of the people that are in business by design. And this is one of those instances where I really find that structure creates space for you to be creative. 

Like it creates space by having a quarterly plan, by having a year planned out. It allows you to really lean back in those moments that you’re meant to lean back when you have that feeling like you always have to be on. It’s really difficult to be in your feminine, and I don’t recommend it. So I hope that you found this helpful. I hope that you find, as the industry is changing, as things are changing, plans have to be flexible. I don’t have a plan that is set in stone, but I do have something that’s laid out so that I feel better about everything that I’m doing each day. 

And it allows me to lean back in a way where I can make changes to my plan for quarter two or quarter three or something like that down the road and feel very supported in that. And it also gives me enough space where if something shifts in the market, I can change something. And we do see that things are very much changing in the industry. We do see that things are. Are not behaving the way that they have behaved in the past. We have to be nimble in this market. But it doesn’t mean that we’re flying by the seat of our pants. It means that we just need plans that are flexible and we need to be flexible, so we need to be able to roll with it. You can’t panic. And that’s where the alignment part comes in. 

That’s where the deconditioning work comes in. That’s where being unshakable comes in. Because it’s very difficult to change a plan that you have. If you’re scared that when you change it, things will fall apart. You have to deal with that. That’s the benefit. And honestly, it’s an irreplaceable part of your business is you being unshakable. And that’s all of the other alignment work. That’s why I believe so strongly in what we do in business by design, is that it isn’t just the strategy. It isn’t just about laying out the perfect plan. Almost anyone can teach you that, although turns out lots of people don’t. But it’s the alignment piece to help you walk the path and expand yourself so that if something doesn’t go according to plan, you can handle it, shift, pivot, change and not skip a beat. 

And also not be frying your nervous system because you’re just making it all happen. That you can do that in alignment, that you can do that in a way that is nurturing for you and that’s how you rise. So I hope that you found this helpful. I hope this inspired you to go and plan your 2026. I’d love to hear about it. Please go and share in your Instagram stories. If you did your plan, I would love to know. Tag me. I’m icoleno official. I would love to hear what you did and thank you so much for being here. If you want to get your hands on the Secret podcast, please just DM me the word Secret podcast on Instagram. I’m nicolelainoofficial. We’ll send it to you over there or go to nicolelaino.com secretpodcast and you can download it right on the website. 

To download the Secret Podcast on how to Build & Scale Your Business with Human Design click here: nicolelaino.com/secretpodcast

Thanks so much. Have a wonderful rest of your day. And remember, in order to have an unshakable business, you must first become an unshakable human. So thanks for letting us help you become unshakable with human Design. We’ll see you next time.