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432: Creating Your Unstoppable Plan for 2026 · Unshakeable with Human Design - A Human Design For Business Podcast

0:11
Nicole Laino: Come here to become an unshakable human and build an unshakable business according to your human design.
0:17
Nicole Laino: I'm your host, Nicole Laino.
0:22
Nicole Laino: Hello, and welcome to Unshakable with Human Design, everybody.
0:25
Nicole Laino: I'm your host, Nicole Leno.
0:27
Nicole Laino: And excuse me, I have my sexy voice.
0:29
Nicole Laino: I'm a little bit under the weather, fighting off a cold, so I have my little husky voice for the holidays.
0:35
Nicole Laino: Hello, honey.
0:38
Nicole Laino: So bear with me here.
0:39
Nicole Laino: Really what I wanted to talk to you guys about.
0:41
Nicole Laino: I'm so excited to be here with you, as always.
0:43
Nicole Laino: We're coming up on the holiday season.
0:45
Nicole Laino: We are winding down 2025, and I took my people in, my clients in Business by Design through a planning session for 2026.
0:57
Nicole Laino: 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.
1:07
Nicole Laino: 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.
1:23
Nicole Laino: And it's funny, I hear it and I'm surprised, or I'm like, you know, wow, that's so crazy.
1:28
Nicole Laino: But I also shouldn't be surprised because no one really taught me how to do that.
1:33
Nicole Laino: We did have.
1:35
Nicole Laino: 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.
1:51
Nicole Laino: She never taught us how to, like, plan out the year, necessarily.
1:56
Nicole Laino: However, she did do it in other ways, but we didn't sit down, have, like, a yearly planning session.
2:00
Nicole Laino: She does that now with her people.
2:01
Nicole Laino: I still follow this coach, and I see that she does that, and that is something that I do with my people.
2:07
Nicole Laino: And this is one of those things where, you know, I straddle that masculine, feminine energy thing.
2:13
Nicole Laino: I think planning your year.
2:16
Nicole Laino: And I plan in a very flexible way.
2:18
Nicole Laino: 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.
2:27
Nicole Laino: 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.
2:32
Nicole Laino: 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.
2:41
Nicole Laino: And.
2:41
Nicole Laino: 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.
2:56
Nicole Laino: We're talking about a little bit about the shifting landscape of the industry.
2:59
Nicole Laino: 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.
3:37
Nicole Laino: Okay, so we're gonna break all of that down in this episode.
3:40
Nicole Laino: So I hope that you love it.
3:41
Nicole Laino: 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.
3:50
Nicole Laino: Like I said, I had clients that were like, you know, it really surprised me.
3:53
Nicole Laino: Like, I sat here and I thought about it, and, you know, no coach has ever walked me through that.
3:57
Nicole Laino: And that made me sad for my clients.
4:01
Nicole Laino: But I'm so happy that they feel supported in our group because we teach human design.
4:06
Nicole Laino: I teach alignment.
4:08
Nicole Laino: I teach you how to decondition and how to shift your identity into your next level self.
4:13
Nicole Laino: But we also teach you how to be profitable.
4:16
Nicole Laino: 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.
4:24
Nicole Laino: Because if you're not supported, if you are not profitable, it's very difficult to feel truly aligned.
4:29
Nicole Laino: You might feel better, but.
4:31
Nicole Laino: 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.
4:41
Nicole Laino: 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.
4:57
Nicole Laino: 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.
5:10
Nicole Laino: I created a whole secret podcast just on this, on how to have an aligned and profitable business.
5:15
Nicole Laino: That's what it's called with human design.
5:17
Nicole Laino: And we lay the entire thing out for you.
5:19
Nicole Laino: All you have to do to grab that is to DM me the word secret podcast on Instagram, I'm icolenofficial.
5:26
Nicole Laino: Or go to nicolelaino.com secretpodcast and you can get it over there on the website.
5:32
Nicole Laino: We'll also link it all up in the show notes for you, of course.
5:34
Nicole Laino: As always, we'll hook you up down there.
5:36
Nicole Laino: Okay, so let's talk about this.
5:38
Nicole Laino: So why do we plan our year?
5:40
Nicole Laino: 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.
5:51
Nicole Laino: 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.
6:00
Nicole Laino: 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.
6:07
Nicole Laino: I don't.
6:08
Nicole Laino: Some quarters are better than others.
6:10
Nicole Laino: For me, we have some runaway ones that are huge successes, and then we have some that don't perform as well.
6:16
Nicole Laino: And.
6:17
Nicole Laino: And that's fine and that's normal.
6:19
Nicole Laino: 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.
6:32
Nicole Laino: And if you have a down month, feeling like everything is going down.
6:37
Nicole Laino: 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.
6:48
Nicole Laino: It's like, okay, well, where am I averaging?
6:50
Nicole Laino: And then what's the number that I need to hit in March?
6:53
Nicole Laino: And that helps me understand, makes me much more intentional with the actions that I take.
7:00
Nicole Laino: 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.
7:12
Nicole Laino: Don't underestimate.
7:13
Nicole Laino: 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.
7:29
Nicole Laino: That feeling of uncertainty that feeling of, what am I going to do?
7:34
Nicole Laino: What that causes in most people is knee jerk reactions.
7:38
Nicole Laino: Now you're making decisions from a place of lack.
7:42
Nicole Laino: Oh, my God, I don't know what I'm going to do.
7:43
Nicole Laino: I got to make some money.
7:44
Nicole Laino: I'll sell this thing.
7:45
Nicole Laino: I'll.
7:45
Nicole Laino: I'll do this thing.
7:46
Nicole Laino: But there's not a lot of strategy behind this.
7:50
Nicole Laino: Then that causes you.
7:51
Nicole Laino: So think about it.
7:52
Nicole Laino: You don't have a plan, so you show up in January and like, I got to sell something.
7:56
Nicole Laino: What am I going to do?
7:57
Nicole Laino: So now you just start talking about something on social.
8:00
Nicole Laino: You're being present on social media, maybe, or you have a podcast to.
8:04
Nicole Laino: You're just creating episodes because you have to create an episode a week.
8:08
Nicole Laino: So you're on your content calendar, but you're not on your sales calendar.
8:12
Nicole Laino: So the content is being put out, but you're not actually promoting anything.
8:16
Nicole Laino: 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.
8:25
Nicole Laino: And the content really wasn't designed to sell anything.
8:28
Nicole Laino: So now you're trying to sell something to sort of throwing it on top of everything else.
8:34
Nicole Laino: That is why people struggle.
8:37
Nicole Laino: Because if you had a plan, then if you knew what you were going to be selling, you could actually promote it.
8:43
Nicole Laino: And everything in your business could kind of be working in concert together rather than you just doing things.
8:51
Nicole Laino: You hear me talk about this a lot.
8:53
Nicole Laino: 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.
9:00
Nicole Laino: A strategy is a system that's working underneath everything, making all the tactics work.
9:06
Nicole Laino: Content is a tactic.
9:07
Nicole Laino: There's a marketing strategy underneath the content that allows it to work and drive sales.
9:13
Nicole Laino: This is what marketing is.
9:15
Nicole Laino: 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.
9:27
Nicole Laino: We want them to monetize.
9:28
Nicole Laino: We want them to drive results in your business.
9:31
Nicole Laino: That's why we're here.
9:33
Nicole Laino: Nobody's in business just to be here.
9:35
Nicole Laino: We want to support our families and we deserve to.
9:39
Nicole Laino: And this is one of the things that drives me crazy, watching entrepreneurs kind of run in circles being busy but not productive.
9:47
Nicole Laino: This is what busy and not productive is to me.
9:49
Nicole Laino: It's working without a strategy.
9:51
Nicole Laino: It is working where it's fear driving a lot of the action.
9:55
Nicole Laino: And what that causes is ineffective action, fear.
10:00
Nicole Laino: More Fear more overwhelm.
10:02
Nicole Laino: Super busy not making money.
10:05
Nicole Laino: And that sucks.
10:06
Nicole Laino: All of it.
10:07
Nicole Laino: Okay?
10:08
Nicole Laino: 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.
10:16
Nicole Laino: 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.
10:28
Nicole Laino: And your first goal shouldn't be 10,000amonth unless you have a lot of apparatus under you.
10:35
Nicole Laino: I don't want to say it shouldn't be.
10:36
Nicole Laino: Usually that's not how we create some success.
10:40
Nicole Laino: Unless you're so energetically in alignment with the 10k month that feels easy to you.
10:47
Nicole Laino: But most of the people who come to me, that's not where they're at.
10:50
Nicole Laino: You can go from 2,000 to $20,000 a month.
10:53
Nicole Laino: Like that can happen.
10:54
Nicole Laino: I'm not telling you that's not possible.
10:57
Nicole Laino: Anything is possible.
10:58
Nicole Laino: But that requires a certain level of energetic alignment and strategic alignment to make that happen.
11:06
Nicole Laino: If you feel good about that, roll with it.
11:08
Nicole Laino: Most of the people who come to me because when I ask them how they're going to get there, they don't know.
11:13
Nicole Laino: They can't answer that question.
11:15
Nicole Laino: 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.
11:29
Nicole Laino: So if you want to go from a 2000 to a $10,000 month, that's cool, that's awesome.
11:35
Nicole Laino: We can do that.
11:36
Nicole Laino: 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.
11:44
Nicole Laino: And what that does is so many people are just looking to sell more.
11:50
Nicole Laino: 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.
12:07
Nicole Laino: Like they have that 10k month, 20k month, or whatever number like that's out there, but that's not really real to them.
12:12
Nicole Laino: And they're not really looking at it being like, okay, well, what would I actually need to sell to hit that?
12:17
Nicole Laino: Like, to me, I look at it and I'm like, okay, I know the sales that I need to bring in.
12:21
Nicole Laino: I know the products that I could be selling in order to hit my revenue goals.
12:26
Nicole Laino: What that does is that allows me again to be intentional about the actions that I'm taking.
12:34
Nicole Laino: Well, if I need to sell these things, then I should be talking about those things, right?
12:38
Nicole Laino: I should be talking about them on this show, I should be talking about them on social media.
12:42
Nicole Laino: I should be emailing my list about them.
12:45
Nicole Laino: And it allows me to understand what will move the needle in my business.
12:50
Nicole Laino: We hear that all the time.
12:52
Nicole Laino: What are your needle moving activities?
12:54
Nicole Laino: What are the needle movers in your business?
12:57
Nicole Laino: Well, that depends on what your goals are and it depends on your business.
13:00
Nicole Laino: And by asking these questions and having some revenue targets, you can actually be backing into the needle moving tasks.
13:08
Nicole Laino: It's not just pulling tasks off the wall, it's saying, well, what's the needle?
13:12
Nicole Laino: And how do I get that very specific needle to move in the direction that I want it to move in?
13:18
Nicole Laino: This is what the plans help with.
13:21
Nicole Laino: 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.
13:31
Nicole Laino: 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.
13:39
Nicole Laino: I have found this to be a difficult one to make work all the time.
13:43
Nicole Laino: This is a supplement to a lot of the things that I do, but it's not my way of driving revenue.
13:49
Nicole Laino: 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.
13:59
Nicole Laino: And then there are ways of selling in mass and selling one to many, like launches, like workshops, masterclasses, things like that.
14:09
Nicole Laino: What I like about having a mix of these two things going on is one of them happens pretty immediately.
14:16
Nicole Laino: You send an email, you want to buy this.
14:18
Nicole Laino: They either buy or they don't.
14:20
Nicole Laino: So that's something that you can be doing all the time.
14:23
Nicole Laino: 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.
14:30
Nicole Laino: And this is where having some sort of conversion event on your calendar at least once a quarter can really help you.
14:40
Nicole Laino: Where your revenue becomes more predictable.
14:44
Nicole Laino: Okay, I'm going to do this event on this day.
14:48
Nicole Laino: But it's not just about that becoming predictable.
14:51
Nicole Laino: 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.
15:02
Nicole Laino: And you have time to do that when you don't plan.
15:06
Nicole Laino: You can't really.
15:07
Nicole Laino: And I learned this in my early days of launching.
15:11
Nicole Laino: So when I first learned to launch, I was either filling a launch, meaning like I was building my list.
15:20
Nicole Laino: At that time we put people in Facebook groups.
15:22
Nicole Laino: 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.
15:32
Nicole Laino: That was my whole business model when I first started out.
15:37
Nicole Laino: But I felt like I was doing that all the time because I was launching every six to eight weeks.
15:42
Nicole Laino: It was a lot.
15:43
Nicole Laino: There was so many and that was too much.
15:46
Nicole Laino: But what we found that having a quarterly cadence where you can be.
15:50
Nicole Laino: There's three phases to a funnel, there is visibility, there's nurturing, and then there's conversion.
15:57
Nicole Laino: You should be doing that within your business all the time.
16:02
Nicole Laino: And eventually you're doing all three simultaneously.
16:05
Nicole Laino: But in the beginning, you're probably going to be doing one at a time until you have a system going.
16:11
Nicole Laino: And when you don't have a plan, it's very difficult to execute on those two things.
16:17
Nicole Laino: To bring new people into your world, to nurture those new people and then bring them to a sale.
16:23
Nicole Laino: This is how you're learning how to juggle.
16:26
Nicole Laino: It's very difficult to do when you don't have a plan.
16:31
Nicole Laino: How do you know what you're nurturing people for if you don't know where you're driving them to?
16:36
Nicole Laino: If you don't know when you're going to be converting them, how do you know what phase you're in?
16:41
Nicole Laino: It just.
16:41
Nicole Laino: I have found that quarterly planning is a really great way to create predictable revenue for your business.
16:47
Nicole Laino: 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.
16:54
Nicole Laino: Am I in list building mode?
16:56
Nicole Laino: Am I in nurturing mode, or am I in conversion mode?
16:59
Nicole Laino: That before you learn to juggle, you can handle doing each of those things one at a time.
17:05
Nicole Laino: So I find this to be just the easiest way for people to have a six figure year if they're doing this.
17:13
Nicole Laino: If you plan quarterly, then if you can make $25,000 per quarter, then you have a hundred thousand dollar year.
17:20
Nicole Laino: Okay, if I have a $25,000 quarter.
17:23
Nicole Laino: Okay, well, how does that shake out?
17:25
Nicole Laino: Let me think about that.
17:26
Nicole Laino: Rather than 10k months, can you make $25,000 in a quarter?
17:30
Nicole Laino: 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.
17:39
Nicole Laino: $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.
17:45
Nicole Laino: 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.
17:54
Nicole Laino: I failed, I failed.
17:56
Nicole Laino: So I hope that this helped.
17:58
Nicole Laino: This is something that has shifted my whole business.
18:01
Nicole Laino: This is something that I've seen shift the businesses of the people that are in business by design.
18:06
Nicole Laino: And this is one of those instances where I really find that structure creates space for you to be creative.
18:13
Nicole Laino: Like it creates space by having a quarterly plan, by having a year planned out.
18:19
Nicole Laino: 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.
18:26
Nicole Laino: It's really difficult to be in your feminine, and I don't recommend it.
18:31
Nicole Laino: So I hope that you found this helpful.
18:33
Nicole Laino: I hope that you find, as the industry is changing, as things are changing, plans have to be flexible.
18:39
Nicole Laino: 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.
18:49
Nicole Laino: 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.
19:02
Nicole Laino: And it also gives me enough space where if something shifts in the market, I can change something.
19:08
Nicole Laino: And we do see that things are very much changing in the industry.
19:11
Nicole Laino: We do see that things are.
19:13
Nicole Laino: Are not behaving the way that they have behaved in the past.
19:17
Nicole Laino: We have to be nimble in this market.
19:18
Nicole Laino: But it doesn't mean that we're flying by the seat of our pants.
19:22
Nicole Laino: 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.
19:29
Nicole Laino: You can't panic.
19:30
Nicole Laino: And that's where the alignment part comes in.
19:33
Nicole Laino: That's where the deconditioning work comes in.
19:36
Nicole Laino: That's where being unshakable comes in.
19:38
Nicole Laino: Because it's very difficult to change a plan that you have.
19:41
Nicole Laino: If you're scared that when you change it, things will fall apart.
19:46
Nicole Laino: You have to deal with that.
19:47
Nicole Laino: That's the benefit.
19:49
Nicole Laino: And honestly, it's an irreplaceable part of your business is you being unshakable.
19:55
Nicole Laino: And that's all of the other alignment work.
19:57
Nicole Laino: That's why I believe so strongly in what we do in business by design, is that it isn't just the strategy.
20:02
Nicole Laino: It isn't just about laying out the perfect plan.
20:04
Nicole Laino: Almost anyone can teach you that, although turns out lots of people don't.
20:08
Nicole Laino: 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.
20:21
Nicole Laino: And also not be frying your nervous system because you're just making it all happen.
20:27
Nicole Laino: 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.
20:34
Nicole Laino: So I hope that you found this helpful.
20:35
Nicole Laino: I hope this inspired you to go and plan your 2026.
20:40
Nicole Laino: I'd love to hear about it.
20:41
Nicole Laino: Please go and share in your Instagram stories.
20:44
Nicole Laino: If you did your plan, I would love to know.
20:46
Nicole Laino: Tag me.
20:46
Nicole Laino: I'm icoleno official.
20:48
Nicole Laino: I would love to hear what you did and thank you so much for being here.
20:51
Nicole Laino: If you want to get your hands on the Secret podcast, please just DM me the word Secret podcast on Instagram.
20:55
Nicole Laino: I'm icoleanofficial.
20:57
Nicole Laino: We'll send it to you over there or go to nicolelaino.com secretpodcast and you can download it right on the website.
21:03
Nicole Laino: Thanks so much.
21:04
Nicole Laino: Have a wonderful rest of your day.
21:06
Nicole Laino: And remember, in order to have an unshakable business, you must first become an unshakable human.
21:11
Nicole Laino: So thanks for letting us help you become unshakable with human Design.
21:13
Nicole Laino: We'll see you next time.
21:15
Nicole Laino: If you love this episode and you're a fan of the show, please show us the love on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to the show and leave us a review.
21:21
Nicole Laino: And if you'd like to connect with other entrepreneurs on the Internet Human Design Journey, join our free Facebook community Human Design for entrepreneurs.
21:29
Nicole Laino: Go to NicoleLaino Me podcast links to join the group, book a human design reading with me or access our free human design resources.
21:38
Nicole Laino: We'll see you there.