The Three Part Accountability System For Achieving Your 2026 Goals

Transcript

G’day. My name is Mike from Lone Wolf Unleashed, and welcome to 2026. Wow. We are here already. It feels like last year, most of last year just flew. We’ve had a lot going on. There’s been a lot happening, and there’s a very exciting things that are lined up for this year that I’m excited to share with you.

So we’ll get into that a little bit later in the show. Thank you so much for joining me. So today we’re gonna talk about the goals of 2026. It is the token first episode of the year, you could say. But, you know, this is not another podcast or a course promising 10x growth. We’ve done an episode on that number before, if you want to go and listen to that from last year. But this one is for the solo operators who want their life back. And this year we’re taking a little bit of a different angle on that.

And that is going to be, how do we actually get you unleashed? One of the biggest ways that you can start to do that is by forming your own team. And I know some of you out there are going, oh, but Mike, I’m listening to this because I want to stay solo forever. Look, that is fine. It’s absolutely okay for you to do that as a strategy. But one of the big things that you can sort of do to start free up your time is to give stuff to other people. So what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to create that certainty that you’re going to get the results when you hand it off to other people and not just you doing it. You started your business for a reason. You know, freedom, flexibility.

It is flexibility not just in terms of time, but it’s also in terms of location. So if you’re wanting to work from somewhere else or you wanting to, you know, take a working holiday or whatever, to be able to enable that, and you’ve probably set some goals for this year. I’d be really interested to hear what they are. If you want to flick me an email, it’s [email protected] we would love to be able to hear about what you’ve got planned for this year. But, yeah, most business owners, they’ve already failed their goals by February, and there’s a bit of psychology behind that. And I think it’s generally, though, that people don’t think through what their goals are a lot beforehand, and then they don’t put in place the systems to go about achieving those goals. There’s been a great episode of the Andrew Huberman podcast recently with James Clear where he talks about the atomic habits. And there is an essence of the lowest friction.

Getting started is the biggest thing that goes into achieving those goals. And if you can get the lowest friction start, which makes it really easy for you to start things, then you’re going to see yourself following through more and more consistently, which ultimately is the thing that gets you the results. But there’s also been really interesting talking with people over the December and the Christmas breaks with some people who are quite close to me who are business owners. And one of the things that they really just want help in is just someone to keep the finger on the button, you know, in terms of, hey, I have these plans, how do we make sure that I’m still executing on those? I think it’s really a challenge for people who are particularly on their own to have that follow through. And that is what my program the Pack is for. You can join that for a quarter. You can head over to my website to check that out. Lonewolfunleashed.com but yeah, today I’m going to walk you through the three part accountability system that we’re going to be walking through here.

The first part is public commitment. So you tell others that you’re going to do a thing. There’s a lot of people out there that say that, oh, you don’t want to share what you’re doing because you know if you fail, then it’s not a huge big deal and you won’t have these people asking you about it, blah, blah, blah. But the point is that you should have people asking you about how things went. It keeps you heading towards that goal. If you know that people are going to be asking about it. Now, there might be other reasons why you stop. It might not be because you’re lazy or because you lose sight of it.

It might be just because the strategy to start out with was not clear or not that good, which is fine. It’s really good to take learnings from that. But to be able to tell other people what you’re up to and to be able to tell them, hey, look, by March I’m going to have a 10% increase in sales. What does that mean? Well, it means that you’ve now set a target that’s reasonable, that you can start to work towards and people might start to ask you about, okay, how are you going with that? Oh, okay, I’m up to this amount. Oh, I’ve got a little bit of work to do here. You know being able to have that public commitment, something that you can follow through on and something you can share your journey with because it can be really hard and really lonely as a business owner, particularly when it’s on your own, yourself running a business because you don’t have those hallway conversations where you get to catch up with people all the time. Being able to share these things and share your journey is really, really important. The second one is peer pressure.

Now, in school you would have been told that this is a really bad thing because your friends are going to get you hooked on drugs. At least that’s what I heard when I was growing up. When I talk about peer pressure, I’m more talking about the good kind of peer pressure. Hey, Mike, your marketing is not really that good. If you try these things, I guarantee you’re going to see an uptick in leads or hey, I’ve seen that you’re operating this way or you’re doing this task or you’re looking to improve this process. Have you thought about doing it these other ways? You really should look at doing it this way because we’ve tried these other ways that it’s just not that good. And we really think you’ll get better results off this. Being able to adopt different ways of working through the way that other people are doing it and other people are recommending is really a good way of doing it.

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel here. You’re running a business. A lot of businesses, they don’t operate in the innovation space. You might think you’ve had a good idea and that’s fine. The ultimate thing about running a business is there’s already a proven model, right? You need marketing, you need finance, you need ops, you need delivery. Consumers act in a certain way, they’re not going to suddenly change the way that they behave just because they’re interacting with your business versus others. It’s really good to be able to take in other people’s experience and to take on the types of things that they’re talking about, types of things that they’re recommending that you do to be able to do that. So that’s what I mean by peer pressure.

The third one is regular check ins. Now this one seems like it’s a, oh, you know, just join the call every week and it’s just more time that I could be doing other things and blah, blah, blah. Look, I hear this a lot, but it really is the essence of being able to check in, see how you’re going with things, see what you’re blocked on. Are you making progress on something? If you’re not, how do we move forward? All those sorts of things you might have escaped corporate to get away from that. That’s okay. Some managers aren’t really that good at doing that. However, I will say that having someone watching, someone watching what you’re doing, someone seeing that you are actually moving towards the things that you said you were going to do is really, really important. If there’s no accountability there, you just won’t act.

And you’re still going to be stuck working those 60 to 70 hour weeks 12 months from now. And the goal that you set yourself is going to be the same, the one that you set for this year, right? So we really want to make progress in that. And having those regular check ins, having those touch points to be able to say, hey, how you getting on? It doesn’t have to be long, it just has to be a, hey, are you stuck? Is there a piece of advice or is there something you need to work through those types of things? Now, participants in the pack do get that there’s two calls that we do every week. They’re not all compulsory. There’s the Monday check in, what are you working on for the week? How are you going with things? And then there’s the Wednesday office hours where people can come in, they can check in. Maybe they’re working through a problem when they’re working on their business, maybe they’re putting in place a new platform or they’re working through how to organize their tasks, all those kinds of things. They might just pop in for 10 minutes and pop their head in and go, hey, Mike, do you have any suggestions about how to do this or. I’m putting together this procedure.

Can you just look over it and give me some advice about what I’ve missed, that sort of thing. So those regular check ins are really, really useful. I like going to the office. I do contracts with some larger businesses and I like to go to the office because I get to have those hallway conversations with people and you get to have those bright sparks and those bright ideas about how things might be able to be done better that you wouldn’t have had if you were sitting at home in your own office by yourself. Those are the three parts of the accountability system that I was going to walk through today. I’d like you to think about how you do that in terms of the concept of implementation rather than just planning. Planning is really, really good. But a plan means nothing unless you start to act towards implementing it.

So there’s a lot of planning that happens in December and January because of New Year’s resolutions and all those sorts of things. What I would really like to challenge you with this week is what are those practical steps that you can go and do now to start to implement your plan that you’ve done? How are you going to move the needle on achieving those goals that you’ve set up for yourself this year? And if you really do feel like you’re going to have trouble doing that, please reach out to me and we can have a conversation. I’ve got a plan for this year and it’s a bit scary, but I’ve already started building the systems around it. I have high confidence that we can pull this off because those systems are looking pretty good. And I think this is, you know, this is why we do systems, right? It’s, it’s so it can give us the capability and the consistency to be able to act in confidence and to be able to act boldly and to keep that consistency going. So that’s very exciting. So, number one, you’re going to hear a podcast every week this year. I’m very excited about that.

It’s going to be every Tuesday, we’re going to launch a new one and it’s going to be about 10 to 15 minutes per week that you’ll get to hear me talk about how you can build better systems so that you can switch off sooner and live larger. There’s also some really exciting things happening in and around Brisbane. So I am based in Brisbane. So if you’re based in Brisbane or you want to come and visit, I’m going to be running an event every month from February through November that is going to be on the second Friday of every month. And the events are going to be very specific in nature. So I held my full one day workshop. There’s going to be content coming out about that soon. You can check my different channels, particularly YouTube, but also that covered off my 5P framework.

But these different other workshops are going to be very, very specific. So the first two are going to be around your first AI agent. So setting up your LLM tool of choice in custom projects to be able to manage specific tasks. And the second one of those is going to be around automatically generating your first documents through one of those projects, which is very cool. I’ve had a lot of people sort of ask me about how all of that works and then, you know, based on what people request and things like that, different types of tasks that are looking to automate in their businesses. I’ll be doing more workshops throughout the year on those different subjects, so really get an opportunity to get in the weeds and the detail on how to really start to execute some of these automation things in the business. That’s going to be all for this week. I thank you so much for joining me today.

You could have been doing so many other things with your time, but we decided to hang out with me and learn about how an accountability system works for achieving your 2026 goals. Check out my website, LoneWolfUnleashed.com you can sign up for my newsletter there and I look forward to sending you some more information and talking about some of the things that are happening in the events this year as we move through. Thank you so much and I’ll see you next week.