In today’s episode, I’m sharing my three big strategic intentions for 2025.

These aren’t just goals — they’re the driving forces behind how I want to show up, lead, and grow both personally and in my business.

I’m talking about putting myself in rooms that challenge my thinking, simplifying everything I do, and prioritizing depth in every aspect of my work.

If you’re feeling stuck in your own bubble or looking for a fresh perspective as you plan for the new year, this episode is for you.

Let’s set the tone for 2025 together.

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh: 

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. These are the last few weeks of the year. I think I am first of all so excited for this podcast for next year. I shared in, I don’t know, four episodes back that I actually am renting a space going into next year and it will primarily be my podcast studio. I’ll also set it up to be able to work if I want to work outside of the house. I just think it’s going to be a really cool shift for me to have a space outside of my home office to separate work a little bit more from home. But with that is going to come a relaunch of the podcast and doing it video.

I’m going to be bringing in some more really amazing interviews because I’ll be able to do in-person video interviews. So I am so excited. I’m probably going to choose a time and do like a little pause on the podcast and then relaunch it. I don’t know exactly when that will be yet, maybe at the beginning of the year, but the tentative relaunch date is February for that because I start renting my space in January and so I’ll be able to do some recording. I have wanted to do this all year and an opportunity just kind of fell in my lap to rent this space from somebody I do CrossFit with and the space is like in the back of their business and it’s brand new and it’s right by my gym. So that’s also awesome. And I’m just so excited. I’m really excited for next year. I feel super hopeful and just really clear. I feel really clear on what I’m focusing on and what I’m going to put a lot of energy into and what I’m not.

So on today’s episode, I wanted to talk about three strategic intentions that I have for 2025 and my goal is this kind of gets you thinking a little bit too. I am going to do a podcast episode on my specific marketing predictions for 2025 and this kind of weaves a little bit of it in because obviously my intentions are based off of. What I predict is going to do well next year, but I want to do a separate bigger episode on my predictions for next year. This one is what I have sat down and said, these are my intentions for 2025 specifically for my business.

And when I say intention, it’s not a goal. This is what actually drives some of my goals. It’s like this is how I want to show up. This is what I want to be focused on. This is what I believe will move the needle the most both both in my personal and business growth. So the first one I want to talk about the most. And this first intention came from an experience I had last week that I want to share. The intention is to get in rooms or surround myself more with new things, with things that make me a little bit uncomfortable, with which are unknown and push my growth. And here’s why. Let me explain this.

So I went to a book launch last week for Cody Sanchez, who’s an awesome entrepreneur. It lives here in Austin. I went with my friend. And as I was in the room, I realized something. It wasn’t something she said. It was just the experience of being in this room. She definitely has a whole different world than what I’m used to. So a little bit of background to make this make sense. She teaches people how to buy what she calls boring businesses. So things like laundromats, plumbing companies, painting companies, landscaping, like boring service based, not always service based, but boring standard businesses that she argues.

We’ll be here forever and there’s a lot of baby boomer generation who runs these businesses and doesn’t want to continue and there’s no one to take them over. And so there’s all this great opportunity to come in and buy them for a great deal and take them over and run them. And so naturally she attracts a lot of these types of people in the room. So you’ve got a lot of people running these types of businesses, buying and selling businesses. That’s what she does. And to me, it’s a very different world. I have no idea how to do that. I have no experience buying and selling businesses and investing in that way.

And I have no idea what it would be like to run a business and not be the face of it. And so I’m not saying that I’m going to go and do that. I am interested in potentially doing that in the future as an investor. I think it would be a distraction for me right now to try to run something. However, as I was sitting there and experiencing this and the conversations that I was having and then my friend brought another friend who owns franchises and it’s just a totally different world, right? And he’s talking about buying franchises and then selling them and like this massive deals like his friend who did like a $90 million dollars deal, just a world that I have no idea about. And so my takeaway from it was wow there is so much that I don’t know and I realized and I’ve had this realization over the last few years how easy it is to get in a place where you are comfortable and you continue to live in the same bubble and you continue to operate doing somewhat the same things. Now, I love to innovate. So I think I innovate in the sense of new marketing strategies and ideas that I can bring to a webinar, to a training, to topics on the podcast, different things I can do in that way. But for the most part, I’m in a bubble. I am in a digital marketing bubble.

And I think there’s a lot of value from learning from people and entrepreneurs who are in a totally different industry. Not in a way where you get distracted and you start chasing all these things, but you learn from them because they have completely different experience than me and have knowledge that i have I don’t even know. You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s such a powerful thing is you can go and seek this knowledge, but the most powerful knowledge is the stuff we don’t even know that we don’t know and could support us. And I think that as an entrepreneur, there’s kind of this experience where in the beginning, if I reflect back to the beginning of my business and that version of me, that entrepreneur that I was then,

I was soaking up information, right? I was in rooms. I was in masterminds of these business owners who were way bigger than me, who had mastered this digital business. And I was just starting out. I was figuring it out. I was trying a bunch of things. I was saying yes to everything. I was i was figuring out what I wanted to do. I had no idea where I was going. I was just following the momentum. And that’s how I started my business, right? I started as a virtual assistant and then that led to Facebook ads and then that led to marketing and then that led to my agency and then that led to building my team. I didn’t start out and say, this is what I want to do. The journey led there, but the journey could have never led me there if I wouldn’t have put myself in situations where I was learning from people who knew more than me and challenging my thinking.

Then you build a business and I built a business and it makes millions of dollars a year. So there’s not as much of a reason for me to put myself in that situation. I want to, but it’s actually harder to find because it’s harder for me to find rooms that I can be in of people way farther ahead of me. And I also have to balance like I have this thing that works. I can’t be as nimble and just changing everything because that’s not smart.

And I think I could think so much bigger if I got outside of this bubble. And so I think as we grow, once we find success, we stop challenging ourselves like we used to. Because in the beginning, and you might be at this beginning stage, and I said this to my friend, I was like, I miss that energy. I actually miss the energy of the brand new business owner where everything was exciting. And you were just learning so much and you’re like, oh my God, like all the possibilities and I can’t believe this. And you know, when things start working and taking off, it’s just that momentum. It’s like you’re on a high. I don’t want to go back to starting a business or be in the beginning of my business because there’s obviously lots of struggles with that too. I didn’t have the team. I didn’t have the freedom. I didn’t have the time that I have now.

But that energy of me is really powerful. And you also at that stage, you have nothing to lose. It’s like, I haven’t really found success yet, so I may as well try all these things and I don’t have anything to really lose. But as you gain success, now you have contrast. You have this success. And so when you try something that doesn’t work, you do kind of go like, well, I don’t want to do that stuff anymore because I have this contrast of success. And so you tend to stay in a bubble. At least that’s my experience. And I feel like I’m a pretty innovative person, but I also am a very structured and routine based person. And I think unless I’m challenged, I don’t think outside of my bubble, my box.

I think outside the box in this space and as it relates to my current business, but not beyond that, right? And all of the opportunity out there. So as I was sitting in this room, I realized I need to think so much bigger. And in order for me to think so much bigger, I need to go into a season. I think of learning of being uncomfortable of new and of just absorbing different. Entrepreneurs experiences and knowledge and taking some of it leaving some of it but exposing myself to it. And so one of my intentions for 2025 is to be really intentional with the rooms that I’m in, meaning the people I hang out with, the groups that I’m in. And I don’t mean this by like, I only want to be with people who are making more money than me. No, I want to be with people who challenge my thinking, who are doing things different, who are in different industries, who have different skill sets than the standard digital marketing.

Because, I’m gonna use this analogy. In health, when you eat the same thing every day, even if it’s the healthiest food, it’s actually not good for your body because you become adapted to it. If you exercise and you do the same thing, like you run every single day, it’s actually not good for your body. Our bodies need variation. They say that when you take supplements, you should actually take five days on and two days off because if you take them the same day every single day, forever, you become adapted and they become less effective. I think it’s the same for our minds we become adapted to what we are exposed to. And so then we go in that box where it’s like we are seeing the same things, thinking the same way in the same bubble, operating in the same structure. And now we’ve taken away this ability to think differently. And it’s not that our structure and our bubble is bad. I have a multimillion dollar company. It’s quote good.

But I feel like I could step outside of the bubble step outside of the box and it could be so much better. So my intention is to be in rooms that challenge my thinking I don’t care how much money the entrepreneurs are making. I want different experience. I want to explore material and learning very intentionally, not as noise, but as challenging my thinking. And I think I’m very much in that season. I’m going into a decade of having my business. You may or may not be in that season. But I think a challenge for you is asking, do you put yourself in situations where the people around you and the knowledge around you is challenging you to think differently than how you normally would? That’s what I think is the important piece for every single one of us, no matter what stage of business we are in.

My second intention for 2025 is simplify and ease is to just continue to look at, and this goes with my next one, but to continue to look at everything we’re doing from our marketing to our delivery, to how I’m spending my time and ask myself, could I accomplish the same result? and do less to get there. I have this chronic struggle of making things harder than they need to be. I don’t know if you guys resonate with that, but I have friends who are so good at just like doing the bare minimum and getting an amazing results. I, for whatever reason, am somebody who, without even meaning to make things harder and and make things more work and do, I think more oftentimes, if I don’t catch myself, more will equal success. And so when I look at my own marketing and my own delivery and the offers that we’re promoting and and how we’re spending this year, it’s like very simple, very focused. We have a couple of big initiatives, the podcast being one of them our two offers, core offers, that’s it. 

And everything as simple as possible because that gets to my third one. I think what this will do is allow the space for depth. And this leads into a prediction that I’m going to share in my next episode, but I think that depth is going to win this year. I think we’ve been on a trajectory of that. And what I mean by depth is within your messaging, within your marketing strategies, your live launches, your trainings, your emails, all of it. The more depth you have and the priority over depth, meaning connecting to that deeper level of emotion or having an experience that goes beyond just the standard webinar. And I think this goes hand in hand with the first one of getting in rooms that challenge my thinking because then I can think of new ideas, maybe not even in this bubble that we’re in of digital marketing and bring it into this industry and shift it up, change it up. And so that third intention for me is bringing depth to everything I do, bringing depth to our promotions, our launches, the podcast, like anything I’m putting my effort in, it’s not going to be for the sake of speed. I like to do things fast. I’ll always like to do things fast, but I don’t want to sacrifice depth. And that takes me intentionally slowing down and making this a priority. And I think in order for me to do this, I have to keep things simple. So for me, what that looks like is having three to five core goals, core initiatives, and that’s me and the entire team’s priority for the entire year. And it feels so good. It feels so simple, so clear, so focused.

So doable, but also able to add depth to what we do. So those are my three strategic intentions for 2025. Maybe some of them resonate with you. Maybe some of them don’t. I would sit down and think about this as you move into your planning. Like what do I want to focus on next year? Because that should drive your goals. It’s like, how do I want it to feel? And when I think about how do I want 2025 to feel, I want it to feel exciting. I want it to feel passionate. I want it to feel expansive. I want it to feel simple. I want it to feel ease. I want it to feel like deep, juicy. Everything I do has that quality to it. And I think I’ve done a lot of that this last year, but I want to up level that even more. And so maybe sit with the question of how do I want 2025 to feel and allow that to kind of dictate your intentions and then that to dictate your goals. All right, everybody have a beautiful week as we get ready for Christmas. If you celebrate, take a moment to be present and I will talk to you guys on Thursday.