EP37: Why You Need a More Meaningful Financial Goal.
Most people set financial goals that sound sensible… but feel totally flat. “Replace my salary.” “Make enough to survive.” “Hit 6 figures.”
But when your goal has no real WHY behind it, it’s hard to stay motivated — especially when you’re building a career rooted in purpose, impact, or regeneration.
In this short solo episode, I’ll walk you through:
Why abstract financial goals create resistance
The difference a meaningful, motivating goal can make
A few personal examples from my own path
A simple exercise to help you feel focused and clear
I hope that this episode helps you to set a financial goal that actually feels good — one that energises you, reflects your values, and helps you take action with confidence.
Listen here
Full Transcript
Alisa: Today we're going to talk about financial goals and how we can approach those through a regenerative lens. Specifically, we're going to explore the difference between goals that motivate you and ones that have very little meaning. For anyone who is pursuing regenerative work, money is unlikely to be the primary driver. But at the same time, we know that it's also the biggest fear that holds people back from taking that step out of the corporate world of work. There's a paradox there that can be solved when we set highly motivational, meaningful financial goals and commit to them. So in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through the process that I developed to do that and share how following that process has changed my own relationship with making money inside of a regenerative business.
Most financial goal setting is generic. It sounds something like, I need to replace my corporate salary, or I need to make enough to survive. You might hear people even doing this thing that I think is a kind of American influence of, I'm going to make six figures this year, or I'm going to have my first six-figure month. And that kind of arbitrary or abstract thinking around numbers really can disconnect us from purpose and clarity. When we set financial goals in that way, it all becomes about money for its own sake. This can lead to a problematic relationship where we either somehow feel dirty about the idea of making money, or we feel burdened by the responsibility of generating our own income rather than receiving a monthly salary, or perhaps we simply avoid the money conversation altogether. which leads to highly unsustainable careers and businesses.
The fact is that profit itself isn't inherently the problem. Profit without purpose is. I've had an interesting relationship with financial goals. My natural instinct, my kind of history is not to think about money at all, to just let it happen and hope for the best. And yes, I want to acknowledge that is because I come from a financially privileged background and I've always known that I will have someone or something to fall back on should the shit hit the fan. But as I became an entrepreneur for the first time, I had to do quite a bit of work on my relationship with money and knowing and owning my value as an entrepreneur. And as I did that work, I became comfortable setting ambitious financial goals for my company. And that ambition, the energy of that certainly helped. But the motivation was always more about achieving that number than something tangible, concrete and meaningful.
When money stays abstract, our relationship with it becomes vague and complicated. When money has a clear beneficial purpose, our relationship becomes clear. We can focus. We can feel good about making that money. Sam Garcia, who is the author of Regenerative Business, talks about finding a ‘regenerative why’ for making money. And I think that is great advice. Making money is important. It gives us the power to make change and to empower others. I've known from the outset that my regenerative why is to do with rewilding. I have a vision of being able to purchase damaged, overexploited land and give that back to nature. But that is a very long-term goal. And in reality, it's simply not immediate enough to be motivating on a daily basis. So that led me to not really think about money much at all, which then led to a lack of focus in my business and a lack of that kind of healthy urgency and connection with the importance of what I do. But recently, and in the midst, if I'm entirely honest, of a little bit of a... Regenerative business existential crisis. I shifted my focus to a highly motivating, short-term and achievable financial goal and it feels so present to me that I'm motivated by it moment to moment.
All the little actions that I'm taking inside of my business are contributing to that vision of achieving that goal and it feels great. For me, that goal is to pay off my mortgage. My goal is to do that within a year and I'm in a fortunate position and I know that I can do that. Since I made that decision, my energy and focus have completely shifted. I can see the finish line. I can see the reason for putting in the work. And I know that achieving that goal will be an important milestone towards making my bigger regenerative why of rewilding a reality. So let's see if I can shift this. for you. Let's see if you can feel the difference when your financial goal has a really meaningful why behind it. It's not about the number, it's about what it means to you. This could be something like paying off a specific debt, it could be covering enough time to take a short career break, it could be funding a creative or impact-driven project, or just creating enough of a buffer so that you have more choice in saying no to work that doesn't feel aligned for you. When your goal is clear, bounded and meaningful, you will find that your energy changes, your decisions simplify, you're no longer just making money and there isn't that tension between making money and wanting to create a purposeful career or regenerative business. You're moving towards something real.
Now if you're in the early stages, by which I mean you're just dipping your toe into regenerative work, maybe trying to figure out if that would be viable for you, or perhaps you have an early stage business idea that you want to test out, then I recommend keeping your goal relatively small and personally impactful. What you're doing here is building your entrepreneurial muscle. You're proving to yourself that you can make money from regenerative work. Once you've done that, then you can expand those goals. You can set them out a little further and you can begin to think about how you could have impact beyond your immediate circle. But start small and start clear. And most importantly, commit to achieving that goal.
Here are a few more examples that might help to inspire you. Maybe covering a few months of living costs so you can go part-time and replacing just one expense like childcare or rent through income from work that feels aligned for you, funding a course, a retreat or a sabbatical that supports your regenerative growth, earning your first amount of money. Okay, that is one way we're focused on the amount, but really the concrete impact is that you're going to see that you can earn money. Set yourself whatever small enough goal feels good to you to know I made that money from regenerative work. So take a moment. think about what that highly motivating short-term financial goal could be for you. Make it achievable, meaningful and more than just the money. And then we are going to put our number on it because that's important. We want to be clear what it is that we have to achieve that's going to help your decision making. I also invite you to set a date. That's really important. Write it down. My date for paying off my mortgage is the 31st of July 2026 and I deliberately am being really really specific there because I don't want to give myself wriggle room or any space to be vague or uncommitted and now that is the really key point here once you have defined that goal and it's clear and it feels good and motivating to you commit to doing what it takes of course within your values within your boundaries to get there you might even need to write yourself a little kind of statement that expresses your commitment to that goal. That's one of the things that I did. I wrote down this is what I'm going to achieve and I am willing to do what it takes to get there. I'm willing to get uncomfortable if necessary. I'm willing to think differently about what it is that I offer to do there. I'm willing to do things that may don't feel great from an ego perspective but still feel fine to me ethically if that's what it takes in order to achieve that goal. Stay focused and prove to yourself that this can be done.
Okay, I hope that you enjoy putting this into practice, getting those things written down, and I hope that you experience the kind of energetic shift that I have done in recent weeks since I put my focus on this goal. I can't tell you how much it is helping me to stay really focused in the time that I have for work, know what my boundaries are, know what I'm here to achieve, and feel really, really good about making money inside of my regenerative business. As I mentioned, this shift came out of me having a little mini existential crisis inside my business. I took myself away for a couple of days to be by myself, to have a lot of space to think. And in the morning, I sat down and I kind of mapped out this framework to find my focus with my regenerative business. And I created a simple values-led tool that I'm going to be sharing with you soon because I really think this has changed the course of my business.
What I've shared with you today around meaningful financial goals is the first step in a process that I'm calling the purposeful income path. If you want to be the first to know when that is ready, then send me an email at alisa@regenerativeworklife.com or contact me on Instagram or LinkedIn and I will make sure that you are on the waiting list. It's going to be ready in a couple of weeks and it's going to be a really incredible framework for helping you take those first steps into finding a focus and generating income from regenerative work.
Thank you so much for listening. Enjoy getting this into practice, and I will see you next week.
