Not Your Ordinary Goal Setting Advice
The new year is peak personal development season. It’s the time of the year we sit down and plan out what we’d like to accomplish. You may or may not be a resolution or goal setting type of person, but as a business owner, it’s imperative that you put pen to paper on what you’d like to achieve this year.
If we’re being honest, we don’t particularly enjoy setting goals. I mean, I struggle with figuring out what I want to eat on a daily basis, how the heck am I supposed to create a plan for the next 12 months! On top of that, setting goals for my business has been another beast. How many clients do I need? What should I charge them? What’s my revenue goal? Am I going to get paid? How many services can I offer? It’s a lot!!!
There are two types of people in this world, however: those who leave their personal financial success solely in the hands of their employers and then there’s those like us. People who have chosen in some capacity, to take full responsibility for our income and build our own futures through owning our businesses.
We’re bosses.
AND, our lives are messy, filled with uncertainty, and constantly changing. Being “human” contributes to our lack of achieving the beautifully written goals we take on each year. So, we’re bosses, with big dreams and goals, yet live messy, unpredictable lives that can get us off track.
If you fall in this category, don’t worry, here’s some not so ordinary advice on crushing your 2021 goals:
Change the word from Goals to Guesses. Take the pressure off of trying to predict the future. This isn’t a “get out of goal setting” free card. This is me saying, give yourself permission to make the best-educated guess you can with the information you currently have. Then, take control of the word GOAL back and use it as a framework to create your plan. You create the goal with the caveat that it’s an educated guess that will need tweaking along the way.
Now, let’s think about the framework. Here’s what I teach my clients:
Create your Why statement (NO arbitrary goals)
Write your personal and business vision
Discover your top 3-5 personal and business values
List out ALL the personal and business goals you’d like to achieve. Then narrow those down to the top 5 for personal and business.
Create SMART goals: Specific, Meaningful, Actionable, Realistic, Trackable (I use meaningful instead of measurable because we need to create goals we care about. Knowing your why and values are critical to this step)
Create projects under your goals. Projects support you in reaching the goals.
Design systems and processes to support the projects
3. Achieving success with your goals takes you becoming and embodying the characteristics of the type of person who keeps their commitments to themselves to put in the work. More revenue, selling more products, having more reach, taking home more money, or whatever you desire doesn’t happen continuously without you becoming the person who is willing to do what it takes. Yes, you may have won without becoming but you won’t sustain those wins.
4. Remember who the (fill in the blank) you are!!! Sis! You’ve won so many times before. You’ve crushed your goals. You’ve pivoted. Listen! You survived 2020!!!! Make you a Win list. When self-doubt creeps up (and it will)
5. Go back and revisit all the things you’ve done in the past to get you to where you are now. Owning a business is hard! Generating income for your family, servicing customers, running all the different areas of your business by yourself is hard. As my mentor in mind, Myliek Teele says, “You can do hard things.” You HAVE DONE hard things. Never forget that.
6. Set your intentions. One way I’ve begun setting my intentions for the day is by doing my daily office. As a woman of faith, I’ve realized that intentionally spending time in silence, meditation, prayer, and devotion in the mornings, has helped me tremendously with my stress. Stress clouds our judgment and takes away our ability to be decisive. Running a business requires decisive action all day. I love doing my daily office. It grounds me. The silence, I've learned, is the most powerful component of my time. I sit for 2 minutes currently. I’m still. I listen to my heartbeat, I can hear the cars outside my window. I can hear the wind blow and the birds chirp. It gives me clarity. You’re reading this right now because I sat in stillness and God told me to create a massive impact on black women’s lives by helping them with their money. If you do nothing else from this list, find time to sit still, unplug, and listen.
If you’ve set your goals for the year, reply back and let me know what they are. We want to create content around what you want to learn more about or struggling with within your business. Don’t be shy, let us know!
Crush your week sis!
