It’s the new year and that means a whole lot of people are setting their intentions, envisioning their futures, and establishing goals for their lives and businesses for the year. I remember from my corporate days coming out of a much needed, sleepy holiday season to come back in the office to Set Your Annual Goals. HR training for SMART goals, anyone?
Maybe you’ve been reading articles like these:
The Ultimate Guide to 2020 Small Business Goal Setting
Create Your Dream Business This Year with Goal Setting
7 Key Goal Setting Areas: Succeed As Your Own Boss
Manifest Your Goals Using a Vision Board
When the new year stretches out ahead of you like a blank page, rich with possibility, it’s so tempting to jump right in and create lots of powerful goals for your coaching, healing or creative business.
After all, you think, how else are you going to grow a business you love without setting specific goals?
Before you get too invested in creating vision boards, income goals or number of new clients targets, consider this: there are a lot of different ways to approach setting goals for your business.
USE THE RIGHT MEASUREMENT
Doctors use a different scale to measure blood pressure in children. As kids grow, their blood pressure increases, eventually reaching adult levels when they become teenagers. But when they’re young, it’s much lower than that of adults.
Evaluating a child’s blood pressure using the same chart developed for adults could cause all kinds of misdiagnoses and lead to treating problems that don’t exist.
It's the same thing with setting goals for your business. You have to use the right scale. And when you are just starting out, having an income goal or a number of new clients goal is often not very useful.
For one thing, both rely on things happening that are out of your control. You can’t control how much money you actually make in a given month, quarter, or year. Yes, you can do things that might lead you in the right direction, but the ultimate decision to hire you or buy your products isn’t something that you have control over.
And, if you set these types of goals for your business, and if you don’t make them for whatever reason, it can set you up for a lot of unnecessary self-doubt.
CREATE YOUR OWN CHART FOR SUCCESS
What matters more is figuring out how to measure success for you. How you define it will be unique to you and should reflect your deeper, essential self. It may – or may not - match what others think success looks like.
Figuring out exactly what success means to you is a deeply personal exercise. I won’t lead you through all of it here, but you can get started by asking yourself this one simple, yet powerful question:
HOW DO I WANT TO FEEL WHEN MY BUSINESS IS SUCCESSFUL?
Maybe you want to feel like you are connecting deeply with your clients, on a heart level. Maybe you want to feel free – free to take time during the day for your family or to have regular lunches with your girlfriends. Maybe you want to feel adventurous and have opportunities to travel as part of your business.
If you’re having trouble coming up with something right away, it might be easier to start with the opposite. In other words, ask yourself:
HOW DO I NOT WANT TO FEEL WHEN MY BUSINESS IS SUCCESSFUL?
And from there you can gain insight into what you do want to feel.
For example, when I started my coaching business, one thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to feel as if my days were being swallowed whole, like I was rushing from thing to thing. I wanted to have breathing space in my day. That’s what success felt like to me.
KNOWING YOUR ANSWER
Take a minute to grab a pen and your journal and jot down what comes to mind when you ask yourself the questions above. What do you discover? Are there any surprises? Things you’ve forgotten about?
From there, you can set actionable steps for yourself that support that vision, whatever it is. That way you won’t be stuck measuring your or your business’ success on with a chart that doesn’t fit. You can then track your business’ progress and celebrate along the way.
Taking time to figure out what feels like success ensure you’ll be measuring your progress in a way that matters to the only person that really matters - you.