I’ve had many years in the past where I gave up on my business goals by February. Okay, so maybe not by February. Sometimes I was stubborn. But I’d definitely give up by some time in May.
Just like we give up on resolutions for our personal lives, we also sometimes tend to give up on the business goals we’ve created. Also as with personal resolutions, a lot of times we give up because of poor planning or overextending ourselves.
Here’s how you can make sure you actually stick to your business goals this year. These are brought to you by my own hard won experience and business failures.
Stop making insane business goals.
Tony Robbins has this great quote where he points out how most people overestimate what they can do in a year while they underestimate what they can do in a few decades.
My life changed the moment I heard that. Simply put, I was one of those people who way overestimated what could be done in a year. I’d try and pull off three huge projects on top of growing my business through client work.
It took me a couple of years to realize how unrealistic this is. So now, I basically stick to just one lofty business goal a year. This has proven to be far more effective.
I apply this concept to business revenue as well. It would be insane for me to try and jump from a mid-five figure range to half a million dollars in revenue in a year. I this sounds completely nuts, but I hear these kinds of business goals all the time.
The real crazy part is then people wonder why they aren’t making any progress – it’s because they set themselves up for failure from the get-go.
Create business goals you can measure.
As a natural born creative, it used to be really hard for me to conceptualize business goals I could measure.
I really just wanted to create epic stuff and make money doing it. That was as far as my rationale went.
For the first few years of building my online brand, this basically looked like throwing a lot of spaghetti against the wall. I had a failed ebook, no real concept of online marketing, and absolutely zero knowledge of a) how this was supposed to make me money and b) how I was supposed to manage it.
With the help of a business coach and lots of classes, I was able to start creating business goals that were rooted in something far more concrete than me just want to make stuff for a living.
As someone who now coaches other business owners, I’ve realized that creating goals you can measure is a struggle for people. You have to figure out why this makes sense, what the objective is and how you’re going to measure whether or not it’s successful.
Final Thoughts
The real secret to creating business goals that will stick past February is to create goals that push you out of your comfort zone, but that are still grounded. Go ahead and dream big. Just make sure those dreams are grounded with a solid foundation.
