Give your goals some soul!
I am sure you are no stranger to goal setting for your life and your business. Everyone knows, in order to achieve your dreams, you need to plan – create a road map. Yes? then, why do most people find the whole process overwhelming? Most goals are forgotten as soon as the ‘planning’ session is over. Why is this?
One of the main reasons for this, I believe, is that we create goals for our business life and goals for our personal life and we keep them separate. we do not tie them into our own values. It can then often feel like there are too many and they are not all moving in the one direction.
Our financial goals, for both our business and personal life, need to tie into our life values.
One client I had struggled with her day to day spending and was looking at ways to cut out any unnecessary costs. She gave me her bank statements to go through, what she spent on coffee was a small fortune. Easy peasy, I thought, one of the things that needs to go is her coffee spend.
Wrong! Turns out, that coffee in the morning on her way to her office, gave her a chance to regroup and get ready for the day ahead. She valued keeping her work and home life separate and this coffee allowed her to switch from one role into the other. So, it needed to stay. Following a more traditional approach to budgeting would have led us both to exclude this cost. The coffee was included in her weekly budget.
I know, coffee seems like such a small amount of money, but you get the idea. Your financial goals need to align with your values. Once they align, achieving your goals will be easier.
So how do we make better goals to achieve? well we look at making them soulful.
What Are Soulful Goals?
Soulful goals are goals that look at – ‘WHY’ is this goal important to me?’ and ‘What’ value am I achieving. By asking yourself these two questions, you make sure that your goals reflect who you are as a person. Soulful goals look at HOW you work best so that you are aware of your own processes and can then plan your steps accordingly. Knowing yourself and what your strengths and challenges are will support you to know how to go about completing your goals.
Below I set out 5 steps you can follow to set up your own soulful goals.
- Set goals that matter.
Sit down and write down what you want to achieve in the next 12 months. It doesn’t matter if it is 
September, picture the next 12 months. What matters to you? How many hours a week do you want to work? Do a brain dump and get it all out.
We then look at the why! Why do these goals matter to me. Are they you think an entrepreneur has to make to, or should make? What value are you feeding? A lot of my clients juggle work and home life. They do not work 7.5 hours each day for 5 days. By asking yourself ‘Why does this goal matter?’ and ‘What is the value and motivation here?’ not only will many of the goals on your list fall away because they don’t matter, but the ones that are left will have relevance and motivation for you. It is this motivation and deeper desire that keep us moving forward despite obstacles and set-backs so that we achieve what we set out to do.
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Less is More
Being busy is NOT the same as being productive. This is something I am very passionate about, as I struggled then when I went out on my own first – I thought (wrongly) that there was safety in being busy.
Studies have shown that doing more than one thing at a time (aka multitasking) can be counterproductive – the quality of our work can go down with the time to complete going up.
Soulful Goals encourages you to set fewer, more meaningful goals. To allow adequate time to complete, thereby increasing the probability you will achieve your goals.
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Play to Your strengths
Most people that set New Year goals have forgotten them before the end of January. Often it is the spur of the moment that makes people make the resolutions or the want of a new start. By allowing yourself to get caught up in the moment (or date) you do not play to your strengths.
Soulful Goals get you to look at your goals and look at your life and ask you to work out what will work best for you with the situation you are living with. There is no point in saying you will get up early to do a blog post in the morning if your kids have you up at the crack of dawn. You need to work out what works best for you and make conscious choices about how to move forward and support yourself in the process.
I was always saying I will get up a 6, 7 or whatever, and get things done before anyone else is up…but I am a night owl! so it never worked for me. Check out this podcast by Georgie Crawford Good Health Glow with Katy Gaffey where they talk about working with the moon and the seasons.
4. Reverse Engineer Your Goals
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Goals are no different, they need to be broken down into simple steps, which make them much easier to achieve. Small, actionable steps can be followed simply and quickly and each milestone helps keep you motivated and on track.
Begin with the end in mind and then work backwards noting down each step or phase along the way. I find it good to get out a calendar and mark in the dates that you want everything achieve by. Soon you will know exactly what the steps are to achieve your goals.
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Get an accountability buddy.
While you will not get far without self-motivation when setting out to achieving your goals, external factors can positively influence outcomes as well. Studies have shown that when we declare our goals and intentions publicly, we are 65% more likely to follow through.
Being accountable is a very powerful tool in getting motivation. Part of being accountable is about proving to others that we will follow through, but the most important aspect of accountability is that it supports us to follow through and keep our word.
Finding an accountability buddy, will help you keep on track. Connect with some of your business buddies or check out my free facebook group and connect with some of the entrepreneurs in there.
I would love if you shared this blog with one of your business buddies who you think would find it useful. I’d love to hear your thought on this or any of my blogs.
Where to find me:
Next week, week 4 of 10 – I’m talking about your emergency fund!
Chat soon.
