Goals and your vision

Today I interviewed Kaya Singer of Awakening Business Solutions about attitude and mapping your business. Her website is here.

Setting Your Goals and Sticking to your Vision

Whether you’re running a business or writing a book, it’s really important to have a vision and set goals to help you manifest that vision. The vision is what you imagine your book or your business will look like. For example, when I’m writing a book, I sometimes imagine the day when I get a doorbell ring, come to the door and see a package from my publisher with my books in it. I imagine opening the box, taking the book out, cradling it, and then getting ready to ship other copies to people who’ve order it.

For a small business, the vision can be imagining what your business will look like five years from now, with how many clients you have, what products and services you offer, and how much income you bring in. The vision can be anything you want, really, and it’s important because it provides you an idea of where you want your business to be. Actually you can apply this concept to any area of your life. When you have a vision of what you want, in anything, it gives you the initial motivation to bring about success.

While a vision is excellent and does provide that initial motivation, there’s still a question of how you will make that vision manifest into a business. This is where goals come into play. Setting goals allows you to chunk how you will manifest your vision into measurable steps. Each step provides you a manageable method for realizing the success of your business.

Setting goals is similar to how you write a book. You first create an outline or map of the business, which shows the bare bones of the business, explicitly what goals you have, or if you will what the chapter title is. Each chapter is a goal. Then you start to write a chapter or you start to take action for a goal. When you finish writing the chapter or doing the action to achieve a goal, you move onto to the next chapter or goal. It’s an incremental process which allows you to address each goal and then move on to the next one.

Of course, there’s also editing and revision. A book needs to be edited and revised to ensure that the writing and content is saying what you really want to say. The same is true with business goals. Maybe you completed a goal, but weren’t as happy with the outcome as you wanted to be. You can always revisit that goal and look at your process and then edit it and revise the actions to improve the success of that goal.

What’s really important is to stick to your vision. Don’t give up just because you encounter a few potholes in the road. Look for solutions, and stay on target with your vision. Use your goals to measure your success as well as help you raise your standards. The rest will follow.

Upcoming Events

Taylor will be presenting a workshop on how to use Linkedin and Biznik and Delicious and other forms of social online networking on Dec 15th at USquared, located at 1562 SE Tacoma St, Portland, OR 97202. The entire event will be occurring between 6:30 and 8:30

To get full details about the event please visit meoutloud.

Taylor will be presenting a complementary teleclass on Dec 8th from 5:30 to 6:30 on When you know it’s time to publish: How to let go of your writing.

Are you one of the many writers who can’t stop revising or editing your book, no matter how good it seems to be? Do you find yourself starting new projects and continually putting off that time when you’ll finish a manuscript and get it ready for publishing? Are you writing a 50,000 word novel each year, but not doing anything with it? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then this workshop is for you. In this workshop I’ll explain how you know when it’s time to let go and send your manuscript off to a publisher.

This is a free class. Register at http://www.imagineyourreality.com/schedule.html

Taylor will be presenting a complementary teleclass on Dec 22nd from 5:30 to 6:30 on Setting your Business Goals for 2009.

It’s coming to that time of year when you evaluate your life and the direction its going in. It’s also an excellent time to evaluate and assess your strengths and weaknesses in your business as well as what goals to set for the new year. In this one hour course we will assess your strengths and weaknesses in your business so that you can set realistic goals for the next year.

This is a free class. Register at http://www.imagineyourreality.com/schedule.html