Set better goals with these 5 questions that consider your personal and professional desires. Create a better vision for your business that considers exactly what you want to achieve.
There’s a lot of talk about how important it is for you to set goals in your business… but why does it even matter? What personal goal setting questions should you be asking yourself as you dream about the future of your business?
Goals are valuable because they give us direction and provide us with a driving force and motivation to carry on. They give us something to work toward, and they keep us more focused on one thing at a time (rather than trying to do all the things at once—which rarely works, anyway).
In other words, goals both reduce overwhelm and set the foundations in place so we can create a strong, strategic plan of action for what tasks we should work on in our business.
What Are the Benefits of Goal Setting?
Your business goals lay the groundwork for seeing the vision of your business come to fruition. When you get clarity on your goals, you can be more strategic and focused with every action you take in your business. This will save yourself time, energy and help you move even faster in the direction of your choosing.
How cool is that?
Once you know why goals are so important, you are ready to move onto the next stage: how to choose the right goal for you and your unique business.
Setting SMART Goals
Identifying longer-term goals and breaking them down into more manageable, realistic pieces is one of the most important steps for goal planning—and you can learn exactly how to do that with the prompts inside the free Solopreneur Goal Planning Workbook.
Your goals should be “SMART” (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely). This means they’re tied to metrics like sales, clients, revenue and more, and they’re also time bound. Whether you’re setting team goals or individuals, they should also be realistic. Consider your current performance and the resources you have at hand to be able to reach your new goals.
Setting your goals are one thing, but figuring out how to implement them for your personal situation is where you may be running into some walls.
Here are a few goal setting questions to help you out as you do this long-term business planning and identify the best SMART goals for you and your business at this point in time.
Powerful Questions You Can Use to Set Goals
Use these 5 goal-setting questions to chart a course for both your personal and professional lives. You’ll find that there’s more overlap than you might think!
- Why is your business important to you? After all, if you don’t know your own “why,” then you’ll struggle to come up with goals that align with your values and passions… and if you don’t choose goals that are right for you and your unique business, then you won’t put in the effort to make those goals a reality, will you?
- If you could wave a magic wand, what would you most want for your personal life? When you are your own boss, your personal life tends to be knit closely with your business life, so this matters!
- If you could wave a magic wand, what would you most want for your business? Dream big here! The more you imagine what you would love to happen, the more creative you’ll be at identifying real-life steps to get you there.
- Where is there overlap between your personal and business visions? There should be alignment between your personal dreams and business dreams—you want them working in tandem, rather than against each other.
- How much are you willing to prioritize your business right now? Be honest with yourself, because if you aren’t willing to choose your business as a priority over and over again, then your goals need to reflect that and you might need to scale them back.
Simple Tips for Achieving Goals
Grounding your goals in what is realistic for you at this point in time is a crucial element here. There are many habits ingrained in us these days, wherein “toxic productivity” has taken over—it’s the concept where we need to plow through and work on projects to the detriment of our own self-care or personal relationships, and so on.
Frankly, “toxic productivity” isn’t actually real productivity, anyway. “Toxic productivity” leads to burnout, which correlates to a poor-quality product and an unhappy or stressed-out version of yourself, which defeats the entire purpose of productivity.
True productivity is about abundance and growth and creativity and results—it’s not about working ourselves into the ground.
So with that in mind, I encourage you to be honest with yourself about where and how you will fit this into your life at this point in time. Be realistic and set goals that are achievable, given your unique circumstances.
That’s also why it’s helpful if you think about your goals on both a personal and professional level. You might want to think about it in terms of saving yourself time and energy, improving your mood and attitude, organizing and streamlining your business, tripling your revenue, building stronger and more meaningful relationships with clients and customers, or a combination of those or something else altogether.
Choosing your business goals is rooted in: a) being honest with yourself about what’s realistic and achievable for you at this time, and b) having the courage to implement and the commitment to follow through.
The more specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-sensitive your goals are, the greater your chances of making a real change and seeing those goals become your new everyday reality.
