Most people start a business and before they know it they are so busy juggling all the elements of the business that they lose sight of why they started the business in the first place. How many times have you had to take work home lately just because there weren't enough hours in the day? How many times have you had to finish someone else's work because you felt they were unable to understand or complete the task? How many times have you reached the end of the day and thought "I haven't managed to get anything done today"? I imagine that you have thought this more times than you would like to admit.
Instead of creating a business that works, we create a business that is us. A business that, more often than not, takes over our lives which can have a detrimental effect on us and others around us. Worse still, when it becomes too much, we sell it for far less than it's worth. This is because when we start a business we never have the end in mind - what we want the business to do, where it will go and what it will be like on the day that we sell it. If we can begin with the end in mind, and apply that to our business, it means that the business must have an end point - the point where we stand back and say, "Now it's finally done", and at this point, we choose to keep it or sell it on. So, we need to find out what our 'end' is, and to this, we need to set some goals for both us personally and our business.
Goals are a huge part of the human condition - our desire to achieve huge things, break boundaries, make a difference to the world and others around us - these all begin with a dream, an aspiration. These dreams not only give us something to strive towards, but they also connect our heart to the cause which creates a passion to drive us forward. Our dreams reflect our innermost desires by igniting the joy and making our imaginations go wild.
One of our core values here at Novus Accountancy is to dream big. Our dreams should be awesome and make us feel excited, passionate and inspired. When we are engaged and energised, we also feel invested, think innovatively and tend to go the extra mile. Sharing these dreams can be contagious, and make the people around us feel the same. In a business environment, having an inspired and engaged team can lead to better productivity and retention. However, if we don't feel this way about our dreams, the likelihood of actually achieving them is drastically diminished.
Let me ask you this - if anything were possible, what is it that you really want? Take a moment to visualise that dream - what will you see, hear and feel? What else will your success allow you to do? By creating a detailed vision of what we want, we give ourselves ultimate focus and drive. It is also just as important to think about the pain that we will experience if we don't achieve our dream because by recognising this pain, we will create an enormous motivating force to help us to work even harder to ensure we do not fail.
Once we have a clear dream and we know exactly what it is that we want to achieve, we can set goals to keep us on track. Research shows that people with written up-to-date goals are as much as 3100% more successful than people who don't. Neuropsychologists have found that people have a better recall for information that they've created themselves than for something that they've read - the "generation effect". This recall is important for goals because we want to focus on them and work towards achieving them. And of course, writing these goals down subconsciously reinforces the importance.
However good your ideas and intentions are, they will come to absolutely nothing unless they are turned into action. So focus on taking action, and start taking it today.