For several decades, I have given myself time at the end/beginning of each year to assess where I am with my life and my business vision to discover what is calling me forward into the new year.
I love setting aside a day to focus on myself and my business. It feels like a nourishing gift. So many powerful insights have found their way to me in the quiet, focused space of these retreats, including spotting the idea that grew into the Organic Way!
Creating Your Business Vision: The Mainstream Approach
When I participated in Mainstream Planning events, the primary focus was business-centric with an heavy emphasis on naming a quantifiable financial goal.
Participants in these events were urged to go big or go home! We were encouraged to expand our vision and push our goals, to stretch ourselves and our business capacity.
To come up with a goal that was outside your comfort zone, you had to catapult yourself into the future. The mission was to claim where you wanted to be in one year or three years. I remember hearing colleagues mention that they were setting such a big goal that the notion of it made them sweat, feel a bit queasy, or shake from nervousness. Feel the fear and do it anyway was, and still is, a common mantra.
When a business owner was brave enough to set such bold goals, they were seen as brave, remarkable, and impressive! Sometimes you'll hear consultants call this level a BHAG — a big, hairy, audacious goal — or a bodacious — bold, audacious — goal.
After identifying your big, bold goal, you then pulled out your calendar to reverse engineer how you were going to reach your goal. What events were you going to produce? What VIP services were you going to offer? How were you going to price each service to ensure that you'd match or exceed your financial goals? This detailed plan became your marching orders. You needed to stay in motion and on schedule all year to achieve success.
Even Back Then This Approach Did Not Sit Well with Me
- Within this outward-facing planning process, I don't ever remember being prompted to check in with myself. No one encouraged me to notice what felt right to me or what nourished me. What matched my natural style or what matched my physical capacity in the months ahead.
- There was no conversation about how this big, bold goal-based business vision intersected with my life. How this vision would impact my health or my mental well-being. It was all about the money!
- I felt like I was just making up target numbers that would produce the numbers I wanted/needed to reach. I had no way of knowing whether the packages I was dreaming up would appeal to my clients or whether I could even reach my big goal.
My Transition Away from the Mainstream Approach
About 15 years ago or so, I started stepping further and further away from the Mainstream Approach. I couldn't deal with the stress of forcing myself to claim lofty goals when my evolving or new business didn't have a sufficient foundation to feel confident in my ability to meet those goals.
One of my business coaches, Isabel Parlett, facilitated an annual planning day that focused on identifying a the themes you wanted to activate in your life and business. Attending her retreats allows me to feel into what I wanted and needed in the new year. This event was always a breath of fresh air after all the Mainstream-focused planning events I had attended.
Creating Your Business Vision: With the Organic Way
In recent years, I've been focusing on the best ways to support my clients in developing the momentum they want to experience in their lives and their businesses. (I'll share more about this sense of momentum in the next blog post.)
Momentum is not just the specifics of your goal or the tactics and strategies you use to make it so. One of the most defining elements of your momentum is how you FEEL about your business vision. New insights appear when you tap into how you want to feel when you work with clients, share your marketing, and live your life.
To create viable, thriving business that supports your way of life, you and your life must be the starting point for your vision.
The only way your business will flourish is if your business supports and nourishes you and your life.
- You must feel in sync your work. Rather than forcing yourself to create something that looks good on paper, but feels out of alignment in reality, create a business that leverages your natural style and skills.
- You must know your work aligns with the life you want to live. If your business requires you to work at a time you want to be home with your children, then that's not a good recipe for success.
- You must see that what's required to work your business aligns with your own physical, emotional, and mental capacities. If you have responsibilities for care giving or child raising, then factor these realities into the way you design your business.
To create a clear, aligned, and resonant business vision for your 2024, you must start with a grounded sense of yourself, your life, your needs, and your desires for the coming year. That's why the very first hour of the Clear Your Path to 2024 Retreat is Come Home to Yourself.
Prepare for the New Year the Organic Way
In this Organic Way podcast episode, Carol shares why the Mainstream Planning Process won’t work for many Change Catalysts. She describes an Organic Way to create an aligned vision for the year ahead by assessing where you are right now. A vision that serves as a point on the horizon boosts your intention, direction, and insight for the new year.