Goal setting for health entrepreneurs

Setting goals for your business is one of those things we all hear lots about when we’re setting out as entrepreneurs. Writing a business plan, knowing what you’ll be doing in 1 year, 5 years – maybe even 10 years time. That’s the right way to do things, isn’t it? Thinking big! Aiming for the stars!

But when we’re up to our eye-balls in getting paperwork for tax, attracting our first clients, watching our finances, learning how to navigate social media and everything else the shouty world of the internet tells us we need to have to run a successful business, who has time to set goals?

The thing is, setting goals for our business is essential to keep moving forward, boost our confidence and guarantee growth.

Without goals we’re all just paddling along doing the same old things, wondering why it’s (often) not working.

Here are my top 3 tips when it comes to setting goals as a health entrepreneur:

Start small when you’re at the beginning

I recently wrote a blog post about how when I started my business I tried to follow the age-old advice of planning my whole year and setting income targets for myself every month.

Needless to say, not having a clue what I was going into, I completely failed to meet my self-imposed targets by month two and ended up feeling totally deflated. Not exactly like a successful entrepreneur.

No matter what anyone else tells you when you are in the early days of your business, if everything seems new and constantly changing, try setting yourself 30 day goals, instead of 365 day ones.

This means that you can constantly evolve and move with what’s happening, and take things at your own pace. Rather than expecting yourself and your business to know what a whole year is going to look like on Day 1.

For example in Month 1 I set myself four goals:

Get 50 sign ups in my new Facebook group (all health and wellness entrepreneurs welcome!)
Finish two resource videos to help my audience
Secure one more speaking engagement to spread brand awareness
Book three clients

These were small, manageable goals and each day I could check back in to see what I was focusing on and whether I was taking action to move towards achieving these goals.

Which leads us neatly on to….

Break your goals down into easy to do tasks

Let’s take one of my goals as an example.

Writing down “book three clients” on my to-do list wasn’t going to make me very productive. My brain would totally see an enormous and overwhelming task like that on my list and immediately send me to browse around on Instagram and faff around reorganise folders on my computer instead of taking action.

Yup – a big task like “book 3 clients” would bring out my Instant Gratification Monkey. If you haven’t heard of the Instant Gratification Monkey you need to get on over to this blog post from Tim Urban at Wait But Why.

In order to take small actions that were going to add up to achieving my goal, I needed to break down the big task into smaller ones. Then I could look at my list and pick something small and manageable each day, which I knew was going to move me towards my overall aim.

Taking “book three clients” and breaking it down could look like this:

Write to 5 people I know to ask for a referral
Design some promotional graphics to put on my Instagram Stories
Promote my coaching services on my Facebook page
Send an email to my mailing list about my coaching services
Direct Message 3 people on Instagram to offer them a coaching package

Don’t let the Instant Gratification Monkey distract you from the task in hand. Break things down into little do-able tasks that you can happily tick off with that immense feeling of satisfaction. That’s what achieving goals is really about.

Make time to review your goals

Setting goals and taking action really doesn’t amount to much if you don’t schedule in some time to step back and assess how it went.

At the end of each month (or whatever period you’re working to) it’s essential to make time to reflect on whether you achieved your goals and really look at the actions you took. Doing this will help you make a decision about how to move forward into the next month or goal setting period.

For example with my goal of booking three clients – if I hit the target, then I can take stock of the actions I took and replicate most, if not all of them, the next month to try and repeat the same success.

I should also take a bit of time to think about how the month went with this goal. Perhaps the goal was too easy? How did it feel? Shall I aim for the same next month, or push myself to go for 5?

If I didn’t book the target number of clients – why not? What actions worked and secured clients? Which ones felt like a waste of time? What were the tasks I didn’t do that would probably have got me better results? How can I overcome my fears or break down tasks further to take more action?

If we don’t do this sort of assessment, we run the risk of just repeating over and over the same sort of activities that aren’t getting us anywhere. Whilst reflecting and assessing might feel like a distraction for the ‘real work’, it’s actually essential to setting more goals and writing better to-do lists each day.

It’s also really important to review because if we achieve our goals then we can and should celebrate!

Celebrating and rewarding ourselves reinforces in our brains that there is a positive outcome from all the hard work and pushing out of our comfort zone. Without that reward, why would we keep doing it?

Find a way to reflect and celebrate your hard work. In my Facebook group for health and wellness entrepreneurs we have Celebrate The Wins Wednesday posts where we can share those results together, feel free to join us if you’d like a supportive community to celebrate with.

What do you think? Will these tips help you set goals in your business?

If you’re still struggling to get started download my Just Start Now Checklist of 10 things you can take action on immediately to get your business going.

BIO

Vicky Shilling is a coach, helping wellness industry entrepreneurs turn their business ideas into reality. Find out more about Vicky, dig into her extensive set of resources www.vickyshilling.com