We are well into October which means we are rapidly approaching the last 2 months of the year. I expect you set yourself some goals for your business back in January. Have you achieved them? With only 2 months to go before we hit 2014 there isn’t a huge amount of time left to make a significant impact on your goals so if you haven’t got your business to where you want it to be now is the time to consider why.
The reason I say “now is the time” is because Christmas will be here before we know it and then New Year and with that you’ll set yourself new goals. Before you set new ones you need to be very realistic with yourself about this year’s performance, and importantly those areas that may not have gone so well.
I expect you have started to think about your 2013 goals in your head while you are reading this. So which ones have been your poorer performing ones? And why is that?
I want you to take a piece of paper, right now, and write down the ones you didn’t do so well in and the reasons why. Go on it’ll take just 2 mins. Now look at the list of reasons. The success of your business relies on you being totally honest with this next question….are the reasons you have written down actually just excuses to make you feel better about why you haven’t achieved those goals? I’ll give you an example if you have said it’s because people don’t have the money to spend that actually means you weren’t compelling enough with your marketing (that’s a broad statement but you know what I mean). If you’ve said you just didn’t have the time to get the extra work done that was required to achieve a goal, that just means it wasn’t important enough to you to achieve it. Now go back through your list and write the real, 100% truthful reasons why you didn’t quite achieve all of your goals (you’ll know if you are being totally truthful as the answers should be something to do with the action you did or didn’t take).
Now you have the real reasons why you didn’t make the progress you had hoped for you can reflect on it and work out how you could have done things differently.
What action can you take in the next 8 weeks to make some more progress towards achieving those 2013 goals?