Hey Coach Ponyling!
Wondering how to achieve your business goals?
What’s my secret, you ask? Well, step one involves planning out your goals :).
Personally, I started off this year, as I do every year, with a plan.
I blogged about it, and my methodology for it , right over here if you are curious (I’m always curious!).
Truthfully, I LOVE beginning-of-year-planning.
You get to be all business goal oriented, you get to dream big.
The world is your oyster!
So, I happily made a plan for myself and my coaching business.
It keeps me focused and gives me a criteria for decision-making, so I don’t get stuck in paralysis.
But since I also suffer from shiny-object syndrome, I often wander away from my plan.
*Sigh*
And things creep onto my plate.
And it’s stressful.
And more importantly, it’s easy to NOT achieve your business goals because you are distracted.
And I want you (and me!) to reach all of our goals this year!
So now that it’s half-way through the year, I’m doing a public review.
How am I doing against the plan? Am I on-point? Or off target? Now is a chance for me to re-adjust if I’m wandering.
And I invite you to do the same. How are you doing against your plan? Even if you only started planning last month, check-in!
–>Because let’s face it, the best way to achieve your business goals is simple: 1) Plan them out, and 2) Focus on following through and making regular progress so you don’t get distracted.
Let’s begin the business goal review so we can track progress!
Feel free to join me, so pull out your goals and let’s do this together :).
Okay! This year my concrete goals were all tied to feeling more calm, connected, and healthy in my business. I mapped out all of my business and life activities against these three feelings, using them as a guidepost to help me choose what to focus on, and what to leave behind.
If I had two ideas and one of them was calm and connected, and the other was a hot mess, for instance, I knew to choose the idea that played into being calm.
In regards to calm, I had two main projects for this year:
1) Redesign my living room, as it is where I spend a ton of time working and it wasn’t particularly calming or helpful in my business work so I made it a priority to change it, and
2) Pursue business activities that calm me, while hitting my income goals and growing the Coach Pony and BARB community by 30-40%. And, of course, making the Build a REAL Business (BARB) program the gold standard for coaches, because all of this only really matters if I’m helping you to create a profitable and successful coaching business.
Report card: Calm
On the living room project, I’m doing well! The entire living room is *almost* done with new furniture in place. We are weeks away from the last two pieces arriving (couches take FOREVER) but so far everything has worked and I like it.
I really like it. It gives me joy to be in here and I feel like that translates a little more into my coaching. Also, I am now the proud owner of a mirrored table. #LIVINGTHEDREAM.
On the business project: Mostly okay so far! I switched gears early in the year because some of the things I was doing (speaking) were NOT making me feel calm. So, I refocused on a marketing strategy that involves PJ’s (data + paid ads) and I added an awesome new team member to Team Pony to run it all for me. This slowed me down but didn’t impact my income or growth goals and should pay off exponentially as we continue 2019.
I’m also getting ready for a big launch (NOT CALM), but I’m only doing one this year (MORE CALM) so that makes life…on the whole more relaxed. Yay!
I’m also, FINALLY, honoring a promise I made to myself in the beginning of this whole journey 7 years ago and taking several weeks off from my business. Everything will continue while I’m gone because my team is awesome, but I depart for vacation in July and I’m super excited!
I was supposed to take this time off in August, but business activities changed this early in the year so here we are! YAY JULY. I’m headed to Napa, Hawaii, Georgia and Virginia.
(Also I’m headed to my couch.)
I find whenever I take a vacation I come back with about 1000 times for energy for my business, which has the expected positive results in my bottom line. I’ve struggled to do this in the past, but being an entrepreneur is a marathon, not a sprint, and all of us need a break at regular intervals.
Finally I’ve been keeping a journal and doing some meditation this year to keep things in perspective. I’m…bad at both of these things so. Ummm. Hmmmm….
Let’s gloss over this last one :).
Lessons learned: It’s always okay to do less, but better. And creating both the mental and physical space to work on your coaching business is important.
Next up was connected. I wanted to be more connected in the Coach Pony side of my business to peers and also in my local life to my community here in California.
Report Card: Connected
Hmmm, it’s a mixed bag! Because I nixed speaking early on, I’ve missed out on the chance to connect with more coaches.
But, I have attended a big conference and I have a great small retreat coming up in September so I’m looking forward to that. I’ve also made some good new friends in a business group I’ve joined, and I’ve made the effort to meet up with some of them in person. So that’s a win!
I’ve also hosted 2 straight weeks of house-guests and thrown a dinner party to connect more locally, but I’m still failing on gardening and joining more local groups.
But if I’m honest, this is a place for improvement. Being social is important as an entrepreneur because it can get lonely, and no one succeeds in business on their own. The right person with the right knowledge or support can make all the difference to you having success as a life coach.
And while my trips coming up will help me connect with friends and family who are far away, I could still do more locally.
Okay, clearly I have work to do.
Lessons learned: As always, if you don’t make time for people consistently it’s easy to miss your goals and lose connection. However, sometimes just having reminders on your calendar can focus your energy and help you make progress and connect.
For instance: I calendared out planning time for researching gardening groups and planning happy hours and dinner parties and while I’ve blown off some of it, I am still managing to get out more often than I did in the fall of 2018, which is important. So I’m going to say there’s been progress, but I need to stay more focused.
Report Card: Healthy
I gave up sugar for a month!
And I have been using my Pelaton bike so…
That’s progress!
Overall I’m eating better and working out more. I’ve discovered the delights of yoga with Adrienne and other Youtube people, and I’ve committed to spinning 3 x week.
I’ve learned tend to work out more often if I use a positive trigger and lay my exercise gear out the night before, and then immediately put it on after waking up (even though I don’t work out first thing – I tend to do it an hour after I wake up).
I bring up health because as entrepreneurs we HAVE to stay healthy. It’s hard to coach clients if you are sick, and it’s hard to execute on your awesome business plans if you can’t get out of bed.
I view it as a necessary business activity, even if I sometimes eat too much chocolate or get off the bike halfway through a ride (that happened…today).
Baby steps, right?
Lessons learned: Small good healthy habits make all the difference, but sticking to them requires positive triggers.
What’s the end result?
The good news is that I’m still on track with my yearly plan, even though I’ve had to tweak some things. I’m hitting my income targets for each month and building even stronger systems in my business (learn about business systems and how to get clients here, they are NECESSARY for success), and more importantly, my plans to continually improve and upgrade our Coach Pony offerings continue, as I just finished another round of trainings for BARB. My true measure of success first and foremost is how many new PROFITABLE coaching practices I help create.
So, as I step back and take in the big picture, I realize could make these three things (calm, confident, and healthy) more prominent in my day-to-day because I’ve found myself forgetting and not always making decisions with these three “feelings” criteria top of mind.
So, thank goodness for this check-in! Frankly, I’ve got three big ideas for the fall for Coach Pony, and after going through this exercise again I probably need to table 2.5 of them.
How did your check-in go?
Are you on track to achieving your goals?
Where could you improve? And what lessons have you learned?
Here’s your next step
If you are suffer from shiny object syndrome in your business and feel overwhelmed by all of your options (PINTEREST! VIP programs! WEBINARS! ETC!) then please read this article IMMEDIATELY IF NOT SOONER.
Seriously. Read it! 🙂