I don’t know where i want to be - and even if I did, i don’t know how to get there

Things that kept me up at night - A Business Owners blog.  

“I don’t know where I want to be & even if I did, I don’t know how to get there”.

I’ve always been a goal setter.  My dad was a business consultant and Coach when I was growing up and when I was younger, he used to sit us down each year and get us to draw with coloured pens the life that we envisaged for ourselves.  Interestingly mine had a business and a cookbook in it as well as the usual husband, house, kids and a pet.  Turns out I have all of these things – I can even cook now.

In other periods of my life, I would work through books such as ‘The Winners Bible” which I highly recommend by the way.  It would get me really clear about where I was and where I am going.  So, it’s fascinating to me that I went into business without any real clear goals.  I guess I thought I would get to it once I started making money.  I had a business plan with a SWOT analysis and knew my breakeven and how much I would need to be able to pay my bills, but I had no clear vision, no values, no clearly defined goals with timelines and actions. 

I didn’t know how much of my days I wanted to spend with clients ideally to allow me a life where I could be present with my family or how much money I wanted to earn to support the life I wanted for myself and my family.  With an absence of real clarity, I also had an absence of the habits that support growth. I was bogged down in the day to day – business was happening to me, not for me and I was just letting it slap me in the face day in and day out. This was my experience of business. 

I guess on reflection it was an easy decision for me to take on a business coach. I had been around it my whole life and I had been modelled the importance of mentors and saw first hand, through my dad, the positive impact having someone else speak into your business can have on your business growth and personal development. 

I believe that a small business affords us supercharged personal development.  We learn quickly or we sink, we pivot, or we are left behind, we challenge our thinking, or we stay in the same place.  It is for this reason that having another person thinking about my business was beyond valuable. 

I call my Coach the Yin to my Yang because he brings to my business a different angle of insight, a clear layer of thought and a calm to my frustration or agitation. It’s a real gift to have someone on the outside looking in and this is what My coach and I brings to your business – condensing decades into days for you to then take away and implement into your business to help you to have a clear path that takes you anywhere you want to go.

My Coachs insights:

When someone is unclear about themselves and what they want to achieve, they are often not who they truly are on a day to day basis. They are someone that they believe they need to be to achieve what they want.

Because they have not clarified what they want, they can end up distant from even themselves. Tony Robbins says clarity is power.  If you are clear on your vision, you know where you want to go.  If you are clear on your values, you know who you are and how you want to behave. If you are clear on your goals, you know what you want to achieve and if you are clear on that you can easily be clear on what you must do each day to achieve all of it. Now that is power!

A mentor of mine once said to me “I always bring people in from the outside to look at my business with me.” He said “fresh eyes, fresh eyes, fresh eyes.” At that stage he had four businesses going at once. What I believe he meant is that it enabled him to have eyes that were not caught up with the day-to-day challenges of his business, muddied with emotion or pain.

Eyes whose prime focus was to learn, master and implement what was great for him, his teams and business. Kelly called this the yang to her yin and that is the power of a Mentor and Coach.