5 Steps To Sanity Check Your Business
I write a lot about youth athletics in relation to business because I spend an inordinate amount of time running and attending kids’ sport events. Sometimes I’m at a climbing gyms with my son, and sometimes it’s a theater with my daughter for dance. Each event, whether it be a competition or a recital, provides a great checkpoint for my kids and other athletes to gauge how they’re doing compared to their goals.
Athletes set their goals early in the season and spend months (sometimes years) training and sacrificing to reach the pinnacle of their sport. In our family, my kids are eating clean and going to bed early when their friends are eating junk and doing other fun things. They spend hours in the gym or at the dance studio, pushing their muscles to the limit and walking out at the end of the day tired and sore. They’re constantly checking their progress, competing and measuring their skills against their peers, and hoping all their hard work will be rewarded when they earn the right to compete and win at big championship event or land the dance role they truly want.
As business owners, we don’t always have the luxury of an event to check our progress against our goals, but we do have to pay attention to where we are in the course of getting there. Sometimes we have to make minor adjustments or big sweeping changes. And sometimes we have to be willing to abandon what we’ve been doing in order to try new techniques (let’s talk before you do this) when things don’t feel quite right. So, I thought what better time than now to do a little business sanity check.
5 Steps to Sanity Check Your Business
IMAGINE – What will you be celebrating on December 31, 2022? Whether you’re surrounded by friends with your drink of choice in hand or having a quiet night in, what accomplishments will you be celebrating? A big part of meeting your goals is imagining and living as though you’re already there. In the last 9 months, I’ve done some dreaming and visioning about what I truly want to create by the end of 2022. I’ve thought a lot about the impact I want to have and what it would feel like to bring that to life. Those pictures in my head and the way the feel in my body are critical to making them a reality.
If you don’t know where you’re going or what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s going to be very difficult to get there. This is your permission slip to STOP doing for a bit and START dreaming.
REFLECT – What can you learn about yourself and your business from previous quarters and years? What worked? What didn’t? Honesty is key here! You can’t change what you’re unwilling to see and/or acknowledge. It’s also a call to celebrate all that you’ve achieved.
In fact, my own coach recently gave me an assignment to spend some time journaling about all I had overcome, learned, processed, and created. She then had me identify who I needed to become to have achieved all of them… and it was insanely eye-opening. Reflection and celebration are some of the best tools you’ve got in your toolbox when it comes to growing your business.
PLAN – There’s still more than enough time to reach your business goals. In December, I ran my Road to Revenue challenge (grab it under the Guides section) in the Empowered Entrepreneur FB group, the approach I take to plotting out my business strategy and strategic goals. If you’ve never walked through that process or feel like you need a reset, set aside a couple of uninterrupted hours and dig in. Many of the women I work with struggle to translate their goals and dreams into action. That doesn’t have to be you.
WRITE – Write a letter to yourself. This is actually one of my favorite exercises because it gets you out of “present-day” you and into the mindset of “future-day” you. In order to bring those big goals and dreams alive, you have to grow into the version of you that’s needed. What would your future self have to say about who she was, what she did, and how she did it, if she was talking to present day you? Remember, if you can IMAGINE it, you can CREATE it.
MOVE – Take your first step TODAY. There are loads of practical tips for taking action. Sometimes it’s as simple as setting a timer for 25 minutes (aka the Pomodoro technique), and getting to it! Perhaps you’d do better to find someone to co-work with or an accountability to check in with on regularly scheduled intervals. Whatever you do, pick one thing, even if it’s tiny, and do it. It gets easier the more you do it. Trust me.
You may not be where you want to be, but there’s still time for massive action. Big things are still to come for you, but the only way to make it happen is to take stock of where you, REIMAGINE where you want to be, do the hard work to get there, and most importantly, BELIEVE you’re worth the effort and that you can and will get there.
