Vision, Values, and Goals: Your Roadmap to Productive Time Management (#1)
This episode is available in blog format here.
Here’s the question for today: Do you ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels, unsure if the time you spend each day is actually moving your business forward in the direction you want to go?
By the end of today’s episode, you’ll have actionable steps to create clarity around your business vision, uncover your core values, and set goals that align with how you spend your time.
SELECTED LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE
SHOW NOTES
[00:01:35] Discovering Your Vision
[00:02:49] Your Business Core Values
[00:04:49] Build Out Your Business Goals
[00:05:16] Work Backwards Into Your Goals
[00:06:31] SMART Goals
[00:08:25] Your Action Items
[00:09:19] Free Mini Course - Escape Business Overwhelm: Plan Your Optimal Week in 15 Minutes
TRANSCRIPT
So today we're going to talk about goals, vision and your values and aligning all those to your business.
And this is all what I call part of the time mastery system. It's building an intentional system for your time. And there are six parts to the system that we'll be covering in the next few episodes of this podcast. So stay tuned for future episodes where we'll talk about this.
And vision, values and goals are the foundation of the system. So let's get into this.
So you want to think of these three things as kind of your North Star. Your vision is going to give you some really good direction on where you're headed,
Your core values you can think about as guiding your decisions and your goals. Provide the checkpoints along the way as you progress along this journey. Without these, it's easy to fall into the trap of working hard but not making any progress. You might feel busy, but you're not actually building towards something meaningful. So how do you get started?
Let's break this down. So the first thing you want to do is building your long term vision.
And a great vision paints a clear picture of where you want to be, where your business wants to be in three, five or even ten years from now. It's a very long term. So the way I like to go about this is I ask myself, what does success look like for my business? If I'm thinking about three years from now, what does success look like three years from now?
And then I journal on that, or write it down, or just sit and think about it. Another question is, how do I want my customers, employees, and community to perceive my brand? Another great question is what kind of impact do I want my business to have in that amount of time? And write this down.
you can craft this into a vision statement if you want.
It doesn't have to be fancy. Something like, in five years, I want my business to be the go to solution for my industry, generating X amount of revenue and providing Y value to my customer. That's simple. And that can be your vision, and you can come back to it and reflect on it.
And that will help you just your mind, yourself of the mindset you were in when you did that vision exercise. And as you go through day to day tasks and maybe get discouraged, your vision is a great thing to come back to to help you kind of move forward.
Core values is the second part of this. And core values are basically just another reminder mechanism to remind you of who you are. Remind you of what your business, what you want your business to be, and it's just something to come back to and reflect on, to keep you grounded and keep you moving in the right direction in your business.
Coming up with your core values is really, really simple. What I like to do is you can come up with these or find these core value lists online. if you want one from me, you can follow me over on Instagram. my handle is @RyanLloydCoaching. Lloyd has two L's. DM me the word "values" and I can send you a list that I have.
That's worked really well for me of, core values. And I'd love to just get to know you over on Instagram a little more too. But you can basically Google Core Values lists, and it'll come up with a list of words. And what I like to do is you go through and you just circle the words that, stick out to you or that are important to you.
Go through and do a first pass and just circle all the words that resonate. And then what you want to go through and do is go through and look at your circled words and put an asterisk or a star next to 3 to 5 of them that you think are really, really, really important and that really resonate with you.
And these are likely your core values. And what you do with this core value list is one idea is when you're faced with decisions day to day or deciding what to do with your day or a business decision, ask yourself, does this align with my core values? And go back and look at that list of words? And another thing you can use your core values for too, is you can integrate them into that vision statement or your vision that we talked about earlier.
Okay. Goals. So we could do multiple episodes just on goals. But goals is the third part of this. And think of goals as the bridge between your big picture thinking, between that vision and your day to day actions. So our goals and our objectives are the things that we're trying to achieve to get us to that big picture.
So two things I'll talk about today. The first, start with the end in mind. So break down that long term vision. If you set yourself a five year vision or a three year vision, let's say you want to grow your revenue by 50% over the next three years. So one way to set kind of a longer term goal is, okay, if I want to grow my revenue by 50%, in three years, what do I have to do this year?
How much do I have to grow that revenue by this year? So those big long term goals can be really good, but they can be really overwhelming. So you'll want to break these down and kind of work backwards into it on okay, what do I want to do this year then to achieve that vision. And then what you want to try to think about is, okay, what do I need to do this quarter?
What do I need to do this month? What do I need to do this week, and what do I need to do today and kind of work backwards into it? A lot of people don't approach it that way, and they get overwhelmed and they're like, how am I going to increase my revenue by 50%? But I find if you back into a little bit like that, it super helps out.
Just making it feel less overwhelming. And it also helps you stick with it and be more impactful. The second part of goals is something that you may have already heard of, the S.M.A.R.T framework. So whenever you're writing a goal to make it effective, you want to make sure you write it in a certain way. And what you do is follow this S.M.A.R.T framework and S.M.A.R.T as an acronym.
The S is for specific M is for measurable, A is for achievable, R for relevant and T is for time bound. So going through these so specific, you want to be really specific about what you're trying to achieve. Measurable is how are you going to know that the goal is done. It has to be something that is measurable.
If you can assign a number to your goal and a way to measure it.
Achievable or attainable, is it realistic? You want to set yourself stretch goals? We all know that. But you want to also not make it so you can't achieve it right? Because then you're just going to get get discouraged. So make sure you're stretching yourself, but also make sure that goal is achievable and then relevant.
Does it align with your vision. Right. So that vision we talked about, is it relevant to getting you to that vision. If it's not, you're probably thinking of a goal that's kind of a time waster. maybe because you're distracting yourself from something else. There could be a lot of reasons for that. But make sure it's irrelevant to that vision we talked about.
And then time bound a deadline. All of us work better when we have a deadline.
We all are familiar with the scenario where. Oh, I have a month to finish that we don't do anything with it for, you know, 25 days and then those last five days, we're, like, rushing to get it done. So set yourself aggressive deadlines that will get you to take action.
Like I said, there could be a lot of things I say about goals, but I'll just give those two tips today. And then in further episodes we're going to talk a lot more, about goals and how to attain those.
All right. So at the end of every episode here, I'm going to give you actionable steps you can take.
So step number one, first thing you're going to do draft that vision statement. Set aside time block ten minutes on your calendar where you're going to think about your vision and you're going to set I'm going to say a five year vision or a three year vision. Do either one of those. The second action step I want you to take is go through and identify your top 3 to 5 core values.
Follow those steps that I talked about above, download a list and get those going,
And then final action item is set one goal for this month that aligns with that long term vision. Or you can do this week if you would like. But set one goal that will really move the needle on your business and get you where you want to go. And remember, this process is not about perfection. It's about creating clarity and kind of getting the ball rolling. So I would just invite you to do that.
Another free value I want to provide to everyone is if you liked this content, I do offer a free mini course. It's free to anyone to download. That is escape business overwhelm. Plan your optimal week in 15 minutes. So if you want to do that goal action item that I just said, this is a great way and 15 minutes giving you great tips on how to plan a week.
You can get that at ryanlloyd.com/freecourse. It's just a free mini course that I just like to offer to anyone listening as a thank you.
That's it for today. Next time we'll be talking about planning. So stay tuned for episode two. And just remember time is your most valuable asset, so spend it wisely.
