5 Goal setting for the future
Setting key goals for your future business and freelance work is an important step. Once you know what you’re aiming for, you can target your actions and approach more effectively.
While you might already have a detailed business plan, it doesn’t matter if you don’t. If you’re at an early stage in your thinking, your goals might be about, for example:
- making something beautiful and selling it to members of the public
- obtaining funding to put on an event that people will want to attend
- performing nationally or even internationally to appreciative audiences.
Activity 5 encourages you to articulate your goals without thinking about them too deeply. Even if you haven’t done any detailed business planning yet, this exercise will provide a useful starting point.
Activity 5 Identifying your freelance goals
Try to answer Question 1 in only 30 seconds and see what you come up with. This can be a useful way to tap into your subconscious mind.
1. What are your three most important freelance goals right now?
2. Now that you’ve got three goals, take a few minutes to consider how realistic they are given any current constraints, e.g. location, financial needs, family commitments etc. Can you tweak them to fit in with what you need? If necessary, re-write them in the box below.
Discussion
Life coach and hypnotherapist Bennie Louw (no date) explains his ‘Quick List method’ as follows:
What we have found is that when you only have 30 seconds to write your three most important goals, your answers will be as accurate as if you had 30 minutes or three hours. Your subconscious mind seems to go into a form of ‘hyper-drive’ and your three most important goals will pop out of your head and onto the paper, often to the surprise of the person doing the exercise.
Your goals might be short, medium or long-term ones and this will obviously impact on the time it might take you to achieve them. In Week 8, you’ll revisit these goals and plan the actions you will need to undertake.
This is only a brief overview of what can be a detailed goal setting process. Many people seek support when setting business goals, perhaps from a careers or small business coach. You’ll learn more about the support networks available in Week 3.
The goals that you came up with in Activity 5 will be useful to keep in mind as you work through the rest of the course.