Why Reflecting on Your Goals is Vital to Your Business Growth
With the new year right around the corner, you may already be thinking about all of the things you want to accomplish in 2021. Will this be the year you launch that new product or service? Will this be the year you bring in enough revenue that you can hire a web designer? Will this be the year you reach 6-figures?
It’s so fun and refreshing to list out all of the goals we want to accomplish in the new year. The thing is, cooking up new goals and ideas is easy, but unless you’re reflecting on your past goals, you’ll have a harder time bringing them to fruition, if at all.
We think one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your business is not dedicating recurring time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished (or not) in the past. It’s imperative to look back on previous years before jumping the gun and setting new goals, and here’s why.
You’re Able to Be Intentional
We’re all about setting sexy goals that are also realistic. Let’s say you set a goal last year that you weren’t able to reach. Before saying, “I’ll try again this year”, you must first reflect on why you weren’t able to accomplish it in the first place. Once you identify what worked and what didn’t, you’re able to be much more intentional in the way you approach this goal next time.
Not only that, you can also identify which goals are just unrealistic for you right now. It’s likely that for some of your goals, at least, the reason you couldn’t accomplish them was simply because you weren’t ready for that goal just yet, which is what reflection will allow you to see.
Now, don’t think we forgot about the cluster that is 2020. A big reason many of us haven’t been able to reach certain goals this year has simply been due to the circumstance we were all thrown into. But this has been a great learning experience for many who didn’t have any sort of emergency plan in place. In fact, we ironically talked all about planning for worst case scenarios and how to plan for things that you can’t plan for in this podcast episode.
It Helps You Set the Tone
Nothing makes you feel more badass than heading into the new year ready to right your wrongs and crush your goals. There’s just something about taking the time to reflect and be strategic in your goal-setting that motivates you in a whole new, intense way. When you think about it, there’s a major difference to feeling refreshed and ready to set new goals when you put tangible strategy behind it, and you have a clear plan for how you’re going to meet those goals based on your performance the year before.
How Often to Reflect
We personally take the time to look back on our goals and metrics monthly, quarterly, and yearly. What do your goals look like? Do you have weekly goals, monthly goals, quarterly goals, and yearly goals? In that case, it may make sense for you to take time to reflect weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
Personally, our yearly reflection time is our favorite. It really helps motivate us for the new year, and we love being able to view all of our numbers from the whole year at a glance. We use a reflection journal where we drop in our numbers and answer specific questions about the year.
What You Should Track
In our end-of-year reflection journal, we track things like:
Top 3 goals of the year and if they were met
If they weren’t met, what we can do to improve them next year
All of our responsibilities for the year and if they can be streamlined or outsourced
What we struggled with the most
Top accomplishments of the year
How many followers we have on our social platforms
Website analytics
Income goal and if it was met
Key takeaways
That isn’t all of the things we track, so if you want to see everything, you’ll have to grab our End-of-Year Reflection Journal in The Creative Template Shop. It’s digitally fillable, or you can print it out. We’ve already created the finished PDF for you to download, but you also have the option to one-click add it to your Canva account as a template, so you can customize everything about it!
You can grab this journal for only $19 in The Shop, or you can become a member for only $47/month and download all current and future templates. (Because, trust us, The Shop tends to have an effect where when you download one thing, you can’t help but to add more to your cart.)
The best way to see the amazing difference that reflecting on your goals can make on your business is to just try it! Grab your reflection journal, and take the time to really pay attention to what the data is telling you, so you can head into 2021 on fire.
