goals with soul

Hey Beautiful

The internet is absolutely buzzing with yearly reviews and setting goals for 2019. Everywhere I look there's a ton of advice about what I should be doing right now.

But as I shared in an earlier post, I'm not one for spending time looking back and dissecting my year as I prefer to live in the present.

In saying that, sometimes, it is good to look back from a place of gratitude and be grateful for everything we have accomplished, everything we have enjoyed, everything we have been blessed to experience over the past year.

So I have taken a little time to look back at all the beauty of 2018. And I have thanked the Universe for the positive lessons and miracles I have experienced.

But what about looking ahead?

I'm not one for setting goals.

You see I come from a corporate finance background where everything was about planning and achieving your goals and being knocked down when you missed a deadline or it looked like you might not be quite on track. And it felt like the whole world revolved around money.

And while I worked in that environment I felt very much like a square peg being banged into a round hole. Every. Single. Day.

And so, since I started my own business, I was hell-bent on doing anything and everything that did not reflect my prior corporate life. Because I struggled so much to fit into that world I wanted my experience as an entrepreneur to be something that I enjoyed, something that I woke up to every morning and wanted to get cracking with.

And that meant I refused, point blank, to set myself goals. Indeed, it went so far that I convinced myself that no matter what goals I'd set, I'd fail to achieve them.... kind of like creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for myself to prove that goals are a bad thing.

Can you imagine how that worked out?

I was drifting every day, sometimes in the right direction but many times not.

When I joined a mastermind last year and was asked what my goals were, I froze. Again everything felt like it revolved around finance and bringing in money and, whilst I appreciate that a business cannot survive without cashflow, I wanted much more for my business. I wanted it to have meaning, to have soul and to positively change the world.

And then I met my current mastermind mentor who worked with me to reframe my goals. Together we stopped focusing on goals and started focusing on what made my heart sing.

We dug deep into my "Why" for my business and started to create goals around that.

And my "Why"? Well that was easy to articulate.

If you don't know my business and just read its name "Simply Skin" or looked on my website to see what products I create, you'd be right to believe that I create and sell skincare.

But if you take a few moments longer to check out the "Why" and not the "What" you'd see that one of my two "Whys" is to make this world a better place for rescued and abandoned bunnies.

Through sales of my products, my customers and I lovingly support a bunny rescue centre. But it doesn't stop there. My dream for my business is to open my own bunny sanctuaries for rescued bunnies until they find their forever loving home.

So together we reframed my goals into goals that touched my heart. As Danielle La Porte would call them "goals with soul".

And rather than stating how much income I wanted to attract (a goal I simply could not drum up passion for), we created goals focused on the number of bunny cuddles my customers and I could give, or the number of days shelter we could provide for bunnies in the rescue centre.

And you know what happened?

The passion I had lost for my beautiful business, because I was so focused on financial goals that didn't light up my soul, began to return.

And as my passion returned, I began to see results.

My posts started to resonate more with my customers (and potential customers) because I wrote them from my heart without worrying and wondering if they would convert to a sale. The pressure was off.

I noticed that more people were seeing and reading my posts - my visibility was improving because I wrote about what made my heart sing.

And sales, the part of business I had desperately tried to ignore, started to come in.

And then in Q3 this year (July - September) when I calculated the donation that my customers and I would be giving to the bunny & animal rescue centre we support, my heart sang as it was the biggest donation for any quarter since I started my Bunny Initiative.

As for our donation in Q4? Well I haven't fully calculated it just yet...

... BUT...

... already I can tell you that it's bigger than the total donation we gave from Q1 to Q3 (ie January - September). In the last 3 months of this year my customers and I shall be donating more than we did in the first 9 months of the year. Which also means that this is, by far, the biggest donation we have ever made to the rescue centre we proudly support.

So going forward into 2019, what has this taught me? And what message do I want to share with you?

It's quite simple, really.

Goals with soul, goals that are created around your business' "Why" rather than your "What", truly do work. Goals with soul have a completely different vibration and energy about them. They're driven by passion, not fear. They're created from a place of love, not a place of need.

Can you imagine the positive energy that companies could create, the enthusiasm that employees would generate, the success and positive change that businesses could achieve if only we all created goals with soul?

Viv xx