I think it was the extra-long pause that threw me off.
I had hired my first business coach, Dave, and we were on our first call. And he asked me a simple question: “How much money do you want to make in your business each year?”
I replied, “Um, I don’t know…. $200,000?”
Then the pause came. It was just a second too long.
He said, “Really? I mean, first year law students make that when they get out of law school. Don’t you want to make, say, a million dollars in your business?”
I said, “Um, well yeah! I guess so!”
In that moment I realized, it wasn’t that I didn’t WANT to make a million dollars. It’s that up until that point, I wouldn’t ADMIT to myself that that’s what I wanted.
I had just gotten my first big lesson about “non-starters”.
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I think that word, non-starters, first came into my world when I was dating.
Non-starters were things where, it wasn’t even worth thinking about because it just. wasn’t. going to happen. Smoking, for example, was a non-starter when it came to dating.
Now, as a business owner, non-starters have a different meaning: the goals you won’t even ALLOW YOURSELF to dream because they seem unattainable.
And I see them every single day when I talk to women running their own businesses. I hear the goals that they will barely admit to themselves. The ones that scare them. Because they don’t see a path to get there.
For some women, it might be, “I want to make $500k per year.”
For others, it could be admitting, “I want to make a great living while only working 3 days a week.”
Or like Ehi, who posted, “My goal that scares the living crap out of me is doing a TED talk.”
But I’ll tell you – when you make these goals non-starters, you subsconsciously hold back from even TRYING to achieve them. If you can’t even admit you want it, how can you possibly wholeheartedly work towards it?
To make these goals a reality, instead of a non-starter, here’s what to do instead:
1) Name your goal – start to say it out loud (yes, really!)
2) Find a step-by-step process to achieve them (it’s all about a plan)
3) Find someone who HAS achieved them, who can cheer you on
When you do that, here’s what happens:
Now I want to hear from you: What are the goals in your business that you had previously thought were non-starters?
