7 Points Of Reference For Business New Year’s Resolutions
Setting Business New Year’s Resolutions and developing business Goals.
Are business New Year’s resolutions important to you and your organization? Do you have marketing goals? Do you have goals for your website?
While I’m writing this as a Business New Year’s Resolutions article it will be useful for setting business goals any time of the year.
For many people New Year’s resolutions have simply become a cliche. To such a degree they often become meaningless.
Traditionally New Year’s is recognized as a time of change and transition. Transition periods have always been a time of danger and opportunity. Many of our current customs and folklore are built upon transition periods. Often our modern traditions have prehistoric origins. There are many treasured traditions that are rooted in ancient rituals from a time before written history, making them prehistoric. However, they do have a history and have survived into our modern age from ancient narratives.
Even though there are troublesome economic signs for 2023, for many there will still be business opportunities. It’s great if your business New Year’s resolutions make you reach. However, it’s probably not helpful to have them so big you’re unlikely to reach them.
New Year’s resolutions are often so lofty and so seldom executed that they have become something of a joke.
New Year Resolutions for Success
It’s time to break that cycle. Small businesses always have goals. Some are very short term goals, such as daily goals. Other goals are for the week and there are monthly goals. Most businesses also have quarterly goals and then we come to a big one. Yes, I am talking about yearly business goals. What do you WANT to accomplish in a year? What are you PLANNING to do?
Goals are the steps we need to take to get to some larger objective. Little goals lead to bigger goals (the rule of progression.)
The steps we take to reach our goals are comprised of the daily rhythms and rituals that make up our life narrative. These daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms are also what make up our business narratives.
It’s ideal if your personal goals do not conflict with your business New Year’s resolutions (business goals.)
It’s not uncommon for our work to stall and goals never reached when business goals do not align with personal commitments. A mismatch often leads to a lot of work that goes nowhere.
Getting bogged down in unimportant work is a fairly common problem. Many people find when they’re having a hard time executing goals or changing behavior they have competing emotional commitments to an incompatible goal. It’s common for competing commitments to be hidden by a lot of busy work. People frequently have an uneasy feeling about the conflict, but can’t quite put their finger on the reason.
To discover your own competing commitments will require an extraordinary degree of mindfulness. It’s probably easier for an outsider to find the reason than the individual. As W. Edwards Deming said, “a system can’t know itself.” This was said of business systems, but most likely applies to individuals as well.
What plans do you have for your business in the next year and how will outside forces shape those plans?
7 points of reference to a successful New Year’s Business Resolution in 2023.
- History
What did you get accomplished last year?
How did you prepare for this year’s goals and aspirations? - Acceptance
Accept where you’re at, so you can move forward.
Accept real limitations and find ways to work through or around them. Don’t let what you can’t do stop you from doing what you can do. - Rules of nature
We all respond to and adapt to nature. Covid will continue to be a significant point of reference for our business narratives in 2023. In 2023 Covid is still a real threat. As Covid mutates it affects all aspects of our narrative model. While Covid is front and center in 2023 we need to continue attending to how reinforcement and our own mental states affect our businesses. - Cultural rules
New laws will have an impact on businesses in 2023.
Supply Chain bottlenecks have become part of the culture of 2021 and continued into 2022. 2023 sees new threats and inflation to deal with. Inflation will continue to be a problem as we work through the stimulus money that was pumped into the economy. - Personal rules
As usual, how we respond to the threats and opportunities of 2023 will play a big part in reaching our business goals.
In the last 3 years the pandemic has given many people a chance to reevaluate their goals and values. However, it’s still the day in and day out rituals of one’s life that make up a life narrative. To change course we need to change the daily rhythms that take us from becoming the change to being the change. - Rules of progression
Our daily rhythms take us from small goals to larger goals, step by step. We make progress by attending to the little rituals that are necessary for reaching the next step in the goal achievement cycle. - Rules of your profession
Each profession has rules specific to its systems and customs. These subcultures change according to the primary culture’s influences. Innovation often comes from reaching outside the norms of a profession’s customary subculture.
History
We all have a history that profoundly affects our daily behavior. The best prediction of future behavior is how we’ve behaved in the past. However, we can change. If changing your business narrative is a goal for this year, how are you going to do it?
Change is often hard and more complicated than most people imagine.
To change you need to set a goal and then change the little daily behaviors needed to get closer to reaching the goal. Changing your daily rhythms of life is what takes you toward your goals. Your first goal should be to achieve these new daily rhythms. This is what is meant by the phrase act as though you have already achieved the goal. If your goal is more sales. Implement the daily rhythms of someone who is at that level. Actually it’s more complicated, but this is a good start. Plan then do.
Those little behaviors need to become rituals that take on a life of their own. Once they become self-sustaining you can use them to develop new rituals leading to new goals.
Acceptance
We need to accept our current situation and then plan our next move. At the end of 2021 there are two new types of coronavirus that could prove troublesome. We need to accept this and make plans for the possibility of new Covid restrictions, threats, and opportunities.
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
We also need to accept the things we do well and those we need help with. Outsource as much of the work that for you is high-time low-value. This means if your time is more valuable performing a service or producing products than janitorial work and building maintenance, hire janitorial and maintenance services, if website design and maintenance is not your strong suit, hire those jobs out.
This New Year’s decide what activities you can make more profitable by hiring or outsourcing it.
Rules of Nature
Everyone’s an expert about the rules of nature, at least they think they are. Many people in America think they know more about coronavirus than those who study it day in and day out.
We find this same phenomenon about how incentives work with behavior.
I once knew a real estate broker who kept telling her people how she was using scientific methods for teaching her people sales scripts. What she was really doing was using common sense and parroting her mentor.
While common sense works most of the time, there are also a lot of times when it is wrong.
We all deal with the rules of nature whether we are aware of it or not.
We are all seeing the effects of genetic mutation with the coronavirus. Getting to see and cope with rapid genetic mutation is something most people have not been fully aware of until recently.
When the environment rapidly changes so do many behaviors. Again rapid behavior change is something we have experienced during the Covid pandemic. It’s not easy for individuals, businesses, or cultures to rapidly change behavior. Yet that is what we need to do. How will you help your employees, customers, and community change?
Changes in behavior almost always leads to changes in business and business practices. As business owners and managers we need to understand incentives (positive/negative reinforcement) and how they affect individuals, communities, and nations.
Are there any new types of incentive you plan to offer in 2022?
What incentive will you offer in the way of products and services? What will you offer to attract employees in a tight job market?
Some questions many businesses need to answer in 2023.
How will you attract customers?
How will you keep customers?
How will you maintain profit margins with rising inflation?
How will you attract employees?
Cultural rules.
While the rules of nature let us see how both cooperation and competition contributes to survival, cultural rules muddy the water a bit with the codification of rules. This codification can come from anywhere, including Stone Age stories, half-truths, false truths, bad research, good research, and common sense.
The interesting thing about cultural rules is they can be about anything we can imagine and don’t need any real relationship to the truth. Even the most unusual myths, if believed, are lived as though they are the only real truth.
Cultural rules are a powerful incentive and include the laws and customs of the land.
What new laws will your business need to work with in 2023?
Personal rules.
Personal rules are a gestalt of our experience with a history and environment.
Our personal rules involve our coping strategies and how we manage stress, challenges, and success.
Start attending to your self-talk. What is the internal dialog you engage with in your own head?
Why is this important?
How we think and what we think, how we talk to ourselves, prompts us to take action. Often self-talk is the antecedent to behavior. I think of this self-talk as internal discriminative stimuli. Changing our self-talk is how we begin to change our behavior. It may only be necessary to change some small part of our daily behavior to begin moving toward our bigger goals.
I believe people use different internal discriminative stimuli. Probably for business the two most common are a combination of internal verbal behavior and imaging. There are also others represented by all aspects of our ability to experience.
Imaging is seeing a thing or event with one’s mind’s eye. Actually picturing it or seeing a moving image in your head. In my self-talk I sometimes call this imagineering. I am imaging while engineering a solution to a problem. Sometimes this is in product design and sometimes it’s working on a solution to a theoretical problem.
Both of these internal events are important for the entrepreneurial part of owning a business.
Yearly goals need to be a good match for personality traits.
There are some traits that make up our personal rules that are binary. We either have them or we don’t. Other traits and behaviors are on more of a spectrum.
Research reported on in the book “The Challenger Sale” found that some managerial traits like reliability and having integrity are binary. People either have them or they don’t. This was done as research for sales managers, but it also applies to others as well.
How do you judge your yearly success?
This brings up a curious difference between how people judge. Some people judge results and events as binary. Either you did it or you didn’t. Others use a spectrum, it was partially successful, but part of it did not have the desired results.
Even those who use a spectrum need a way to determine if an event was successful. This is difficult to do without taking into account the overall success over a given period of time.
Even then to get an accurate answer, one needs more data than most people have. For the average small business owner it’s measured by accomplishing monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals and successes. Then at the end of the year we tally up the profits and costs and come to our conclusion. Because of variability it’s not always accurate. It is also often lacking critical information we need to improve our systems. However, it’s the main and often the only resource available to most small businesses. Larger businesses can use statistics.
Rules of progression.
This is where one step leads to the next. It is an order of events. Most goals progress from the beginning or a becoming stage, to accomplishment or the being stage.
When starting a business there is the idea, then the plan, then the beginning. This is the becoming stage. Perhaps the becoming stage is never totally over. Why you ask? Because as technology and cultures change, so too must businesses. A business is always becoming something it has not been before.
Rules of your profession
The last principle is perhaps the rules people are most familiar with. These are the rules and norms of our profession and job. These rules are what we spend a lot of time learning formally, socially, and through experimentation. Often this is what we focus most of our life on.
A lot of people self-identify with their profession. How they fit into their profession and into society is determined by all the other points of reference.
While all the other points of reference shape our professional life, our profession colors our world view. An individual’s profession becomes a filter they view the world through.
Information filtering by profession is one reason it can be beneficial to have members from diverse professional backgrounds in a planning group or mastermind group.
Business Planning for the New Year Starts in Earnest December 25th.
December 25th is the time to really start planning and committing to your business New Year’s Resolutions and next year’s goals.
What is the reason? By starting your mental quarantine and focusing on the New Year you are honoring a long standing seven day or night tradition. This is a tradition that goes back to the days of Gilgamesh. In a way these seven nights from December 25th to January 1st will be used to become more fully human. We take the uncontrollable wild man that could not be tamed from last year and govern him as part of our kingdom.
Andrew Ledford
For information websites.
I do offer ongoing continuous improvement programs for websites, marketing, and goal achievement