12 Questions for Goal Setting in Your Business | 112
If you’ve listened to my podcast before, you know I am big on mindset and reflection in business. It’s really easy to keep chugging along with our business and never take time to stop, reflect, and shift as needed. But these moments of reflection are exactly what we need to grow. So, to help you fine-tune your business, I have twelve questions for goal setting to help with the reflection process.
Set Yourself Up for Success
If stopping to reflect comes easily to you, then you may be ready to jump in. But sometimes, we are in such a rush to do the act of questioning that we don’t really take it seriously. We just want to check it off our list.
So today, I’m going to challenge you to focus and make the most of your time. Sometimes I find it helpful to have two sheets of paper when I’m doing these exercises. On one paper, I write down my answers to the actual question at hand. On the other paper, I write down any random thoughts that come my way (for example, a reminder to put the laundry in the dryer or buy more shampoo).
Next, I set a timer. Sometimes it’s five minutes other times it’s twenty minutes - doesn’t matter! I just make sure it’s a time I can reasonably commit to the task.
Do not try to answer every question in one sitting. In fact, I recommend just the opposite… pick just 1 (maaaaybe 2) question that really speaks to you, so you can really focus in.
During this time, I try to make sure to jot down anything that comes up: the good ideas, the wild ones, and the outlandish ones… never know what could inspire me later.
12 Questions for Goal Setting
When you are ready with your pen and paper in hand, you can start to read through some of these questions for goal setting.
You’ll notice that many of the questions are very open-ended. The purpose of these is to fill them with a goal or challenge you have in mind. It can be personal or business related.
FYI – some of the questions say “we” or “our”, but you can change that to “I” or whatever pronoun makes the most sense for your situation.
1. What is the vision?
2. What if (something you desire) ?
3. How could we (do this specific thing) ?
4. How does this support our goal or vision?
5. What is the first step towards (the big goal or vision) ?
6. What will have the biggest impact on (the goal or vision) ?
7. What is the most important thing to focus on right now?
8. What is the timing for (the project or goal) ?
9. How can we make (project, goal, vision, etc.) happen?
10. Why is this (specific thing) so important?
11. What other industry can I look to for inspiration?
12. What is challenging or most frustrating in my business right now?
After You’ve Completed the Questions
After you’re done, I recommend taking a brain break! Walking away from your notes will give your brain time to process and make connections. Then, when you return to your notes, notice any common themes, issues, or desires.
You might notice that one problem comes up over and over again, and now you can switch to brainstorming solutions. Or you could have a completely offbeat idea show up, and you can daydream about what it might look like to implement it.
If you want more questions for goal setting in your business, check out episode 102: 6 Reflection Questions for the End of the Year and episode 96: 6 Questions to Ask to Improve Your Messaging.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Hello and welcome back to another Saturday strategy session. As always, I am super excited to be here with you for this strategy session. I love the Saturday show. I know I explained this way back at the beginning, so if you've gone back and listened to episode one where I share my story, I did talk about why I do Saturday strategy.
But just as a little recap for anyone who is a little bit newer around here, I am obsessed with podcasts. I listen to podcasts almost every single day, and I always felt like I never had anything to listen to by the time Saturday afternoon came around. A lot of shows come out on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday is a pretty big day too, but almost nothing comes out on Fridays or Saturdays or Sundays. Nothing!
So by the time the weekend rolls around, my list of “to-listen” is usually pretty depleted. And so when I started, I was like, I am gonna help solve that problem. And that's where the Saturday strategy sessions came from. I'd love for you to send me a DM on Instagram and just let me know if your podcast list is also depleted when Saturday comes around. I'm @heyitsjenzaia on Instagram. Let me know if you like the Saturday shows or if maybe a different day would be better.
Today we're gonna be talking about power questions for your marketing plan, how we can use questions, and some of my recommendations if you're gonna sit down and answer these questions. And then I have a list of 12 different questions that you can totally use in your business with some examples of how I've personally used them or I have not. Full disclosure, I’ve not actually used every single one of these questions, but some of them I keep in my back pocket because I know one day they will just be the perfect question for what I'm needing.
So first of all, what are questions? It sounds like such a silly thing, but I don't actually mean it grammatically. What is a question? Questions are tools. We can use questions to do a whole bunch of things, and they're really, really important if we're feeling stuck, or lost, confused, unsure of the direction we should be taking our business going forward.
Some of the different ways that you can use questions as tools are to focus your attention on something specific that's either gone wrong in your business or that you want to make happen in your business. You can use questions to help you reflect on how something went. So maybe you did a launch or maybe you were on a podcast episode and you wanna reflect on it.
Reflection is so powerful and is a really, really great way for you to grow and to learn from past experiences, positive and negative. You can also use questions as the starting point for a brainstorm, and I love a good brainstorm.
I also love a good brain dump where you're just like dumping everything out on the page. A brainstorm is a little bit more focused and a little bit more targeted. A brain dump, you're just kind of like a stream of consciousness.
I'm gonna pause for just a second because my husband and I were talking about books we had read. We were talking about stream of consciousness writing, and I feel like a brain dump is just like stream of consciousness.
I can’t remember the book but in grade 10, we had to read a book by James Joyce. That was, his style of writing; stream of consciousness. And if you don't know what that is, it's just like you literally write down every single thought that comes to your brain. Don't filter it. I am not a hundred percent sure if his books were legitimately just him sitting down with a pen and writing whatever he thought, or if it was an intentional choice to tell a story in that way. He wrote with the style of stream of consciousness, but wasn't actually doing stream of consciousness. He was writing a story.
I don't know if I'm making any sense, but back to my point…brain dump is more like that stream of consciousness where you're just like, anything that comes to mind goes on the paper. Brainstorm is more focused and targeted. While I do highly recommend that you put everything that comes to mind on the paper, you want to filter just a little bit. So if you're brainstorming about ways you could launch your upcoming course and you think, oh, I have to do the dishes later today. You don't need to write that in your brainstorm.
Other ways you can use questions as tools to find problems or solutions, or both in your business. If you decide that you need a specific journal prompt, or recognize that you're stuck on something and you wanna get out of it and you decide to use a question, here's how I recommend doing it. Especially if you're doing it because you feel stuck or in a negative head space.
I highly recommend that you set a timer. You don't wanna spin out in that negativity forever. You really wanna focus on getting those thoughts, feelings, emotions, whatever it is onto the paper so that you can shift into the positive. Set the timer for two to 10 minutes.
Again, I highly recommend that you feel those feelings and you let yourself sit in those emotions, but you don't wanna spin out. Sometimes it can be a very fine line between sitting and feeling the emotions and just spinning out of control within those emotions. Write down, in my opinion, every single thing that comes to mind, similar to that brain dump. And what I like to do is actually have two pieces of paper where I can write down things, like do the dishes, so that when they come up, I don't get focused on…do the dishes, do the dishes, do the dishes. Because it's in my head and I know I'm gonna forget if I don't write it down, but I'm not supposed to write it down because it's not about what I'm doing.
Write down things that you consider huge or big, small ideas, the tiniest little inkling of something to come. Maybe you don't even know where it's actually going. You also wanna write down things you think are amazing, but also terrible. Because you never know where something is going to lead you. You never know if that terrible idea is going to trigger an idea that is the idea or the solution.
You also might choose to go back and look at this list later on. I do this sometimes. It all depends on what kind of question I'm answering, where my business heads, where my life is. Sometimes I’ll look through my notebooks if I'm going through a particularly challenging situation, and I'll notice that I've answered a very similar question already.
And then one of the strategies that I was taught in Teachers College - used for getting students to brainstorm more effectively - is the DOVE strategy. The D in DOVE strategy is Defer judgment. So no matter what it is, there's no qualifier being added to it. There's no thought behind how good or bad it is. We just write it down. O is for Offbeat idea. These are things that are out of the box; that are wacky, crazy, impossible. V is Vast number of ideas. So if you're trying to find a solution or brainstorm the direction to go, you might really wanna zone in on the vastness of ideas and just write as many things as possible down. The E is for Evaluation later. So after your timer's gone off, take a little break and come back to it at a different time.
You evaluate the ideas and then you can select the ones that are gonna be most effective for you, your business, where you are. It also will give your brain some time to connect dots and make connections. That's the same as connecting dots. Make connections to link different ideas together. Then maybe something will be spinning in your head and you won't realize it until you're in the shower or driving down a country road. Some of my best ideas have come to me in those moments, and then you can add to or expand on and evaluate those ideas later. This is even more true if it's a negative thing that you're working through. That time will let you diffuse and hopefully be in a more positive position to deal with the situation.
What I've found is when I write down all of these things - the emotions, the feelings, whatever it is that is causing the negativity - that lets it out of my body and it helps me to move away from it. And then when I come back to my list, I'm in a much better place and I'm emotionally detached from it more so than I was in the moment.
The last thing that I wanna do is chat about some of my favorite questions. Like I said before, I've used some of them and some I have not used but I think they are really great questions.
#1 - What is the vision?
This is great for long-term planning. I love using this as a journal prompt at the beginning of the year and beginning of quarters or when something feels like it's shifting in my business. So I definitely have used this multiple times. And I love just imagining what my life and what my business are gonna look like a year from now, three years from now, five, 10 years from now. A bigger picture.
#2 - What if …
What if money was an issue? Or what if time wasn't an issue? Or what if we hired five people?
What if blah, blah, blah. Go big here. If the course was already sold out before we even launched, what would we be doing to get that? And that's gonna help you be in that head space to get there and to do those things.
#3 - How could we fill in the blank?
So how could we sell more spots? How could we create products faster? And this is great for brainstorming, coming up with all kinds of crazy, wacky out-of-the-box ideas and trying to find something that really works for you in your business.
#4 - How does this support your goal or visions?
This is a really, really good one. If you're feeling stuck about something. If you're feeling like you have to do something because other people are telling you, but maybe it just doesn't fit with you and your business, your goals. So I used this one recently when I was going to launch Dream List Essentials. I've launched previously with the standard “go to” webinar, and it never felt right.
It never felt authentic. I've tried a couple different variations of the webinar. It just never felt right and so I said, how does this style of webinar support my vision and how does it not? And I was able to find the things that did work and the things that really stood out as not working. And that helped me to create the three day workshop style that I much, much preferred and felt like it was much more authentic to me.
#5 - What is the first step towards the …
So if you want to do a summit - which is something that's on my to-do list - what's the first step towards that? Because it's such a huge, huge project, I can't even begin to wrap my brain around all of the steps. And so instead, I am focused on what is that first step and then what is the next step. Just one piece at a time.
#6 - What will have the biggest impact? I
If there's a problem or a goal that you wanna succeed at, what will have the biggest impact? Now, this is not a question that I've ever had personally, but it's one that I really like because sometimes we feel like we're doing all of the different things and we're not really thinking about the impact of those things.
And so what will have the biggest impact on our success or on this specific goal, and using that as a metric or determiner of how you're gonna move forward. I think it's just a really great question.
#7 - What is the most important focus right now to get unstuck?
Again, this is very similar to a couple of the previous ones, but what is the most important thing to focus on right now to help us move forward on our goals or to get us unstuck in the situation? And this one could be really, really great brainstorming, coming up with all of the possible ideas if you're stuck on a particular problem. How are all the different ways you could get unstuck so that you could move forward?
#8 - What is the timing?
I love this one as a journal prompt because I think sometimes we get so wrapped up in the timing of things. We have to make six figures this year, or we have to make seven figures this year. But does it really have to happen in that time? Give yourself the time and the space to sit in the moment and to find the right timing to do different pieces of your business, like a summit or a course launch or whatever it might be.
#9 - How can we make … happen?
Another great brainstorming question that I've definitely used. How can we make whatever it is that you want happen? Set that timer. Write down every single crazy idea that you have. Big, small, amazing, terrible. How can you make it happen? And you're gonna have some amazing ideas. You are gonna have some terrible ideas, and at the end of the day, you're gonna be able to pick three or four that you can implement over the next year to start making those things happen.
#10 - Why is this important?
An amazing journal prompt, especially if something is coming up again and again and again.
Why is it important? Why does it keep coming up? Writing down all of your thoughts and feelings. A stream of consciousness style, where you're not even thinking about it and you're just putting it all down on paper. Maybe your brain, your subconscious, has some thoughts that you don't even know are there, and can help you to understand why this thing keeps coming up.
#11 - What other industry could I look to for ideas or inspiration?
I've actually done this before. I have my Monday mini’s. They are 30 minute strategy sessions. I only have space available for them on Mondays. I absolutely love them. The idea for that came from a photographer's holiday mini family sessions. She had 30 minute photo sessions all in one day. Just like back to back. And I love the idea and I wanted to figure out how I could implement it into my business. And so looking for ideas in different avenues.
#12 - What is challenging or most frustrating right now?
This could be really useful if there's a lot of things that are bugging you or overwhelming you. Getting them all out and then prioritizing or ranking them. I guess I just like giving yourself that time and space to actually recognize the challenges. And once you've written everything down, you can take those challenges and ask some of the other questions to start looking for solutions.
Before I wrap up, I'm just gonna read the 12 questions again quickly, without any explanation.
#1 - What is the vision?
#2 - What if …
#3 - How could we fill in the blank?
#4 - How does this support your goal or visions?
#5 - What is the first step towards the …
#6 - What will have the biggest impact? I
#7 - What is the most important focus right now to get unstuck?
#8 - What is the timing?
#9 - How can we make … happen?
#10 - Why is this important?
#11 - What other industry could I look to for ideas or inspiration?
#12 - What is challenging or most frustrating right now?
I really hope that you found these questions valuable and that it's giving you some ideas!
My homework for you, if you choose to accept it, is to pick one and spend 5 to 10 minutes journaling on it today.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!