Now is the time for you to start and realise you business dreams and aspirations and to stop procrastinating about it. There is no other way to say it, other than to just do it. Remember, if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always got.



Success comes from doing something, rather than doing nothing and to make the most of the feedback that you get from the experience of doing it. Procrastination is essentially self sabotage and all you are doing is starving yourself of the opportunity to explore and discover the realms of possibilities of the ideas and plans you have. Pablo Picasso said that, ‘the foundational key to success is action'.

The fact of the matter is that one thing is guaranteed 100% of the time when you take action, and that it that you will always experience feedback from it. An action result in an outcome and the outcome produces feedback, which may or may not be what you were expecting. However, it is important to use this feedback constructively to ensure that it positively supports your beliefs about your capabilities and who you see yourself as a business person.

Goal setting is one of the best ways to stop procrastinating and to convert your ideas in to actions, which is why I want to share with you how you can start to set yourself some ‘well formed outcomes' using; a positive statement, being specific about the evidence of your goal, putting it in to context, identifying the resources needed, that it is ecological and worthwhile.

Having identified from the previous article ‘Know Your Business Know Your Identity' write down a positively stated sentence of what you do want, such as ‘I am going to run my own successful alternative therapy business for pets'. Ensure your statement avoids any negative connotation such as, ‘I want to run my own business so I enjoy my work' or in a non-business example, ‘I want to enjoy a healthier smoke free life' is better than, ‘I want to give up smoking'. State what you do want, not what you don't want.

Next be specific about your statement and write down how you will know when you have achieved it? What will feel different, what will seem different and what will others see when you have achieved your goal? How will you know when you have achieved what it is you wish to achieve and what evidence will you be looking for? Write all of this down under your positive statement.

Put your goal in to context by writing down where specifically do you want the outcome or goal to occur and with whom. For example you might say that you want to run a successful alternative therapy business for pets with your partner from a home based practice within the next 18 months.

List what resources you need to achieve your well formed outcome, how do you need others to behave, what support do you need, what peers and role models would be useful? Write these down as well.

Ecology is important to ensure that your plans, outcomes and goals are congruent with your own values and beliefs. Ask yourself what will achieving this goal bring you more of, what will it provide you less of, how will others benefit from it and what will achieving this mean?

Finally, ask yourself how worthwhile it is for you to achieve you desired outcome? What is important to you about achieving this outcome and what are the benefits? This differs from the ecology question because you are looking to identify what it is that is motivating you towards your desired business plan.

Write all of this down on one piece of paper and keep it in a place where you can look at it whenever you need to remind yourself of your desired outcome.

It is now time to take the first steps towards turning your outcome in to action and start to enjoy watching you own business take shape around the preferred environments, behaviour and skills you identified in earlier articles.