One of the most challenging parts of being a business owner is ALL the decisions you have to make on a daily basis.
Some days your to-do list can feel like a complete free-for-all, with everyone else’s needs and ideas on there but yours. And it’s so easy to get distracted by new articles, strategies, and products that appear on the Internet every day.
How do you know what actions to take daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly in order to actually get to the place you want to be with your business?
You need a Guiding Intention.
A Guiding Intention is the one big thing you want to accomplish in the next six to twelve months.
When you have a Guiding Intention, it makes those day-to-day decisions SO much easier, because you can hold each potential to-do up against your goal to confirm that it will get you closer, not farther away.
Signs that you have landed on the right Guiding Intention:
- You feel scared-cited—that’s my word for a wee bit scared, a wee bit excited—by it
- You can’t reach it in a day, a week, or a month
- It addresses a fundamental challenge or problem you’re currently facing in your business
- You realize that you’ll have to stretch and expand outside your comfort zone to reach it
Now that you know what a Guiding Intention is, and how to know when you’ve landed on the one that’s right for you, it’s time to ask yourself a few questions in order to find yours.
You can jot your answers to these down in a notebook, a Google Doc or Word Doc, or in a notes app. You can also download a free interactive worksheet that guides you through this process at the end of this post.
So things are starting to come into shape and ideas are percolating in your mind. Or perhaps you’ve already landed on the Guiding Intention that fits the criteria above?
If not, write a few options on a Post-it note or text to yourself, and sit with it for a few days. Often the right one will shake loose when you’re not “working” on it—so on walks, baths or showers, and so on.
Once you have a Guiding Intention that feels challenging, exciting, and doable within six to twelve months, you can start creating sub-goals that will support it, individual tasks for those sub-goals, and the team members and systems that will need to be in place in order for you to reach your Guiding Intention.
With your Guiding Intention as your compass, every time you’ve got a decision to make or to-do list to create, the day-to-day operations of running your business just became a whole lot easier.
