I love being self-employed because I always feel like I have such control over my life. Now we all know that this feels good and bad at different times. There is no one telling us what to do! (How often have I thought, “Should I be the one making this decision here? Surely someone else should make it!) But to me, being self-employed is about living life the way I want to live my life. It is about consciously creating my life on my own terms. My life is NOT accidental, even if I can’t always control everything that happens.
Planning and goal setting helps me guide my life. I’ve been reading and following Edwene Gaines’ work—she is a great prosperity teacher in the Unity church—which is part of the New Thought movement that I follow. (Edwene wrote The Four Spiritual Laws of Prosperity.) One of the laws of prosperity is learning how to set goals. Edwene says that being specific is crucial. (You can substitute the words “the universe” for God.) She writes
If you want to start effective goal-setting, where you are clearly conveying to God (the Universe) what it is that you want, then you’ve got to first get it clear in your own mind. After all, if you don’t even know what you want, how can you ask God to send it to you? Can you imagine calling up a clothing catalog company and telling the person who wants to take your order, “Just send me something you think I’d like”? It wouldn’t work at all.
Well, in the world of running your own business, the sky is the limit. What do you want to ask for? What are your specific goals? A couple of years ago my objective was to be more visible professionally. Well, that’s nice. It’s actually a great business objective, but not much of a goal. So one of my goals was to start writing a newsletter. I wanted lots of people to read me. I thought about it for a long time with no action. Then I realized it still wasn’t specific enough. There was no time line, for one thing. So I revised it to: My goal is to write a monthly newsletter by August 1st that I send to 1,000 people. I then wrote this down where I looked at it every day. It was still a bit overwhelming. So I started breaking it down.
Breaking a goal down into manageable steps is key. It is so satisfying to cross items off your to-do list! The first thing I did was block out one hour each week to work on the project. Then during that hour I started brainstorming topics, looked at newsletter templates and looked for an editor. I also realized I didn’t have 1000 people in my database! But as I kept looking at my goal, ideas kept coming to me. I did do a lot of speaking, but up until then, I had not collected many names. So I started collecting email addresses. I was so fixated on my goal that at one point I accepted a speaking engagement just so I could get to 1,000 names on my list! This is the power of goals.
It’s likely that you’ve read the end result of that goal. Now I put out a monthly newsletter as well as a blog. I wanted readers and I wanted to share my ideas. I’m glad I didn’t ask the universe to send me “whatever”.
