“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”
— Anthony Robbins
If you’re self-employed and worry about making rent or your mortgage to avoid foreclosure, you might think that establishing goals is a luxury you don’t have time for. Quite the opposite. Unless you set goals to stretch the way you market, and grow your income, you run the risk of being a casualty of this recession.
Tracking weekly goals makes use of the Law of Attraction, which states that energy goes where attention flows. There’s a physical law paralleling this—the role that the observer plays in the process of observation: “You cannot separate the observer from the observed,” said David Bohm, the world-famous quantum physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. In the case of goal setting for your business, the observer is the entrepreneur and the observed is the business itself.
To take advantage of this law of nature, create a variety of weekly goals for different aspects of your business. These might include gross income, number of new clients gained, number of new prospective clients, hours spent on marketing, and so on.
At the top of your paper going across the page, write Goal, Actual and Percentage. Then, write your goals going down the page on the left margin. The first thing Monday morning, before your workweek begins, fill in your goals for the week. As the week unfolds, tally your results as they develop in the category called Actual. Then, the following Monday morning, total your results. If your goal was to gain two new clients and you gained one, you did 50 percent. Do this for each category weekly.
There’s great power in this process for, as Lee Iacocca put it, “The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.” Simply intending certain results and attending to these intentions daily helps bring them into manifestation. That’s why it’s wise to display your weekly goal sheet where you can see them daily—remember the power of attention. “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness,” said Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner. The same can be said for the laws of quantum business growth.