Happy New Year! We are nearing the end of January…do you know where your goals are? I have a practice at the end of January where I take a retreat to clear my head and set intentions for the year. Before I head out for that, I wanted to share a technique that has made the greatest impact on my success and helped me achieve my goals faster and with less effort. That technique is setting intentions vs. resolutions or goals. Just to be clear, this is what I mean by an intention:
- Intentions describe the result you want to produce vs. the action/goal to get there
- They are stated in the present tense as if they have already happened (“I am…I do…I have… I <verb>…”)
- They are specific and positive and paint a clear picture of what you will achieve
Here are some example intention statements from my own business:
- I book 3 or more speaking gigs a month that align with my purpose and impact solopreneurs in growing their business.
- At each speaking gig, 75% or more attendees sign up for my newsletter or download the quickstart kit and 30% or more purchase my home study program.
- I speak at 3 conferences or more nationally and internationally
If you want to get your unique message out to a whole lot more people and achieve your wildest dreams in 2012, I invite you to create intention statements for your own business and see how easy it is! Here are some questions to kick-start the process:
- What mix of services do you want to offer this year? To what kind of audience?
- What kind of revenue do you want to generate from each service offering?
- What areas of pain/challenges/desires is your target audience going through?
- What talks/workshops/webinars will help alleviate that pain/generate those desires?
- Where does your target audience congregate? How could you get in front of them?
- What results do you want to produce out of your talks/workshops/webinars?
Notice that intention statements are not goals, but the beautiful thing is that after writing your intentions, your goals will fall effortlessly out of them 
The next step is to extract out the actions you need to achieve to reach your intentions. Have fun with this and let me know how it goes. Feel free to email me atjean@workshopuniveristy.com or call me at 303-413-8001 with questions.
