https://youtu.be/56hOP6OyRT4

Hello, and welcome to the Jameson Files. I'm Carrie Webber and I'm your host. And I'm so glad to have you joining me once again, for another episode of the Jameson Files podcast. Now you may come across this live on the Jameson Facebook page. If so, welcome. We send out our podcast initially via live stream on the Jameson Facebook page, every other Wednesday at 11:30 AM central. I want to invite you if you haven't already done so to connect with us through the areas that you listen to podcasts, whether that's iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify, and become a part of our Jameson Files podcast community. We'd love to have you following along and learning and growing with us. So as this podcast goes live this episode, we are in January 2021. 

Now as business leaders and business owners, you may find yourself on the regular spending time in the first of the year, or nearing the end of a year, strategically planning for the year ahead, setting goals and wanting to build upon either successes you've had or lessons that you've learned in the previous year.

How to Set Goals for the Year Ahead

Now we are coming out of a most extraordinary year and it may be easy to continue on the path of recovery, or you may find it very challenging. How do I set goals in the year to come, and how am I to be successful in the pursuit and achievement of those goals? I often think about goal setting. It's a very common topic in podcasts, blog articles, and books. And if you Google “goal setting,” you can find a plethora of insights and information on how to do it successfully. But for this podcast, I studied reflecting on what has historically gotten in my way personally, or what I hear from other practice leaders, other dentists, other business owners that I work with, or I try to help what gets in their way and how can we overcome those and really shift our perspective to be more successful this year as we plan for the future.

So some things that I've struggled with over the years, or that I have had conversations with doctors or practice leaders over the years about are some areas that really impede goal setting, goal accomplishment, and making progress on your overall vision for your business and, and your efforts and making strategy to move forward.

Obstacles in Goal Setting

1. Inconsistency

Of those thoughts, I came up with four areas that are really those obstacles that seem to stop us making progress in goal setting and goal accomplishment and strategic planning. The first one is inconsistency. We all have experienced this either personally, when we try to set new year's resolutions or goals for ourselves, with our health, with our family, with our professional lives. But also inconsistency as a business in setting clear and attainable goals with our teams and achieving those goals on the regular, we may start strong, but somewhere along the way either in the busy-ness of our day-to-day lives or we maybe didn't meet a goal and in frustration and how difficult it proved to be, we become inconsistent in making this a healthy habit for our business lives for our professional lives.

James Clear wrote a brilliant book called Atomic Habits. And when I read this book, I felt it really hit the nail on the head and what causes us in a variety of ways to be inconsistent in our achievement and pursuit of goals and healthy, strategic planning. And it's really about the mindset we bring to the table, the commitment we make to whatever it is we're striving to achieve. Clear talks about how to achieve the great goals you may have for your life. It takes the building of small disciplines along the way. So the moment we embrace goal setting as a discipline and commit to its key purpose—that's the moment we can take all the things running in our head to build and improve upon this year and make them happen in the year to come.

If we want that moment, we have to take action,