Setting Goals for the New Year

I've long believed that setting goals is a great way to lend clarity of purpose and a sense of power and control to the otherwise overwhelming vastness that is the future. It's like editing your potential. And it's something that I've always done quite naturally. In fact, as a young child, I was notorious for making proclamations about how things are, how they ought to be, and how they would be. And why not? I had considered all the angles I could think of, I had studied the world and everything in it, and I felt perfectly comfortable letting people know exactly what was what. The adults around me could rarely change my mind or even budge me once my feet were set. I was a powerhouse of focus and determination. I think "stubborn" was the word my parents liked to use.

Of course, as I got older, I learned that even the strength of a will like mine doesn't stand a chance against the forces of reality. The world moves and we are moved. It took many years to realize that there isn't enough strength to survive on strength alone. There isn't enough in the world. And anyway, the hammer is just not always the best approach. If you don't balance your strength with flexibility, patience, and judgement, you'll eventually wear out.

So I spent a lot of time working on mental flexibility. Putting things in perspective is a great way to bounce back from failure and learn as much as possible while moving on to the next adventure. Unfortunately, it's possible to become too flexible and lose sense of the future. For a while, as new circumstances and new people came into my life, new possibilities came into view and old ones disappeared. Flexibility means that that's OK because every opportunity is equal in importance and interest. But floating ahead without form, a future without real goals is just a soup of potential. In order to realize that potential and gain the benefits of both the struggle and the victory (hopefully!), the victory has to be defined. You have to be willing to inspect the soup and consciously pick out the parts that, from now on, are going to be most important.

So here are my business goals for 2010:

1. To add grooming staff to enable the shop to service more clients and to free up more personal time for me to pursue other goals.


2. To develop my online client tracking and appointment software for sale to grooming shops.


3. To develop Groomerisms educational products for sale to grooming shops.


4. To update this blog with a new article at least once per month.


5. To attend at least one grooming education seminar.

And there it is. I look forward to an exciting new year!