Have you a vision for how your life and your business will be different one year from now?

If you avoid goal-setting to allow for the “unknown”, in reality you are letting circumstances dictate your level of success or failure.

Why not explore the limits of your ability to achieve at the boundaries of your realm of belief? If you do not have specific plans for how high you will reach, you may never know what you could have achieved. Articulate now (in writing) what you want success to look like in 2010. Risk taking action to achieve what you really want – for you, for your family, for your team, business or community.

Many business managers mistake budgets for business plans. They determine revenue and cost projections while failing to address how they will develop a culture that inspires people to achieve beyond projections. They plan for expansion without considering how to increase Customer Loyalty necessary to achieve real growth and sustainability. They will pressure people without improving the systems in which their people work.

Sound like you? Do you avoid written goals because you believe them to be too confining and inflexible, rendering you unable to adapt to changing circumstances? Research and practice of the most successful organizations prove otherwise. If you avoid goal-setting to allow for the “unknown”, in reality you are letting circumstances dictate your level of success or failure.

Many people and organizations thrived or failed in 2009 – not “because of the economy” – but because of their basic attitudes about the economy, their daily habits and their pre-determined goals or lack of goals.